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.
Ecology
To signpost what is effectively a rubbish dump as an ‘ecological isle’ requires some semantic acrobatics.
To sort waste is admirable, but is still just a way of storing it. The work of purification is a separate process, happening elsewhere, with an energy proper to it.
Really ecological would be the non-generation of junk, so as not to have to get rid of it.
The logic can be transferred, mutatis mutandis, to the inner life. There too we must beware of supposing that merely labelling and sorting amounts to cleansing.
Practising Sight
Contemplative life is grounded in an ability to see. Contemplation is grace, of course, but grace, as ever, builds on nature, so we must exercise our faculty of sight. That’s something we all can do. In fact, if we fail to foster an ability to see and distinguish colour, the world around us increasingly appears monochrome. Czapski once noted:
‘Dusk already. Work once again, fresh and sure. Sure, in what way? In the way I control myself, objectify, expand the range of my sense of colour which, when I don’t work, is impoverished. The routine? Could you call this routine, this secular technique that opens a universe of happy, pictorial experiences before me? This slow pace couldn’t be called vision, it’s more like an apprenticeship of looking.’
Daybreak
Hans Ulrich Treichel’s novel Daybreak is effectively a pietà in prose. An elderly woman cradles her middle-aged son, dead after long illness, and at last feels free to express to herself – and to us – elements of the drama that has framed her life, which only in appearance has been ordinary (what is ordinary?) and banal.
How litte we know of one another! How limited is our notion of what others may be carrying, what heroism they may be called upon to exercise simply to rise in the morning!
‘Have we not passed along a steep mountain pass?’ asks the narratrix towards the end of her story. Indeed she has. And she has enabled the reader to get a sense of the risks run at such altitude.
Hunting the Pluck
This Heaney poem makes me think of John 7:38. It is one thing to carry a spring of water, another to find it.
Cut from the green hedge a forked hazel stick
That he held tightly by the arms of the V:
Circling the terrain, hunting the pluck
Of water, nervous, but professionally
Unfussed. The pluck came sharp as a sting.
The rod jerked with precise convulsions,
Spring water suddenly broadcasting
Through a green hazel its secret stations.
The bystanders would ask to have a try.
He handed them the rod without a word.
It lay dead in their grasp till, nonchalantly,
He gripped expectant wrists. The hazel stirred.
Far and Wide
In 1900, five years before Norway regained sovereignty, parliament passed a motion to grant 12,000 kroner towards the publication of Heimskringla in both established forms of the Norwegian tongue, ‘so that the book might reach far and wide, being affordable’. The notion that a nation in search of corporate identity would gain from engaging with its founding narratives was taken for granted and subsidised.
This provides food for thought in a cultural context marked by wilful amnesia. We readily live and speak as if the past were mere overweight, prospect all that mattered. And we’re surprised that we’ve trouble coming up with a sharable account of who we are, what we’re about? Never, perhaps, has there been a time in which the practice of careful remembrance was more necessary, indeed a civic (and ecclesial) duty.
Thanks
It was once common for votive plaques to be fitted in churches in thanksgiving for graces received. An object might take the place of a plaque: a crutch showing that the owner had no further use for it, a photograph of a long-awaited child.
An essential passage in the Gospel is the one in which Jesus, between Samaria and Galilee, asks the cleansed leper come to thank him: ‘Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine?’ (Lk 17:17).
I love this unpretentious ensemble. Loud gestures are not always needed to give thanks. Sometimes a pine cone says it all.
What matters is the consciousness of having been graced, then the capacity to respond graciously.
Wind-Whirls
This morning I stood at a window holding a bowl of hot tea while watching a swallow circling a pond into which, every third round or so, it shot like a bullet. The window was shut, I couldn’t hear the swallow. But I could see its jubilation.
This afternoon I saw a paraglider under a billowing, bright yellow sail perform gracious wind-whirls, all the lovelier for being wholly gratuitous.
It struck me that the two were doing the same thing: making being explicit and delighting in it. What a splendid urge all creatures have to enact that line in Hopkins’s poem, almost a confession: ‘What I do is me, for that I came’. Yet how much distracts us from it. How easily we surrender to unselving and so accumulate, instead of joy, dispiriting sadness.
