UNUSUALLY BLESSED

My weekly e-mail from St Matthias in Somerset, N.J. sent me this colourful character. I thought he was worth sharing.

Bl. Daniel Brottier                                    

Daniel spent most of his life in the trenches-one way or another.
Born in France in 1876, Daniel was ordained in 1899 and began a teaching career. That didn't satisfy him long. He wanted to use his zeal for the gospel far beyond the classroom. He joined the missionary Congregation of the Holy Spirit, which sent him to Senegal, West Africa. After eight years there, his health was suffering. He was forced to return to France, where he helped raise funds for the construction of a new cathedral in Senegal.
At the outbreak of World War I, Daniel became a volunteer chaplain and spent four years at the front. He did not shrink from his duties. Indeed, he risked his life time and again in ministering to the suffering and dying. It was miraculous that he did not suffer a single wound during his 52 months in the heart of battle.
After the war he was invited to help establish a project for orphaned and abandoned children in a Paris suburb. He spent the final 13 years of his life there. He died in 1936 and was beatified by Pope John Paul II in Paris only 48 years later.
Blessed Daniel might be called "Teflon Dan" since nothing seemed to harm him while in the midst of war. God intended to use him in some pretty wonderful ways for the good of the Church and he willingly served. He is a good example for all of us. 

Cry aloud, spare not,
lift up thy voice like a trumpet,
and shew my people their transgression,
and the house of Jacob their sins.
2 Yet they seek me daily,
and delight to know my ways,
as a nation that did righteousness,
and forsook not the ordinance of their God:
they ask of me the ordinances of justice;
they take delight in approaching to God.

3 Wherefore have we fasted, say they, and thou seest not?
wherefore have we afflicted our soul, and thou takest no knowledge?
Behold, in the day of your fast ye find pleasure,
and exact all your labours.
4 Behold, ye fast for strife and debate,
and to smite with the fist of wickedness:
ye shall not fast as ye do this day,
to make your voice to be heard on high.
5 Is it such a fast that I have chosen?
a day for a man to afflict his soul?
is it to bow down his head as a bulrush,
and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him?
wilt thou call this a fast,
and an acceptable day to the Lord?
6 Is not this the fast that I have chosen?
to loose the bands of wickedness,
to undo the heavy burdens,
and to let the oppressed go free,
and that ye break every yoke?
7 Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry,
and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house?
when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him;
and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh?

8 Then shall thy light break forth as the morning,
and thine health shall spring forth speedily:
and thy righteousness shall go before thee;
the glory of the Lord shall be thy rereward.
9 Then shalt thou call, and the Lord shall answer;
thou shalt cry, and he shall say, Here I am.
If thou take away from the midst of thee the yoke,
the putting forth of the finger, and speaking vanity;
10 and if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry,
and satisfy the afflicted soul;
then shall thy light rise in obscurity,
and thy darkness be as the noonday:
11 and the Lord shall guide thee continually,
and satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones:
and thou shalt be like a watered garden,
and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.

Isaiah 58

UPDATE ON QUINQUAGESIMA

Thonas Cranmer, with his Prayer Book

 I've been neglecting this blog, not because of a falling-off but because I've been too busy trying to incorporate daily Matins and Evensong into my life. A pity in a way, because I notice that readership has been diminishing as well; and as thinking and writing about thinking are one of the few things I can do to take my faith beyond the walls of my skin, this is clearly a message that I should pick it up again.

Daily Matins and Evensong (from a 1662 Book of Common Prayer stamped "property of York Minster" -- sorry, York Minster) is an interesting experience. It makes you read the Psalms in an intens(iv)e way, and the old Lectionary gives you longer and more consecutive readings that most modern ones. Also, as is always the case when you repeat old and trusted liturgical texts on a regular basis, they acquire a slightly different content each day. Why?

A liturgical text is a score for performance. The real "text", in other words, is not the words as written but the written words pronounced, said (or sung) by your voice in the context of a service, even if it is a private one, said within the walls of your own inner room. And as such it consists of two parts: the words, the score, as written by Thomas Cranmer and/or Miles Coverdale on the one hand, and what your mind, heart and soul bring to those words at this time on this day on the other. And since that part changes each day, the liturgical text is never the same two days running.

Things you notice: first, the readings, being more or less consecutive, take you through stories in the form of a coherent narrative in longer sections than you are used to, which is not only salutary but pleasant and interesting. Second, you keep getting blown away by the Psalms, those strange haunting poems that keep changing the person of the speaker and therefore keep upsetting the manner and level of your own identification with them.

