Commensurate
Recently, during a long drive, I listened to Yo-Yo Ma being interviewed on Desert Island Discs. He speaks of growing up with a recording of Leon Fleisher playing Brahms’s First Piano Concerto. Anyone who has heard that recording will know what an impact it makes. Only upon watching Nathaniel Kahn’s fifteen-minute video portrait Leon Fleischer – Two Hands did I discover that the great pianist spent much of his life, on account of a subtle neurological condition, with a substantially incapacitated right hand. The drama that represents for a pianist is overwhelming; the lucidity and grace with which he dealt with it are inspiring. Fleisher remarks: ‘There was a lot of despair and misery and unhappiness. But there were commensurate ecstasies. And you can’t really expect to have one without the other.’ On the whole, he says, he wouldn’t have changed anything in the way his life turned out. In this there is a parable – worth watching, and thinking about.
To Be Decent
In a judicious essay in today’s Klassekampen, Carline Tromp reflects on Iris Murdoch’s novel Under the Net, which she inherited, apparently together with Murdoch’s complete oeuvre, from her mother. With regard to the protagonist she writes: ‘One feels like crying out: Everything isn’t about you – pull yourself together! Jake is as inconsistent as a snowflake, as brittle as a biscuit. Other people are extras, antagonists, at best little helpers. The reasons why Jake has turned out this way are complex. The war is just ten years back, one can only speculate. But Murdoch’s point, the way I read her, is that this is of no importance. No circumstance absolves you from the responsibility to make an effort to become a decent human being.’ This is well observed. I am less convinced when Tromp notes that Murdoch provides the help one needs ‘to find out alone what is right’ after having ‘thrown off God as a moral compass’. I hope that, one fine day, she will read and comment on Murdoch’s The Bell.
Mary Magdalene
After the burial of Jesus, his Apostles hid behind locked doors ‘for fear of the Jews’. What about Mary Magdalene? Was she not afraid? It would be odd if she wasn’t. As the known follower of a branded man, she was at real risk. She hurried to the tomb ‘on the first day’ not because she was fearless, but because she knew a desire that made fear seem insignificant. So intense was her longing to be with Jesus, to grieve by his side, that she cast caution to the wind. That energy of love qualified her to be the first witness to the resurrection. It made her, as the Greek liturgy has it, ‘Apostle to the Apostles’. From this we can draw a practical lesson. When we are fearful, the best remedy is not always to deal hands-on with our trouble, apt to entangle us in confusion and self-pity. We emerge victorious not by fighting darkness but by fostering our desire for light. And the light will kindle in us that love which casts out fear. Out of hopelessness we shall hear the voice of Jesus speaking our name. We shall know him to be alive and true to his promise: ‘See, I am with you always!’
Reaching the Young
In a recent gathering in Greece, my friend Father Theodosios Martzouchos, longtime protosynkellos to the great Bishop Meletios of Preveza and now parish priest in the city, reflected on the urgent challenge of passing on the faith to the young in today’s weird, fast-moving world. He spoke of faith and doubt: ‘Faith in God is a kind of struggle. Faith is not unprovable metaphysics, it is a constant overcoming of both reason and lack of reason. That is why it never becomes irrefutable certainty, it becomes irrefutable doubt. It is not a frenzy of self-convincing reason, but an awakening of reason’s doubt of itself. Doubt is the dawn of faith and the criterion of its value-quality.’ He remarked that the Church often tells the young they ‘are the Church of tomorrow, while in fact they are the Church of today! The Church wants to accompany them for what they will become; while they want to be taken into account for what they are now!’ I am grateful to Father Theodosios for sharing this insightful talk with us. You can read it here.
Guts Into It
I love this documentary portrait of Jini Fiennes, novelist, essayist, painter, photographer, so talented in so many ways, who nonetheless, whenever she had to fill in her profession on a form, always wrote just, ‘mother’. She would tell her seven children, in pursuit of some goal or other, that they’d ‘got to get their guts into it’. She herself lived viscerally, though at the same time with consummate intelligence. She turned a childhood marked by absences and an early breakdown into tasks to be fulfilled creatively, with precision and beauty. She demonstrated by her life a most important point: it is possible, by perseverance and grace, to pass on graciously to others what one has not received. In a poem she spoke of her freedom being ‘spilt and poured’ into others’ needs, though because the spilling and pouring were desired ends, her freedom was not ultimately compromised. It grew. It became love.
