New Reality

There’s a scene in Sigrid Undset’s conversion novel The Wild Orchid I think of often. It describes the book’s protagonist, Paul Selmer, entering St. Olav’s cathedral in Oslo very late one night, after an evening ill spent. He considers himself an agnostic but is informed about Catholic beliefs, being the lodger of a Catholic family. 

Sitting alone in the dark, he sees the sanctuary light flicker in the distance. It suddenly occurs to him: if this tiny flame tells the truth, that is, if God is truly present here, then life needs to be rethought entirely; then nothing is the way he’d previously thought it might be. Easter is what enables this perception.

From a conversation with Luke Coppen for The Pillar.

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A Proposal

The first half of George Weigel’s fine book about the legacy of Vatican II is in fact about the time preceding the Council. This is helpful, enabling us to understand conciliar accomplishments within an ongoing history, an oriented history of salvation. Striking is his account of the sea-change wrought by Leo XIII, symbolised somehow in the pope’s funerary monument: ‘Leo, wearing the papal tiara, stands atop the marble coffin that contains his mortal remains. His right foot is thrust forward, and his right hand is raised in a gesture of invitation, as if to say to modernity, ‘We have something to talk about. We have a proposal to make.’ With Leo XIII, a new Catholic era opened: an era in which the Church would engage modernity in an effort to convert it – and perhaps, thereby, help the modern world realise some of its aspirations to freedom, justice, solidarity, and prosperity.’

Such engagement, such help are still called for.

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Beyond Purposeful

In a recent interview, Navid Kermani speaks with characteristic lucidity about the loss of gratuity. We’ve created a society in which everything is done in view of utility, profit, or gain. How to counter the trend? Listen to Schubert, and pray.

‘As human beings we are more than every before trapped in a system of purposefulness. We wake up and clean our teeth in order that our teeth be clean. Even love, even human relations are woven through with purposes, and not just of today. The truly political and anti-capitalist element of music resides in its freedom from purpose. Why do 2,000 people gather in the Philharmonie? If you’ve time, go and visit the church of Groß St. Martin here in the old town [of Cologne]. There you’ll find a monastic community, right in the middle of the city, largely unnoticed. The brethren sing and pray four or five times a day – no one knows why – but it is wonderful. […] They settle in cities, in centres, in order to pray precisely where everything round about is governed by business. They say this has intrinsic value. I, too, think that is the case. I see it makes sense politically. To break the utilitarian model, ‘We make music because …’, proposes, beyond the music itself, an alternative to the world the way it is.’ See also the Notebook entry of 30 November 2021.

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What Is Man?

It seems obvious that the central challenge of Christian proclamation today is anthropological. ‘What is man?’ This question, posed in the Psalms, occupies our times intensely. Discussion is focussed on the area of sexuality, which touches the human being at its most intimate. Strong emotions arise. It is crucial to take discourse beyond emotional rhetoric. It is crucial to consider the question of human — and consequently sexual — identity in the light of God’s creative and redemptive work in Christ. From a Christian point of view, anthropology divorced from christology is bound to walk blindly in circles. Our bishops’ conference has tried to indicate the finality of existence christocentrically, hoping to enrich, perhaps even liberate, a conversation about sexuality that has gone rather stale. We do so as the Church prepares to celebrate Easter. Christ is Alpha and Omega. This is more than a formulaic truth; it is the vibrant principle by which we are called, each of us, to understand and shape our lives.

From an exchange with Madoc Cairns, in The Tablet.

