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.
The Higher Clergy
Among the people whose lives and works are considered in Daniel Mendelsohn’s fascinating, sinuous essay, Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate, is Archbishop François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon (1651-1715):
‘In a portrait made before his downfall, the archbishop has an elongated but kindly face, the high hooked nose, with its sharp tip, and the rather pointed chin offset by the warm dark eyes, whose brows are raised in what can strike you an an attractive frankness— an openness to questions, to possibility, not always present in the faces of high clergymen.’
Now, there’s a remark to ponder.
At Mogiła
Visiting the shrine of the Holy Cross at Mogiła on 9 June 1979, Pope St John Paul II proclaimed:
“Let us go together, pilgrims, to the Lord’s Cross. With it begins a new era in human history. This is the time of grace, the time of salvation. Through the Cross man has been able to understand the meaning of his own destiny, of his life on earth. He has discovered how much God has loved him. He has discovered, and he continues to discover by the light of faith, how great is his own worth. He has learnt to measure his own dignity by the measure of the sacrifice that God offered in his Son for man’s salvation.”
This time of grace, of salvation has not passed; it is now, full of eternal promise.
The Fragility of Peace
To go on pilgrimage to the shrine of St Onuphrius in Jabłeczna on the river Bug is to enter a state of emergency. Just across the border, refugees largely from the Middle East are used as pawns in a political manoeuver. A little further along the Bug, again on the other side of the river, military exercises qualified by Reuters as ‘war games‘ run their course. One is reminded of the fragility of European peace, of the way in which innocent lives are overrun by historical processes. Over and above the necessary discourses of politics, I keep hearing the resonance of the monks’ constantly repeated invocation at the liturgy this morning: Господи помилуй, Господи помилуй, Господи помилуй! ‘Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy!’
The Heather Blooms
Now, mother, the heather blooms,
for the first time in this world
without you.
Only for you
the fields were gleaming,
the colour of amethyst.
They lay there in wait
for a word of praise from you,
the utterly generous.
Not even the tiniest knoll
went unthanked
after an encounter with you.
Åse-Marie Nesse
Gaude Polonia
At noon today, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, that noble pillar of Catholicism, was declared blessed at a solemn Mass in Warsaw, though not alone. Alongside him, the Church beatified Mother Elżbieta Róża Czacka (1876-1961), whom Wyszyński knew and revered. Born into a noble family, she suffered from an eye disease since childhood. A riding accident in 1898 left her with both retinas detached. She lost sight for good. This could have been the bane of her life. It wasn’t. She turned it into an opportunity, deciding to dedicate her life to caring for the blind. She founded the order of Franciscan Sisters Servants of the Cross to care for and educate the physically blind and to do penance for the spiritual blindness of the world. To me, the most moving part of today’s Mass was the proclamation of the first reading from a text in braille by a blind woman taught by Mother Elżbieta’s sisters. In that reading we were told, ‘come to me, you who desire me’ (Sirach 24:19). Where such desire burns, no failing, no handicap is decisive. What appears to be an impediment may even turn into a grace, an impetus.
Righteousness
When at sunrise this morning, just below the monastery of Strahov in Prague, I found myself in a street named after Raoul Wallenberg, I felt as if I had unexpectedly bumped into an old friend.
I was first confronted with the facts of his life in 1990 through Kjell Grede’s film, Good Evening Mr Wallenberg. In 2012, reviewing two new books on Wallenberg, Inger Dahlman wrote: “In Budapest Raoul Wallenberg was transformed from a dansant élégant always surrounded by beautiful women into a man who, at the end, was unshaven, sweaty, and bleary-eyed, falling asleep for sheer exhaustion as soon as he sat down, though never tiring in his endeavour to find new ways of saving lives.”
The example of Wallenberg shows what nobility human nature can reach in one whose conscience is awakened – and how such awakening comes about. It is a scandal that the circumstances surrounding Wallenberg’s death remain an enigma. May the memory of this man, honoured as ‘Righteous among the Nations‘, never perish.
