The Art of Cleaning
For most of my adult life, it has been part to my job to clean public areas, so to clean up after others. I have the highest esteem for the cleaner’s profession. So it was with interest that I recently watched Maria Hedenius’s film from 2003, The Art of Cleaning.
It is a contemplative, intelligent portrait of Mrs Wally Pettersson, for whom cleaning was no demeaning task but a way of humanising society. One senses a metaphysical dimension to her work, for Mrs Pettersson was a person alert to ultimate realities: cleaning was for her a day-to-day participation in the great task of creating kosmos out of chaos. Remarkable throughout the film is the protagonist’s matter-of-course respect for other beings, humans and animals, and her sensibility to beauty. She says, ‘I like helping others. Isn’t that the purpose of life?’
Hedenius presents before our eyes a noble life, though this is nobility of a kind we might easily overlook.
Risk of Self-Deception
A seminarian soon to be ordained a priest recently sent me Jelly Roll’s Son of a Sinner, remarking that the artist sings about ‘regret, hope, the dangers of self-deception, and the tenuousness of sobriety’. In an interview with the NYT, Roll has said he wants to perform ‘real music for real people with real problems’. He is on to something. His songs are racking up millions of views. People hear something there they don’t hear elsewhere: an engagement with life as it is. They go to Jelly Rolls for it, not necessarily to church. Yet such engagement was what people heard when they first encountered Christ’s Gospel. It was what made them see the Lord as one speaking ‘with authority’, credibly. These days, the Church is in the throes of a credibility crisis. She is perceived as eschewing accounts of things as they are, as being phoney. Such perception is sometimes biased and malicious. But not always. There are reasons for it. So preachers might take a leaf out of Jelly Roll’s book and seek to give voice to the biblical New Song (cf. Ps 96.1) as ‘real music for real people with real problems’. Deep calls out too deep (Ps 42.7).
Prospective memory
We think of the eighth century as a dark age. Out of this supposed darkness shines the Venerable Bede. Notker of St Gallen, who lived 200 years later, likened Bede to a new sun God had caused to rise, not in the East, but in the West, to illuminate the world. Bede was not an ambulant preacher with a great propaganda machinery. He was a monk who lived in peaceful stability in his Northumbrian monastery, where he was deeply content. How did he help England’s Church to find a way into the future? By engaging with the past. Bede was a careful historian, analytic in his reading of source. At the same time he read the chronicle of mankind in a supernatural, Biblical perspective. He knew that God reveals himself and acts through history; therefore history is a branch of theology. Our time is strangely historyless. What concerns us are the signs of our time. We keep assuming that some categorical rupture frees us from past experience, that the past is an encumbrance. Is that not a mark of presumption? Are not we the ones tumbling into a new Dark Age without clear points of reference? Bede offers us an alternative model of life and thought, far fresher and livelier than our weary, unanchored, hopeless postmodernism.
At One with the Task
A departure gives us a chance to say things we wouldn’t otherwise say, especially when it is final. Paul’s speech in Miletus is moving. Elsewhere, too, we have heard him speak of his experiences. Think of the tirade in 2 Corinthians (‘thrice whipped, once stoned, thrice shipwrecked’); or of his correction of the Galatians (‘Let no one trouble me, I bear in my body the marks of Jesus’). At Miletus the tone is different. There is tenderness in Paul’s voice. His words testify to acceptance. He, who has preached kenosis and crucifixion to the world, shows us what the Christian condition consists in. It is as if he no longer has eyes for himself. The only thing of consequence is to complete the mission received: ‘to testify to the gospel of the grace of God’. We can sometimes perceive discipleship as a burden, not least when the world is against us. We kick against the goad, complain, and cry, ‘Usquequo? How long, O Lord?’ In the mature Paul we see a Christian fully at one with his task who finds freedom and fulfilment in it, even when he knows that ‘imprisonment and afflictions’ await him. We glimpse what it means for the glory of Jesus to be alive in a person. Then everything else recedes into the shadow, even things that normally, humanly speaking, would scare us witless.
