Belshazzar
‘You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting’. The saying is proverbial in many European languages. Do we remember its source? It was put before us this morning in the Office of Readings. Belshazzar was the son of Nebuchadnezzar, chastised for his ambition and complacency. But who remembers lessons dealt our fathers and mothers? In a gesture of deliberate blasphemy, Belshazzar profaned the sacred vessels from the Temple, thinking this a convenient way of showing his status beyond any law of whatever origin. That is when he noticed the writing on the wall, a most terse oracle stating simply that some boundaries are final. To overstep them is to plunge into destruction. Heine retold the story in verse set to music by Schumann. Ian Bostridge’s interpretation has an intensity that makes the listener shudder, for it makes us see that this isn’t just the retelling of an old fairytale, but the stated criterion for many decisions with which we ourselves are faced.
A Doorway
I was delighted by this doorway I happened to pass in the centre of Hildesheim, not just because it shows up the banal featurelessness of much modern architecture, which bans any decoration interfering with the streamlined design of an industrially made birds’ nesting box, but because it bears witness to the outlook on life of the houseowner that commissioned it back in 1705. I dare say it does something to you to place all your goings-out and comings-in under the motto ‘In you, Lord, I have always put my hope’.
Insouciance
In Mozart’s Don Giovanni, the aria Là ci darem la mano is charged with ambiguity, being the callous seducer’s attempt to lure the innocent Zerlina into his embrace while Masetto, her fiancé, is otherwise engaged. Don Giovanni fails, so the music has come to represent thwarted ambition. As such Gabriel Axel used it with good-hearted irony in Babette’s Feast to voice the rotund Achille Papin’s futile hope for the pastor’s daughter’s hand. Three weeks ago, in Warsaw, the winner of this year’s Chopin Competition, Bruce Xiaoyu Liu performed Chopin’s Variations on the theme in a ‘vividly detailed and amazingly insouciant’ rendering, writes Gramophone‘s Jed Distler. It is brilliant, with exactly the right measure of humour.
A Tiny Spark
‘If a tiny spark of God’s love already burns within you, do not expose it to the wind, for it may get blown out. Keep the stove tightly shut so that it will not lose its heat and grow cold.’
This was advice St Charles Borromeo gave to priests. He was one of the most enterprising forces behind the great movement of renewal that followed the Council of Trent. He did not advocate passivity or a kind of quietism; but he stressed that no outward work will bear fruit in the Church unless it alive with a fire that is of God. The last part of the collect for the feast is a prayer for the present moment: ‘Shape and renew your Church until it bears the image of Christ, and shows his true likeness to the world.’
Amal
Yesterday, the giant puppet Amal arrived in Manchester after trekking through Europe from the Syria-Turkey border. This epic journey was undertaken to draw attention to the plight of refugee children. They are present on our continent in baffling numbers, but who sees them? Amal stands 3.5 metres tall: it’s been impossible to overlook her. Amir Nizar Zuabi has spoken of his team’s wish to create an ‘artistic moment that creates compassion’. Such moments are needed. Politics void of empathy is nothing but a pragmatic game. Article 1 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms: ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.’ It says a lot about us that we need, these days, a doll to call this principle to mind.
All Souls
We live in times that find it harder and harder to forgive. It is not that people are becoming crueller; but they’ve largely lost the conceptual categories, the identity-shaping stories, that make forgiveness possible. It isn’t natural to pardon. Our nature craves vengeance and tends to crave it immoderately. To be a Christian is to place forgiveness at the centre of one’s life: to ask for it humbly; to give it generously, letting go of grudges. When we come up against the boundaries of our sensibility, we look towards the cross and remember: we are not our own. All Souls’ Day affirms the reality of a pardon that extends, in Christ, beyond death. It summons us to become, by prayer and sacrifice, agents of divine mercy. Our prayer for the dead manifests the Christian revolution. It’s charter is founded on faith in the soul’s immortality, in our answerability for our choices, in the efficacy of intercession, in the reality of a Love stronger than death. Long live that peaceful revolution.
