Fully Human
The feast of the Assumption shows us what heights human nature, redeemed and irradiated by the Word, can reach. One who made this mystery of faith palpably embodied was Sr Marie-Ange de Chamas, who died on the eve of the Assumption last year, 53 years old. I never knew her, but was privileged to attend her funeral. That experience was among the most important things that happened to me in 2020. The wake of joy and gratitude the passing of her life had left swept me up, too. I keep her portrait in the bishop’s office, as a reminder of what really matters, something the world is ever more inclined to forget, even tries to eliminate.
You can find a piece I wrote about Sr Marie-Ange for The Tablet here.
Anchorage
Early in Marilynne Robinson’s Jack (2020), the fourth of her Gilead novels, Della and Jack have this exchange, trying to work out where a person’s true self is anchored:
‘I really just meant that there is—anyone, any human being, and then that person’s actual life, everything they didn’t mean or couldn’t say or wished for or grieved over. That’s reality. So someone who would know the world that way, some spirit, seems kind of inevitable. I think. Why should so much reality, most of it, count for nothing? That’s how it seems to me.’
‘That spirit would not always be impressed, depending on case.’
She shook her head. ‘I just think there has to be a Jesus, to say ‘beautiful’ about things no one else would ever see. The previous things should be looked to, whatever becomes of the rest of it.’
Without Darkness
The Magnificat antiphon for vespers tonight, the feast of St Laurence, sets a phrase attributed to the fourth-century martyr:
Mea nox obscurum non habet, sed omnia in luce clarescunt.
‘There is no darkness in my night, but all things are brightly illumined by the light.’
The message resounds with particular authority in the sweet luminosity of a Northern Norwegian summer night.
Humanitas
In classical Latin, ‘humanitas’ stands for ‘kindness’ or ‘compassion’, qualities thought to be specific to humankind. When one looks at how humans coexist in the world, though, it is easy to yield to cynicism. To be reminded of what a humane life looks like, I regularly listen again to David Nott’s conversation with Kirsty Young recorded in 2016. Dr Nott’s commitment as a surgeon in war-torn areas is an inspiration. Moving, too, is his account of an encounter with Queen Elizabeth II. Her response to the state of crisis he was in at the time shows what majesty means.
Heron
So heavy
is the long-necked, long-bodied heron,
always it is a surprise
when her smoke-colored wings open
and she turns
from the thick water,
from the black sticks
of the summer pond,
and slowly rises into the air
and is gone.
Then, not for the first or the last time,
I take the deep breath
of happiness, and I think
how unlikely it is that death is a hole in the ground,
how improbable that ascension is not possible.
Mary Oliver
Olsok Vespers
St Olav, amidst the tasks that absorbed his attention here in this world, ‘rested devotedly in the soul’s free contemplation of heavenly things’. The saints teach us the importance of fixing our gaze right there. They do so with the mixture of giftedness, limitation and eccentricity that characterises human beings in all periods of history. Sigrid Undset remarks that, while customs and cultural norms are subject to continuous mutations (in this respect they are rather like a virus), ‘the hearts of men do not change at all, throughout all ages’. They are pregnant with a longing imprinted on their essence, created as they are in the image of God, a longing that points towards a single, unchangeable goal.
Fated to live
Solzhenitsyn’s remark in a BBC interview from 1976, published in Warning to the West, has perennial relevance: ‘Once I used to hope that experience of life could be handed on from nation to nation, and from one person to another, but now I am beginning to have doubts about this. Perhaps everyone is fated to live through every experience himself in order to understand.’ Depending on one’s point of view, this perspective can be exhilarating or a source of despair.
Tenderness and Grief
Sir András Schiff’s recent interpretation of Brahms’s D Minor Concerto brings out the music’s tenderness and grief incomparably, not least in the Adagio movement. It is rendered brittle, somehow, by the artist’s choice of a Blüthner piano built in Leipzig around 1859, the year in which this music was first performed.
No return
In the Book of Exodus (13:17), when Pharaoh finally let Israel leave Egypt, ‘God did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines, although that was nearer; for God thought, “If the people face war, they may change their minds and return to Egypt”’. There are two ways of reading this. Superficially, it may seem that the roundabout route was simply safer. But a deeper motive is at stake: had the way to newness been too direct, the incentive to return to a familiar setting in the face of opposition would have been too great. To maintain the incentive of God’s call, the impossibility of return was required. We find, here, a helpful paradigm for reading our lives in a supernatural perspective.
People I have loved
Watching a documentary about Albert Camus this spring made me want to read his last, unfinished novel, The First Man. It was a revelation to me, a beautiful book full of tenderness. Camus told a friend it was ‘about people I have loved’. Dealing as it does with shifting cultural identities, the quest for an absent father, inter-ethnic tensions and endeavours to overcome them, it is also intensely topical.
For The Tablet‘s Summer Reading supplement. You can find the documentary about Camus here.
I will not fear
Ego obdormivi et soporatus sum, exsurrexi, quia Dominus suscepit me. Non timebo milia populi circumdantis me. Exsurge, Domine, salvum me fac, Deus meus.
I have slept and taken my rest: and I have risen up, because the Lord hath protected me. I will not fear thousands of people surrounding me: arise, O Lord; save me, O my God.
From the Waiting Psalm (Psalm 3) at Vigils, in the English rendering of the Douai Bible.
Lord Sacks
Learning of the death of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks last night, I felt a spontaneous, visceral sense of loss. For years I have looked forward to his weekly reflection in the series Covenant and Conversation. Sacks has long been one of the few voices in British public life that carried real authority. He was firmly rooted in and expressive of his Jewish identity while remaining sincerely, lucidly, benevolently open to otherness. The Hesped read by his daughter Gila today is one of the most moving accounts I have ever heard of what it is to be a father.
Cordial air
Our Lady of Auch
It is an ancient Christian tradition that St Luke the Evangelist was not only a good physician but an accomplished painter, and that we owe him the first life-like image of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Though what ‘life-like’ means has been subject, through the ages, to changing sensibilities. This matronly account from the cathedral in Auch would surely have surprised, not necessarily delighted, the sitter.
Eat crêpes
In a time when so many people are dissatisfied with their bodies (a recent survey established that 61% of Norwegian youths are unhappy with the way they look), the healthy pragmatism of this cheerful sign outside a crêperie on Montmartre provides a breath of fresh air.
Testimony
To say that Seamus Heaney’s posthumously published translation of Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid is alive with intelligence and musicality is simply to state the obvious. What sets it apart is its status as testimony. It shows how even a poet of supreme inspiration is enriched by engaging perseveringly with great, ancient texts. And it honours the memory of one who enabled still untrained eyes to glimpse literature’s potential: Heaney intended the volume as a tribute to his classics master at school, Fr McGlinchey. Oh, to be a teacher able to inspire a life-long pursuit of meaning and beauty!
A Contribution to The Tablet‘s ‘Books of the Year’ pages.