Faith in the Real
Last week, having travelled back to Cracow from Kyiv, I saw an exhibition at the Wawel. It shows sculptures made by Johann Georg Pinsel for the church in Hodovytsya near Lviv. It was my first close encounter with Lviv Rococo. A style we normally associate with colourful excess, swooning damsels and mantelpiece ornaments is present in a quite different form: rigorous, ascetic, at once elegant and angular, as if to prove that the edges of existence can be brought into a flowing design. The theme is earnest — a Crucifixion flanked by two OT prophecies: Samson’s slaying the lion and the Sacrifice of Isaac. This may jar with us, keen as we are to stress the joy of faith. But doesn’t that mantra on its own often sound like a hollow gong? Seeing Pinsel’s work just after visiting Irpin, I thought: this is how life is. The joy of the Gospel is not infused intravenously. It is born of perseverance through perplexity and loss. In former times, Christians had courage to represent this mystery visually. They recalled that ‘The cross stands while the world revolves‘ and thus had a conceptual tool to make sense of their lives, not always bright, seeing the grandeur of suffering, which is not a question of idealising pain, but of making sense of it, building up strength to bear it. This aspect of faith needs, I think, to find new form in our time, often lost in superfluity. Cf. 1 Cor 1.17ff.
Recapitulation
Christ’s glorious Ascension restores the union of heaven and earth. But it does more, it inaugurates the recapitulation of history. Mother Elisabeth-Paule Labat has written with great perspicacity of the process in which we are caught up.
‘Growing in wisdom man will perceive the history of this world in whose battle he is still engaged as an immense symphony resolving one dissonance by another until the intonation of the perfect major chord of the final cadence at the end of time. Every being, every thing contributes to the unity of that intelligible composition, which can only be heard from within: sin, death, sorrow, repentance, innocence, prayer, the most discreet and the most exalted joys of faith, hope, and love; an infinity of themes, human and divine, meet, flee, and are intertwined before finally melting into one according to a master plan which is nothing other than the will of the Father, pursuing through all things the infallible realisation of its designs.’
Proximities
To stand under the cupola of Sancta Sophia in Kyiv is to be aligned to a chronological axis evidencing dizzying proximities. Work on this great shrine began in 1011. Olav Haraldsson, later Norway’s St Olav, buried in Trondheim, stayed in exile with Yaroslav the Wise, Great Duke of Kyiv, in 1028-29. Will he have stood within the complex of Santa Sophia? It is probable. With Yaroslav he will have discussed the significance of this church and its dedication to Christ as the Father’s incarnate Wisdom. The embodied reality of Christianity was very much part of Olav’s statesmanship and projects of legislation – a significant factor in arousing the antagonism that resulted in his death on 29 July 1030, at Stiklestad. Our modern world seems orphaned of Wisdom, often enough. Yaroslav’s Rus’ is subject to a mad attack. Olav’s Norway is susceptible to seduction by absurd irrationalities. It matters, then, to look up into the cupola and remember: the Sophia this holy place manifests is not just an optional package of life skills; it is the principle by which we, and the choices we make, will be judged.
What Endures
This icon of the Dormition was the one intact object left in a house in Lukhansk bombed to pieces by Russian occupying forces last year. It now hangs on the wall of the Greek Catholic Patriarchate in Kyiv. From the beginning of recorded time, wars have provoked existential questions: What is the point of suffering and destruction? Can there be meaning in it? It is difficult to formulate propositional answers; but one can sometimes see the contours of a response in transformed lives and gracious deeds. I am moved by the Ukrainian Catholic community’s commitment to humanitarian action. In the midst of war there is blossoming practical charity. The Gospel is enacted. Wounds are healed on the part of those who receive and on the part of those who give. Christian faith in the resurrection is personal and concrete, rooted in an historical, transformative event; but it also has symbolic, corporate power. It is not vain to speak of the resurrection of a society. One can see signs of it in Ukraine. Certain things cannot be destroyed; attempts to do so will simply manifest their indestructibility.
No Different Track
Famously, the Russian Empire employed a railway gauge different from that adopted in Western Europe. The laborious process of changing the bogies of trains travelling east has created the notion that a hop is involved from one tectonic plate to another, from a European World to a Russian World. This image has been used, and abused, in rhetoric to justify the war of aggression against Ukraine. To take the train from Przemyśl to Kyiv is not, though, to leave one universe for another. The continuities are obvious. Kyiv is a modern, European city whose resilience in keeping ordinary life going is impressive. The parks are in order; there are tulips everywhere; the chestnuts trees are in bloom. The city’s inhabitants refuse to be brutalised. Soul-strength finds expression in this attitude. Naturally the strain of war is great, the trauma real. But the city breathes the conviction that injustice will not, cannot, have the last word. And so the visitor comes away feeling strangely buoyed up, encouraged.