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Under Authority

There are people who get exercised at the sight of a bishop’s mitre, thinking it represents some sort of Oriental crown, considering that prelates should avoid such ostentation. The mitre, however, is a symbolic object. Its front and back are seen, in tradition, to represent the Old and New Testament; its lappets stand for the letter and spirit of the law. When the mitre is placed on the newly ordained bishop’s head, it is not to boost his ego, but to remind him that he is a man under authority. He is ordained to proclaim the eternal Word of God as interpreted by the one, undivided Church, having previously promised by solemn oath to do just that. It is in this spirit that the Nordic Bishops’ Conference has written a pastoral letter on human sexuality. This subject is contentious. It calls for pastoral delicacy, but also for clear thinking. Our text aims to be constructive and to root theologically a conversation often marked by superficiality and strong emotion. I invite you to read it, ponder it, pray about it, and, if you think it worthwhile, to share it with others. You can find it here.

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Good Taste

To watch András Schiff teach is like standing next to the little child who had the courage to shout, ‘The emperor is naked!’ While remaining unfailingly courteous and kind to his pupils, he is clear in his judgements. ‘Stop the snake-charming!’ What is the difference between sentiment and sentimentality? Sentiment is emotion, part and parcel of who we are; sentimentality is ‘fake art, bad taste’. ‘What good taste is’, admits Schiff, ‘I don’t know; I just know that our world today is full of bad taste, and many people don’t know the difference.’ To discern it, education in depth is needed, and depth of global culture, but that is what, most of the time, we don’t get. ‘It’s like in medicine: if you’re an eye doctor, you don’t know where the nose is.’ The man who says these things can say them without rancour because he has acquired, by genius and patient slog, mastery of a vast repertoire. He is able to reproduce from memory subtle details from works by Bach, Scarlatti or Beethoven as if he’d just come up with them himself. Do we realise that in order to create something truly original and new, we need to have assimilated what is classical?

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Annunciation

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Lucy

Are you familiar with the story of Lucy, a thirteen year-old from Yorkshire who just won Channel 4’s The Piano? It is always fascinating to watch super-talented young musicians, but Lucy’s case is exceptional: she is developmentally delayed, so cannot hold a conversation, and has been blind from early childhood. What is amazing is not primarily that she is blind yet plays so well. There are other blind pianists. Zhu Xiao-Mei purposely keeps her eyes shut while performing. What is amazing is that music found a way into the mind and heart of a child largely locked up in herself, and released her. It taught her stillness. It opened her to encounters. A dormant, perhaps unexpected soul-depth within her awaited the discovery of beauty. A vulnerable youngster unable to communicate verbally acquired fluency of expression through Chopin and Debussy. To hear her teacher, Daniel Bath, speak of how he went about unlocking the universe of music for her is wonderful.

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Unitary Vision

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Ideological Sands

Professor Cordelia Fine’s TLS review of Hannah Barnes’ Time to Think – The inside story of the collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children is crucial reading. While taking the phenomenon of experienced gender dysphoria seriously, it shows the extent to which public discourse on this topic is determined by ideology. The result is calamitous for vulnerable youngsters whom gender ‘science’ ostensibly sets out to serve. Fine records the manipulative quashing of dissent. The scandal we associate with the Tavistock Clinic sprang from ‘the construction of institutional ignorance’. Political pressure built up over years by activist groups had created a climate that ‘made it very difficult for people to have freedom of thought’. What was effectively medical experimentation was carried out on the scantest empirical basis. Hannah Barnes’s scrupulous research, says Fine, is ‘a painful, important reminder that clinical care that promotes the wellbeing of young people experiencing gender incongruence and distress, and that protects their autonomy, cannot be built on ideological sands of ignorance, forgetting and silencing.’ Care is called for, caution, and above all wisdom, a rare bird in current debate. See also here.

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Providence

Today we read in Hosea this oracle of God, ‘ I will be as the dew unto Israel: he shall grow as the lily, and cast forth his roots as Lebanon’ (14,5). The cedars of Lebanon, desired by Solomon for the building of the temple, are a symbol, in the Bible, of stability and majesty. Yet the humble lily represent a splendour Solomon in all his glory can only envy. The dew is more subtle still. Immeasurable it descends upon earth in the night, in profoundest silence, but from it springs the manna that for forty years nurtures Israel during its errancy, a tangible symbol of the mystical, super-substantial Bread. The Lord’s action cannot be limited to any particular sphere. It can be realised by any means, now spectacularly, now imperceptibly.

