Beyond the Subjunctive
‘A certainty dawned: ‘I had not to be nostalgic for what I had been or for what I might have become. Instead I had to love what I was and to seek what I ought to be.’ She abandoned a life’s project composed in the subjunctive mood for one in the indicative. She is emphatic: ‘It was a long journey. Nothing happened overnight. But this is the condition, at once, of redemption and of every battle. […] Forgiveness does not come about in the abstract; it calls for someone to whom it can be addressed, someone from whom it can be received.’
A passage from The Shattering of Loneliness on the testimony of Maïti Girtanner. Here you can find my introduction to a new Italian translation of Maïti’s book-long conversation with Guillaume Tabard, published today.
Not About Seeing Quickly
There’s uncanny prescience in Marguerite Duras’s reflections, recorded in 1985, on life in the 21st century. And she didn’t even know about the internet!
‘I think man will literally drown in constant information about his body, about his physical becoming, about his health, his family life, his salary, his leisure. It is not far from a nightmare. No one will read anymore. They’ll watch TV. There will be televisions everywhere: in the kitchen, in the bathrooms, in offices and streets. No one will travel anymore. It won’t be worth the bother. When you can tour the world in eight days or fifteen days, why do it? In travel, there’s the time of travel. It isn’t about seeing quickly. It’s about seeing and living at the same time. It will no longer be possible to draw life from travel. Still, there’ll be the sea, the oceans — and then reading. People will rediscover that. One day, a man will read. And everything will begin again.’
Unstunted
In a review of The Letters of John McGahern, Emer Nolan, Professor of English at Maynooth, touches on the novelist’s sometimes fraught relationship with Seamus Heaney. Of Heaney she writes, ‘there is little sense in his work of having been stunted or damaged by Catholicism’ – as if this were exceptional. The remark is not malicious, simply bemused. That it should be thus says a lot about Irish Catholicism, indeed Catholicism in general, anno 2022. Examples of dysfunction and destructiveness in the Church are legion, alas; still, to present or tacitly (with guilt-induced breast-beating) to accept them as a norm is irresponsible and false. Over the past few days I have encountered two people who, independently of one another, spoke to me of the ‘explosion of life’ they have found as members of the Church and of the ways in which this explosion bears fruit in joy. I could understand what they were saying. I have known something similar, for which I remain profoundly grateful. It is important to share such experience, to talk about it. ‘Encourage one another!’ (1 Thess 5:11): A fundamental aspect of charity. ‘He who believes in me’, says Christ, ‘out of his heart will flow rivers of living water’ (Jn 7:38). Let the rivers overflow. Share the water generously.
Saving the World
On Monday I stayed in an airport hotel. A note in the bathroom informed me that each re-used towel would help provide drinking-water in the developing world. On Tuesday I passed through Schiphol Airport. A tub invited contributions of PET bottles ‘for clean water in Africa’. I’ve just stepped off a Delta flight, during which the announcement was repeatedly made: ‘Flight by flight we can make a difference. You shouldn’t have to choose between seeing the world and saving it!’ A concern for global welfare is laudable. But surely there is something not right about statements suggesting that I, by chucking plastic into plastic or by taking trans-Atlantic flights, am saving the world? It seems to me a way of anaesthetising conscience, potentially of paralysing real constructive action. I think of a brilliant take on absurdities in self-satisfied aid rhetoric produced by the SAIH in 2012. If you haven’t already seen it, do watch RadiAid: Africa for Norway.
Lifegiving Letters
This page is from a manuscript of the Vetus Latina Bible written at the end of the eighth century, probably in Brittany. The text (from Matthew, telling the story of the Holy Family’s journey to Egypt) is eminently legible. What elegance in each letter!
The period from 500 to 800 is often referred to as Dark Ages. After the fall of the Roman Empire, new political and social infrastructure developed, necessarily with a degree of chaos. Much of it was pagan, alien, if not hostile, to the Christian patrimony. During such a time, this glorious artefact was produced to enable the proclamation of hope: ‘Go to the land of Israel! For those who sought the Child’s life are dead.’
What if we, now, were to hold on to the letter of the Gospel with equal reverence, concerned simply to let it speak?
Numquam minus
The art of Fernando Botero can be provocative. It can also illuminate. I am charmed by this ‘Journey to the Ecumenical Council’ in the Vatican Museum. The travelling bishop has no qualms about being visible – that’s the least one can say. He advances with as much of a spring in his step as his girth will allow. His pastoral staff serves a purpose: not a status symbol but an aid to progress through uneven terrain. We may object that he is on his own. Should a pastor not be surrounded by sheep? Well, he is moving between folds: his cathedral’s steeple is seen in the background; the assembly of the council lies ahead. We mustn’t forget the solitude to which a bishop is also called. It is a prerequisite for his ministry of episcopacy, meaning ‘oversight’. His solitude will entail an element of suffering at times, but can also be joyful. One who is truly grounded in the Lord is, to cite Cicero’s phrase, ‘numquam minus solus quam cum solus’ – never less lonely than when alone.
