A Shudder
The Second Vatican Council taught: ‘In the earthly liturgy we take part in a foretaste of that heavenly liturgy which is celebrated in the holy city of Jerusalem toward which we journey as pilgrims, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God’. The phrase makes me think of a photograph I like to keep within reach. It shows the monk-archbishop of Milan, Blessed Ildefonso Schuster, as celebrant. It shows a man transfigured, wholly surrendered to the sacred act, in symbolic and embodied continuity with the heavenly host. Schuster was a man of slender, fragile appearance. Vested for the liturgy, though, he became a giant: ‘We witnessed a holy colloquy with the invisible power of God; it was impossible to behold him without succumbing to a religious shudder.’ Arguments about worship go on and on. The decisive question to be asked, however, is surely this: Who, now, celebrates the sacred liturgy on such terms? We might recall that Schuster used to say: ‘It seems people are no longer convinced by our preaching, but faced with sanctity, they still believe, still kneel down and pray.’
Sursum corda
I recently had occasion to cite an insight of which I am convinced: ‘Anthropocentrism kills the Church and its life.’ How to get out of the rut? We’re told in this morning’s vigils reading, one of my favourite texts in the liturgical cycle. The Irish abbot Columbanus (ca. 543-615) asks how God’s light may shine in him and so illumine others? His answer is formulated as a prayer: ‘I beg you, my Jesus, fill my lamp with your light. By its light let me see the holiest of holy places, your own temple where you enter as the eternal High Priest of the eternal mysteries. Let me see you, watch you, desire you. Let me love you as I see you, and before you let my lamp always shine, always burn. Let us know you, let us love you, let us desire you alone, let us spend our days and nights meditating on you alone, let us always be thinking of you. Fill us with love of you, let us love you with all the love that is your right as our God. Let that love fill us and possess us, let it overwhelm our senses until we can love nothing but you, for you are eternal.’
Wealth
At the end of Olivier Mille’s documentary portrait of Messiaen, the composer speaks of his oratorio Francis of Assisi. He’d been reproached for it, he says, by right-minded people objecting that St Francis had been poor whereas Messiaen’s orchestration, colours, and rhythms are incredibly rich. The composer gives the following response:
‘St Francis was totally poor, that is true. Yet he retained a child’s capacity for wonder. He was in awe before all the beauty that surrounded him. So he was rich! Rich in sunlight, rich in the stars, rich in flowers, rich in birds, rich in the sea, rich in trees, rich in all that surrounded him. That’s immense wealth – and it is’, adds Messiaen, ‘something I wish you all.’
Belonging
By being abstracted from belonging (belonging in a culture, in a religion, in a gender, in one’s own body), the individual is surrendered to itself on the basis of self-defined psycho-sexual criteria. The surrender reflects the mentality of our time —our wish to create ourselves. It is presumed that there is no such thing as meaningfully mediating institutions. Cultural experience, meanwhile, shows that the self-understanding of women and men tends to develop precisely through community. Hardly any other epoch has had a view of human nature as atomised as ours. This view is upheld in full awareness that loneliness is a growing societal ill, especially among the young. The law proposal shows a lack of historical consciousness. As a society, driven by the state, we are asked to capitulate before an understanding of human nature that will turn out to be ephemeral.
From a Statement on Conversion Therapy.
St Francis & the Viol
So vivid are the accounts of St Francis’s personality that we risk forming an impression that is purely this-worldly. Francis is held hostage to more pragmatic causes than any other saint. It matters to recall with reverence the supernatural foundation of his life and witness. The Fioretti speak of an incident that took place not long before his death. Weakened by abstinence and spiritual trials, Francis turned his mind to meditation on celestial joy. ‘Now while this thought was in his mind, suddenly an angel appeared to him in surpassing glory, having a viol in his left hand and a bow in his right. And St Francis stood in amazement at the sight, the angel drew the bow once across the strings of the viol, when the soul of St Francis was instantly so ravished by the sweetness of the melody, that all his bodily senses were suspended, and he believed, as he afterwards told his companions, that, if the strain had been continued, the intolerable sweetness would have drawn his soul from his body.’ Here we glimpse the soul-mystery of this singular Christian, whose being was wholly attuned to the music of eternity.