Let us live, then, with great attention, sharpening our sensible sight and that of our heart.

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Caesar and I

It has ever been challenging for men and women of faith to position themselves within secular structures. What exactly should one, and should one not, render unto Caesar? Pinchas Goldschmidt, formerly chief rabbi of Russia, reflects on this matter in a penetrating essay written for Foreign Policy (and discussed here by Sandro Magister). He reflects on the role religion plays in Russia’s iniquitous war against Ukraine. And states with clarity how hard it is to maintain religious integrity within a totalitarian system. Some religious communities do well by the system. But what will happen if, when, the system falls? Goldschmidt makes a vital point: ‘All religious leaders should remember one fundamental principle: Their main asset is the people, not the cathedrals. And there is a heavy price to pay for a total merger with the state. Once the state and the church become one, one of them emerges as dangerously, ominously, superfluous.’ An insight worth pondering everywhere, also in the setting of an apparently liberal democracy.

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Choose Light

In popular imagination, the devil’s footprint is the mark of a cloven foot. It is an appropriate image. The term ‘devil’ means ‘divider’; wherever the devil passes, it leaves division in its wake. Most of the time its action is unspectacular. Don’t think in terms of Max von Sydow’s Exorcist. Evil tends to insinuate itself. It is often sweet-talking. All the more reason, whenever we face division in ourselves or in our surroundings, to repeat our baptismal Abrenuntio, which features yearly at the Easter Vigil. It is well to affirm this profession in private peacefully but with firmness. The effort to combat evil will always be an effort in view of unity, integrity, and reconciliation in truth. The truth aspect is crucial. ‘Unite my heart to fear your name’, reads a wonderful verse in Psalm 86 (Ps 86.11 RSV). In Latin, ‘Simplex fac cor meum, ut timeat nomen tuum’. To make that prayer undistractedly is a powerful weapon against dark influence. It’s an option for the light.

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Fratelli tutti

It is risky to seek a single hermeneutical key to a pontificate, which has many aspects. In Pope Francis’s case, though, there is a crucial statement in the exhortation Evangelii Gaudium published in 2013, shortly after his election. The text was a programme statement for his ministry as successor to the Apostle Peter. In his introduction he wrote: ‘The great danger in today’s world, pervaded as it is by consumerism, is the desolation and anguish born of a complacent yet covetous heart, the feverish pursuit of frivolous pleasures, and a blunted conscience [de la conciencia aislada]’ (EG, 2). The pope tirelessly calls us back to communion. He asks us to purge our faintheartedness and so to let the Spirit of Jesus transform us; to seek the nurturing joy that comes from forgetting oneself; to de-privatise our conscience in order to let be illumined by the Lord’s commandments, communicated through the Church. He stresses that fraternity is the only possible foundation for a humane society. Fraternity presupposes recognition of ourselves as children of our Father in heaven, who loves us, calls us, and renews our life. Let us, in gratitude for the Holy Father’s service these ten years, cast off self-centred desolation and learn to know the Joy of the Gospel as ours.

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On Love

In Hannah Coulter, Wendell Berry lets the aged Hannah look back on the experience of losing her husband Virgil during World War II while pregnant with his child, then on her second marriage to Nathan. She is led to think deeply about the nature of love.

‘Sometimes too I could see that love is a great room with a lot of doors, where we are invited to knock and come in. Though it contains all the world, the sun, the moon, and stars, it is so small as to be also in our hearts. It is in the hearts of those who choose to come in. Some do not come in. Some may stay out forever. Some come in together and leave separately. Some come in and stay, until they die, and after. I was in it a long time with Nathan. I am still in it with him. And what about Virgil? Once, we too went in and were together in that room. And now in my tenderness of remembering it all again, I think I am still there with him too. I am there with all the others, most of them gone but some who are still there, who gave me love and called forth love from me. When I number them over, I am surprised how many there are.’