At the moment, the Old Testament readings are from Exodus, and recite the interminable and depressing story of the Plagues of Egypt. It goes on, and on, and on, and you occasionally feel a certain sympathy for Pharaoh, the more as we are told that it is the Lord who keeps hardening his heart so that even after the frogs, the hail and the locusts he still won't let the Israelites go, when it comes to the crunch.

The Morning Prayer New Testament readings are from Matthew and show us Jesus in conversation with Pharisees and Sadducees, with the ordinary folk listening in and oscillating between fanzone crowdcrushing of the Meshiach and politely urging him to go somewhere else. Again, sometimes you can see their point: when he lets the Legion (of) demons move into the herd of pigs at Gadara, which then plunge off the cliff into the lake and drown, that herd was presumably someone's livelihood.
There is a directness about Jesus' healing which can be disconcerting.

The Evening Prayer New Testament lessons are from Acts, and currently concern Paul's interaction with two Roman governors-general and the local King Agrippa, culminating in his being sent to Rome to bejudged by Cæsar because he has insisted that he is a civis Romanus as our school books called it. Great narrative, that has you wondering (because you had forgotten) what comes next, as in any good thriller.

As for the Psalms, they are demanding a separate post and I think I will indulge them, because there is a lot to be thought and said about them. I will try to be more regular about all this, so stay tuned.
 

THE PRAYER OF THE HEART - CONTINUED

In my last post I ended with the Carthusian saying that, in the Prayer of the Heart, the heart itself is eventually transfigured by the Crucifixion and Resurrection: a saying that if it is not simplistic is extremely profound, complex and difficult. So I have been giving it some thought, and prayer, and I think that there is perhaps a way to understand it.

            Let’s begin with that word “transfigured”. it has dictionary meanings, but in the discourse of a contemplative monk it should be taken, surely, in a Biblical, Gospel sense. There is, in the Gospel, that moment when Yeshua goes up on a mountain – traditionally Mount Tabor, on the summit of which my daughter was married – with Peter, James and John. There, all of a sudden, he is “transfigured before them; his face shining as the sun, and his garments became white as the light." Moses and Elijah appear, talking with him (according to Luke, about his fatal journey to Jerusalem); the voice of God is heard, saying “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased: listen to him.” When the terrified disciples eventually look up, Moses and Elijah have gone, and Yeshua is there looking normal and telling them not to be afraid.

            So “transfigured” implies a change not only of appearance but of nature: in the Gospel story, Yeshua’s brief and flaming change from human to divine and back again. In what way can our heart, then, be “transfigured” by the Crucifixion and Resurrection? Coming as it does after an astonishingly profound and beautiful chapter on the Prayer of the Heart and the silence that we must learn, not to create but to accept, I think this transfiguration is in a sense a reminder. The prayer of silence, it tells us, is not a cruise. It is not a peaceful, meditative, lengthy polishing of an ideal or higher self we are growing into (as it might be in Buddhism). As we are learning the prayer of the heart, the prayer of silence, the Crucifixion and Resurrection are there to add a necessary dimension of verticality, and a vivid reminder of suffering.

            I have thought a lot recently about the gradual transformation of Yeshua bar Yosef, teknon (builder) of Nazareth, into Yeshua the Meschiach, the Anointed (i.e. crowned) Saviour. Toward the middle or end of this process I seem to see something like a rage of compassion. As he looks around him with new, or gradually renewing, eyes what he sees is an ocean of suffering: I imagine him feeling like the only physician in Aleppo after weeks of bombing. It is of course a suffering he is destined wholly and entirely to share in what is perhaps the acme of his humanity.

            For us, that sharing is a message we cannot and must not evade. Yet in this context that message is not simple: it is not simply telling us to stop being Mary and become Martha. It is telling us that we must, in the midst of pursuing the prayer of the heart, let that very heart be transfigured, first by the Cross and then by Easter. The Cross will enrich our search by the hugeness of its suffering, by the enormity of its sacrifice, by the price of its blood. It will remind us that we are not embarked on a development of our self to greater heights and/or depths. We are embarked on a relationship that will lead us to places unknown and barely guessed at. And Easter, the Resurrection, will remind us that that relationship and the voyage it entails is one of our salvation, and thus of a scarcely imaginable joy.

