Trauma of Loss

Fortunately, the Rabbi Sacks Foundation maintains its mailing list, enabling those of us on it to benefit still from Jonathan Sacks’ learning and insight. This week’s instalment lets an intimate experience of grief and failure shed light on a momentously mysterious passage from the Book of Numbers. Scripture lets us confront deep truths:

‘We are not always masters of our emotions. Nor does comforting others prepare you for your own experience of loss. […] We are embodied souls. We are flesh and blood. We grow old. We lose those we love. Outwardly we struggle to maintain our composure but inwardly we weep. Yet life goes on, and what we began, others will continue. Those we loved and lost live on in us, as we will live on in those we love. For love is as strong as death, and the good we do never dies.’

You can read the full text here.

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Being Faced

When last week I saw this marble head, carved in the late second or early third century, the time of Caracalla, in the Archaeological Museum of Nicopolis, I was moved and puzzled. Having admired it, I walked on; but I found myself compelled to return. It was as if the lady was trying to say something to me. I could have sworn I’d seen her that same morning in downtown Preveza coming out of a hairdresser’s, her perm carefully reset. It is extraordinary how a skilled artist can convey personal presence in such a way that it arrests us still after the passage of millennia. Though to have a presence that carries, and so a gift of communion to share, I must first discover and consolidate it. Gregory the Great wrote of St Benedict that he spent a crucial time of his life ‘living alone with himself in God’s sight‘, thus preparing himself for decisive encounters. The order is taller than it may at first seem. A lot of the time, we tend rather to run away from ourselves.

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Mission

When Bishop Meletios Kalamaras of blessed memory was consecrated metropolitan of Preveza on 28 March 1980, stepping into a troubled situation marked by scandals, he said: ‘The bishop, and every priest, must be a messenger of peace, a source of calm for souls which are troubled, for whatever reason. In order to be so, he must not seek honours, but must imitate Christ who, when He was reviled, did not revile in return; when He suffered, He did not threaten. And he must always be prepared to say from the depths of his heart: ‘To those who hate us and wrong us, Lord, give pardon; and grant them your bountiful mercy and your Kingdom.’ Yet for the mission of the priest, that is not enough. The chief mission of our Lord Jesus Christ was to give His soul, His whole self, to save the world. Initiating His disciples into this, the Lord taught them, saying: ‘My friends, see that no fear separates you from me. For though I suffer, yet it is for the sake of the world. If then you are my friends, imitate me.” If we truly seek remedies for clericalism, surely they are found in this mindset, this state of soul. 

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Orientale Lumen

St Benedict, Patron of Europe, was keenly aware of being heir to an Eastern tradition. He saw it as intrinsic to the treasure from which, in his Rule, he asked abbots to bring forth things old and new. In Orientale Lumen, Pope John Paul II submitted that ‘members of the Catholic Church of the Latin tradition must be fully acquainted with this treasure’. Drawing on the metaphor of Vyacheslav Ivanov, he insisted that the Church needs to breathe with both lungs, Eastern and Western, so to be rescued from asphyxiating provincialism and imprisonment in the immediate: ‘Today we often feel ourselves prisoners of the present. It is as though man had lost his perception of belonging to a history which precedes and follows him. This effort to situate oneself between the past and the future, with a grateful heart for the benefits received and for those expected, is offered by the Eastern Churches in particular, with a clearcut sense of continuity which takes the name of Tradition and of eschatological expectation.’ Are we now, in the Latin Church, breathing to capacity?

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Summer Break

CoramFratribus will take a holiday for a couple of weeks.

I thank you for your interest in the site.

May you have a happy, restful summer – like the one sung about here.

