Patience

Scripture repeatedly presents restoration of health as recreation. In the story of Noah, the waters that, on the first day, receded from earth are drawn back over it to enable a new beginning. The image is of a world drowning (Genesis 8:6-22). Spiritual healing can pass through a stage of trauma. When an active collusion with death, addiction, or structural sin is washed away from a person’s life, he or she may feel rudderless and lost; passage into a state of grace may seem terrifying. Perseverance is required then, and solid accompaniment. The blind man in the Gospel likewise gains sight gradually. In a gesture that recalls the forming of Adam, Jesus moulds him, opening his eyes in stages until, eventually, he is able to take in reality as it is (Mark 8:22-26). To trust God is to believe that, as long as we commit ourselves into his hands, he will realise a blessed purpose even when what we presently experience is perplexity.

• Share

Absurd Ideals

Catching up with things, I have just read the obituary of a monk of Dallas, Fr Roch András Kereszty, who died on 14 December 2022. It presents the faithful, fruitful life of this learned Hungarian who settled on what he had assumed would be just ‘a vast dry prairie, the wildest and least cultured place on the continent’, and there turned into a wellspring for others. ‘His students eventually began to perceive that, behind his rough exterior – the imposing presence, the deep, loud monotone of his voice, the face that turned to a scowl whenever he tried to smile – was a man deeply in love with all that was good in those around him, and whose hopes for you always exceeded your own, which is why he could freely be so tough on you.’ He, who had practised ‘the discipline to overcome fears’ was not afraid to ‘present us with the highest, even with absurd, ideals.’

No one forgets a good teacher.

• Share

Alphabetisation

The blood brothers Cyril and Methodius are examples of missionary zeal. They left their homeland to witness abroad to the newness of life in Christ. They displayed the Christian virtues to a heroic degree. They also served the cause of culture. We still call the alphabet used by the Eastern Slavs ‘Cyrillic’ after St Cyril, a brilliant linguist. You might say that the cultural impact was incidental. Cyril’s concern was to find a way to codify liturgical texts and to write up a translation of Scripture. But these sources became the foundation of culture. In the West today we lack a common language. Our society is atomised. We struggle to talk with one another, so violence erupts. Let us not underestimate the task of alphabetisation which pertains to us, as Christians, today. We have the only adequate tool. Christ, the Word of God, in whose image we were made, is not only Alpha and Omega, but all the letters in between. In him we find what it takes to make sense of ourselves and of the lives we live.

• Share

Between Brothers

‘Cain set on his brother Abel and killed him’ (Gen 4,8). The relationship between brothers — and, for that matter, between sisters — can be complicated. One is close, yet distant. It can be hard to see one another clearly. Sometimes brothers and sisters know too much about each other. A lot of prehistory feeds their relationship. Cain’s jealousy must be rooted in such prehistory. We know nothing about it, but can imagine it. He feels that Abel puts him in the shade; he can no longer look his brother in the face: ‘his eyes were downcast’. Let’s be on our guard in such instances, lest we be pulled, without noticing, into action motivated by blind anger. The question we should ask ourselves is the one God poses: ‘Why are you angry and downcast?’ Once we understand the motivation underlying a mood, we can do something about it. Something fabulous can happen. Even men’s rage, as Psalm 76 proclaims, can turn into praise, grounded in humility, marked by prayer for forgiveness, a source of new conversion.

• Share

From Aleppo

The world had largely forgotten about Syria. When we heard of the recent earthquake, eyes glazed over – we need to root such news in personal destinies. Here is a letter from an old man in Aleppo, cited on a site run by friends of my sisters in Azeir. ‘What can I say, Joseph? I’ve never seen anything like what happened, neither in war nor in other circumstances. A terrible thing! Despite all, we keep praising God. With our eyes we saw death, then again we saw life. I remained under the debris for two days, then I was saved, thanks be to God. Although my house is badly damaged, I’ve tried to make it more or less inhabitable, and I’ve once again slept at home. There are people who have slept in the streets for three days, and people who still sleep in the streets. The situation is very serious and indescribable. But let me tell you that today I am reborn to life and I thank God.’

Let us do what we can to help.