Bishops’ Sermons
I am made thoughtful by a remark of Christopher Isherwood’s cited by Zachary Leader in a review of Katherine Bucknell’s new life. It concern the turning of Isherwood, ‘an unlikely convert’, to Vedanta. He explained it thus: ‘My prejudices were largely semantic. I could only approach the subject of mystical religion with the aid of a brand-new vocabulary. Sanskrit supplied it. Here were a lot of new words, exact, antiseptic, uncontaminated by association with bishops’ sermons, schoolmasters’ lectures, politicians’ speeches.’ Isherwood, as Leader remarks, did not have much of a predisposition for the chastity and asceticism Vedanta presupposes; but that is by the by. His point is an important one, it seems to me. At the best of times, bishops’ sermons have been charged with the irreducible newness of the Gospel, a resonance audible, for example, in the Ambrosian texts the breviary has given us this week. When did they turn tedious? How to convey Christ’s perennial novelty today? The question is an essential one.
Desire
For Vigils today, on the feast of St Bonaventure, the Church gives us a passage from his Itinerarium mentis in Deum. A passage reads like this in the breviary: ‘For this passover [into life in Christ] to be perfect, we must suspend all the operations of the mind and we must transform the peak of our affections, directing them to God alone. This is a sacred mystical experience. It cannot be comprehended by anyone unless he surrenders himself to it; nor can he surrender himself to it unless he longs for it; nor can he long for it unless the Holy Spirit, whom Christ sent into the world, should come and inflame his innermost soul. Hence the Apostle says that this mystical wisdom is revealed by the Holy Spirit.’ That is already wonderful. But it becomes even more striking if you look up the original and realise that the word translated ‘innermost soul’ is medullitus, which means ‘in his marrow’, i.e. in his most physical interiority; and that Bonaventure’s word for ‘longing’ is desiderare. Why do we shy away from and paraphrase the Fathers’ (and Scripture’s) stress on the physical and affective dimension of the spiritual life?
On Priesthood
I recently met a priest who had attended February’s Roman conference on ongoing formation for the clergy. He said that by far the most valuable contribution, rapturously applauded, had been that of Mother Martha Driscoll. Having listened to Mother Martha’s talk, I can see why. She said among other things, having exhorted priests to become contemplatives: ‘Being contemplative doesn’t mean being a saint. Ordination does not automatically confer sanctity. In fact, contemplatives are more aware of themselves as sinners in constant need of mercy. The love of Jesus is light and so he shows us our darkness – our faults, limitations, selfishness, our inner divisions and pride. He leads us into self-knowledge so that we can be more and more emptied of self, more and more united to Him so that it is no longer I that live but Jesus who lives in me. […] Priests need the joy of deep understanding of their priesthood as the fulfilment of their heart’s desire. Christ came not only to reveal the Father but also to reveal us to ourselves. If they know their identity in Christ, they can help others to find theirs.’ This is an important talk. You can find it here, from ’47:50.
Sven Åge Varden RIP
Maybe there is only a strip
of shadow between their world
and ours? Maybe they are
as near to us now as the tall
handsome ferns in the garden
or as the sounding river
or as the light in the darkening sky
or as the balm of jasmin
in the air, or as those lifting
sparks, the tiny fires of
glow worms glimpsed, half-glimpsed
in the bonfire-smoky dusk?
Summer Break
I am taking a vacation.
CoramFratribus will have a break, too, but will be back in a couple of weeks.
Happy summer! And thank you for your interest in the site.
