BON APPETIT

On a Friday night as Yeshua, head of the family, was preparing to bless the bread -- baruch atta Adonai Eluhenu --, he looked at the pile of inviting, freshly-made blond loaves and thought: Yes, that too has its place in the prayer I'm building. We harvest the wheat, we thresh it, we mill the grain, we bake the flour; but without the wheat, and the millet, and the rest, what should we do? It was you, Father, who brought forth lechem min ha'aretz, bread from the earth. Nothing is so basic: it is 'bread', but sometimes we use it to mean simply 'food'. It is your gift, not our right.  And sometimes You withhold it, or seem to; sometimes rains or drought spoil the  harvest, and we go hungry. You have not given, but You have allowed, great famines. It would be proper to ask for it: "Give us today today's bread, today's food." Only today's, he thought; it would be wrong to demand tomorrow's, too like  hoarding, control, security. Abba, you have taught us to care and not to care, to live lightly, loving only you so that we may the better love all else. Give us, just for today, the lechem we need.

And, he reflected, as every thing here below is itself but also an image, how true this is of the lechem! It is the warm bread we eat and enjoy this Shabbat, but at the same time it is the unleavened bread that reminds us of our flight from Egypt; it is the food that God provided for Israel in the desert -- and remember, they were told to gather only each day for that day (except for Shabbat). And the food God gives is not only that of ha'aretz, is it? 

As he meditated, walking in the fields that day, the subject opened out and out in his mind. What feeds us? What feeds our bodies? What feeds our souls? `What has fed my mind, that now I can access so many treasures of thought? And the Word of God swam into his mind: all those riches of Torah, Tanakh, all the words of the prophets, all the overflowing beauty of the Psalms -- what a banquet!

The Psalms brought him to the Meshiach, that supreme gift from God that we are promised. Meshiach, who will repair the great Ill and heal Israel of its wounds. Will not Meshiach be like bread also, not today's but eternity's?

ROYALTY, OR, IS RUNNING THE WORLD BEYOND US?

British Library MS K90049-89 Royal 6 E ix ff. 10v-11

As he was composing the Abun Dbashmayo (“Father in Heaven” in Aramaic), Yeshua began with Ha Shem, the Name. The Name is as close as earthlings can come to the essence of the Deity. What should come next? “Thy Kingdom come” says Yeshua. I have previously written about the curious optatives in the first half of the Lord’s Prayer; now, of course, we have to put right a noun. What is desired here is not the coming of a place or even the transformation of a place: the word malkuth, with the same MLK root as melech, would be much better translated in this context as “kingship” or “reign”. May/let Thy reign come.

Now this is a petition we can understand and wholeheartedly support. A dear friend of mine is always sad, sorry and frustrated that God, in His omnipotence, does not one day simply appear on all TV stations and all social media at once, say “Playtime over, you little horrors!” and close the whole show of our sorry planet down. And I suspect that many people would be in more-or-less agreement with that. Let Him take over. Let Him wipe out poverty and sickness and misery in one mighty stroke, and magically transform our squabbling messy billions into the sweet harmonious societas we think He must have had in mind when He created us. Thy reign come – please!  Ours has made such a spectacular mess of things; do please take over!

God, of course, softly but definitively says “No” to that. That frustrates us, and it makes us try to work out why. Why does God let all the evil in the world happen, why does He not set up his reign once and for all, now? There are two reasons, which I’ve mentioned here before. In the first place, God does not, I think, micromanage our planet. Not a sparrow falls, says Yeshua, but God sees it; but He doesn’t stop it falling. Shit happens. Earthquakes happen. Hurricanes happen. Secondly, God’s omnipotence has only one limit but it is huge: He cannot go against His own nature. Since his nature is love, and since love by its nature implies freedom, He cannot force us to love Him back, or love our neighbour. Auschwitz happens. And God weeps burning cosmic tears as he takes the souls of massacred innocents to Himself.

Having thus understood why he does not impose his reign, we may still ask why, then, we can and should beg for it to come? I imagine, again, Yeshua meditating on this, perhaps at night on a Nazareth rooftop, and coming gradually to the realisation that our prayer for God’s reign to come means that we are asking for, begging for, his institution as our Ruler, the ruler of our land, of our polis, of our oikos, of our collective and individual lives. And this is not something God will do on his own: rather, it is we who will nominate and install Him – evidently through His grace, through His Holy Spirit. If we ask Him – and in so far as we ask Him – He will, as he has promised, come and dwell with us, in us. So the prayer is turned back on us: it is our praying, our asking, our begging, that will make His reign come.

