Become an Event
Recently a friend sent me a line from the Czech poet Petr Hruška: ‘Díval jsem se na strom rostoucí ve dvoře tak dlouho, dokud se nestal událostí.’ Which is to say: ‘I kept looking at the tree growing in the yard until it became an event.’ When a thing becomes an event, we are alerted to the life within it. Ceasing to be an object, it draws us into conversation, potentially a kind of communion. I think again of Dom Porion’s insight, dear to me: ‘I ascertain the riches contained in a single perspective, the outline of a mountain, say, with its pine trees in the golden glory of May, in the mists of October, or whenever. We must become the mirror of this beauty and its echo. It always reveals something new, yet every time it says it all.’ ‘I wonder’, the Carthusian asks, ‘whether travel is worth the bother.’ A pertinent question. If only I could open my eyes and see what, who, is before me now.
Strings to a Harp
Today’s official of reading offers us a wonderful passage from St Ignatius of Antioch’s Letter to the Ephesians. It provides an image of the Church by way of musical metaphor. ‘It is fitting, therefore, that you should be in agreement with the mind of the bishop as in fact you are. Your excellent presbyters, who are a credit to God, are as suited to the bishop as strings to a harp. So in your harmony of mind and heart the song you sing is Jesus Christ. Every one of you should form a choir, so that, in harmony of sound through harmony of hearts, and in unity taking the note from God, you may sing with one voice through Jesus Christ to the Father. If you do this, he will listen to you and see from your good works that you are members of his Son. It is then an advantage to you to live in perfect unity, so that at all times you may share in God.’ To live in this way, and to build up the community, we all need a capacity for careful listening that presupposes inward silence, the silence above all of self-will.
Patience
As after a gloriously azure morning clouds descend and the snow begins to drift, the abbey of Tamié nestles with perfect serenity in the mountainside 900 metres above sea level, resembling a mother bird spreading her wings to protect her brood. She has sat there for almost a thousand years. She has seen all sorts of weathers come and go. She has seen fat years and lean. ‘But the mercy of the Lord is everlasting.’ This has been the constant refrain of the monks living within her, one generation succeeding another. The words have been borne out by experience. Saints have gone forth from her, and martyrs. Even a bishop. Today she lies there discreet, almost invisible. At the opportune time her white walls will stand out in bright contrast to her green surroundings. For winter will yield to spring, and the pear trees will bloom. An image of the Church in her mystery.
Sr Chiara Picierro RIP
On the feast of the Epiphany, in our monastery of Vitorchiano, Sr Chiara died. She was wonderfully full of life. The sudden death after fulgurant illness of a young person is hard to accept. Yet one can with eyes of faith see mysterious, even lovely patterns of coherence. On making profession, Sr Chiara wrote: ‘I live fully only when utterly available to receive God’s love and to live within it. To give ALL is not only to offer what is best in me, what I think I can give; the ALL embraces my limitations, too, and my talent, my sin and my joy.’ Not long ago, knowing she was very ill, she wrote: ‘I think I can see in this business of illness a call from the Lord to grow into self-giving. To live out an offering is about more than giving something; it is about bringing to the Lord what he gives us, and to do so deliberately, embracing what he proposes.’ Sr Chiara fought the good fight, finished the race, kept the faith. Her testimony inspires. Her memory is joyful, sweet.
Plato in the Lift
I laughed when I read Claire Giuntini‘s list of books of the year, which begins: ‘A few months ago, I began making a mental list of what my fellow passengers have been reading on the subway. You don’t see folks reading every ride. Or even every other ride. But those who do read come from all ages and situations, and they read all sorts of things.’ For I often make the same observation travelling by public transport, and have picked up some really good clues that way. Giuntini’s confession makes my curiosity seem less culpable. She concludes: ‘The crown jewel is the man I encountered in the elevator of my apartment building, and though he was neither on a train nor actively reading, I simply must include him on my list. He sported a leather trench coat, neck tattoos, a nose ring, and—most importantly—a fancy-looking hardcover edition of Plato’s Republic, the one that bears the subtitle ‘The Heaviest Penalty for Declining to Rule Is to Be Ruled by Someone Inferior to Yourself’.’ So there.