Called to Fidelity
Today’s Gospel gives us the parable of the good Samaritan, a criterion by which we must measure ourselves. Are we naturally inclined to act like the priest and levite? Do we, to avoid others’ needs, cross the street and vanish into the cityscape on the other side? Perhaps we think, ‘I can’t’ or ‘I daren’t’. Right action in extreme conditions isn’t necessarily spontaneous. Such action must be prepared by other, small choices made in secret, the sort of choices of which life consists in the main. Let’s remember: each small action carried out in the name of Jesus, for his love’s sake, can be a source of sanctification. It can prepare us for big choices lying before us, choices as yet unknown on which others’ thriving will depend. We must practise fidelity, then, in daily circumstances, in whatever task God’s providence entrusts to us now. If we get used to saying Yes! in that setting, we shall be armed for greater trials, too. Then God’s Spirit will be free to work in us. By grace we shall acquire the mind of Christ. ‘It is no longer I who live’, writes St Paul, ‘but Christ who lives in me.’ What he means is: It has become natural for me, now, to walk as he walked. May God grant us, too, grace to reach that point of identification.
Bitter & Sweet
Michael Leunig has a gift for putting his finger on things. He is almost always enlightening, often funny, sometimes infuriating. He can both write and draw with tenderness.
Here is an autumn prayer from his collection The Prayer Tree:
No Truck
A great deal of nonsense is often said about angels. We may find we’re given to thinking nonsensically about them ourselves, haunted as we are by images of feathers, celestial chariots, and cascading cloaks.
So earthbound are we poor human clods, so conditioned by our bodies, that it is hard for us to conceive of pure spiritual existences.
Another hurdle that separates us from the angels we celebrate today is this: they have no truck with sin, no experience of it. They can distinguish between good and evil with perfect clarity, whereas we, often enough, are captive to deadly ambiguities, not knowing, sometimes not wanting to know, what’s what.
Law & Parables
There’d be much to say about Linda Kinstler’s important volume Come to this Court and Cry, a landmark study of the aftermath of the Shoah. I’d like, though, to hone in on a remark which indicates, as it were, the book’s hermeneutic framework. ‘In Jewish tradition’, writes Kinstler, ‘law and literature have a dialectic relation, inflecting and following upon one another. Where the law fails, parables point the way. Where stories are silent, law speaks. In this way, literature and law produce and revise one another. «The two are one in their beginning and their end», wrote Haim Bialik.’ This insight helps us understand an aspect of the contemporary cultural climate. In society, but also in the Church, a movement is abroad to abolish fundamental laws. At the same time we have largely forgotten our identity-shaping stories, no longer retold. What we’re left with is bewildering emptiness.
The Good’s Discretion
St Vincent de Paul, born in 1581, embodied the Tridentine movement. Deeply committed to the reform of the Church and clergy, he was reared on the spiritual doctrine of the Capuchin Benet Canfield, an Englishman who did much to form French Counter-Reformation spirituality. The work for the poor for which Vincent is best-known was part of an overall vision of Catholic renewal. He did not prettify corporate charity. He knew that poverty rarely ennobles people. He told a confrère: ‘The path will be long, the poor often ungrateful. The more uncouth and unjust they are, the more you must pour out your love on them. Only when they know you love them will the poor forgive you for your gifts of bread.’ This is insight born of experience, informed by a keen sense of human dignity. Many an NGO could do with taking a leaf out of Vincent’s book.
I also love this other phrase of his: ‘Noise does no good, and good makes no noise.’
Extreme Value
People sometimes speak of finding comfort in Scripture. Often enough, though, the Word of God is anything but reassuring. The beginning of the Book of Job is an example. It presents a man’s life as subject to an eternal wager, to testing that amounts to total loss. The Book of Job, let’s remember, is an extended parable, not reportage. Through exaggerated features it invites us to recognise a pattern of divine action and human response. It is not that God is cruel. He does not deal with Job the way we may, as children, have dealt with ants in an anthill, intoxicated by the disproportion between our felt omnipotence and the tiny animals’ powerlessness. The motivating factor behind the testing of Job is not sadism but the extreme value of the supernatural call addressed to man by way of an appeal to his freedom, a freedom that demands to be tested as gold is tested in the furnace.