This is true both individually and collectively. If I ask Him with all my heart and soul and mind and strength to rule me, He will, although it may take time; if we, “We the People”, so far get our shit together that we ask him unitedly and insistently and with our whole collective heart and mind and soul and strength to rule us, He will. Of course, as we even begin to think about the possibility we see how staggeringly unlikely is such a unanimity. But maybe it has to start with small collectivities: an oikos, a household or family; a club; a group of friends; a charitable institution; even a political party. The petition “Thy reign come” is a compass that gives direction to out hope, a sense to our work in the world, and a course to our praying.

HALLOWING

In my continuing meditation on the life, activities and thoughts of Yeshua Bar-Yosef before he began his ministry, I've begun to think about the moment, and the way, he began to imagine what we call the Lord's Prayer or the Pater Noster. For I do not believe that this prayer which, as Bonhoeffer and others have said, sums up all the prayers we could conceivably pray was born fully formed at the moment when the disciples asked him how they should address the Father. 

I imagine him, then, in that slow eighteen-year runup from twelve to Cana, gradually forming and evolving his interactions with the Father -- learning, in fact, to pray. As, indeed, we all must, but in his case it must have been very different. I do not imagine him, for instance, having the problems we face, which were so beautifully expressed by John Donne: "I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in and invite God and his angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door." But I do imagine the composition of the Pater Noster as having taken much time and meditation.

So, to begin: "Hallowed be thy Name." Sanctificetur nomen tuum. We have trouble with this, as we don't hallow much, and we are't used to attached serious weight to a name. We can look it up, and find that to hallow or sanctify is to set apart, to venerate or honour. And what about the Name itself? Most of us know that the Hebrew name for God is something like "Jehovah", and that it is in fact "Yahweh", a name too sacred to be pronounced unless furnished with the vowels of "Adonai" the day-to-day name of the Deity. In Hebrew it is written YHWH, four letters, in Greek a tetragrammaton, shown in Goya's painting above. Richard Rohr has said that this name was not spoken but breathed; as such it was, and is, a Name that lives in wind and water, in the gusts and ripples of creation, in the sweetness and the sorrows of humanity.

I have imagined Yeshua, in his late Twenties, spending a Shabbat away from the family, perhaps on the edge of the rock hard by Nazareth, lost for an entire day in an Act of Adoration of the Name, of the Tetragrammaton. I imagine him having a miniature basket filled with a wax medallion of the Name; seeing it in the shape of tree-branches, hearing it in the autumn wind. And out of such a day grows quite naturally the very first petition, or commandment, of the Great Prayer: "Hallowed be Thy Name." For unlike ourselves, who are known but not defined by our names, God is his Name. Its root is the verb "to be". So to hallow the Name is to worship the Father. 

How do we, then, hallow it? First, by never using it disrespectfully. I was brought up as a very liberal Protestant; but my parents came down heavily on any casual use of the Name. In the Dutch streetcars of my youth, among the advertisements were nailed little enamel signs of the League Against Swearing: "Speak freely about God, but never abuse His name." So we could begin by banishing "OMG" from our and our children's texts. 

Secondly, we could follow the League sign's other suggestion, and hallow the Name by talking about it, and about Him, with others, even those who don't agree with us. This is hard, but it may be one of the ways we can help our world come back to civilised behaviour and conversation across divides of conviction and belief. 

And thirdly, we could perhaps best hallow the Name by imitating Yeshua and praying intimately and often. A Carthusian wrote that we should not think that we can bring to God only the best of ourselves: on the contrary, He can only heal us and love us better if we bring him everything, all the time. Something we would not do even with our best friends; but then, He and his Name are sanctified --- set apart.

"THE SKY IS MARBLE TO MY THOUGHTS"

Those words were written by William Hazlitt in one of English Romanticism’s oddest books, Liber Amoris, the shame-less autobiographical account of his all-consuming passion for a young, uncultured and slightly bewildered shopgirl. But they also reflect the experience of many Christians, in long periods when their prayers seem to be going nowhere, when there is no sense of an answer, an encouragement, a hearing even. One goes on praying because one has been told that that’s important and in any case it has become a habit; but there’s no sense of a conversation any more. Once, there was: we felt that we were being given great spiritual gifts almost every day; we felt privileged, loved, cherished by the Father we were learning to love. And then, gradually more often than suddenly, a curtain of increasing density seems to be drawn between us and Him, and our prayers feel as if they were being absorbed and powdered into dust.