Ave Crux
The saint we honour as Rose of Lima was born in Peru, to Spanish parents, in 1586, 23 years after the closure of the Council of Trent, which energised global Catholicism. In Rose’s life, this energy was manifest in strong dedication to care for the poor, which brings her close to the aspiration of contemporary Christianity. We may, by contrast, feel estranged by her life of mortification. For Rose, the Passion of Christ was not a subject for meditation. It was the vital atmosphere within which her existence unfolded. Her attachment to the Cross was radical. This is an aspect of the Christian condition that, today, we tend to forget somewhat. God, says St Paul in today’s Mass reading, calls us ‘to share the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ’. Now, that glory was supremely manifest on Calvary. To recognise this fact is not to yield to a morbid religiosity. It is to read the Gospel honestly, recognising our need for redemption and affirming the effective truth of the refrain the Church sings on Good Friday: ‘By the wood of the Cross joy entered the whole world.’ Thereby, not otherwise.
St Bernard
In a sermon, St Bernard or Clairvaux likens the Christian’s life in this world to a man who carries a flickering flame through a long, stormy night. The wind blows, the rain lashes down. To keep his flame from going out, he cups it with both hands, focusing all his attention on keeping it safe as he makes slow progress towards the Father’s house. What keeps his courage up is the certainty that he will, as long as he is faithful, arrive there one day. ‘And in that house not made with hands’, Bernard says, ‘there is nothing to fear. No enemy enters that house. No friend leaves it.’ The last remark is characteristic. St Bernard had a life-long charism for friendship. He knew that, in order to serve God, we have need of one another, and that this fellowship of truth-seeking hearts is life’s sweetest gift.
Quixote in Odessa
In his latest dispatch from Ukraine, published today in Dag og Tid, Andrej Kurkov reports that Minkus’s Don Quixote was performed, this week, at the Odessa Opera to a full house. To stage a ballet in the midst of war is an act of defiance, upholding the attainments of the human spirit in the face of brute aggression. One could interpret the choice of repertoire as high sarcasm. For this enterprise is not ‘quixotic’; it is bound to prevail. The spirit always does, in the long term. Last week, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk remarked, continuing his exceptional wartime catechesis: ‘the cornerstone of any society is respect for the dignity of the human person and the sanctity of human life, from conception to natural death. Because it is from the dignity of a person that all other rights and responsibilities of a person derive.’ To be determined to counter ugliness with beauty is to display what dignity is, and so to spread hope far abroad.
Grandeur of Time
A quarter-century ago I heard Olivier Clément speak unforgettably of the virtue of slowness. The world has speeded up a lot since then. We need to hear voices that remind us of the craziness of constant acceleration. Like that of Marie Noël, who in 1946 noted: ‘Here, each evening, there comes a splendid moment: the homecoming of the oxen with the great cartloads of sheaves towering over them […], they appear, slow and majestic, to come straight out of eternity. Maybe Boaz saw their like. And maybe that is the true rhythm of work, the one God devised for man, that noble gait, that powerful, unhasting tread. Perhaps our Cathedrals were conceived and built without hurry or fret, and with the steady calm of mind and hands and only the vigorous effort measured to the day’s need. Perhaps all human labour, be it of soul or body, requires for its beauty something of the grandeur of time.’ From a precious Essay in Meaning translated by Pauline Matarasso, p. 239.
Redressing Loss
Ever since I first read Simon Wiesenthal’s book Recht, nicht Rache (Justice, not Revenge), the legacy of this nobly tireless yet unbitter maintainer of remembrance has marked me deeply. In a documentary now a few years old, Sir Ben Kingsley, who played Wiesenthal in the feature Murderers Among Us, speaks about his first encounter with a man he had to get to know, so to speak, from within. What struck him above all — ‘it has never left me’ — was the way in which Wiesenthal would spontaneously draw his hand across his face in a gesture of contained despair: ‘I have never seen anyone else physically embody a whole generation of grief in one gesture. He manages to tap into the collective grief and the understanding of grief in all of us, whatever our history. This I think is tremendously healing. Because if you cannot grieve over loss, you cannot begin to redress that loss and repair the damage done.’ Kingsley stresses, though, that there was more to Wiesenthal than the incarnation of grief: ‘As well as weeping all of his tears, he was a man capable of laughing all of his laughter.’