+fr Erik Varden
God’s Pleasure
Today’s Vigils reading from a treatise by St Cyprian tells us: ‘We should know and remember that when we call God our Father, we must behave as children of God, so that whatever pleasure we take in having God for our Father, he may take the same pleasure in us.’ I am brought to think of an observation the Reverend John Ames makes in Gilead: ‘Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behaviour, and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic rather than morally judgemental in the ordinary sense. How well do we understand our role? With how much assurance do we perform it? […] I do like Calvin’s image, because it suggests how God might actually enjoy us.’ A wonderful perspective.
Vastness
Valerie Stivers on how Kristin Lavransdatter made her discover that Catholicism was something quite other than she had imagined: ‘Religious people, places, and traditions are not there to condemn Kristin for breaking the rules—though she has broken them. For her sins, she is mostly punished by life. The religious people, places, and traditions are there to meet her in the pain of her struggle and offer things: forgiveness, wisdom, tradition, community, advice, punishment when needed, endless fresh starts. I had always imagined the Church as a distant and cruel regulatory body, and suddenly I saw it as Undset did, as the place you turn with the whole unregulated mass of your life—as the only place large enough for it.’
Having Time
I am often helped by something Mother Maria Gysi wrote in a letter to Professor A.H. Armstrong more than fifty years ago:
‘I already begin to feel that I have time again. Time that I never had for six years. Time is so little connected with actual work. It is something quite different, I believe. It is the absence, or relative absence, of pressure on the mind.’
This rings true. The secret is to learn to resist the pressure, or to let it, I suppose, just pass through one.
Example
Only in Hammerfest have I had the experience of seeing wild reindeer from an airport carpark. The Catholic parish in the town is the world’s northernmost. The climate is challenging; though much depends on your point of view. The locals say: ‘We’ve nine and a half months of winter, but apart from that it’s non-stop summer!’ The first Catholic Church was dedicated here in 1878, part of the extraordinary North-Pole Mission headed by Baron Étienne Djunkowski. What were its principles? They were various; but one can get a sense of which were most effective. The other day I met a nonagenarian, wonderfully youthful parishioner who is a fourth-generation Hammerfest Catholic. What, I asked, had caused her great-grandmother to convert at a time when Catholicism was held in suspicion and snowball fights erupted between Catholics and Laestadians? Her answer was clear: The example of the Sisters of St Elisabeth, who made this patch of land their own and loved it, who poured themselves out to help people during a time of famine while nurturing a deep life of prayer, maintaining the church as a place of beauty in a setting of harshness. The lesson is perennial.
Life & Calculation
Needed construction work in the cathedral complex in Tromsø has ground to a halt because a pair of black-legged kittiwakes (Rissae tridactylae) have built a nest in a corner of the yard. The kittiwakes are a protected species. The city authorities were clear: no human activity is permitted to disturb their habitat until the pair’s young have left the nest. It’s a nuisance from a practical point of view; I’d like to see the work completed. It is also something of a peril: the birds are protective of their territory, swoop low with menacing cries when one goes in and out, and practise precision bombing. At the same time there is something beautiful in this situation. The providence of two menaced, exposed birds have arrested the strategic planning of serial human agencies, leaving us all in anticipation of their freckled eggs hatching. The priority of life, be it fragile, wins out in an unequal combat with cool calculation. In this, may there be a parable.
Voice to Word
Though I have read them countless times, the Letters of St Ignatius of Antioch always reveal something new. For Vigils today, the Church gives us a passage in which Ignatius exhorts the Christians of Rome not to canvass for his release and instead to let him face martyrdom (Rom., II)): ‘I shall never have a better opportunity of reaching God, and you will never have the opportunity of performing a better act than now, by keeping silence. If you remain silent, I shall become the word of God [λόγος θεοῦ]; but if your love of my physical life makes you speak, I shall be nothing but a voice [φωνή]. Grant me nothing more than this: that I should be poured out to God, while an altar is still ready for me.’ Ultimately this is the trajectory we must all follow: from being a mere voice to becoming a substantial word, a process that will be accomplished by means of oblation.