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Call to Holiness

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No Such Thing

‘There is no such thing as a casual, non-significant sexual act; everyone knows this. Contrast sex with eating – you’re strolling along a lane, you see a mushroom on a bank as you pass by, you know about mushrooms, you pick it and eat it quite casually – sex is never like that. That’s why virtue in connection with eating is basically a matter only of the pattern of one’s eating habits. But virtue in sex – chastity – is not only a matter of such a pattern, that is of its role in a pair of lives.’

Thus wrote Elizabeth Anscombe in her essay Contraception and Chastity, an immensely readable text marked by humanity, humour, and razor-sharp intelligence. To read it is to be reminded how muddled much of public discourse is on these subjects, and how we need lucidity and faith-based reason. Have a look, too, at my Notebook entry for 12 January 2023.

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Humble & Strong

In these synodal times, when everyone’s voice is to be heard, we must listen not least to the voices of the saints. What have they to say to us? Cardinal Anders Arborelius asked this question last night at Vadstena, in a Mass celebrated as part of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference. Vadstena is the city of the indomitable St Birgitta. When she made instructions for the abbey church in Vadstena, a remarkable example of theological architecture, full of mystical measures, she insisted that it should be ‘humble and strong’. The Church of our time lives in a state of humiliation; this fact summons us to conversion and renewal. But what about her strength? Often she seems to be embarrassed to display it. All the more important, then, to remember that the strength in question is not hers, but the Lord’s. There is inward work, here, to be done. We shall do it on the right terms if we remember the phrase St Birgitta adopted as her motto: ‘Amor meus crucifixus est’ – ‘Mine is a crucified love’. Are we grounded in this truth?

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Swords to Ploughshares

This image of the Sorrowful Mother of God, in a posture suggesting a crucifixion scene, was painted by a Ukrainian iconographer on wood from an ammunition crate. The artist wanted to express stubborn conviction that beauty, aesthetic and spiritual, can emerge from ugliness and violence.  Even in the midst of the ongoing, terrible war. ‘They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, their spears into pruning hooks’, we read in Isaiah. When? When the Lord ‘shall judge between the nations’ (2,4). Judgement has been inaugurated, but is worked out at a pace that, from our perspective, seems unbearably slow. The Mother of God displays a grief inalienable from the human condition; yet we address her in wonderful liturgical texts with the imperative, ‘Rejoice!’. Christian joy is born through things as they are. It is a lucid joy not needing to abstract from reality; for reality as we suffer it is borne, held by a humanly inexplicable benevolence, in process of redemption. The mystery of faith.

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Christian Odyssey

If you visit the abbey church of Corvey, where St Ansgar was a monk, and climb up to the ninth-century choir of the west front, you make a fascinating discovery. On the north wall is a mural painted more than 1,000 years old portraying Odysseus battling Scylla. What’s he doing there? An example of medieval syncretism? A watering-down of the Gospel in terms of classical literature? No. In the ancient Church, Odysseus was widely seen as a type not only of the Christian journey (see Notebook 5 May 2022), but of Christ. Our ancestors in the faith were convinced that Christ was the answer to the ideals and noblest dreams of all peoples and periods, the recapitulator of culture. Their conviction was well-founded. We could do with reappropriating it, should we have lost it. One of the chief Christian tasks here and now is surely to demonstrate that Christ alone corresponds to the deepest longings and best aspirations of our own age, however confusedly they may be expressed.