+fr Erik Varden OCSO

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Conscience

I have long valued Jennifer Bryson’s work in spreading knowledge about Ida Görres, whose insights speak clearly to the present moment. Only this week, thanks to a reference in Luke Coppen’s indispensable Starting Seven, did I learn something of Bryson’s biography and work in Guantanamo Bay. What she says about her experience there is worth reading. I was struck by her remarks on conscience. Conscience, she reminds us, is not some kind of faultless software we carry from birth; it needs formatting: ‘I didn’t know anything about conscience formation when I went to Guantanamo. And I’d been a Catholic at that point for almost 13 years. […] What I realized in Guantanamo is, first of all, that formation really needs to happen before the difficult challenges come. And because we can’t predict when those come, the time for conscience formation is right now.’ This is a theme at the heart of Görres’s work, too. ‘Understanding that there is a cosmic level of justice and that each of us, as human beings, will meet our Maker’, Bryson adds, ‘does provide a broader perspective’ on present choices.

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Teleology

In an intelligent review of  Matt Walsh’s What is a Woman (Notebook 3 June), Abigail Favale writes: ‘Contraception has reshaped our cultural imagination about what it means to be a man or a woman. There has been a collective forgetting about what sex is for, that it has a clear teleology around which our bodies are organized. When gender is no longer linked to generation, it becomes merely an aesthetic, a signifier without a signified. And when the signifier bears the full weight of meaning-making, the external signals of gender become intensely important—too important. We must perform and express our gender because that is all gender is now: a performative expression. These gendered signals, moreover, are increasingly shaped by the soulless forces of consumerism and pornography. We are what we watch, buy, wear, and click. Femininity and masculinity have become products, costumes, commodities.’ If one re-reads Humanae vitae in this key, one is impressed by its prescience.

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Wisdom

Lyuba Yatskiv, one of the major Christian artists of our time, has created an apse mosaic for the Church of Holy Wisdom at Ukraine’s Catholic University. It is nothing short of astonishing. Its inspiration is a passage from Proverbs (9,1–6) dear to the Church Fathers, who saw in it a prophecy of Christ’s economy of grace: ‘ Wisdom has built her house; she has hewn her seven pillars. She has slaughtered her beasts; she has mixed her wine; she has also set her table.’ The visual representation is subtle, combining Old Testament themes with sacramental symbolism. What remarkable angels! The whole is marked by unity of intelligence, line, and colour. The heart is invited to rise, the mind to fix its attention, the eye to rest. Ms Yatskiv’s work sets a standard by which to evaluate other contemporary essays in mosaic art. Victoria Emily Jones wrote about the design in 2018. You can find her article here.

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Too Easy Gospel

Squalor characterises Roberto Abbado’s production of Madama Butterfly once we get into the second act – Butterfly and Suzuki go shabbily dressed and live on a building site. This jars at first. But the approach grew on me: it displays the ingloriousness of betrayal. In Act 1, the cavalier Pinkerton tells the consul in Nagasaki about his good fortune. He has acquired a lease on a house for 999 years, yet is free each month to cancel it; the bride he will put in it cost him a mere 100 yen. He sings a hymn to the man of enterprise: ‘His anchor boldly he casts at random, until a sudden squall upsets his ship, then up go sails and rigging. And life is not worth living if he can’t win the best and fairest’. The consul retorts, È un facile vangelo – ‘that gospel is too easy’. He tries to make Pinkerton see that for Butterfly the wedding is real. She gives herself to him heart and soul. Pinkerton nods pensively: he is not wicked, yet can’t conceive of anything but a provisional commitment. When he finally sees that Butterfly is a real human being, not a plaything, it is too late. The pathos of his outcry at the end is heartfelt, but shallow. The tragedy was predictable, and was his doing. Pinkerton is a type of the narcissistic lover. He comes across as startlingly contemporary. As for Butterfly, she is timeless in her patient, self-sacrificing waiting. This interpretation of the role remains unsurpassed.