Maturing
There is a justly famous recording of Marta Argerich playing Rakhmaninov’s third piano concerto with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Richard Chailly on 5 December 1982. Her mixture of force and utter precision, of passion and intelligence gives the music rare intensity: it becomes an existential statement. To hear Argerich play Rakhmaninov today, as in this remarkable concert from a couple of weeks ago, is to find all her signature qualities undiminished at the age of almost 82. And yet there is something more. A self-evidence perhaps, a connaturality of the kind that arises in one who has spent a lifetime in the company of a great composer, author, or scientist, having assimilated a production of genius to the extent of being able to communicate it as his or her own, spontaneously, though without presumption. I am brought to think how important it is to persevere in engagement with the beautiful, good, and true, recognising that genuine mastery will not come easily or immediately, even in our culture of instant accomplishment.
Beyond Mimesis
‘We should take a major step in the direction of freedom were we to free our own emotions – and also our own thoughts – from those of others: if you like me, I’ll like you; if you’re unfriendly, I’ll be unfriendly. To hear, really hear what another says is a thing of capital value. The same goes for the attempt to respond to what one has heard. But my response must be more than just a repetition of what came at me. Jesus gave us an example, responding to hate with love.’ Thus wrote Mother Christiana Reemts, abbess of Mariendonk, a few days ago; and how right she is. All too often we react instead of responding to what happens, to what gets said. Thereby we let ourselves be caught in a mimetic game of mirrors. It’s a tedious game. What we are called to in fact is freely to reveal our countenance, our true name; thereby to call forth freedom hidden in others.
To Be Loved
We are told that when St Athanasius (circa 296-373) was a child, the bishop of Alexandria one day came upon him on the beach playing church with his friends. Athanasius, playing the part of priest, was performing a baptism so exactly that the bishop affirmed it to be valid. He took the Wunderkind under his wing and raised him to become the eminent theologian we admire. The story is charming. It also has depth. It shows the astonishing linearity that can mark a life viewed in the back mirror. We may have experienced it. One day we suddenly realise: I have shaped my life freely, through uncountable unplanned vicissitudes, and yet it has somehow assumed a straight integrity, like an oak that, bursting its seed, penetrates the dark earth and stretches towards the sun. In Christian vocabulary we think of this process as a vocation story. Do we realise how extraordinary it is? I can be 100% myself, live with utter freedom, and at the same time correspond to the plan another has made for me.
In this insight we realise what it means to be loved.
The Great in the Small
When Pope John Paul II stood before the image of the Comforter of the Afflicted at Kevelaer on 2 May 1987, the first thing he said was, ‘How tiny!’ It is a paradox – this great place of pilgrimage arose around what is effectively a paper postcard. Who would have thought that such a small, humble thing could help renew a continent exhausted by hopelessness and war? We think nowadays that to enable renewal we must produce spectacular gestures. But the spectacular rarely brings comfort. There is a whiff of mendacity in the spectacular – a show is a show. Comfort, meanwhile, is true, and personal. Even with slight means we can be carriers of comfort, builders of peace. The renewal of a weary world, of a Church showing signs of weariness, begins with the renewal of particular lives. No one, nothing, not even comprehensive restructuring, can renew my life on my behalf. To kneel before Our Lady of Kevelaer is to start to see existence in a new light. Our Saviour was born in a stable. But above it angels sang.
Magnified Action
Anyone who follows human affairs with application for more than a week or two will be struck by this: how quickly we get used to war. Who now remembers there’s a war going on in Syria? Even that in Ukraine has disappeared from our headlines, once again dominated by local, pragmatic and (frankly) often pernickety concerns. Yet the wars of our time continue devastatingly; real human destinies are determined, if not destroyed, by them. After a conversation with President Zelensky last year, Timothy Snyder remarked, ‘there are moments in the world where your actions are magnified’. This is obvious for a head of state. Stefan Zweig saw such a destiny in the life of Marie Antoinette. But moments like this could come to all of us. Think of Sophie Scholl. Do we prepare ourselves – our conscience, mind, and heart – to make essential choices if called upon to do so?