Suffusion
Gathered with a group of friends for a seminar on Ida Görres, I am affirmed in my conviction: hers is a crucial voice for the present moment (see Notebook 1 February, 23 June and 17 September 2023). About the Church she writes: ‘The strangest creation of God, so unique in kind, so large, so contradictory, so colourful that no single person can take stock of her and figure her out, and certainly no outsider can ever take her all in, let alone understand her and judge her. Only she herself can do this, comprehending herself in faith, endlessly considering herself in her faithful theology, looking at herself through her mystics, loving herself in her children. Only the believer as the cell of this body, embedded, suffused with her life-process of knowledge, faith, love, participates also in her consciousness and in the spirit in which she understands herself.’ In terms of a contemporary register of terms, such suffusion would seem to be a sine qua non for synodality.
Aversion of the Gaze
This sixteenth-century mural in the twelfth-century church of Moster shows the drama of the fall. Man and woman, created to face one another fearlessly with love, can no longer look upon one another. Adam’s face is turned away, invisible. His betrayal has reduced him to something less than the prosopon as which he was created to subsist. Impressive is the energy of the serpent whose disturbing coils, for being interrupted by whitewash, testify to a determined purpose to undermine relationship.
‘When Scripture speaks of the origin of sin, the first casualty is the natural, free relationship between the sexes. The fall lets Adam and Eve know what it means to be ‘cut off’. They no longer find themselves in one another. They hide. They are ashamed.’ From Chastity.
Nefarious
A seminary rector recommended Nefarious to me. I am glad he did — I probably shouldn’t have seen it otherwise, it being advertised as a ‘horror film’, a genre I stay clear of. That label, though, is misleading. Nefarious is subtle. It offers a study in motivation, an exploration of freedom (what does it take to be a responsible agent?), a critique of language subversion, and an engagement with the nature of evil. Sean Patrick Flanery delivers an exceptional performance as Edward Brady, a death-row prisoner apparently possessed by a demon. When the other main character, a well-meaning psychiatrist, dismisses this hypothesis as irrational, the demon retorts: ‘I am the most rational creature you will ever know.’ A thoughtful line that has equivalents in the writings of the Fathers. Kevin Turley reflects on the critical establishment’s booing of the film, which is what one would expect, for ‘to say Nefarious is countercultural is an understatement’: ‘It reminds anyone who will listen that there is only one battle — and that we are all enlisted in it, whether we realise that or not.’ We may prefer to close our eyes and pretend the battle isn’t real. This is not an easy movie to watch. It couldn’t be. But it is worth seeing.
Polyamory?
‘Surely one of the pleasures of monogamy’, writes Miranda France in a bracing review of three recent books about sexual liberation (?), ‘is knowing that your partner isn’t having amazing sex in a boutique hotel while you’re taking out the bins.’ I’d call that a definition of happiness by minimal criteria. Still, her frank emphasis on pleasure is rather a relief in the context of these putative accounts of desire in the twenty-first century, which seem to be marked by joylessness. The trend they chronicle isn’t catching on among the young: ‘More and more young people are opting for sexit. Where centuries of prohibition failed, society has finally found the way to dampen teenage appetite: sexual saturation.’ France’s reading, basically sympathetic, certainly not moralist, is thought-provoking. It shines a torchlight up what is evidently a cul-de-sac, indicating a cultural, social, anthropological and indeed theological task: that of rediscovering and showing what desire is for.
Trinity Sunday
‘It is customary on Trinity Sunday for bishops to issue a pastoral letter to be read in place of the homily. It is said that this is because bishops fear their priests will lapse into heresy if left to preach themselves. Many priests, true, have a dread of today’s feast, not because they do not believe that God is three-in-one, not because they do not love the trinitarian mystery, but because it is so hard to talk about it. This shouldn’t surprise us. God is by definition greater than anything we can think up or imagine. It is his nature to be transcendent. He reveals himself to us for love, but our minds are inadequate to grasp what is revealed. St Augustine, one of the acutest minds the Church has known, wrote at the end of his treatise on the Trinity: ‘Free me, Lord, from a multitude of words!’ Having written that immortal book, he looked back over it and thought: it would be better to say nothing than to speak so inadequately. We know how he felt. Yet we crave illumination. We wish to comprehend. We have to say something.’ From Entering the Twofold Mystery.