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Perduring Voices

It is hard to speak of the death of someone we have loved, even many years on. So it is balm to the soul to hear a voice that can – and may help us find our own voice with regard to private, hidden, perhaps still unarticulated griefs. In a recent essay Daniel Capó reflects with dignity and beauty on the anniversary of death of his younger brother: ‘When we die we begin to belong to others, to become others. Our voice perdures as a legacy in others’ souls. It is our responsibility to preserve an inheritance consigned to us from the very moment in which we knew love. Indeed, it is our duty to remain faithful to this light which we have received, to nurture it, and to protect it from the world’s miseries in order, thus, to pass it on to others. […] Our personal light presupposes the reflection of many other lights and of a love that, at times, in death can come to be terrible, yet whose mystery leaves within us a deeper, more indestructible truth.’

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Mystery Undermined

A 2018 Festschrift to Fr Elmar Salmann described him as being ‘neither conservative nor liberal, but rather classical and liberating’. The source of the description is not given, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it comes from Fr Salmann himself, enunciated as an aspiration. He is a deeply aspirational man, ever in via. This comes across in a recent, readable interview with the Osservatore Romano. Among other things he says: ‘The Council led to a humanisation of the kerygma, spiritualising it in a Lucan key – we are living in the era of the third Gospel – a dramatic and extraordinary passage that has run its course in parallel to my own life. But this humanisation hasn’t made us more human. I mean, it has given no profile to the mystery. The Eucharist today is a ‘fraternal meal’, which is fair enough, but what have we done with the Mystery, the real presence, the making-present of Jesus’s passion? Tension has been pushed in the direction of making the Mystery comprehensible. As a result, we have lost it as such. Thus the humanised Christian undermines the framework of the mysteries and with them the role of the Church.’

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Impact of Words

It is said of Dayan Chanoch Ehrentreu that he once prevented someone who declared disbelief in the Torah’s divine inspiration from being called upon to read the sacred text in the synagogue. In an inclusively-minded climate this might seem shocking. However, the Dayan’s reasoning was simple and sensible: had the reader ‘uttered the requisite blessing, “Our God … who gave us the Torah of truth …”, he would have committed the grave sin of giving false witness for something he did not believe. Ehrentreu always believed words had consequences.’ This belief is profoundly Biblical; indeed it encapsulates a chief dimension of Scriptural revelation. It is a perspective society urgently needs at a times when words are being devalued — and not just in secular contexts. Am I conscious of the force of the ‘Amen’ I repeatedly utter as part of liturgical prayer, of the commitment it entails?

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Integrity

I have come to know and appreciate the voice of Sibylle Lewitscharoff posthumously, intrigued by obituaries published after her death on 13 May this year. A writer of virtuosity, she was also a woman of wit – and a wonderful reader. In a terrific lecture given in Vienna in 2016, she considered the lasting impact of Dante by discussing not so much the merit as the fundamental options taken by various translators, to great effect. She remarked how Dante haunts Samuel Beckett and his ‘aesthetics of negativity’, representative of much modern fiction: ‘The essence of the modern novel is brokenness. That’s what it lives on. Happiness has become a subject for kitsch.’ Dante might teach us to dare to envisage happiness, to rediscover hope. Lewitscharoff gave this aspiration voice in her writing. It also informed her life. Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2010 she knew hardship. Not long before her death, she said with a characteristic mixture of earnestness and irony: ‘In the next world I imagine a differently constituted spiritual-embodied, simultaneously glorious beauty. I hope for a new connection with the body – I’m not so keen on the old one.’

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De venerabili

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Manna

The Eucharist, let’s remember, is food for pilgrims. It is not a snack for sedentary holiday makers; it is manna for those who’ve a distance to cover each day, who strain forward to be worthy, at last, to enter the Father’s house, and to feel at home there, taught by the journey through exile what homecoming means.

The Eucharist gives both a pledge and a challenge. One of today’s liturgical texts puts it thus: ‘The bread of life will incorporate us into itself if we are transformed into his likeness through a pure mind, firm faith, and perfect charity.’ That is our roadmap. In the strength of the bread from heaven, we continue on our journey of transformation with zest, great love, and gratitude.