If you are baffled by the background to the war in Ukraine, consider watching Snyder’s Yale lectures, The Making of Modern Ukraine.
Noctium phantasmata
Jacques Lusseyran, blind from the age of eight, reflected throughout his life on the nature of seeing and not-seeing. I am struck by this passage from his Conversation amoureuse. ‘Those with eye-sight speak so poorly about the imagination. It is as if they did not know what it is. They speak as if they were sure that it replaces everything, especially the eyes. They do not see that in fact it generates thousands of figures, combining them in different ways for days on end, leaving you in an emptiness as vast as that of migraine. I have always affirmed that there is no such thing as the night of blindness. If it does exist, it takes the form of an invasion of images. For not all are good. There are those that tell you the opposite of reality; which speak to you only of your own reality. If you have the misfortune to look too much at these, it’s the end of love.’ Such reality-subverting, self-absorbed images are like the noctium phantasmata from which we pray at compline that our eyes, inward and outward, may be freed.
Saudade
In A Poet’s Glossary, saudade is defined as a ‘Portuguese and Galician term that suggests a profoundly bittersweet nostalgia. Aubrey F. G. Bell described saudade as a “vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future”. It is not just a nostalgia for something that was lost; it can also be a yearning for something that might have been.’
I had the privilege of discussing the sense and implications of this term, denoting a loneliness waiting to be shattered, in a recent conversation in Lisbon with António de Castro Caeiro, translator of Pindar and Aristotle. For me a privileged encounter! If you like, you can watch our exchange here, in English with simultaneous translation into Portuguese.
What’s a Good Man?
In the opening scene of Eugene Onegin, Madame Larina, Tatiana’s mother, reflects wistfully on her youth and exclaims: ‘Ah, how I loved Richardson! Ah, Grandison! Not that I ever read it.’ The fact that Tchaikovsky could expect a Petersburg audience in 1877 to pick up the reference, shows the status of Samuel Richardson’s famously long-winded novel Sir Richard Grandison, now out in a brand new 3000 pp. (!) edition. In a spirited review, Norma Clarke admits that the work is full of ‘interminable stupor-inducing exchanges’, yet insists that it has abiding worth. Jane Austen loved it and assimilated it, which is something. But what really strikes one is Clarke’s account of Richardson’s purpose in writing: ‘Was it possible to interest readers in a man who embodied Christian virtue? What would a good man be like?’ These questions are fundamental to the fiction of, say, Marilynne Robinson and Wendell Berry. One can only hope they will continue to draw forth literary creativity in an age for which the prolixity of Grandison is just too much.
Post-Secularism
In a column in this morning’s Aftenposten, the Swedish scholar Joel Halldorf asks why Swedes connect more readily than Norwegians with the spiritual dimension of contemporary literature. He writes: ‘We [Swedes] were long considered the world’s most secularised country. Over some years, however, there has been a steady movement towards faith and religiosity, especially in the world of culture. The trend has often been remarked on in the media. It indicates that we have passed from a stage of secular rupture to a post-secular stage. This doesn’t mean that all Swedes are about to return to Christianity; but materialistic atheism is not longer regarded as the obvious final stop on humanity’s religious journey. Atheism is no longer the norm; the norm is openness to a many-faceted religious search.’
This is well observed. Materialistic atheism does come across, now, as rather moth-eaten and old-fashioned. But we Norwegians tend to lag behind a little.
Wrath
Today’s gospel confronts us with God’s wrath, a theme we’d rather not think about. God is love, and if he is loving, surely he must be nice? Note, though, that the wrath in question is not the opposite of love. It does not stand for passionate anger on God’s part, but for self-enclosure on ours. Wrath as Jesus expounds it (‘he who refuses to believe in the Son will not see life; God’s wrath rests upon him’, Jn 3,36) is the opposite of life. Wrath is a state in which we confine ourselves when we refuse to receive life from a source that transcends us. To live under wrath is to feed on our own substance. Wrath finds expression in dark sadness. Life in wrath unfolds within a dank cloud of hopelessness. God’s gift to us in Christ, by the Holy Spirit, is not just survival, but life by which to flourish and bear fruit, overflowing life. Are we open to life on these terms? Or do we wrap ourselves up, be it unconsciously, in introspective, fruitless wrath?