• Share

Presence

The story of Benedict’s and Scholastica’s final conversation at Monte Cassino shows that even the consummate saint may need a sister to put him in his place now and again. It also shows us the importance of meeting face to face. Scholastica took the evening bell seriously; she was a nun, after all. But she also knew that the two of them had essential things to say to each other, and that time was short. The Lord confirmed her priority by means of bad weather. So that, too, can be a sign of celestial benediction.

We whose pockets are filled with gadgets that beep, purr, flash, and stir are constantly pulled away from where we are. Scholastica reminds us of the importance of being present, of giving priority to encounters.

It was Scholastica’s ‘greater love’, we are told, that made her prayer well-pleasing. Am I someone who loves? Do I even know what love is? Or is the word to me an abstraction? These are questions we might ask ourselves today, on Scholastica’s feast day.

• Share

Someone Who Cares?

• Share

Enslavement

Norway’s Bible Society has decided to use the word ‘slave’ more broadly in a translation to be published next year. The decision is pondered; indeed it has been the object of a clickable internet survey. It is fascinating that the Word of God can be interpreted, as it were, by census. But is not even the learned debate somewhat abstract? Dare we assume that our notions of slavery render the thought and practice that underlay Greek usage in the New Testament? A Norwegian thrall at the time of Olav Tryggvason is hardly comparable to a character from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Is St Paul, who calls himself Christ’s doulos, aptly described as a ‘slave’ given the word’s contemporary resonance? Today the Catholic Church celebrates a Sudanese Saint, Josephine Bakhita, who spent twelve years as a slave. She was sold five times. She was subject to unconscionable abuse of body and soul. She was a non-human until she was declared free by a court decision in 1889. It enabled her to realise a deep desire: to be baptised and confirmed, then to join an order of sisters. In the Church she had learnt what freedom means. I wonder what Josephine had clicked, had she received an electronic questionnaire asking whether ‘enslavement’ is an adequate modern description of the Christian condition.

• Share

Becoming

The problem posed in today’s Gospel (Mark 7,1-13) is timeless. We, too, easily ‘put aside the commandments of God’, be it because we haven’t got strength to follow them, consider they’re past their sell-by date (like soured milk), or disagree with them in principle. By all means, we must use reason as we engage with divine revelation: it is a Christian imperative. But the real issue is deeper. Do I believe that God has expressed himself definitively in Christ Jesus? Do I believe that the Bible can meaningfully be called ‘Word of God’? Have I trust that God wants what is good for us, even when it is costly? We are children of an age that has made of the fitness centre an ultimate sanctuary. We energetically shape ourselves in an image that appeals to us. Have we still space, purely conceptually, for a God who may ask us to do or to become something we hadn’t thought of ourselves, who is able to realise what seems urealisable?

• Share

Pleasure

Can one live for pleasure? That is the question examined in The Triumph of Time and Disillusion by Benedetto Pamphilij, for those were the days when cardinals wrote morality plays. Handel, who met Pamphilij in Rome in 1706 set the work to music the following year. The composer was then 22 years old, the cardinal was 53. How astonished they would both have been to find their work performed in Trondheim, virtually Ultima Thule, this evening — and excellently, too. The drama, comprising four characters, is straightforward: Beauty is torn between the allurements of Pleasure and the stern admonitions of Time, helped in discernment by Disillusion, a fine contralto part. Gradually Beauty comes to see that Pleasure just isn’t a reliable long-term partner. She decides that a hierarchy of values is required to construct a life that is prospective. Increasingly she awakens to the attractiveness of truth, a category that at the outset didn’t feature in her thinking. So not a daft plot, really.

• Share

Materialist Impoverishment

In one of her inexhaustible ‘letters’, published as essays, Ida Görres insists that God is beyond any notion of gender. ‘He is One in every respect; for he is is the fullness of being. In the earthly-human realm, though, this fullness is divided into poles of generative and receiving love, of the love that protectingly and caringly maintains and the love that bears, gives birth, and nurses. God is the Father from whom all fatherhood on earth is named; and God is the maternal God ‘in whom we live and move’. Inscrutably rich and deep is the symbolism and sacred sign-value of the sexes. Devout paganism knew a lot about this (only now – at the end of modernity – have we reduced it to a matter of pure materialism). Christians ought to know more about it still. The great and venerable spiritual tradition of the Church is rich in hidden treasures, which we should once again make our own.’ This text was published in 1949, in Von Ehe und von Einsamkeit. Görres could have no idea of the urgency her call would have three-quarters of a century later. Incidentally, who reads Ida Görres nowadays? She, too, represents a treasure we should again make our own.