Those who know, the spiritual masters and novice masters, tell us that this is a recognised stage in one’s spiritual education, to which perseverance is the only answer. That’s a slight comfort to know, but it doesn’t help explain the phenomenon; and we feel that somehow an explanation would help us weather it. Should we, greatly daring, try to find one?

Suppose it is we who are the cause ourselves. It might be that, simply, our prayer has become a habit, that repetition has made it routine, that we can recite our prayers without being fully there, and that consequently they arrive in Heaven as a confused mumble hard for even God to hear and decode. On a higher plane, the perceived silence might be the result, the backlash, of a period of intense concentration, a backlash which is telling us to calm down, to give it a rest, to recharge our batteries. And a third reason might be that we have become a little deaf: that we are waiting for a mighty roaring wind, at the least a small earthquake, and that for some reason – ears battered by daily life, eyes glazed over by the Internet, senses numbed by private griefs – we cannot perceive the faint rustle trying to reach us.

Suppose, on the other hand, that it is God who is the cause. If so, the one thing we should not do is take the silence as a rejection: as if God had other things on His mind, as if he didn’t think we were worthy, as if he thought us too ugly or too insignificant to reply to. God rejects nobody who seeks Him: not the sinner, not the idiot, not the creep, not even the saint. So if it is not a rejection, what else might it be? We can take it as axiomatic that whatever His reason, it is meant for our good. Hard, to try to second-guess the Divinity; to plumb the Mind that made us. What might He mean? One possibility is that He wants us to try different kinds of prayer: less formulaic, more spontaneous, or conversely, less ejaculatory and more soberly formal. Or it might be that He wants us to spend more time in action, helping the poor buggers who show us Christ on the bus: action, not words. Or, finally, it might simply be that He is training us for the long haul. The true spiritual life, if we are to believe the masters, is never a sprint and always a marathon.

Every great prayer figure – Theresa of Avila, St John of the Cross, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas à Kempis, Hildegard of Bingen – somewhere mentions the silence, which can be as deep and desperate as “the Dark Night of the Soul”. And all of them tell us that we must not give up, that beyond the night, beyond the silence, there is a brightness beyond describing. As a Carthusian put it, we are made to enter into the flow of love that passes from the Father to the Son and into the glory of love that returns from the Son to the Father. By the gentle force of the ruach, the pneuma, the Spiritus Sanctus, we are invited, perhaps destined, into the very life of the Trinity. The marble is not to be broken: if we are steadfast, it will melt.  

SCANDALOUS AND IDIOTIC

I was struck, again, by the text of today’s reading in the French Prions en Eglise, which really is very powerful, and also touched by one of the commentaries on it, which seemed to me extremely perceptive. (I have retranslated the Pauline passage from the French, because it comes across strongly that way, but not without rechecking it against a few English versions and the Greek.)

“Brothers, Christ did not send me to baptise but to announce the Gospel, and that without having recourse to the language of human wisdom, which would make vain the cross of Christ. For the language of the cross is folly to those who perish, but to those who are saved, to us, it is the power of God. Indeed, the Scripture says, I will make the wisdom of the wise to perish, and the intelligence of the intelligent I will reject. Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the rational man of earth? As for the wisdom of the world, has God not made it folly? Indeed, since -- by a disposition of God’s wisdom -- the world, with all its wisdom, was not able to recognise God, it has pleased God to save those who believe by the folly that is the proclamation of the Gospel. While the Jews demand miracles and the Greeks look for wisdom, we proclaim a Messiah crucified: a scandal for the Jews, a folly for the pagans. But for those whom God calls, whether Jews or Greeks, this Messiah, this Christ, is the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the folly of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”  (1Corinthians 1: 17-25)

Commentary by Roselyne Dupont-Roc, Hellenist and Bible scholar:

The text operates a series of reversals, from folly to a higher wisdom, from weakness to a higher strength. This reversal Paul had himself experienced on the road: an encounter had made the persecutor, sure of his rights and of his power, into the passionate disciple of the Crucified, announcing the Good News in the midst of the dangers and the sufferings of the voyage.

How can one say, faced with the Cross, that object of horror and disgust, that the wisdom of God and his power are at work? Only, surely, by experiencing in our deepest self that His love comes to us and sustains us in our distress and anguish, and by bearing witness toward those who have not known this experience, through an attentive and loving accompaniment of their crucified lives.