Latin for Fun
In certain circles Latin is considered an ancient affliction like the measles, against which the wonders of progress have happily inoculated us. To be an anti-vaxxer in this regard is to set oneself up to be publicly shamed. How refreshing, then, to read a vintage essay by Joseph Epstein singing Latin’s praise. Epstein picked it up at 81, for the fun of it and because ‘I found not knowing Latin a deficiency, especially in a person of my rather extravagant intellectual and cultural pretensions’. His complex soon yielded to delight. Latin, he stresses, is a language of beauty, at once precise and subtle, gorgeously architectural. The study of Latin is a school in clear thinking, of which we’re in dire need. The Roman Catholic Church is heir to a vast intellectual and cultural heritage composed in Latin. To access it only in translation is to miss out on treasures. Who would doubt the necessity of learning German to savour and analyse Goethe? Vatican II confirmed the status of Latin as a living language. Among other things, it laid down that ‘the Latin language is to be retained by clerics in the divine office‘, for which purpose they must learn it well. Whatever happened to that conciliar counsel for renewal?
Not Numerous
For Easter I received a letter citing something Fr Jerzy Popiełuszko once wrote. The words arose from his ministry under a totalitarian regime, but have universal relevance. ‘Truth contains within itself the ability to resist and to blossom in the light of day, even if [truth’s opponents] try very diligently and carefully to hide it. Those who proclaim the truth do not need to be numerous. Falsehood is what requires a lot of people, because it always needs to be renewed and fed. Our duty as Christians is to abide in the truth, even if it costs us dearly.’ What especially strikes me is the true observation that falsehood cannot stand on its own. It requires bands of flunkies. This gives it a ridiculous aspect it is important to remember. We mustn’t trifle with falsehood; but it is good to recognise its absurdity. What we can laugh at heartily has no power over us.
Have you seen Rafał Wieczyński’s film?
Short Pause
Gaudia Paschalia!
CoramFratribus will take a break for a few days.
I wish all readers a joyful Easter Octave.
+fr Erik Varden
Hope for the Body
The good news of the body’s significance and of the realisable, death-defying scope for human wholeness was entrusted to a ragged dozen people in a collective state of post-traumatic stress, not especially brilliant humanly speaking, but shorn by stark humiliation of presumption, so freed to proclaim a message that surpassed them. Through their unlikely mediation, this message renewed a civilisation in crepuscular decline. It revitalised the body politic. It restored hope, enabled prospect.
It might do such a thing again.
From today’s column in ABC’s La Tercera.
Epitaphios
In an anonymous fifteenth-century Greek poem, we find this meditation on the entombment of Christ. It speaks the ineffable.
‘The most pure Virgin saw you, Word of God, lying supine, and lamented in words befitting a Mother: ‘O my sweet springtime, my sweetest child, where has your beauty set?’ Your immaculate mother, Word of God, began a lamentation when death came over you. Women came with myrrh, my Christ, to anoint you, you, the sacred Myrrh. Death through death you destroyed, my God, with your godly power. The deceiver of men was deceived, the deceived set free from error, my God, by your wisdom.’
Philanthropy
It’s about time the Netherlands Bach Society was awarded an international prize for services rendered to mankind. What they have produced – and made available for free – these past few years is astonishing, truly an enterprise of philanthropy. I have watched and listened to Jos van Veldhoven’s production of the St John Passion with keen attention. It touches perfection, not just for its musical excellence, but for its dramatic intelligence. Raphael Höhn is a compelling evangelist. He really knows how to tell a story. And I am not sure I’ve ever heard Ach, mein Sinn, the lament following Peter’s betrayal, sung with greater intensity than that displayed here by Gwilym Bowen. By deliberate casting, almost all performers are under 35, which serves not merely to energise the performance but to make it topical. Because we’re so used, now, to thinking Christianity old and the Church tired, we risk forgetting how young most of the drama’s protagonists were. This performance has helped me to rethink many things and to experience essentials afresh.