Dear Comrades
On Wednesday this week, the President of the Russian republic made a speech that began with the address, ‘Esteemed friends’, and ended with the phrase, ‘I believe in your support’. In between those statements lay a proposition of alternative reality. The stakes of absolutism, which Europeans thought was a superseded stage of societal development, are making themselves felt with force, not far away. This is a time to be mindful of where such tendencies lead. One way of doing so might be to watch Andrei Konchalovksy’s 2020 film Dear Comrades, a re-enactment of a massacre that took place in western Russia in 1962, when Red Army soldiers and KGB snipers opened fire on unarmed striking workers. As Peter Bradshaw wrote in his Guardian review last year, ‘Anger burns a hole through the screen in this stark monochrome picture’. What is our response, yours and mine, to the violent insult to righteousness being committed before our eyes?
Attention Demanded
Treasures can be found in unexpected places. One doesn’t normally look to the daily press for sapiential nourishment — but sometimes we find it there, to our delight and astonishment. An example is this essay by Katherine Rundell on John Donne (1572-1631) published in the New York Times a fortnight ago (it takes me a while to catch up). Rundell writes of Donne’s ease with extremes, of the way in which this supremely sensitive man could delight in life while looking on death fearlessly. From his practised capacity for tension sprang curiosity, sympathy, compassion, above all determined attention:
‘Wake, his writing tells us, over and over. Weep for this world and gasp for it. Wake, and pay attention to our mortality, to the precise ways in which beauty cuts through us. Pay attention to the softness of skin and the majesty of hands and feet. Attention — real, sustained, unflinching attention — is what this life, with its disasters and delights, demands of you.’
Rest
The notion of rest is important in ascetic vocabulary. The Greek Fathers designated it as hēsychia, a term rendered in Latin as pax. What the Fathers had in mind was not relaxation, but a state of inward balance in which the composite elements that make up human existence are gradually harmonised, attuned to the Logos, much as the members of an orchestra, before a performance, tune their instruments to the A intoned by the First Violin.
Often enough, we are conscious that this harmony and the beneficent balance it induces are absent from our lives. What to do then? An avenue is indicated by the poet Reiner Kunze, who once wrote that a poem is unrest come to rest: ‘Das gedicht ist zur ruhe gekommene unruhe‘. What if the fundamental human task were poetic, if the chief challenge before us were to make of our lives such a poem?
Who We Are
An artefact on display in a fine exhibition in Hildesheim’s Dommuseum is a candlestick made in the Meuse Delta around 1180. It represents the three continents known at that time – Europe, Africa, and Asia – as female figures. How interesting to note the attributes ascribed to them.
Asia holds a filled vessel and bears the inscription DIVITIE (wealth). Europe, bearing sword and shield, is characterised by the word BELLUM (war). Africa, meanwhile, is portrayed contemplatively, holding an open book on which is inscribed the word SCIENTIA (knowledge).
We find, here, a correction of perspective useful in the context of claims made in the European sphere, in a certain kind of political discourse, to perennial cultural supremacy, as if such a thing belonged to our continent by some sort of monopoly.
Restoration
What is the relationships between an original and a copy? In the light of Genesis 1,27, ‘God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him’, this problem is urgently relevant to every Christian. Athanasius, in his treatise On the Incarnation of the Word, developed it explicitly in terms of an artist’s work to restore a painting: ‘For as, when the likeness painted on a panel has been effaced by stains from without, he whose likeness it is must come once more to enable the portrait to be renewed on the same wood: for, for the sake of his picture, even the mere wood on which it is painted is not thrown away, but the outline is renewed upon it’. This enthralling documentary on the restoration of the Mona Lisa of the Prado is of more than just art-historical interest. It provides a parable of an existential pursuit of authenticity. It shows that a true copy is not a dead re-production, but a creation in its own right, possessing integrity. This applies to the works of a painter of genius. How much more must it apply to the works of the Author of Beauty?