Image: the Crucifixion, from the Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald (ca. 1470-1528)

IT NEVER RAINS BUT IT POURS

“Now I live; yet not I, but Christ in me” (Galatians 2:20).  This text had long fascinated me, like its counterpart “Your life is hid with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). And then, recently, I got an inkling of its meaning, or at least of one of its meanings. Life, in its daily round, had been weighting me down, and it was all beginning to feel like one of the grimmer bits from Ecclesiastes. I prayed, as usual, to be taught the Prayer of the Heart, the prayer that prays even when we are not praying; and then, in a few moments, I remembered what I had written about a long time ago: our doors and shutters.

In the Angelus, we pray that God may “pour Thy grace into our hearts”. I’ve always loved that verb and that image. And it occurred to me that in fact that pouring is going on all the time. We live in a perpetual monsoon of grace: pouring out grace upon those He loves is what God does. And when we feel deprived of it, it is usually we who are, with a complex system of shutters and barriers, keeping it out.

If, for once, you don’t, you wake up in the morning and, as a Carthusian put it, you savour the immense gift you are being given, at this precise moment: one whole day. A whole day, of life, of love, of work, of thanksgiving. You give thanks, and you pray that you may not in this day close off your heart and keep out the outpouring that is heading for you. And as you do so, you can hear the faint creak of shutters opening. Some of them are old, fairly massive and jammed shut: they need real effort to dislodge. Some are charming, and part of you opens them with regret: they let through just the tiniest ray of light, in which dust motes danced so prettily; but they too can and must be flung wide.

And as they open, the tide of grace flows in, and you are suddenly filled with a morning sunshine of joy – which will last you all day, if you keep strong winds from closing the shutters again. And as this happens and you revisit that joy from hour to hour, you realise that the less of “you” gets in the way of the flood, the happier the real you will be.

It is “I” that keeps God out all the time. So if I can get “I” out of the way, then grace, i.e. God, can come in. And the result will be, in at least one sense, like Galatians 2:20: “Now I live; yet not I, but Christ in me.” If I can empty the clutter and open the shutters, there will at last be room for Him.

A MOVING POEM FROM AN UNCOMPROMISING MAN

This austere 17C Dutch Hebrew scholar, Calvinist pastor, poet and polemicist was Jacobus Revius from Deventer. He was Secretary to the committee that made the official translation of the Old Testament; he had attended Duplessis-Mornay's Academy at Saumur on the Loire; he was a deeply devout man who, while his theology and politics were uncompromisingly Calvinist, had in his devotion and his devotional poetry learnt much from French Catholic verse. In a dusty corner of my computer's memory I came upon his one famous poem, a sonnet called "He Bore Our Sorrows", and thought I might try my hand at a translation.

‘t En zijn de Joden niet, Heer Jesu, die U kruisten,

Noch die verraderlijk U togen voor ‘t gericht,

Noch die versmadelijk U spogen in ‘t gezicht.

Noch die U knevelden en stieten U vol puisten.

‘t En zijn de krijgslui niet die met haar felle vuisten

De rietstok hebben of de hamer opgelicht,

Of het vervloekte hout op Golgotha gesticht

of over Uwe rok t'saam dobbelden en tuisten.

Ik ben ‘t, o Heer, ik ben ‘t die U dit heb gedaan

Ik ben de zware boom die U had overlaan.

Ik ben de taaie streng daarmee Gij gingt gebonden.

De nagel, en de speer, de gesel die U sloeg.

De bloedbedropen kroon die Uwe schedel droeg.

Want dit is al geschied, eilaas, om mijne zonden.

‘Tis not the Jews, Lord Jesu, crucified Thee,

Not they betrayed and dragged Thee to be tried,

Nor they that spat and mocked Thee far and wide,

Nor bound and whipped and loudly vilified Thee.

‘Tis not the soldiers with their fists defied Thee,

Held up the reed nor stabbed Thee in the side,

Raised up the cursèd tree where God’s Son died,

Nor diced over thy clothes as all decried Thee.

‘Tis I, O Lord, ‘tis I did this to Thee:

I am the beam that made Thee slip and fall,

I am the cruel cord that bound Thee in;

The nail, the spear, the scourge that wounded Thee,

The blood-soaked crown Thy skull bore for us all:

Alas, I made this happen, by my sin.