• Share

Faithfulness

In his eulogy at Ida Görres’s funeral, on 19 May 1971, Fr Dr Joseph Ratzinger cited a cry of pain from one of her essays. ‘What if the rebels really were to own the future? What if this process, which seems to us like destruction and betrayal, were actually God’s will and to resist it were impious and an act of petty faith? What if—an agonizing thought in the midnight hours—what if I were tied to a great but inexorably dying body, through just emotionally stirring, but ultimately subjective, unreasonable inhibitions, habits, prejudices, antiquated piety, wrongly grounded loyalty? . . . Are we living on a leaky ship sinking inch by inch, from which not only the rats but also the sensible, sober people jump off just in time?’

‘But all this questioning’, Ratzinger added, ‘is offset by a great, indestructible confidence. It is expressed in the simple yet likewise great affirmation: “I believe in God’s faithfulness”.’ Here is a perennial lesson, a source of balance and quiet joy.

• Share

Empoignement

‘I love Viktoria’, said Yehudi Menuhin about Viktoria Postnikova: ‘Such empoignement! Such power, and such wonderful commitment, strength, passion. There’s no gap between what she plays and the music. She’s off in full command.’

The remarks were made in conversation with Bruno Monsaingeon as the two listened to a recording of Bartok’s First Sonata. One can quite see what he meant here, too, where we find her playing Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto no. 1 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Gennady Rozhdestvensky, her husband, live at the Proms on 31 August 1979.

Though I find her musicianship even more supremely expressed in this recording, made much later in life. As an encore in Budapest she plays Schubert’s Impromptu no. 3, Opus 90 in G Flat Major. She really is one with that piano, without the slightest need to perform histrionic gestures.

• Share

Tohu va-Vohu

‘In the beginning’, we read in Genesis 1, ‘the earth was without form and void’. What that might have been like is beyond the ken of most of us. We get tantalising impulses, however, in a recently recovered interview from 1964 with Fr Georges Lemaître. The priest-physicist, one of the first to formulate a theory of the ‘Big Bang’, insists that ‘the beginning is so unimaginable, so different from the present state of the world’ that we must first of all abstract from the image of the world as (we think) we know it: ‘there is a beginning […] in multiplicity which can be described in the form of the disintegration of all existing matter into an atom. What will be the first result of this disintegration, as far as we can follow the theory, is in fact to have a universe, an expanding space filled by a plasma, by very energetic rays going in all directions. Something which does not look at all like a homogeneous gas. Then by a process that we can vaguely imagine, unfortunately we cannot follow that in very many details, gases had to form locally; gas clouds moving with great speeds…’

You can find the video here, a transcript here.

• Share

Free Before Power

A review article by Josh Cohen mentions an incident from Freud’s life that was unknown to me. It occurred when Freud, subject to keen attention from the Nazis since the Anschluss, was at last persuaded to leave Vienna on the Orient Express in June 1938.

‘Freud’s late and deeply ambivalent recruitment to the plan of escape often inspires a joint sense of frustration and respect. How, for example, could he have been so reckless as to ask the Nazi official awaiting his forced signature (on the document attesting to the “respect and consideration” shown him by the Gestapo) “whether he could add one sentence: ‘I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone’”? The quip risked instant sabotage of the plan; witnesses attest to the fury on the face of the officer. Still, it is hard to hear this snatch of sharp gallows humour without feeling a wave of admiration.’

May the admiration one feels grow into fortitude.

• Share

Learned Levites

I happen to own a life of St Francis de Sales published in 1928 by Eugène Julien, bishop of Arras. It carries the epigraph, ‘A mes prêtres, ce beau visage de Prêtre’, ‘To my priests I propose this beautiful type of a Priest’. How we need beautiful examples of people whose holy lives we desire to emulate! For a bishop to put forward such an example is a truly pastoral initiative. When King Henry IV offered Francis de Sales preferment that would take him from Geneva to a wealthier see, he replied: ‘Sire, I pray Your Majesty to forgive me, but I cannot accept his offer. I am a married man. I have married a poor woman, and I cannot leave her for one who is richer.’ Herein lies a whole theology of episcopal ministry. To his priests St Francis said: ‘It is not enough for clerics to strive to be holy; they must also become learned in the science of their state. In priests, ignorance is more to be feared even than sin, for by ignorance one does not merely lose oneself, one dishonours, disgraces the priesthood. […] In a priest, learning is the eighth sacrament of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The greatest misfortunes of the Church have come when the ark of learning has been found in other hands than those of the Levites.’ Certain Levites now seem to disagree. All the more wholesome, then, is the saint’s admonition.

