It Takes a Poet
Eight decades ago, while the Second World War was raging in a state of frenzy, William Francis Jackson Knight wrote in his still very readable book, Roman Vergil:
‘The Romans were hard, cynical materialists. Bloodshed was what you saw and the news you heard. Shameless exploitation was accepted as normal. We could say the same of our time. But just occasionally, even to contemporaries, a window is opened on to the soul of an age. There are hard things, and there are soft things, which last and in the future have their command. These are the things which it takes a poet to see and say.’
Commensurate
Recently, during a long drive, I listened to Yo-Yo Ma being interviewed on Desert Island Discs. He speaks of growing up with a recording of Leon Fleisher playing Brahms’s First Piano Concerto. Anyone who has heard that recording will know what an impact it makes. Only upon watching Nathaniel Kahn’s fifteen-minute video portrait Leon Fleischer – Two Hands did I discover that the great pianist spent much of his life, on account of a subtle neurological condition, with a substantially incapacitated right hand. The drama that represents for a pianist is overwhelming; the lucidity and grace with which he dealt with it are inspiring. Fleisher remarks: ‘There was a lot of despair and misery and unhappiness. But there were commensurate ecstasies. And you can’t really expect to have one without the other.’ On the whole, he says, he wouldn’t have changed anything in the way his life turned out. In this there is a parable – worth watching, and thinking about.
To Be Decent
In a judicious essay in today’s Klassekampen, Carline Tromp reflects on Iris Murdoch’s novel Under the Net, which she inherited, apparently together with Murdoch’s complete oeuvre, from her mother. With regard to the protagonist she writes: ‘One feels like crying out: Everything isn’t about you – pull yourself together! Jake is as inconsistent as a snowflake, as brittle as a biscuit. Other people are extras, antagonists, at best little helpers. The reasons why Jake has turned out this way are complex. The war is just ten years back, one can only speculate. But Murdoch’s point, the way I read her, is that this is of no importance. No circumstance absolves you from the responsibility to make an effort to become a decent human being.’ This is well observed. I am less convinced when Tromp notes that Murdoch provides the help one needs ‘to find out alone what is right’ after having ‘thrown off God as a moral compass’. I hope that, one fine day, she will read and comment on Murdoch’s The Bell.
Mary Magdalene
After the burial of Jesus, his Apostles hid behind locked doors ‘for fear of the Jews’. What about Mary Magdalene? Was she not afraid? It would be odd if she wasn’t. As the known follower of a branded man, she was at real risk. She hurried to the tomb ‘on the first day’ not because she was fearless, but because she knew a desire that made fear seem insignificant. So intense was her longing to be with Jesus, to grieve by his side, that she cast caution to the wind. That energy of love qualified her to be the first witness to the resurrection. It made her, as the Greek liturgy has it, ‘Apostle to the Apostles’. From this we can draw a practical lesson. When we are fearful, the best remedy is not always to deal hands-on with our trouble, apt to entangle us in confusion and self-pity. We emerge victorious not by fighting darkness but by fostering our desire for light. And the light will kindle in us that love which casts out fear. Out of hopelessness we shall hear the voice of Jesus speaking our name. We shall know him to be alive and true to his promise: ‘See, I am with you always!’
Reaching the Young
In a recent gathering in Greece, my friend Father Theodosios Martzouchos, longtime protosynkellos to the great Bishop Meletios of Preveza and now parish priest in the city, reflected on the urgent challenge of passing on the faith to the young in today’s weird, fast-moving world. He spoke of faith and doubt: ‘Faith in God is a kind of struggle. Faith is not unprovable metaphysics, it is a constant overcoming of both reason and lack of reason. That is why it never becomes irrefutable certainty, it becomes irrefutable doubt. It is not a frenzy of self-convincing reason, but an awakening of reason’s doubt of itself. Doubt is the dawn of faith and the criterion of its value-quality.’ He remarked that the Church often tells the young they ‘are the Church of tomorrow, while in fact they are the Church of today! The Church wants to accompany them for what they will become; while they want to be taken into account for what they are now!’ I am grateful to Father Theodosios for sharing this insightful talk with us. You can read it here.