Fear Not
When we hear the name Bach we spontaneously think of Johann Sebastian, one of our civilisation’s most luminous geniuses, a man who has reasonably been called the fifth evangelist. He was not, though, a solitary comet blazing across an otherwise dark sky. He came from a long line of musicians. His star shines within a constellation. The music of other Bachs increasingly draws the attention of scholars, performers, and listeners. This recording of the motet Fürchte Dich nicht by Johann Christoph Bach (1642-1703) is exquisite. Its word patterns and subtle polyphonies indicate a link connecting the music of the better known Bach, the composer’s cousin, with that of Schütz. What is more, the way in which Christ’s promise to the Good Thief (‘Today you will be with me in paradise’) is woven into a prophecy from Isaiah (‘Fear not: for I have redeemed you’) reveals a refined theological sensibility.
Simple Words
We’ve such a need for simple words like
‘bread’, ‘love’, ‘kindness’
to keep the blind from losing their way
in the dark.
We’ve such a need for silence – silence! –
in order, through the air and in our thoughts,
to hear the voice,
the murmured, modest voice,
of pigeons, ants, human beings, human hearts
and their cry of pain amid all that is
not love, not kindness, not bread.
Full of Interest
Archimandrite Sophrony Sakharov taught his community at Tolleshunt Knights: ‘If one always considers oneself to be the last, meeting someone else becomes each time the opportunity for spiritual profit and progress. If I am the first, life is infernally tiresome. If I am the last, life is full of interest because I am always learning something useful.’
Gila Sacks recently said something similar about her father: ‘He learned and learned, and continued to learn every single day, until his last. He learned from books, from texts, from laws. He learned from history and from world events. But, mainly, he learned from people. He would seek out people to learn from, from every possible path of life. And he would seek out what he could learn from everyone he met.‘
To learn to live like that!
Promises
Every Catholic priest carries the legacy of clerical abuse as a profound grief. To be a priest now is to live within an open wound. It is difficult, in such a climate, to speak about the nobility and beauty of the priestly vocation, of the joy at its heart. One statement that still conveys something essential, I think, is this video produced by the Spanish Bishops’ Conference in 2015.
‘I don’t promise that people will ask for your help; but I promise they’ll need you.’ ‘I promise you will provide the world with nourishment.’ ‘You will accompany those who suffer.’ ‘You will give strength to those who desire to be strong.’ ‘I don’t promise you’ll meet important people but people who’ve no idea what they’re worth.’
This is a time to set ourselves a high ideal and to mobilise all our strength, all our love, to follow it.
The Aroma Gone
About halfway through Nikita Mikhalov and Rustam Ibragimbekov’s film Burnt by the Sun (Утомлённые солнцем), an incidental character says:
Things aren’t so bad nowadays, but it’s the aroma, the taste of life, that has vanished. For good.
The statement is belied by the setting, which bursts with life, affection, and sensual warmth. The trouble is: in one participant, life has perished within, frozen by the cold hand of totalitarian power. The outward show of vitality is but a choreographed death-rattle of the soul. Gradually, the influence spreads. To refer to capture in an icy spider’s web as ‘sunburn’ is supreme irony.
Bound for Albania
‘I remember setting out in late August 1996, from a basement flat with one of the classiest addresses in London. The evenings that August were filled with distant music. Live opera wafted over from open-air performances in the nearby park, where fat, late-matingseason peacocks almost broke the tree branches with now desperate enthusiasm, their randy shrieks mingling with snatches of amateur Carmen. A heady blend of music and nature to accompany my frenzied packing, for I was swapping London W11 for Tirana.’
Thus begins Joanna Robertson’s retrospective reportage of how she ‘stumbled into Albania’, a country about which I may not be the only one to know far too little. The result is a thrilling account of a country rich in colour, beauty, dignity, and tragedy at a crucial moment of its recent history.
Sowing Light
Two helpful insights from today’s divine office, for the feast of St Luke.
Gregory the Great wrote: ‘One who has no charity towards another should in no way be entrusted with the office of preaching.’ To speak with authority and merit others’ attention, we must first of all see them with benevolence, deeply wanting their good for their own sake. Gregory was a civil servant before he became a bishop. The principle applies, I’d say, to any public discourse.