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Of Our Word

What sets man apart from animals is not least the fact that he can talk. An animal can be faithful – any dogowner knows that – but only man can promise to be faithful. To this day, there is solemnity in the air when someone gives his or her word. Our word commits us. It also liberates us. A promise ennobles the one who pronounces it. Fidelity provides soil in which we may grow, mature, and bear fruit. When the Lord gives us his prayer – ‘Our Father, who art in heaven’ – it is not to be repeated as pious babble. The prayer provides the foundation of a binding pact. When we pray, ‘Forgive us our trespasses’, we commit ourselves to forgive. The daily bread we pray for is given us to be shared. Do we let the Lord’s name be hallowed in us? ‘My word’, says the Lord, ‘does not return to me empty’. It can, however, sink into a black hole in our consciousness and seemingly vanish. May that not happen! Let us be receptive to God’s word, then show ourselves men and women of our word.

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School for Prayer

‘We do not need exhaustive experience of the human condition, or the spiritual life, to realise that we are held captive by an almost boundless world of disorder in the form of sins, affective imbalance, unhealed wounds, destructive habits, and so forth. All these things make up the impurities of our heart. We have just noted that our heart speaks through the emotions. Now, all the disorders I have listed lead to emotions in disarray. They express themselves almost without our noticing; they order us about; they tear us apart; they close us to God; and they tie us down in an automated kind of evil. All this from within our heart!’

From a letter on the prayer of the heart by the Carthusian Dom André Poisson. It is excellent Lenten reading, and you can find it right here.

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Vocation

On the 365th day of Russia’s aggressive war against Ukraine, Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, chooses to speak about vocation. A significant choice on this tragic anniversary. It concerns all of us. Are we responsible stewards of God’s gift to us, resolved to carry out our task even in extremely adverse circumstances? The archbishop reminds us: ‘God calls. Man must respond. When a person responds to the call, God gives himself to that person.’ We can take God’s call for granted: ‘God never ceases to call man. If a man has already chosen his state of life by means of a definitive decision […], he must confirm that definitive decision in daily choices, daily decisions, and not change it. If that person closes in on himself and thinks of what he has received as his private property, his own treasure, he risks losing it. It sometimes happens that one who does not wish to keep listening daily to God, who calls him, can get lost and lose his direction on his journey towards daily growth. […] Then that person feels lost.’ Thus speaks one who remains steadfastly faithful, a beacon of hope for others, in the midst of war. It is only right that each of us should ask him or herself: ‘And I?’

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Lenten Fast

Is there a difference between fasting and dieting?

Yes, there’s a categorical difference. Dieting has me as agent and focus, and my desire to emerge from the diet and be able to put on clothes I could put on three years ago. Fasting has its object outside myself. I deprive myself of food or some kind of enjoyment, whatever it is.

But fasting is an ecstatic practice in the strict sense of that word: it helps me to step outside myself and toward the other, and to grow in attentiveness. Dieting, I think, can sometimes be doing the opposite and make us excessively focused on ourselves.

From a conversation with Luke Coppen for The Pillar.

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Thin Coat

In a beautiful essay in Mentsch Magazine, Knut Ødegård writes about ‘The Playful Rolf Jacobsen‘. He speaks of Jacobsen’s enthusiasm, his onomatopoetic exuberance, his sense of the absurd; yet all this coexisted with great seriousness. Perhaps only one who takes life seriously can truly laugh (and not just snigger) at it? There was ‘something fond and vulnerable’ in Jacobsen. It found expression not least when his wife Petra died. I have rarely read a more piercing love poem than the one he wrote on that occasion. Petra’s hands had been ‘like a home’ for him, the husband and poet: ‘They said/Move in here./No rain, no frost, no fear./In that house I have lived/without rain, without frost, without fear/until time came and pulled it down./Now I am back out on the street./My coat is thin. It is about/to snow.’ Yet even in loss Jacobsen detected meaning, though he could not grasp it. ‘Indeed, he was a performer, playful — and devout.’ ‘His broad heart was home to a Chaplin-like humour, he found ‘passages everywhere and traces in people’s hearts/and paths illumined by quiet light.’

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