Non-Dimensional
Thinking a lot, as I am these days, about the Desert Fathers, I recall this passage from one of Helen Waddell’s letters to her sister Meg: ‘In fact I had a sudden revelation one quiet gentle autumn day in Primrose Hill of the eternity of every moment of time. The Desert Fathers did bring eternity into men’s minds by their exaggeration of it, and contempt for the bus-stop of time. But the great thing is the conviction of eternity: and now we have the balance adjusted, and each moment is deeper than ever plummet sounded. It is this non-dimensional world that one is released into by music.’ And it strikes me, one way into this rich tradition, a bridge from our present reality to theirs, would be the Goldberg Variations.
Рождество
Mikhail Aldashin’s pictorial meditation on the Nativity is so enchanting, so full of loveliness that it is an asceticism to keep it just for Christmas. This cartoon, made in 1996, is in the best sense naïf; that is, capable of seeing reality as it is, yet gloriously illumined. Works such as this one remind us what wonder means. It is vital to keep that faculty alive. Without it our view of the world is contorted, warped. For all its simplicity, which makes the story accessible to all, Aldashin’s film is full of subtle allusions to Biblical typologies, expository narratives, and great works of art. It makes us want to join the angelic band, even if our instrumental skill does not extend beyond the triangle. What does it matter! You can watch the film here.
Music in Church
How better to spend the Nativity Octave than by singing Bach’s Christmas Oratorio? Here is an excerpt from an interview with Cologne’s Domradio on the occasion of the Cappella Lacensis‘s performance tonight in the abbey church of Maria Laach. ‘Few people are indifferent to music as an expression of adoration and of worship. I think music can often be a door-opener, an awakener. In music we hear a call from beyond drawing forth from us an echo at once familiar and astonishing. Church musicians must be conscious that their contribution to the liturgy will often be as important as, sometimes more important than, a sermon. Therefore it must be made prayerfully. There is no room for mediocrity. The Christmas Oratorio is wonderful – we might call it heavenly! At the same time it is earthbound and unsentimental. That belongs to the mystery of Bach.’
Desert Fathers
It may seem odd, even subversive, to launch an ascetic project on the eve of Christmas Eve; but it isn’t, really. For the core meaning of ‘ascesis’ is ‘exercise’, and what Christ’s Nativity does is to introduce into this world the possibility of living divinely, an art we must learn by practice. Thanks to a long, stimulating exchange with Exodus 90, a programme that has led the way to uncommon freedom for countless people, and to the cordial collaboration of EWTN, I am happy to announce the launch of ‘A Year with the Desert Fathers’ on this day. Find out more about the programme here, or visit the designated website, here.
Leavening
In August 1969, George Mackay Brown wrote to Stella Cartwright: ‘Dear Stel, not many people have to walk such a hard road. One feels desperate with solitude often; then it is salutary to know that one is not alone, but is “involved with mankind”. And that means, as I understand it, that whenever you are brave, enduring, uncomplaining, then the whole world of suffering is helped and soothed somehow. This is sacrifice, and fulfilment and renewal: an incalculable leavening.’ This ‘incalculable leavening’ is what Christmas, the incarnation of the Word, renders possible. Mackay Brown noted elsewhere that ‘in a sense, everyone is the writer’s concern. The whole of humanity is his family and he must participate in their joys and ennuis and sufferings, otherwise what he does would be as meaningless as an endless game of patience.’ Quotations are from Maggie Fergusson’s George Mackay Brown: The Life, of which A.N. Wilson wrote it was ‘the best biography of a poet I have ever read’.