Distinctive Voices
The Bible, writes Marilynne Robinson, displays ‘an interest in the human that has no parallel in ancient literature’. Her Reading Genesis is so thrilling because she understands this interest and shares it. Take Rebekah, who ‘alone in Scripture laments the discomfort of her pregnancy’. Did she feel let down by life? ‘Did Abraham send his servant to find a wife for Isaac, and forbid him to take Isaac with him, because Isaac himself was unprepossessing? […] Would the bride have been pleased to be brought to Sarah’s tent, and to comfort Isaac for the death of his mother?’ The more Robinson engages with Rebekah, the more she brings out her ‘very distinctive voice’ marked by ‘expectations she cannot bear to have disappointed, though I speculate, they have been disappointed since she first saw Isaac walking in that field. Disappointment is a very familiar turn in human affairs, therefore always relevant to the larger question of divine providence at work in it.’
Not Simply Itself
Early this morning, having listened to the BBC World Service‘s updated account of anguished realities in Ukraine and Gaza, of the forthcoming election in Great Britain taking place ‘against a pretty sour backdrop’ with voters not liking ‘any of the politicians or any of the political parties’, being citizens of a country ‘that senses it is on the wrong track and that life is getting worse’, I found myself reading an essay by Alice Albinia about a recent book, The Rising Down. It chronicles ‘the human experience of land and describes with acuity how the places we know are often linked through our experiences, thoughts and memories to other lands.’ The book’s author, Alexandra Harris, describes this as ‘the very common, complicated, unpredictable habit humans have of making places from other places, so that nowhere is simply itself.’ When this is acknowledged, Albinia writes, even patches of territory will be found to ‘sing’. It seems to me that political rhetoric worldwide moves in the opposite direction; and that that accounts in part for serial political, cultural and religious deadlocks.
View of China
One discovery leads to another. I’m interested in the linguist Ross Perlin’s work. He writes: ‘At the current unprecedented rate of language shift, a significant portion of the world’s cultural and linguistic diversity will disappear over the next century.’ As codirector of the Endangered Language Alliance, he documents languages at risk and supports linguistic diversity. Reviewing his recent book Language City in the New York Times, Deirdre Mask praises it as ‘a gorgeous new narrative of New York’. She throws in this aside: ‘I invite you, too, to binge-watch Perlin’s fascinating YouTube dispatches from China.’ The invitation was irresistible. That is, I haven’t binged, but have watched one now and again. In a series of ten-minute features filmed by his fiancée some 15 years ago, edited by a couple of mates, Perlin takes us on a journey to visit synagogues in Shanghai, shamans in the uplands, old people walking pet birds before settling down to mah-jong, roadside cooks. He converses fluently with natives in Chinese dialects while presenting a humane, witty, philanthropic account for his viewers – in Yiddish. This series is a phenomenon, heart-warming and enlightening. Take a look at A New York Jew in China.
Maturity
Ina Weisse’s film The Audition wasn’t a box office success, as far as I know; perhaps it couldn’t have been. The story of an ambitious violin teacher pushing a student over the brink is too marginal to engage the mainstream. There are cinematographic imperfections – excessive longueurs. Yet it is a powerful film, credibly displaying a Cain-and-Abel rivalry and, at the same time, a delicate and difficult motif present in art since Antiquity: that of a mother devouring her children. It is wholesome, albeit unpleasant to be reminded that the pursuit of beauty – of perfection in beauty – can be terribly compromised; and of how imbalance in our own lives can make us make impossible demands of others. There’s an exchange that will remain with me. At one point Anna Bronsky, the teacher, hears a recording of herself playing the violin. At first she cannot recognise her own sound. Then she remarks to her husband (whom she cheats): ‘It’s rather immature.’ He replies: ‘That’s what’s beautiful about it.’ One realises: When ‘maturity’ comes to spell ‘iron control’ or even ‘loss of innocence’, it can be fatal.