Grace
Christ’s Passion is such an overwhelming paradigm in Christian art that it tends to invest motifs of every kind with solemn pathos. This inspires awe, which is good. Still, we sometimes need a different perspective. Central to the Fathers in their endeavour to expound the identity of God’s eternal Wisdom made flesh was this verse from the Old Testament:
‘I was beside him, like a master workman; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always’ (Wisdom 8:22).
In Mary’s Magnificat, which the Church sings each evening at Vespers, we make her proclamation our own: ‘My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour’ (Luke 1:47).
A Czech, Gothic Madonna and Child in the cloisters of Nový Dvůr renders this aspect of the Christian proclamation with grace. It is far from superficial; on the contrary, it is very profound.
Revitalisation
Thirty years ago today, Jonathan Sacks was installed as Chief Rabbi of the Commonwealth. In his installation address, he presented an audacious programme full of hope: a ‘A Decade of Renewal’. He explained:
“I choose the word renewal carefully. Judaism recognises not shinui but chiddush, not change but revitalisation. And if we do not renew our institutions they will die the slow death of increasing irrelevance. […] We must search out a hundred new ways of letting prayer speak to our souls, learning to our minds and mitzvot to our lives; and if they fail we must search for the hundred-and-first way.”
To revitalise, not necessarily to alter; to rediscover the potential of what has been passed on; to let this heritage form our spiritual, intellectual, and moral lives; to discern a task for the future in the experience of the past; to know where we come from, where we are going, to whom we must give an account: this enables growth and progress, not the merry-go-round of constant restructuring.
What’s in a Voice
In his five-part contribution to the BBC’s programme The Essay, Peter Brathwaite reflects on the power of the human voice. But that is not all: he also exposes, with due discretion and elegance, the political potential of art, its capacity to subvert and liberate. He speaks of Marian Anderson’s performance at the Lincoln Memorial before an audience of 75,000 people on Easter Sunday 1939, after she had been barred, on account of the colour of her skin, from singing at Constitution Hall. He indicates, to my mind credibly, the different dimensions of tension and expectancy that found expression in Robert McFerrin’s Rigoletto at the Met in 1956. Deeply moving is his account of Vera Hall’s ‘songs sprung from necessity’.
‘The human voice holds so much’, says Brathwaite, ‘but needs a listener to enrich and complete, to really hear it.’ He challenges us to listen differently; and to begin to find our own, true voice.
Aggression of Empires
As, with the rest of the world, I follow developments in Afghanistan aghast, I re-watch, with undiminished interest, Rory Stewart’s documentary made for the BBC in 2012, Afghanistan: The Great Game — a Personal View. Stewart is that rare animal: a politician who is also a scholar and an explorer. He walked across Afghanistan on his own, accompanied only by a dog named Babur, in 2002.
Cataclysmic events easily call forth facile responses. Stewart helps us avoid these. He asks: ‘What is it about this place and the paranoia and aggression of empires that has created repeated tragedy?’ One of his interlocutors in the film, Akbar Ahmed, answers, ‘When you combine arrogance with a lack of knowledge of that part of the world, you are almost guaranteed to run into trouble.’
Stewart’s The Places In Between is worth reading, as is Akbar Ahmed’s Journey into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization.
On the Threshold
Dom Ildefons Herwegen concluded his portrait of St Benedict, Der heilige Benedikt, ein Charakterbild, which first appeared a century ago, with words that remain full of relevance now:
“St Benedict refers the spirit of the Western world to the unchangingly divine, the final goal of all created spirits. He shows us how the dignity of man can be preserved in his likeness to God. At the same time he teaches how a human society on earth is to be built. May the essential traits in this portrait of St Benedict — his great, soul-changing love of Christ, the measured, noble form of Antiquity, his keen sense of the pressing necessities of the time — remain the inalienable heritage of his disciples in the new epoch on whose threshold we stand.”