From a sermon for Corpus Christi

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Priesthood

Throughout the Western world there are fewer seminarians. The average age of priests is rising. Parishes close. At the same time people ask, ‘But do we need priests – aren’t they a relic of a bygone patriarchal age?’ Part of the problem is that we’ve developed a view of priesthood that is almost exclusively functional, expressed in ‘pastoral’ terms, that is, in terms of being helpful and kind to others. One does not need to be ordained to be helpful and kind. So what is the priest’s consecration for? The New Testament is radical: ‘A good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep’ (John 10.11). In this view, the pastor is called to a sacrificial existence, to be, like his Master, both shepherd and lamb, his very being caught up in a sacerdotal dynamic. I have just watched again Robert Bresson’s version of Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest. The film is bleaker than the novel, but reaches the same depths. I reflect: there was a time when the life of a Catholic priest was popularly perceived – the film drew great audiences – as being an oblative drama, the embodiment of radical charity grounded in, an illumined by, the mystery of the cross, a sacramental existence. This perception was true. We must acquire the words and symbols needed to express it afresh.

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On Anger

We easily accuse others of disturbing our peace of mind. But can another rob me of genuine peace? Consider the scenario put before us by Dorotheus of Gaza (I am conflating a passages from Discourse 13). A monk sits quietly, minding his own business, when a brother approaches him and says something unpleasant. The monk gets angry, and justifies himself: ‘If that brother had not approached him and said those words and upset him, he never would have sinned. This kind of thinking is ridiculous and has no rational basis. For the fact that he has said anything at all in this situation breaks the cover on the passionate anger within him. A brother comes up, utters a word and immediately all the venom and mire that lie hidden within him are spewed out. He should return thanks to this brother, who has proven an occasion of profit to him.’ Unacknowledged reserves of anger, usually grounded in experiences of hurt, are major obstacles to freedom and peace in many people’s lives. We should be glad when they are revealed to us; and get on with the unpleasant but necessary work of clearing out the septic tank.

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Talking Up

I’m not on the whole a great watcher of cartoons, but the Cartŵn Cymru series from 1996, Testament: The Bible in Animation, equipped with a sourcebook from the UK Bible Society, has enchanted me. The imagery is beautiful. The stories are intelligently retold. I am intrigued to find the source book suggesting taking children further into the narratives by having them listen to great music (Haydn, Britten) and read poetry. There is poetry in the films. In the one about Moses, Israel’s future liberator, seated at night in Jethro’s tent engaged in confidential exchange, says: ‘I was conceived in slavery, and born in the stink of death. Our tribes have multiplied. Rameses saw mutiny striding towards him and subtracted the space between birth and death. One swift harvest rid him of our lastborn sons and his fear. And who was I, after all this dark arithmetic, to be the remainder? A cuckoo floating into Egypt’s nest. […] I was loved, but it came a difficult way. […] I came by my life dishonestly. I am looking for another.’ What a joy to find a catechetical resource aimed at children that does not talk down to them. Moses sounds like a Welsh bard. I intend that as the highest compliment to the script writer.

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Some Inkling

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Womanhood

Matt Walsh’s film, What Is a Woman?, is clocking up millions of views on the internet. The question raised in it is real. It generates perplexity in our day, sometimes in unexpected fora. A year or so ago, Professor Hanna Barbara Gerl Falkowitz spoke (at 37.45) of a recent vote in the assembly of Germany’s Synodaler Weg. A call had been made for this vote to be taken by women only, something the assembly’s constitutions allowed. So far, so good. Yet when the procedure was about to begin, someone asked, ‘What, then, is a woman?’ No one could come up with an acceptable answer. A solution was found. Those members were allowed to vote who were ‘not men’. Gerl Falkowitz calls this option ‘incredibly interesting’, adding: ‘Here we are back before Simone de Beauvoir, before feminism’, with womanhood described in terms of negation, no positive definition being speakable. Intellectually, this is a deadlock. Intellectual deadlocks tend to be short-lived. Minds, men’s and women’s, do have an innate appetite for sense and an impatience with nonsense.