            Coda:

           So many of these words have become counters in discourse. “Salvation”: what does it mean, really? Literally: to be safe, to end up safe, home free, saved from danger on every side, from the bullet that flies in the noonday, from the bomb that kills in the night, from the cancer that stalks us everywhere, from the inferno to which we consign ourselves daily in our great and small refusals of love. To be plucked from the jaws of peril and set down in a garden of pure raindrop love. But like Yeshua, we can only be resurrected if we go through death ourselves. That it is not eternal, not definitive, we proclaim in every recitation of the Creed. Learning the prayer of the heart may help us actually to believe this incredible promise.

THE PRAYER OF THE HEART

I have been moved by, and reflecting on, a passage from the Carthusian miscellany The Wound of Love on the subject of the Prayer of the Heart. The author (anonymous as are all Carthusian authors) writes that in order to attain the Prayer of the Heart, we must confront all our own weaknesses: not to attempt to conquer them but to acknowledge and live them completely in our relation to God. Then God can enter into them and transform them. Is this last, he wonders, a kind of second thought on God’s part, or is it a fundamental dimension of the divine order?

“Even in the natural order, all true love is a victory of weakness. Love does not consist in dominating, possessing, or imposing one’s will on someone. Rather love is to welcome without defences the other as he or she comes to meet me. In return, one is sure of being welcomed unreservedly by the other without being judged or condemned, and without invidious comparisons. There are no contests of strength between two people who love each other. There is a kind of mutual understanding from within which a reciprocal trust emerges.

            Such an experience, even if inevitably imperfect, is already a very compelling one. Yet it is but a reflection of a divine reality. Once we really begin to believe in the infinite tenderness of the Father, we are, as it were, obliged to descend ever more fully and joyfully into a realm in which we neither possess nor understand nor control anything.

xxx

Thus, almost without being aware of it, we enter into communion with the divine life. The relation between Father and Son in the Spirit is at a level completely beyond our comprehension, a perfect embodiment of weakness transformed into communion.

            In a way closer to ourselves, this intimate tenderness of the thrice-holy God is revealed in the relationship between the incarnate Son and his Father. We cannothelp but be struck by the serenity and sense of infinite security with which Jesus quietly proclaims that he has nothing of his own, and that he can do nothing but what he sees the Father doing. What man would accept such powerlessness? Nevertheless, this is the path we must follow if we wish to live in the depths of our heart as God has made it, and as he transfigures it through the death and Resurrection of his Son.” (86-7)

I find this remarkable, both in its depth and in its conceptual simplicity. It goes well beyond the monastic life: indeed it may be more accessible in some ways to those living in the world and, perhaps, in relationships of human love.

            A perennial difficulty for us in these latter times is that we do not seem to have the direct access to the Father that Jesus had. And yet – if we think we do not, is that not because of us? Do we not, perhaps, try too hard to do everything ourselves, try to be better persons, try to do this better and to refrain from that more consistently? I think there is perhaps a two-stage development we need to learn to follow. The first stage is “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you.” That takes care of our compulsive need to fight our own battles and confront our inner and outer Amalekites all on our own. The second stage goes further and says “First let the Kingdom of God seek you, and find you, and all these things will turn up” – at least in so far as they are (as the Prayer Book says) “requisite and necessary as well for the body as the soul”.

            A final subject is that last sentence of the quotation: God’s transfiguration of our heart through the death and Resurrection of his Son. That needs a lot more thought: I’ll try to get back to it at a later stage.  

The Wound of Love: A Carthusian Miscellany (Leominster: Gracewing, 1994,2006). Readily available through Amazon.

WHAT KIND OF NEW YEAR?

El Greco, the Blessed Virgin Mary

A new year, for most people, implies resolutions and an attempt to improve one’s life. Yet as a Catholic text I saw this morning said, the beginning of a civic year (the Church’s year, don’t forget, starts with Advent) stands in the sign of the Mother of Christ. It may be useful – and, in a way, a relief – to remember her reaction to the unexpected visit of an archangel: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord: be it unto me according to thy word.” Instead of specific resolutions, with their known limited half-life, we might think of making these words, and this thought, our own for 2018: a year to be spent in the silence of listening, whatever the world’s noise around us.

CHRISTMAS

As I do every Christmas, I here post the exquisite little poem by English actress Jill Furse, the wife of glass engraver and poet Laurence Whistler and the mother of Robin Ravilious. It moves me as much today as it did fifty years ago.

Jill Furse, by Angus McBean

CAROL

Beyond this room

Daylight is brief.

Frost with no harm

Burns in white flame

The green holly leaf.

Cold on the wind’s arm

Is ermine of snow.

Child with the sad name,

Your time is come

Quiet as moss.

You journey now

For our belief

Between the rich womb

And the poor cross.