Tromsø in Advent
EWTN’s Colm Flynn has paid a pre-Christmas visit to Tromsø, producing a lovely reportage broadcast today. You can find it here. The strong invocations of the final days of Advent, ‘Let your light shine upon us!’, ‘Come, do not delay!’, resound with special force in the Polar Night, which can occasionally reveal displays of spectacular colour. Holy Writ speaks of a playfulness embedded in the structure of creation: ‘When he fixed the foundations of earth, then was I beside him as artisan; I was his delight day by day, playing before him all the while, playing over the whole of his earth’. Sometimes, it takes the darkness of night to awaken to this, to learn anticipation – and rejoicing.
Utopias
It is fascinating and uncanny to re-read an essay Joseph Needham wrote for Scrutiny in 1932. It begins like this: ‘‘Utopias’ writes Prof. Berdiaev, in a passage which Mr. Huxley chooses for his motto ‘appear to be much more realisable than we used to think. We are finding ourselves face to face with a far more awful question, how can we avoid their actualisation? For they can be made actual. Life is marching towards them. And perhaps a new period is beginning, a period when intelligent men will be wondering how they can avoid these utopias, and return to a society non-utopian, less perfect, but more free.’ Mr. Huxley’s book is indeed a brilliant commentary on this dismally true remark. It is as if a number of passages from Mr. Bertrand Russell’s recent book The Scientific Outlook had burst into flower, and had rearranged themselves in patches of shining colour like man-eating orchids in a tropical forest. Paul planted, Apollos watered, but who gave the increase in this case, we may well ask, for a more diabolical picture of society (as some would say) can never have been painted.’
Conclave
So I did go to see Conclave. As a cultural phenomenon it shows, like Nanni Moretti’s Habemus Papam from 2011 (a much cleverer film), the fascination exercised by Catholic rituals and processes on a world professing indifference to religion. The photography is good. The script is flat. The characters lack depth. The allegiance to stereotypes is heroic. I didn’t find the film offensive; it isn’t interesting enough to offend. If I left the cinema feeling dejected, it was for another reason: Edward Berger’s effort shows how sterile talk of religion becomes when faith is absent from it. Dan Hitchens has suggested, in a thoughtful review, that Conclave points beyond itself. I fear my response is more hopeless. I found the film leaden, with no intimation of flight. It is an implicit exposé of the third commandment, for what happens when the name of the Lord is taken in vain is not necessarily blasphemy but pointlessness.
Holy Globalism
In the curious mishmash that makes up the York Art Gallery, where some very fine pieces hang among some very indifferent pieces, I came upon this portrayal of St Birgitta, one panel of a diptych in which she is flanked by, of all people, St Anthony the Great. The ensemble was produced by Maso di San Friano about 1565 for a church near Florence. A fourteenth-century Swede in the company of a fourth-century Egyptian, removed from Renaissance Italy to post-industrial York. Just behind the Art Gallery stands St Olav’s church, dedicated in 1055. Just 25 years after Olav’s death, his cult had spread to the north of England. The communion of saints presupposes and nurtures a global view of history, and of mankind, that lets us draw lines and see connections across the pedantic boundaries we draw to enclose ourselves reassuringly in too narrow categories of belonging. We need this broader perspective now, when in many places portcullises are lowered, bridges burnt.
Tenderness
I was sitting on the airport shuttle early this morning when I read the second reading of vigils, astounded by the immediacy of words written nearly a thousand years ago by that great man and monk, Anselm of Canterbury. How tenderness carries across the centuries! The vocative diminutive ‘homuncio’ and twice repeated ‘aliquantulum’ are eloquently encouraging. ‘Come, little fellow, rise up! Flee your preoccupations for a little while. Hide yourself for a time from your turbulent thoughts. Cast aside, now, your heavy responsibilities. Put off your burdensome business. Make a little space free for God; and rest for a little time in him. Enter the inner chamber of your mind; shut out all thoughts. Keep only thought of God, and thoughts that can aid you in seeking him. Close your door and seek him. Speak now, my whole heart! Speak now to God, saying, I seek your face; your face, Lord, will I seek. And come you now, O Lord my God, teach my heart where and how it may seek you, where and how it may find you.’