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Polyphony

The human ear is constituted in such a way that it can hear several voices at once and perceive them as united. The history of western music is the story of development from the sublime but austere monody of Gregorian chant to ever more complex polyphony. Our minds, too, are equipped for polyphonic perception, but this faculty must be practised and refined. We seem, alas, inclined more and more to underuse it. The following remarks by Micah Mattix make me thoughtful: ‘Education, which used to be understood as an induction into the conversation that is civilization, now understands itself primarily as a problem-solving and knowledge-acquiring enterprise. It trains students in the use of a single voice. Such an education is barbaric, no matter how developed it may be. An increasingly monopolized discourse, Oakeshott writes, ‘will not only make it difficult for another voice to be heard, but it will also make it seem proper that it should not be heard.”

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Entirely

A quarter of a century ago, in Paris, I went to see Corneille’s Polyeucte, the story of an early Roman martyr, performed in a small theatre. I’d read the play, but it’s a different thing to hear lines spoken aloud. I was unprepared for the force of Polyeucte’s serene confession, ‘I am a Christian, and I am one entirely’. I came out of the theatre thinking, ‘Am I?’ I thought of the experience this morning, re-reading the martyrdom of Justin and his companions. Justin was decapitated in 165, under the reign of Marcus Aurelius. Terrible things can happen in the state’s name even under an enlightened king. Asked to renege, Justin simply answered, ‘I am a Christian’. Justin was a learned man. He’d thought his way to faith and was not prepared to give up on truth: ‘No right-thinking person falls away from piety to impiety.’ Doing so would be stupid, and stupidity is unworthy of a human being. There was more to it, though. Justin could surely have made the same confession as his friend Hierax, ‘Christ is our true father, and faith in him is our mother’. Of that union I am the fruit. And would be so entirely.

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Awful Grace of God

The status of Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way  as a civilisation marker is well documented. In Indianapolis on 4 April 1968, facing crowds distraught and enraged at the murder of Martin Luther King, Robert F Kennedy cited from memory, ‘In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God’. This is Aeschylus in Hamilton’s version, not a very accurate one, as classicists will tell you. To read the book today is to be aware of the author’s schoolmistress-like demeanour. Yet her fundamental proposition remains fascinating: ‘Very different conditions of life confronted [the ancient Greeks] from those we face, but it is ever to be borne in mind that though the outside of human life changes much, the inside changes little, and the lesson-book we cannot graduate from is human experience.’ The Ancient Greek account of such experience remains phenomenal. Hamilton’s knowledge of that account, while imperfect, was profound, and she wrote it up beautifully.

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Renew the Earth

At Pentecost we pray, ‘Come, Holy Spirit, renew the face of the earth.’ Powerful words in our present circumstances.

With so much awry in the world, we can feel powerless. It is important to resist this feeling; to realise that we can all do something to aid renewal, to prepare the ground for fraternity, friendship, justice.

This Pentecost, all principal Masses in all the Catholic churches of the Nordic countries will be offered for just peace in Ukraine. All collection will go towards the work of Caritas in Ukraine, to provide food and hygiene packages.

You can find videos presenting this initiative in English here, in Norwegian here.

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Perspective

‘In a celebrated marble relief, the monumental Pazzi Madonna, the half-length Virgin and Child are set within a sharply perspectival window embrasure that both locks them in place and puts them on stage. They enact the most intense of clinches, noses and foreheads touching, eyes drilling into each other’s face. The mighty Virgin’s Roman nose overlaps her son’s in an unprecedented partial eclipse of Christ’s head; the fingers on her hands reach out to clutch him. She seems to want to shield him from the outside world – and from his preordained future.’

From James Hall’s review of the ‘largely exhilarating’ Donatello exhibition currently on at the V&A, in a basement gallery ‘as cavernous, hi-tech and high-ceilinged as a Bond villain’s lair’.

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