Maybe
In 1949, 53 years old, having recorded his account of a war during which he’d endured and witnessed terrible things, faced now with the suffocation of Poland, Józef Czapski asked himself if it was still possible to paint. Should he paint, a new form of expression was called for — but was the pursuit of art even moral? He wrote to Hering: ‘All I want to do now is to disconnect myself from other painters, from the Louvre, from the methods, and to use all my passions to gnaw their way into some painting of mine. Maybe a painting of an old Jewish woman in a train or standing at the Otwock station is closer to my heart today than the most scrumptious Parisian ideas. My painting really seems to have no use for Paris. I have one good friend here who continues to blast me harshly for not painting. Even though I tell him, “But the sky is falling, and you want me to sit and paint?” And he says, “Maybe the sky is falling because you and the others have stopped painting.”‘ (In Karpeles, p. 268).
Age-Old Battle
At the end of 1938, Edith Stein was moved from her monastery in Cologne to the Carmel of Echt in Holland. Her superiors hoped that, there, she would be less exposed to Nazi persecution. She had, however, as a Jew, to report in person to the occupying forces. Turning up at HQ in Maastricht, she was struck by its ordinariness. It was just a busy office like any other busy office, full of girls with typewriters, their minds half on the work in hand, half on their evening engagement. How deceptively innocuous is the bureaucracy of evil! Edith’s discomfort grew while she waited. It reached its pitch when she was summoned to appear before officers of the Gestapo, whose standard greeting was, ‘Heil Hitler!’ Edith promptly declared, ‘Praised be Jesus Christ!’ She later told her prioress she knew this response could be perceived as an outright provocation, but she could do nothing else. Then and there, she said, she was intensely conscious of being caught up in the age-old battle between Jesus and Lucifer. Each day’s task is to acquire wisdom to recognise the terms of this battle, courage to step forward when we are called, grace to let Jesus work his victory through us. His strength is made perfect in our weakness if only we place that weakness unreservedly at his disposal.
Beyond the Trivial
In an insightful review of a book I think I’m unlikely to read, Rowan William provides a throw-away, elegant definition of poetry. ‘Poetry’, he says, ‘is language so constructed that it lets us see beyond the trivial, exploitative, weaponized uses of words that are deafeningly present around us.’
The word ‘weaponised’ is unexpected, but it is spot on. It recalls me to this morning’s Vigils reading from the Book of Hosea: ‘Provide yourself with words and come back to the Lord’ (14:2).
It is a great and urgent civilising task to redeem words that have been taken hostage for violent purposes, to liberate them and enable them to metamorphose into praise, the highest, noblest form of free expression.
Wooing Humanity
‘The faith of God in us makes, every now and then, one of us come true. And then a heart is rhymed to the very beat of God, a mind to truth, and a mouth to gospel, wooing the matter of humanity to God.’ I find these lines, written by Fr Simon Tugwell, printed as an epigraph to a fine new edition of the Dominican Libellus Precum published by the English Province of the Order last year. Fr Tugwell continues: ‘Such a man was Dominic, messenger of God’s love, a carrier of his infinite pain and hope, a hurricane and a haven, hurling torrents of peace through the civilised corridors of comfortable half-truths, of plump correctness and wizened zeal; to dwellers in ancient darkness long familiar, a disturbing possibility of day.’
May it please God to raise up men and women of such stature also now.
Rilke on Joy
‘These things have I spoken unto you’, says Christ in the Gospel, ‘that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full’ (Jn 15:11). Joy, like peace, is a criterion of authenticity in spiritual discernment. It matters, then, to distinguish it clearly. On 31.01.1914 Rainer Maria Rilke wrote to Ilse Erdmann: ‘The reality of any joy in the world is indescribable; only in joy does creation take place (happiness, on the contrary, is only a promising, intelligible constellation of things already there); joy is a marvellous increasing of what exists, a pure addition out of nothingness. How superficially must happiness engage us, after all, if it can leave us time to think and worry about how long it will last. Joy is a moment, free of obligation, timeless from the beginning, not to be held but also not to be truly lost again, since under its impact our being is changed chemically, so to speak, and does not only, as may be the case with happiness, savour and enjoy itself in a new mixture.’
Curé d’Ars
St Jean-Marie Vianney was an inspired pastor. The great message he conveyed concerned the Christian call to holiness, indeed, to divinisation. For Vianney it was axiomatic that the Christian is called to share in the very life of God. The tragedy of sin lay, for him, in the fact that it impedes the divine life in man and thus keeps him from his finality, the goal for which he is made, making it impossible for him to be truly happy. Consider a statement such as the following, from one of Vianney’s sermons: ‘Like a lovely white dove which emerges from the midst of the waters and comes to rustle its wings upon the earth, the Holy Spirit sets out from the infinite sea of divine perfections to come and agitate its wings upon souls that are pure, to impart to them the balm of love.’ Couldn’t we, in our day and age, do with rather more exposure to this message?