• Share

Through Fog

At a time when much about Russia inspires fear, indignation, and rage, it is important to remember that other Russia of deep humanity and openness. It does me good to revisit Yuri Norstein‘s exquisite animation Hedgehog in the Fog, a parable that does not admit straightforward interpretation. It is multi-layered and complex, yet utterly simple. It speaks to us of anxiety, of genuine peril, of unexpected allies, of the joy of reunion in friendship, and of the fidelity and affection that can be held by a jar of raspberry jam. We all go through periods when we can’t understand where we’re going; when we seemingly can’t even see our own feet on the path. Norstein said of this film: ‘Each day, Hedgehog goes to see Bear, but once he walks into the fog and comes out of it changed. This is a story about how, under the influence of circumstances beyond our conscious ken, our habitual state can suddenly turn into a catastrophe.’

Yet the catastrophe is not final. Do the stars not, at then end, shine even more brightly for what Hedgehog has been through?

• Share

The Sense of It All

Admirably, His Beatitude Sviatoslav Shevchuk continues his daily addresses to the faithful of Ukraine and to people of good will everywhere. Yesterday he uttered this cry: ‘We want to be heard in different corners of the globe, for people to hear that Ukraine is suffering, Ukraine is crying, and we are in pain.’ Yet he does not permit himself, or us, to get stuck in introspective fascination with pain. His overarching concern is to ‘discover the meaning of our Christian existence’ in the light of Christ’s mystery and on the basis of historical reality. Contemplating the sacrament of baptism, Shevchuk cites Chrysostom: ‘Let us imagine a golden cup that was damaged. No matter how it is repaired, it will always be visible that it was damaged. What must be done to remove any sign of past defects from that cup? It must be remelted, put into the fire again, remelted again, given the shape of the same cup, but it will now be new. It will have the same piece of gold, the same shape of the cup, but it will be taken out of the fire as new, it will experience a new creation and a new birth.’ To this re-making we are called. Our world needs to be made new in Christ. With the Major Archbishop we can pray: ‘Heavenly Father, grant us Christians of the third millennium to discover our deep divine sonship.’ Thus, only thus, shall we find the lasting source of justice, of peace.

• Share

Newness

Blessed Cyprian had a keen sense of the newness of the Christian condition. It was motivated by the attraction of the Catholic faith, liturgy, and patrimony. It was also informed by awareness of what a world without Christ can look like. In 1929, when Fr Cyprian was newly ordained, working in Onitsha, a smallpox epidemic broke out in his native village. The local people attributed the spread of the disease to evil spirits. A witch hunt began. Among those singled out was Fr Cyprian’s mother Ejikwevi. She was sequestered and forced to drink poison. We can only imagine the wound left by her cruel death in the heart of her son. It is all the more striking that Fr Cyprian’s faith was marked by determined trust in providence.

From a homily for the feast of Blessed Cyprian

• Share

Perfect Fit

People often ask: How can I pray? In a conversation with Lydia Chukovskaya on 27 September 1939 Anna Akhmatova provided an example of how not to do it. At a time of tension nationally and personally she recalled with amiable sarcasm, perhaps to distract herself, a scene from happier times: ‘Once, while waiting to try on a new dress designed by Schweitzer, the famous couturier, my cousin (who weighed more than a hundred kilos) kissed an icon of St Nicholas and said: Please, do make it fit!’

If we’re honest, don’t we often pray like that, insisting that God’s providence provide us with outfits that neither fit us nor display us to our best advantage? A prerequisite for prayer is humble, that is realistic, self-knowledge. Another is trust that God knows what is best for me, and will provide it if I am disposed to receive it. That entails willingness to let go of cherished ideas of what I want, even of what I think I really need.

• Share

Silence

Today’s Office of Readings gives us a marvellous passage from Ignatius of Antioch’s Epistle to the Ephesians (§ 15).