Healing Wounds
‘There is a tendency in Christian devotion to prettify, even to idealise, wounds. This tendency is perverse. Human nature, created in the image of God to be like God, is made for wholeness. Here and now we inhabit a world that is wounded, groaning in pangs of deliverance. We are wounded, subject to the anomaly which Scripture calls ‘sin’, an existential wasting-sickness. Sin leaves its mark on our spirit and on our body. It can paralyse our will or lead it astray. To be fully human is to own this state of affairs. It is to be reconciled to loss and the inevitability of death. But it is no less to remember that our woundedness is of time, and that time will pass. The Christian Gospel envisages the passage from a frank acknowledgement of wounds to the prospect of definitive healing. It proposes a vista of transformation, ‘a new heaven and a new earth’ where ‘death will be no more, mourning and crying and pain will be no more.’ There, the first things will have passed. The first things, though, must happen first.’ From Healing Wounds, published today.
Die Manns
The docudrama is a tricky genre. The dramatic component easily comes across as a series of ornamental vignettes jarring with or romanticising the documentary. Life is mostly duller than drama; so we are left feeling cheated, confronted with something that is neither quite real nor quite satisfying our thirst for fantasy. Heinrich Breloer’s Die Manns is an exception to this rule. True, Thomas Mann and his gifted entourage were not a ‘normal’ family: in their case realism was fantastic. There is at the same time a narrative rigour to the drama that presents a credible portrait, not only of a clan, but of a world before, during, and after World War II subject to cataclysmic change. It is an unsettling and appropriate film to watch again now, with so much coming undone. The serene commentary of Elisabeth Mann Borgese adds a note of paradoxical hopefulness. Marcel Reich-Ranicki called Die Manns a high point of German cinema. I’d say that is no exaggeration.
Iron Age Words
I recently learned that Fr Paul Mankowski would advise people to pray the Divine Office by giving them this recommendation: ‘It’s good to have Iron Age words in your mouth every day.’ His phrase has been ringing in my ears, echoing with truth. There’s something about the taste of substantial ancient utterance that trains one’s palate to appreciate excellence and identify bosh, an exercise which, practised daily, may actually train me to swallow the latter before I am tempted to articulate it. This morning at Lauds, I savoured the phrase: Ego et anima mea regi cæli lætationes dicimus. Literally: ‘My soul and I speak rejoicings to the king of heaven’ (Tobit 13.7). There’s no dualism here, but recognition that I’m often enough at odds with myself. Am I where my soul is? To let myself be challenged by that question is, I think, an excellent way to prepare for Christmas.
Oneself in a Word
I am charmed and inspired by the answer Einar Økland gives an interviewer in last week’s Dag og Tid:
– If you were to sum yourself up in a word, which would it be?
– Colon [:].
–???
–A colon has something on either side of it, open to what comes in and what goes out. But it is an articulation made in retrospect. One doesn’t know what one takes in until one releases it, until afterwards. An alternative answer could have been ‘full stop’. A full stop has no extension and can be both a beginning and an end.
Poetry
A contribution to the Books of the Year supplement in The Tablet of 30 November 2024:
There is something remarkable going on in the poetry of Father Paul Murray, a crystallisation progressing from one volume to the next, though without lessening his poems’ characteristic earthiness and intimacy. Light at the Torn Horizon contains many fine pieces in a register stretching from the playful (‘Canticle in Praise of Punctuation’) to the deeply serious (‘To a Friend Dying’). I have read it with reverence, attention, and gratitude.