Then, in the Vigils hymn: the evangelist is called ‘seminator luminis’. Oh to be a sower of light!
Messianic Bond
I have been to the cinema to see the latest James Bond. Even he is recast as a saviour-sage these days. He is no longer pitted, as in days of yore, against mere criminality, but against the menace of universal extinction. A life-threatening substance is set to infiltrate mankind, making merest touch lethal, cancelling out human flourishing. Bond works his victory by giving up his life. Greater love has no man. There is every reason to believe that resurrection will follow in the next episode. Before the film we were treated to a Coke commercial playing on Eucharistic imagery.
People are clearly hungry (and thirsty) for Ersatz narratives of redemption. Why is it that we Christians have such trouble conveying the attraction, nobility, beauty and compelling plausibility of the real thing?
Crisis of Trust
A law proposal from the government is rich in paradoxes. It affirms that the young now reach psychosocial maturity late, yet would place on teenage shoulders the weight of tremendous decisional autonomy in cases of experienced dysphoria. An observer remarked: ‘We would give our children a gift package without precedent: an immense vacuum, a gigantic black hole, in which they have to work it all out on their own, without any compass other than that of an absolute relativity.’
The proposal premises that ‘asymmetric’ communication is of its nature suspect: that any person of authority (a parent, a teacher, a doctor, or a priest) should be seen as a potential manipulator. Naturally there is a need for prudence. But where will this general crisis of trust take us? The state proposes itself as guardian; but what have we witnessed these past 18 months if not a general collapse of trust in governments? My heart goes out to the young. What battles they have to fight — alone.
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Elevation
Alain Finkielkraut’s conversation with Rémi Brague and Guillaume Cuchet, recorded on 9 October under the title ‘Does Catholicism still have a future in France?’, is illuminating and instructive for all sorts of reasons. Memorable not least is Brague’s remark:
‘A Christian thinks that the truth is preferable to an illusion, even to the kind of illusion that, as Pushkin said, elevates us.’
The only ladder worth climbing is the one that makes us descend into the embodied truth about ourselves. To aspire heavenward, we need to have our feet on the ground, even if it happens to be a dungheap.
Dies iræ
I approached Teodor Currentzis’s rendering of Verdi’s Requiem with scepticism at first, put off by the Le Chiffre look and by all the jumping up and down. Having lived with it for a couple of years, I feel only admiration. Currentzis restores to this work, often performed as if it were a bravura extension of the Chorus of Hebrew Slaves, urgency and seriousness. His ensemble Musicaeterna sometimes sing Verdi as if he were Rakhmaninov, but it is no imposition. On the contrary, it is a revelation. This performance was recorded in the church of San Marco in Milan, where the Requiem was premiered in 1868.
How did we ever manage to consign the Dies irae, that profound and grandiose prayer, to the liturgical archives?
When For You It Is Night
What do you do when life apparently disintegrates, when structures you rely on collapse, when you no longer see the sense of anything? Pour another drink? Ring your therapist? Bury your head in the sand?
There is a further option. Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik accounts for it in this stirring testimony to which I return on a regular basis, wanting a share in the great man’s enthusiasm and unshakable sense of purpose.
This evening at vespers we read: ‘And we have the prophetic word made more sure. You will do well to pay attention to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.’ (2 Peter 1:19)
Integrity & Honesty
In a letter to his brethren at Chartreuse (included in the breviary for his feast today) St Bruno expresses joy at seeing them full of zeal ‘erga ea quæ integritatis et honestatis sunt’, that is, with regard to all such things that pertain to integrity and honesty. Rare qualities at the best of times.
Reading these words just hours after absorbing the impact of the Sauvé Report on the abuse of minors, I found them resounding like a bugle call. Only if we also pursue integrity and honesty with zeal, in a spirit of reparation illumined by hope, will the Church find the renewal she evidently needs.
‘I stand as a beggar before the mercy of God’, wrote Bruno to his friend Raoul-le-Verd, ‘praying that he will heal all the infirmities of my soul and fulfil all my desires with his bounty.’ A prayer for the present moment.