‘It is better to be silent and to be real, than to talk and to be unreal. Teaching is good, if the teacher does what he says. There is then one teacher  who ‘spoke and it came to pass’, and what he has done even in silence is worthy of the Father. He who has the word of Jesus for a true possession can also hear his silence, that he may be perfect, that he may act thought his speech, and understood through his silence.’

Ἄμεινόν ἐστιν σιωπᾶν καὶ εἶναι, ἢ λαλοῦντα μὴ εἶναι. Does my speech enhance being? Does it affirm reality or foster unreality?

• Share

To be a Christian

Today George Cardinal Pell’s requiem is celebrated in Rome, with a final commendation given by Pope Francis. Much has been written about Pell in recent days. Matteo Mazuzzi, writing for Il Foglio, remarks that he was no natural diplomat. His outspokenness could be disconcerting – indeed disconcerts still. My remembrance of him is marked by a broadcast following his release from prison in April 2020, after months of incarceration for crimes he had not committed, after a process widely dismissed as a miscarriage of justice. What struck me was Pell’s complete lack of bitterness. With robust cheerfulness he accepted what had happened as one might accept a bad-weather day. He insisted he bore no grudge against his accusers. St Silouan used to say that heartfelt prayer for enemies is the criterion of Christian faith. In that respect Cardinal Pell has left a luminous testimony; in that light everything else he did and said must be read. In his last homily, a week ago, he urged his hearers to work for the Church’s unity, founded on charity in truth. That, too, is a lesson to remember.

• Share

Army with Banners

Walter Daniel, St Aelred’s biographer, described the Cistercian enterprise thus: ‘They venerate poverty—not the penury that stems from negligence and sloth, but a poverty regulated by voluntary privation, sustained by perfect faith and rendered congenial by the love of God. So strong is the mutual love which binds them that their society is as terrible as an army with banners. Trampling the flowers of the world with the foot of forgetfulness, counting riches and honours as dung […], they renounce in food, drink, act, and affection the pleasures of the world and the flesh. […] The strongest of mutual loves sweeps from their midst the bane of resentment, every growth of anger and the murky phantasms of pride, so that, in the words of the Acts of the Apostles, they are united in heart and soul by the grace and love of the Holy Spirit.’ 

By such principles the Church of the twelfth century was powerfully revitalised.

• Share

Life with Reason

In a fine review article in First Things, Jennifer A Fray cites Elizabeth Anscombe‘s syllabus of errors from the mid-1980s. It is made up of ‘twenty theses, commonly held by her fellow analytic philosophers, that she deemed inimical to the Christian religion and that could, she insisted, be shown ‘false on purely philosophical grounds’.’ Nearly all these theses pit nature—conceived of as formless, and thus empty of objective meaning or purpose—against reason. I think of Chapman’s line in his Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron from 1608: ‘O of what contraries consists a man! Of what impossible mixtures!’ It is tragic, though (and, when you think of it, comical), that nature and reason, body and soul should be thought of in terms of contradiction. On the resolution of this quandary, the Church has crucial things to say. How we need, now, not rhetorical effusions of sentiment, but thinkers of Anscomb’s stature, integrity, and clarity apt to conduct metaphysical enquiry in the terms here outlined: ‘Metaphysics is not the project of constructing static systems of reality; rather, it is a lived praxis whose defining aim is wisdom.’

• Share

Against Inhumanity

At almost 100, Henry Kissinger remains a keen observer of world affairs. In a 2021 book he discussed the way in which the balance of power is rocked by the onset of Artificial Intelligence, which Niall Fergusson has proposed we might rename ‘Inhuman Intelligence’. Recently Kissinger applied this perspective to the war in Ukraine: ‘Auto-nomous weapons already exist, capable of defining, assessing and targeting their own perceived threats and thus in a position to start their own war. Once the line into this realm is crossed and hi-tech becomes standard weaponry – and computers become the principal executors of strategy – the world will find itself in a condition for which as yet it has no established concept. How can leaders exercise control when computers prescribe strategic instructions on a scale and in a manner that inherently limits and threatens human input? How can civilisation be preserved amid such a maelstrom of conflicting information, perceptions and destructive capabilities?’ The ascendancy of the inhuman points to the urgency of Christmas. Faith in the incarnation does not just vindicate humanity; it asserts that we depend on God to know what is, in fact, human. That assertion appears to be empirically demonstrated round about us.

• Share