A Good Man
Thinking of Mount Melleray, I recall with veneration a monk who served as prior there at a difficult time, a deeply good man whose funeral I was privileged to celebrate: ‘For anyone inclined to think that a monk’s dying to the world is a life-denying, fearful, glum affair, Brother Boniface provided a startling corrective. What a cheerful, warm-hearted, hospitable man he was! As Mount Melleray’s porter he exercised for decades a ministry of welcome. A brother who worked with him has told me he never saw Boniface turn away a person in need. That is a noble legacy. Brother Boniface received all comers kindly. He practised the asceticism of suspended judgement. Not that he was gullible. In fact, he was very shrewd. But he refused to condemn another. As a result, he was a vessel of comfort for many. He gave fresh heart to the hopeless, showed the way to the lost. Gifted with wonderful patience, he knew how to listen. Having listened, he would speak, but not much. His essential message was conveyed simply by his presence.’
No Abiding City
The news of the Cistercians’ departure from Mount Melleray has caused many reactions. The abbey has played a key role in Ireland’s Catholic – and secular – history. I have just re-read an elegiac essay John Waters wrote ten years ago after a visit to the place, conscious of witnessing something precious passing away: ‘It strikes me forcibly that, even if we are barely aware of their existences – even if we scorn their sacrifices – the silent prayerful presence of these men here is somehow vital to our very human continuance. I don’t mean just that they pray for us, but that the sense they give us of something to be believed in so unconditionally – that, even as we scoff, this somehow allows us to continue inhabiting what we think of as the ‘real’ world, in much the way that we once partied all night, knowing that our staid parents slept fitfully at home, hoping we would make it back safe with the dawn.’
Infant of Prague
It seemed eminently meaningful to find myself, in the evening of the feast of Christ the King, on my knees before the Infant of Prague. The aesthetics of the statue and its shrine will appear differently to different people, but that is beside the point: what the monument expresses is that God, to become man, became a child. Dom Porion has written: ‘God made himself a child to heal our useless fears and to inspire us with confidence; for fear, lack of trust, and timidity constitute an ancient and grave illness that affects us all to a greater or lesser extent.’ This is true. There is a further dimension to this image. Having been made in Spain it was brought to Prague in rough conditions: it lost its hands. A Carmelite praying before the statue seemed to hear it say: ‘Give me hands and I will give you peace.’ He promptly restored them. Countless people have since found peace in the statue’s presence. Of course, there is also a parable in the story: each of us is called to be Christ’s hands in this world, instruments for the good he wishes to accomplish. Caritas Christi urget nos.
Cecilia
‘Cecilia’s Christian witness caused scandal in a city still largely pagan. She was arrested, then condemned to suffocation in the baths. When the city’s prefect heard she was still alive after 24 hours, he ordered decapitation. The henchman struck thrice, unable to sever the head from the trunk. Roman law did not permit a fourth attempt. He left Cecilia bleeding, therefore. She lived on for three days. Then she died, and was buried by Pope Urban. This story, told in ancient chronicles, was confirmed by observation in the jubilee year of 1600. During restoration works at the abbey of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, on the site where Cecilia’s family had held its titulus, the martyr’s remains were found. Not only were they in a state of incorruption. The twisted position of Cecilia’s head also corresponded exactly to the story of failed execution. The find was a sensation. Swiss guards had to be brought in to control the traffic of pilgrims wanting to pray in the physical presence of one of Rome’s most beloved saints.’ From Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses.
Poison
One of the papers I look at each morning is the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a good old-fashioned continental broadsheet with a deserved reputation for serious, well-researched journalism. Even here one senses a change of tonality these days. I have been struck to find, over little more than 48 hours, three front-page headlines that cry out: ‘Poison!’ The contexts were various, applying first to a political party (the AfD), then to the culture of victimisation, then to Platform X. The matters in hand are causes for concern, that is true. But what does it do to public discourse when bastions of measured analysis yield routinely to hyperbole? What does it say about journalism that such easy recourse is had to the semantic register of toxins? It goes beyond my competence to attempt the psychoanalysis of a newspaper. But it seems to me these questions are worth asking. The task of the press is surely to articulate problems so that these can be addressed, not just to cry wolf.