The Fear of God
Right now, when not much works out the way one would expect, one may be forgiven for finding pleasing irony in the liturgical calendar’s announcement that we’re back in ‘Ordinary Time’. In any case, it is good to be given, as a guide to ordinariness, the beginning of Sirach to read:
‘The fear of the Lord is glory and pride, happiness and a crown of joyfulness. The fear of the Lord gladdens the heart, giving happiness, joy and long life.’
Who fears the Lord nowadays? It is an attitude rather out of fashion. This is a pity. What is more, it is a concession to shallowness. What is holy is of its nature fearful simply because it’s categorically different to the stuff of our ordinary lives. If we’ve lost the ability to fear God, we’ve lost the ability to know God as God. And so it is no wonder that people discard the spectre that remains as an irrelevance.
Freedom
In an important book, Dom Dysmas de Lassus, the current prior of La Grande Chartreuse, asks:
‘Isn’t this one of the most surprising aspects of the spiritual life: the ever fuller discovery of the extent to which God, for being our creator, is free in our regard from any desire to assume power and control?’
The extent of our freedom!
You can find a discussion of Dom Dysmas’s book, which analyses what may happen when freedom is put to bad use, here.
Beyond
Today’s collect speaks of salvation proceeding radiantly with a view to bringing about a sunrise in our hearts ‘ever to be renewed’ (ut nostris semper innovandis cordibus oriatur). Our heart’s craving for infinity, its insatiable hunger for super-substantial nourishment, is magisterially affirmed in Fides & Ratio, n. 17.
‘The desire of knowledge is so great and it works in such a way that the human heart, despite its experiences of insurmountable limitation, yearns for the infinite riches which lie beyond, knowing that there is to be found the satisfying answer to every question as yet unanswered.’
A sense of being darkly imprisoned in restraint can reveal itself blessed if I choose to seek freedom and light ‘beyond’. The trouble is, we easily begin to feel comfortable, and safe, in captivity, especially when we’ve designed the prison ourselves.
True Honour
While out on a long drive, I listened to a podcast of Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time dedicated to Thomas Becket. None of the participants, specialists all, seemed to consider it possible that Becket’s mature recalcitrance may have been based on sincere conviction. The idea that faith might be, or become, the defining reality of a person’s life was not entertained. Such a priori scepticism on others’ behalf is bound to make for a shallow reading of history, and indeed of the present. Jean Anouilh, whose play inspired the 1964 movie Becket with Burton and O’Toole, was nearer the mark when he put this prayer into the newly consecrated archbishop’s mouth: ‘I gave my love, such as it was, elsewhere. […] Please, Lord, teach me now how to serve you with all my heart, to know at last what it really is to love, to adore, so that I may worthily administer your kingdom here on earth, and find my true honour in serving your divine will.’ As Henry II remarks with a mixture of disdain and awe later on, when Becket’s position is fixed: ‘Here he is, in spite of himself.’
Duplicity
Asked by the TLS to name his book of the year, William Boyd plumps for James Hanning’s life of the super-spy Kim Philby. He remarks:
‘What continues to intrigue about Philby after all these decades is his astonishing ability to maintain his double-life with such devious aplomb for so long. It showed a true, virtuoso dedication to the the art of duplicity, if such a thing exists.’
I think it does. There’s no joy in it, and we all have it in us to practise it, even if not to the level of virtuosity. Hence the abiding force of the Biblical injunction to cultivate an undivided heart.
2022
I would have liked to invite all readers of the Notebook to a decent New Year’s lunch. Alas, the logistic challenge is too considerable. As an alternative solution, I offer you this recording, made at Verbier in 2002, of Bach’s Concerto for Four Pianos BWV 1065 interpreted by Argerich, Kissin, Levine, and Pletnev. A YouTube commentator has written: ‘If aliens were to stop on earth and ask what our civilisation is like, I would show them this concerto.’ Vox populi, vox Dei.
Thank you, known and unknown friends, for your interest and digital companionship. I wish you a blessed and happy year. As Dag Hammarskjöld wrote in his diary at the beginning of 1953:
‘Night is coming on.’
For all that has been – Thanks!
To all that shall be – Yes!