Guts Into It
I love this documentary portrait of Jini Fiennes, novelist, essayist, painter, photographer, so talented in so many ways, who nonetheless, whenever she had to fill in her profession on a form, always wrote just, ‘mother’. She would tell her seven children, in pursuit of some goal or other, that they’d ‘got to get their guts into it’. She herself lived viscerally, though at the same time with consummate intelligence. She turned a childhood marked by absences and an early breakdown into tasks to be fulfilled creatively, with precision and beauty. She demonstrated by her life a most important point: it is possible, by perseverance and grace, to pass on graciously to others what one has not received. In a poem she spoke of her freedom being ‘spilt and poured’ into others’ needs, though because the spilling and pouring were desired ends, her freedom was not ultimately compromised. It grew. It became love.
Bishops’ Sermons
I am made thoughtful by a remark of Christopher Isherwood’s cited by Zachary Leader in a review of Katherine Bucknell’s new life. It concern the turning of Isherwood, ‘an unlikely convert’, to Vedanta. He explained it thus: ‘My prejudices were largely semantic. I could only approach the subject of mystical religion with the aid of a brand-new vocabulary. Sanskrit supplied it. Here were a lot of new words, exact, antiseptic, uncontaminated by association with bishops’ sermons, schoolmasters’ lectures, politicians’ speeches.’ Isherwood, as Leader remarks, did not have much of a predisposition for the chastity and asceticism Vedanta presupposes; but that is by the by. His point is an important one, it seems to me. At the best of times, bishops’ sermons have been charged with the irreducible newness of the Gospel, a resonance audible, for example, in the Ambrosian texts the breviary has given us this week. When did they turn tedious? How to convey Christ’s perennial novelty today? The question is an essential one.
Desire
For Vigils today, on the feast of St Bonaventure, the Church gives us a passage from his Itinerarium mentis in Deum. A passage reads like this in the breviary: ‘For this passover [into life in Christ] to be perfect, we must suspend all the operations of the mind and we must transform the peak of our affections, directing them to God alone. This is a sacred mystical experience. It cannot be comprehended by anyone unless he surrenders himself to it; nor can he surrender himself to it unless he longs for it; nor can he long for it unless the Holy Spirit, whom Christ sent into the world, should come and inflame his innermost soul. Hence the Apostle says that this mystical wisdom is revealed by the Holy Spirit.’ That is already wonderful. But it becomes even more striking if you look up the original and realise that the word translated ‘innermost soul’ is medullitus, which means ‘in his marrow’, i.e. in his most physical interiority; and that Bonaventure’s word for ‘longing’ is desiderare. Why do we shy away from and paraphrase the Fathers’ (and Scripture’s) stress on the physical and affective dimension of the spiritual life?
On Priesthood
I recently met a priest who had attended February’s Roman conference on ongoing formation for the clergy. He said that by far the most valuable contribution, rapturously applauded, had been that of Mother Martha Driscoll. Having listened to Mother Martha’s talk, I can see why. She said among other things, having exhorted priests to become contemplatives: ‘Being contemplative doesn’t mean being a saint. Ordination does not automatically confer sanctity. In fact, contemplatives are more aware of themselves as sinners in constant need of mercy. The love of Jesus is light and so he shows us our darkness – our faults, limitations, selfishness, our inner divisions and pride. He leads us into self-knowledge so that we can be more and more emptied of self, more and more united to Him so that it is no longer I that live but Jesus who lives in me. […] Priests need the joy of deep understanding of their priesthood as the fulfilment of their heart’s desire. Christ came not only to reveal the Father but also to reveal us to ourselves. If they know their identity in Christ, they can help others to find theirs.’ This is an important talk. You can find it here, from ’47:50.
Sven Åge Varden RIP
Maybe there is only a strip
of shadow between their world
and ours? Maybe they are
as near to us now as the tall
handsome ferns in the garden
or as the sounding river
or as the light in the darkening sky
or as the balm of jasmin
in the air, or as those lifting
sparks, the tiny fires of
glow worms glimpsed, half-glimpsed
in the bonfire-smoky dusk?