Consultancy
Consultancy is a key function in our society. Enterprises large and small invest huge sums in it. The advisability of counsel is evident. St Benedict affirms, in chapter 3, ‘Do everything with counsel and having so done you will not repent’. Anyone who has exercised government knows what he means. There are times, though, when consultancy – weighing up options – is no good, when we have to abide by principles. We commemorate the martyrdom of Cyprian of Carthage. When arrested in 258, he was urged to perform the civic ritual the emperor required: a brief visit to the city hall, a little bit of incense strategically placed, and that would be that. Cyprian said no: to obey would, to his way of thinking, be blasphemy. The imperial proconsul was shocked. Taking Cyprian aside, he said, Consule tibi – that is, ‘Exercise consultancy’. Cyprian retorted: ‘In a matter so just, there is no consultancy to be had’, In re tam iusta nulla est consultatio. Sometimes there’s a limit to what consultancy can achieve. What matters then is simply to tell truth from falsehood, and to opt for truth.
Compassion
The requests put on our lips by the liturgy today, on the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, are enormous. In the collect, ‘grant that your Church, participating with the Virgin Mary in the Passion of Christ, may merit a share in his Resurrection’; in the prayer after communion, ‘we humbly ask, O Lord, that […] we may complete in ourselves for the Church’s sake what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ’. These aren’t just words. They are pointers to the core of the Christian condition, where to be ‘passive’ is not to be inactive; on the contrary, incorporation into the Passion is the highest form of action, the presupposition for meaningful, effective Christian agency. We contemplate this truth in the ineffable compassion of Mary. Concepts fail to render its intensity. Music can hint at it, nowhere perhaps less inadequately than in Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater. This version with Mirella Freni and Teresa Berganza is to my mind unsurpassed. Both singers are at the peak of their powers. But there is more than just virtuosity at work. Their mature voices enable the maternal mystery to be voiced with singular power.
Chrysostom
John Chrysostom is not a universally lovable saint like Polycarp or Francis of Sales. He was a preacher and teacher of genius; his fortitude was proverbial. Each year I am struck by the reference, in today’s collect, to ‘his astounding eloquence and his forbearance in persecution’. At the same time, Chrysostom had many rough edges. Some of his utterances can to this day startle us with their force, even violence.
He reminds us that genuine communion must be a function of truth, and that truth, more often than not, is something that has to be striven for.
The foundation of our oneness in Christ in the Church is radical authenticity. This requires us to be ready to denounce whatever in and around us is inauthentic, an obstacle rather than a help to the pursuit of genuine discipleship.
Like the Ore of Bells
There’s a tendency abroad to deprive the Church of her definite article, her capital letter, her personhood. What’s left, the task of ‘constructing church’ is a bit like ‘studying maths’, an exercise in human ingenuity. What a contrast in Gertrud von Le Fort’s Hymns to the Church: ‘Your servants bear ageless ornaments, your language is like bell-metal ore. /Your prayers resemble millennial oaks, your Psalms have the breath of the seas. /Your teaching is like a fastness on unassailable hills. /When you receive vows, they resound to the end of time; when you bless, you build mansions in heaven. /Your consecrations are like great signs of fire on human foreheads, no one can put them out. /The measure of your faithfulness is not the faith of men, the measure of your years encompasses no autumn. /You are like enduring fire above whirling ash! /You are like a tower in the midst of tearing waters! /That is why your silence is deep when days are loud; at eventime they will nonetheless fall upon your mercy. /You are the one who prays upon every tomb! /Where today gardens bloom there’ll be a wilderness tomorrow; where a people dwells at dawn, there is ruin at night. /You are the sole sign on earth of what is eternal; all that is not remoulded by you, is transmuted by death.’
Faithfulness
Queen Elizabeth II lived a life admirable in so many ways that the encomia pouring out on her death yesterday, on the feast of Mary’s Nativity, are inexhaustible. What strikes me especially, though, is this: one person’s radical fidelity to her task and station lent stability to the lives of countless others. Fidelity can take many forms. Who knows what awaits us? Important is the heart’s stability, translated into embodied living. I recently came upon this noble prayer formulated by John Paul II on his 65th birthday: ‘If one day illness touches my mind and clouds it, I do surrender to You even now, with [a] devotion that will later be continued in silent adoration. If one day I were to lie down and remain unconscious for long, it is my desire that every hour I am given to experience this be an uninterrupted thanksgiving, and that my ultimate breath be also a breath of love. Then, at such a moment, my soul, guided by the hand of Mary, will face you in order to sing your glory forever. Amen.’