+fr Erik
Hope
Amid the excesses, and frequent banality, of seasonal decoration in our society of affluence, I was moved by this image from a youth prison in Northern Cameroon. The embellishments were overseen by a man serving a very long sentence, a man who once said: ‘You have to accept who you are. Once you do that, peace is possible. In prison I have become a man. My desire is to enable each of my comrades, too, to say with conviction, ‘I am a man’, to help them understand that they possess a freedom of self even in prison.’ One way of doing that is by creating something gratuitously lovely, the way God did when he created the world, and each of us. The friend who sent me the photograph remarked: ‘There is an irony in the paper ornaments becoming so many lights with the glow of the prison search lights beamed onto them. A confirmation that beauty can be retrieved wherever there is the faith to do so.’ Where there is beauty and faith, hope can be reborn. Blessed are those who kindle it.
Right & Wrong
I always try, on this day, to re-read Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. As a student I had a walk-on part in an amateur production. The advantage of having seen – and heard – a play many times, is that salient phrases stick in one’s mind. Timeless is Thomas’s observation:
The last temptation is the greatest treason: / To do the right deed for the wrong reason.
More than ever, however, I am struck by the warning that follows:
Servant of God has chance of greater sin / And sorrow, than the man who serves a king. / For those who serve the greater cause / may make the cause serve them.
Which may God forbid.
Pelagianism
The term ‘pelagianism’ is bandied about quite a bit, often cryptically. A helpful application is one made by Benedict XVI when he spoke about ‘Bourgeois Pelagianism’. According to Tracey Rowland, commenting on it in a recent interview, it refers to ‘the mentality that Christ does not expect us to be saints. It is sufficient that we are decent types who recycle our rubbish, donate a few dollars to charity, and refrain from murdering and raping our neighbors or stealing their property. The mentality is that Christ was not really serious when he said that we must be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect.’ She generalises the notion of the ‘bourgeois’ (broadly understood as ‘keen on upward social mobility’) by identifying a ‘bourgeois Christianity’, which ‘does not fight on sacramental ground. It does not fight at all. It simply goes in search of Christian-friendly elements of the Zeitgeist with which it might identify and market itself.’
And so one is presented with plenty of scope for new year’s resolutions.
Freethinking
At the age of 92, George Bernard Shaw pronounced this considered judgement upon his friend, the formidable (and admirable) Abbess Laurentia McLachlan of Stanbrook: ‘though you are an enclosed nun you have not an enclosed mind’. Twenty-four years earlier, in 1925, when Shaw had contended that the Catholic Church has not space for Freethinkers, Dame Laurentia objected: ‘I said that to my mind no thinker was free as a Catholic – the limitations being in the direction of good sense and ensuring right thinking; it is not freedom to be able to think contrary to objective truth.’
About to make profession, at nineteen years of age, Dame Laurentia and her novice companion received a note from Dom Laurence Shepherd, a monk who had done much to affirm the community’s contemplative vocation: ‘Tell them they must be saints. They must be grand Benedictines of the seventh century.’ A call heeded.
Ramanujan
Matt Brown’s 2015 film about the great mathematician, ‘based on true events’, is based on a fair amount of imagination, too. The result is a picturesque but somewhat unsatisfactory yarn full of facile stereotypes, with more than a passing resemblance to Slumdog Millionaire. There are good lines in it, though, as when Hardy says, in an early encounter, ‘You, just as Mozart could hear an entire symphony in his head – you dance with numbers to infinity’; then, later, while promoting Ramanujan’s candidature as a Fellow of the Royal Society: ‘We are merely explorers of infinity in pursuit of absolute perfection: we do not invent these formulae; they already exist and lie in wait.’
And, of course, there are Ramanujan’s own words of certified authenticity: ‘An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God.’
Receive It All
Ich steh an deiner Krippen hier,
o Jesulein, mein Leben,
ich stehe, bring und schenke dir,
was du mir hast gegeben.
Nimm hin, es ist mein Geist und Sinn,
Herz, Seel und Mut, nimm alles hin
und lass dirs wohlgefallen.
I stand before Thy manger fair,
My Jesus, Life from heaven!
I come, and unto Thee I bear
What Thou to me hast given.
Receive it, for ’tis mind and soul,
Heart, spirit, strength—receive it all,
And deign to let it please Thee.
Image
An inspired teacher enabled me, thirty years ago, to discover the art of Tarkovsky. With amazement I saw what heights cinema could reach. Last night I found myself watching, again, Andrei Rublev. A curious way of spending the eve of Christmas Eve? No, wholly appropriate. Tarkovsky evidences the sheer, superhuman cost of leaving an image of the divine in this world. One appreciates what it might mean when Scripture says the incarnate Son of God ’emptied himself’; what it might mean for us to ‘put on Christ’. Andrei Rublev is a celluloid icon.