Růžičková
My main musical discovery this summer has been a recording released in 1972 of Zuzana Růžičková (1927-2017) and Josef Suk (1929-2011) playing Bach’s sonatas for harpsichord and violin. Suk and Růžičková introduce the listener into a wholly new, often surprising sonorous universe. Their interpretation is marked by intelligence, rigour, and (to use that unfashionable word) virility. Quiet passages resound with an almost unbearable tenderness free of appeal to superficial sentiment. The two communicate this music as an essential statement. They play Bach as if their lives depended on it.
When you read up a little about Růžičková, you find that hers literally did, in extreme circumstances. Her existence was deeply marked by Europe’s twentieth-century traumas, yet she seems to have been without bitterness. I recommend Peter Getzels’ cinematic portrait of this remarkable musician, available here – or on Medici.
Ashamed of our Face
In her fine 1997 series on the history of painting, Sister Wendy Beckett marvelled before the murals of Lascaux: ‘All these animals are beautiful. And centuries ago, when there was room on earth for all of us, how humankind must have yearned to be strong and beautiful, free, innocent — all the things that they were not, and we are not; and perhaps that’s why they made these images secretly in the earth, to honour the animals?’ Before the same murals, three decades earlier, Zbigniew Herbert had wondered at the comparatively inadequate, often disguised representation of man: ‘Man destroyed the order of nature by his thought and labour. He craved a new discipline through a sequence of self-imposed prohibitions. He was ashamed of his face, a visible sign of difference. He often wore masks, animal masks, as if trying to appease his own treason. When he wanted to appear graceful and strong, he became a beast. He returned to his origins lovingly submerged in the warm womb of nature.’ I wonder: are we not weirdly witnessing, now, a similar kind of retreat behind a similar kind of mask, inspired by a similar kind of shame?
Never More Bishop
What’s a bishop for? The list of answers is long. Ideally he should be all things to all people! Still, something basic is expressed in this account that features in Martin Mosebach’s important book, The 21.
‘In Wadi-Natrum, in one of the ancient monasteries which had grown into new greatness, it was announced to me that the very elderly Abbot, also a Bishop, would appear. A small door opened, and there was the old man, his gaze dreamingly absent. He stood up straight, but was visibly already resident in another world, with staff and cross in hand. Could he sense the lips that touched the back of his hand? His gestures of blessing were faint; still, he must have been conscious of the presence of the faithful. Never was he more a bishop than just then, nothing but the vessel of a more exalted will.’
Not Ready-Made
Sigrid Undset wrote of St Olav, patron saint of our diocese and country: ‘Saint Olav was the seed our Lord chose to sow in Norway’s earth because it was well suited to the weather here and to the quality of the soil.’ What makes his story so compelling is the fact that we can follow, step by step, the work of grace in his life. Olav was not a ready-made saint; he began adult life as a viking mercenary. Though through his encounter with Christ in the Church, through decisive sojourns in Rouen and Kyiv, then his final, dramatic return to Norway, where he died a martyr, supernatural light gradually took hold of him and suffused him, radiant in his body even after death. The feast of St Olav is kept on 29 July. Should you wish to follow our triduum of celebrations, beginning this evening, you can find access here. A good account of St Olav’s life is available here.
Prayer & Poetry
At vespers tonight, the feast of Sts Joachim and Anne, I was struck by the Magnificat antiphon. The text is familiar, but it was as if I read it for the first time: ‘Inclita stirps Iesse virgam produxit amoenam, de qua processit flos miro plenus odore’ (The glorious stem of Jesse brought forth a lovely shoot from which proceeded a flower replete with wondrous scent’). The repeated dactyls produce a pleasing rhythm moving towards the restful syllable ‘flos’, which is a way of conveying, without clunky commentary, that the feast is not primarily about the individuals named but about the fruit of their union, whose whole existence was oriented towards Christ. The noun ‘virga’ (‘shoot’) suggests ‘virgo’ (virgin). The image used to describe her Child indicates the important Pauline theme of Christ’s fragrance (2 Cor 2:15). More could be said about the choice of words. These riches are contained in a single, humble line. Why did it impress me so? Because it is so unlike many newer liturgical prayers, which read like announcements in morning assembly. Is one reason behind the trouble we have integrating our liturgical past a loss of poetry?