Man and Beast
When Anthony the Great, in the final stage of his long life, retired to the Inner Mountain, he was bothered by beasts that dug up his vegetable patch. He addressed them graciously (χαριέντως), saying, ‘Why are you doing me harm, since I do no harm to you?’ From then on, he and they lived together in peace. The restoration of harmony with the animal kingdom is a Leitmotif in ascetic literature, a sign of return to graced innocence, an indication of holiness. We are, as a generation, at the opposite end of the spectrum. A review of recent literature provides statistics that show how far our exploitation of animals has gone: ‘Spain’s porkers, nearly as numerous as its people, provide enough manure annually to fill the Barcelona football stadium 23 times over’; ‘We raise 66 billion chickens a year, eight for every human, almost all of them in terrible conditions’. The cinema is mobilised to open our eyes. I have been touched by Gunda and Cow. Both are beautiful. Neither is sentimental. Effectively these films reveal the otherness of animals, reminding us that the antiseptic, plastic-wrapped meat in supermarket fridges was once alive – and that all life deserves to be regarded with reverence.
Stepping out of Fear
In Scripture, a consequence of sin – which is a state of disorientation – is the experience of fearing where there is no fear (cf. Ps 53:5). The process of conversion involves the shedding of irrational anxiety. Sometimes, though, we’ve objective reasons to fear. This was the case with Judah in Jeremiah’s day, lending force to the Lord’s oracle, spoken through the prophet: ‘Do not fear the king of Babylon, of whom you are afraid; do not fear him, says the Lord’ (42:11). God does not tell the people their fear is groundless. He asks them to acknowledge it at a natural level, then to go beyond it in a spirit of faith. We often feel guilty about fear, trying either to suppress or dissimilate it. So it gains a deeper foothold. To say instead, ‘This is frightening, I am frightened’, can confer unexpected freedom. It grounds us in the real. To opt for the real is to aspire to truth. The truth, even when hard, liberates, opening us to the grace of courage.
אַל־תִּֽירְא֗וּ מִפְּנֵי֙ מֶ֣לֶךְ בָּבֶ֔ל אֲשֶׁר־אַתֶּ֥ם יְרֵאִ֖ים מִפָּנָ֑יו אַל־תִּֽירְא֤וּ מִמֶּ֙נּוּ֙ נְאֻם־יְהֹוָ֔ה כִּֽי־אִתְּכֶ֣ם אָ֔נִי לְהוֹשִׁ֧יעַ אֶתְכֶ֛ם וּלְהַצִּ֥יל אֶתְכֶ֖ם מִיָּדֽוֹ
Metaphysical scandal
It is often assumed that what puts the Church at odds with contemporary society is its ethical teaching. Many cry out for change in this area. Quite apart from the merit of considering what might be a Catholic response to particular, perhaps new problems in ethics (something each age is called upon to do), I consider the assumption false. I do not think the principal skandalon is ethical. I think it is metaphysical.
The holiness of God! The splendour of his glory, made manifest in Christ through infinitely gracious condescension! These core realities, which to the founders of Cîteaux were axiomatic, seem strange to an age whose outlook is wholly horizontal. We are children of that age. Of this we must ever be aware.
From a Letter to the Order.
Enough to Say Yes
‘For me and for each one of you, when God called us to specific stations in life, He revealed very little: the basic call, the bare bones. His invitation didn’t include a biography and a script, and so it called for faith and trust, our hand in God’s. No rose garden, only that whatever the garden, Eden or Gethsemane, He would be there faithful through all our infidelities. It’s true of every vowed existence, husband and wife, priest or religious, the law, dance, music or medicine, commerce or the State house. It’s true of the powerful and the powerless. God tells us only enough for us to say yes.’
With these words the Assuptionist Fr Philip Bonvouloir (1929-2012) offered friends a retrospect of his own experience. In it I dare say many of us will recognise our own.