A Year Gone
I heard the voice of Jesus say,
“I am the dawning light.
Look unto me, your morn shall rise,
and all your day be bright.”
I looked to Jesus, and I found
in him my star, my sun,
and in that light of life I’ll walk
till trav’ling days are done.
Horatius Bonar (1808-89)
Important Television
Having watched, yet again, Granada’s 1984 production The Jewel in the Crown, based on Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, I find myself wondering whether TV is ever again going to attain such heights. I am astounded by the series’ relevance now in its portrayal of how empire unravels; of what happens to outdated structures conceived to prop up ideals in which no one any more believes; of the sheer unprincipledness of ambition; of the intractability of racial and class prejudice, whether born of stupidity or unacknowledged passion; of the unlikely appearance in dungheaps of flowers of courtesy; of India’s complex fascination. The New York Times wrote, 37 years ago, ‘The Jewel in the Crown is not only engrossing television. It is important television, a model of what the medium can do.’ I’d say that still holds.
Foundations
On this day in 1835, a group of monks who had set out from the Breton abbey of Melleray founded the monastery of Mount Saint Bernard in Leicestershire, the house in which I was blessed to make my profession. Though to speak of a ‘monastery’ at that early stage is to evoke the wrong kind of association. The founders settled in a poor cottage with a leaky roof in Tynt Meadow, a field on the property given them by Ambrose Phillips de Lisle. To establish the community was a matter of naked faith, holy perseverance, and sheer bloodymindedness. We often speak now, and rightly, of ‘refounding’ communities. It is good, when considering this prospect, to brace oneself for radical poverty, perhaps for a very long time; also, to nurture that sense of excitement, of having something wonderful to share, of wanting to give all without half-measures without which no foundation ever got off the ground.
What is Truth?
Pilate’s question has lost none of its edge, though we prefer not to think about it much. Often, remarks Cardinal Biffi, in a recently published collection, we shy away from statements of truth for fear they might be divisive. He goes on:
“Instead we must ascertain that since God began the creation of the world dividing light from darkness, any forfeited ability to draw distinctions, any relinquished understanding of what is and what isn’t, any design that favours (or at any rate puts up with) the mingling of truth and error, any confusion between good and evil, far from spelling the dawn of a new era of understanding, communion and peace, spells capitulation to an absurd nostalgia for primordial chaos.”
Rhetoric of Confinement
Two days ago the Norwegian government resolved to reopen the country (to use the official nomenclature) after a year and a half of Covid-related restrictions. When I looked up the website of a national newspaper, the lead item was an editorial with the title ‘The End of 562 Absurd Days’. For further reportage, one had to scroll quite a way down the page. This unexcited approach seemed broadly representative of other media — as if the fizz had long since gone out of the bottle, notwithstanding the language of ‘war effort’, ‘deadly threat’ and ‘national dugnad‘ having been, not long ago, in everyone’s mouth. Something significant happened in about the middle of July when, seemingly overnight, statistics of dread moved into small print while prime space was taken over by advertisements for summer wear. That events of these past 18 months have been dramatic and that radical communal efforts were called for: this is beyond doubt. Still, I’d interested to see a cool study of the rise and fall of the rhetoric of confinement. It would help us understand not only what we have lived through but the forces that influence our understanding.
Remembrance
I thoroughly enjoyed Craig Brown’s essay ‘Nothing is real’ in the TLS of 10 September 2021 (the paper takes a while to reach Norway). It’s one of those pieces one should re-read before writing anything about anything, or anybody, at all. I was struck by this quotation from the historian Lewis Namier, born Ludwik Bernstein Niemirowski and now perhaps most renowned – a fact that would have bemused them both – as the husband of Iulia de Beausobre:
‘One would expect people to remember the past and imagine the future, but in fact, when discoursing or writing about history, they imagine it in terms of their own experience […], they imagine the past and remember the future.’
Which is why it is so important to put historical remembrance to the test, especially when it is lodged in a profound sense of involvement, with individual and collective identities at stake.