Tarkovsky defected to the West because, he said, Soviet authorities spat on his soul. Yet later he testified: ‘The longer I stay in the West, the more I find that man has lost his inner freedom. In the West, everybody has their rights, but in an internal, spiritual sense, there is no doubt more freedom in the Soviet Union.’ A haunting statement made by one not given to superficial rhetoric.
In the Night
I am always touched by words from Psalm 102: ‘I am like an owl among ruins’. All of us feel like that from time to time. The experience needn’t be purely subjective; it may well correspond to things as they are. It is wonderful, then, in this morning’s office, to meet the assurance (from Isaiah 51): ‘The Lord comforts Zion, comforts all her ruins, and will arrange her desert like Eden, her wilderness like a garden of the Lord.’ The promise is prospective. But prospect presupposes retrospect: ‘Look to the rock from which you were hewn’, cries Isaiah, ‘to the quarry from which you were dug.’
How can we look forward now, as a society, even as a Church, given over as we are to collective amnesia? The Word we await is the Word that ‘was in the beginning’. We must remove over-focused spectacles which only make short-sightedness worse and contemplate, somehow, that entire span. We must be like owls, watching in the night with attention.
Most Crucial
It is countercultural to call Thomistic christology ‘this most crucial of theological disciplines’. Long live counterculture! In an incisive review article, Fr Robert Imbelli reminds us that it is carefully thought-out, carefully articulated dogma that makes the Gospel evangelion. But how many modern and contemporary christologies ‘support the Tradition’s claim regarding the unique Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ’? Do they not often ‘fail to rise above a view of Jesus as inspired prophet’? Think of sermons you’ve heard. Think of the collapse of ecclesiology. Often enough, ‘by scanting ontological reflection, [we] lack sufficient resources to undergird the New Testament confession of Christ’s uniqueness and its elaboration in the Church’s creedal and conciliar Tradition’. Christmas is the time to think about such things. What are we celebrating? Are we exclaiming, exultantly, ‘Oh come let us adore him’, or just singing, ‘Happy birthday’?
Incomprehensible
‘Be it done to me according to your word’, says the Blessed Virgin Mary, about to become Theotokos. She shows us what it means to walk, in St Paul’s phrase, ‘by faith, not by sight’ (2 Cor 5:7). St Ambrose expresses this in different terms:
Incomprehensibilis incomprehensibiliter operabatur in Matre.
Which is to say that ‘the Unfathomable worked unfathomably in his Mother.’ We have limited tolerance, now, for what is incomprehensible. We like things to be clearcut, simply expressed, horizontal, ideally risk-free. We’ve a massive act of renunciation to make if we would enter the Mystery of Faith and make our home within it.
Elevation
The philosopher Pascal Bruckner, author of The Tyranny of Guilt, describes himself as ‘impervious to faith’. It is all the more interesting to note this remark in a recent essay, commenting on the current collapse of Catholic practice in France and elsewhere:
‘I am certain that the Church will only regain ground among the young if it offers them an art of living that is at once tolerant and demanding, without disclaiming any of its principles. A religion should aim to elevate men, not to flatter their foibles.’
Later: ‘There is no cult without mystery. By dint of drawing close to a common language with a view to seducing the faithful, one runs the risk of pushing them away.’
Unexpectedness
For us who hear it just before Christmas, the annunciation to Ahaz (Isaiah 7:10-14) is full of sweetness and light. Ahaz heard it differently, awaiting as he was the destruction of his country. Assyria was mounting a massive assault. The anxiety that reigned in Jerusalem, notes Isaiah, was such that Ahaz’s ‘heart and the heart of his people shook as the trees of the forest shake before the wind’. Ahaz wasn’t a good king. Religiously he made terrible compromises. Politically, he was a pragmatist void of principles. To this agnostic monarch, in these tormented circumstances, the promise was made: the Virgin will conceive; God will be with you; you will know the mystery of Emmanuel. Centuries passed before the promise was fulfilled. But it was henceforth in the air, resonant, orienting, hope-bestowing. God speaks to improbable people at improbable times. We’d better pay attention.
Angelus
The impact of the Angelus bell, inculturated into Lutheran practice, is beautifully evoked in Selma Lagerlöf’s Jerusalem:
‘Everyone in the parish knew that no parishioner neglected to say the Our Father when the church bells tolled; and that every afternoon, at the sound of the bells, work ceased both indoors and out of doors while the men removed their caps and the women curtsied and everyone stood still for as long as it took to recite the Lord’s Prayer. Everyone who had ever lived in the parish would further affirm that they never thought God greater or more worthily praised than on those summer evenings when they saw the scythes motionless, the ploughs at a standstill in the furrow, and a cartload of grain left right in the middle of discharging just for the sake of a couple of tintinnabulations. It was as if people knew, that Our Lord just then hovered over their parish on an evening cloud, immense and great and good, sowing blessings across the entire county.’
