One Step
With elegance Daniel Capó draws an arc from the well-known line in Newman’s poem, ‘one step enough for me’, to the scene of an eleventh-century Iranian sheikh before a crowded audience in Tus, making the figure seem self-evident. What promise there is in a single step taken freely, benevolently towards another! It is a matter of caring and of accepting others’ care.
Capó notes: ‘We know we are fallible. We know no less that none of our faults — however grave they may seem — will define us forever. We are poor and weak, absolutely, but there is beauty concealed in this fragility of children. There is truth in it, too — in the image of a mother dandling her child on her knee; of a family tramping under the stars looking for a home. Love grants us this certainty. The one thing it asks in return is that we draw one step closer, from one heart to another, so to discover the substance and savour of humanity.’
Keeping Rubrics
I am reminded of a request one of my predecessors made to Rome a few years ago for a liturgical dispensation. It was not granted. Here is Gregory IX’s responsum to Archbishop Sigurd of Nidaros (medieval Trondheim) dated 8 July 1241:
‘Since we have learnt from your account that it sometimes happens in your country that children, for lack of water, are baptised in beer, we give you the following response: since according to evangelical doctrine it is needful to be born again of water and the Holy Spirit, those who are baptised in beer are not to be counted as rightly baptised [non debent reputari rite baptizati]’ (DH 829).
A marginal concern, but perhaps worthy of a footnote to Gestis verbisque?
Chastity Overseas
The last few months have seen many thoughtful responses to Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses in the United States, where the book was published in January. I’d single out three. Nathanael Peters reviews the book in a contextual essay, stating a premise with which I am in full agreement, ‘I’ve come to see chastity as primarily a question of freedom’. He goes on to provide an illuminating juxtaposition with Maestro. Carl E. Olson is attentive to ‘a robust and self-aware anthropology’ and, a really important point, to the eschatological dimension of chastity. Jared Staudt engagingly writes of ‘the resurrection of chastity’ – and indeed there is much to suggest that it is not dead but, like Jairus’s daughter, ‘sleepeth’. He notes: ‘My largest takeaway from the book regards the way in which chastity fulfills our nature rather than diminish it’, and this delights me. It is a blessing for a writer to have careful readers. The book, already out in Spanish, is currently being translated into Italian, French, Portuguese, Swedish, Norwegian, and Greek.
What Is Truth?
A spate of reviews convinced me I should go and see Ilker Çatak’s The Teachers’ Lounge, which premiered in Norway yesterday. I am glad I did, though I can’t say it was a fun night out at the cinema. The film is painful to watch as it places its finger deftly in one societal wound after another. It touches issues of racial prejudice, surveillance culture, subverting rhetoric, and the backfiring of good intentions. At one level it can be seen as a critique of liberalism gone dictatorial, driven by a mixture of self-righteousness and a furious desire to please. But there is more. Mathematics are a motif, pointing towards the question of what constitutes an objective burden of proof. Can truth ultimately be proven? This question suffuses the whole. I was unprepared for the burlesque of the ending, set to a rousing interpretation of the overture to Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Puck’s final monologue in the play might provide one interpretative paradigm. The Biblically minded might find another in Leviticus 19.14.
Bonum facere
The German Bonifatiuswerk has done a tremendous amount to assist the rebirth of Norwegian Catholicism, enabling strong bonds of assistance and friendship.
To celebrate the foundation’s 175th anniversary, EWTN Norway has made a small video to chronicle the activities of the Bonifatiuswerk in the prelature of Trondheim.
You can watch the video here.
Athanasius
From The Shattering of Loneliness: ‘Athanasius does not maintain that all sensual impulses lead to God. There is a distinction to be drawn between our heavenly, ‘logical’ longing and our earthbound, ‘illogical’ desire. Yet the fundamental principle holds: any authentic longing, any longing that, even implicitly, points towards eternity, is a possible path towards God. Dying, Christ declared a sentence of death on death. Death alone is dead. In Christ, we go beyond what is ‘natural’ so that our nature, one with the Word, is no longer what it used to be. The condition of newness, which corresponds to what at first we were, makes of us, too, possible epiphanies. ‘Our arguments’, says Athanasius, ‘are not composed merely of words, but have the proof of their truth in experience itself.’ On this basis he concludes by professing the principal result of the Word’s incarnation: ‘He became human that we might become divine.’’
The Church celebrates the feast of St Athanasius today, 2 May.
Akhmatova
From the Notebook of Anna Kamienska:
Akhmatova. A thick volume of her collected poems, as if they were written by one person. But after all there were so many — from youth to old age. The elegant, refined lady and the old peasant who roars in pain and beats her forehead against the church floor: “Lord!” The poet thronged by crowds of admirers and snobs, and the old woman: wise, comprehending, like the earth, like a peasant rocking her dead child in her arms. […]
Music teaches us the passing of time. It teaches the value of a moment by giving that moment value. And it passes. It’s not afraid to go. […]
The dangerous passion for absolute purity. To evaporate with the atom. Wake up!
Poor Fit
In 1959, in Erasmus and the Humanist Experiment, Louis Bouyer wrote: ‘Many, indeed, consider that the Christians of the sixteenth century were unaware of what was required to christianise the immense fund of experiences and new realities that characterised their epoch, and that was why the new world broke from a Church whose representatives were incapable of emancipating themselves from their own set ways. This explanation is at once convenient and flattering for Christians today. It should cause no astonishment that many of them consider it all but axiomatic. They contend, in effect, that, were the modern world to pay them proper attention, their intelligent sympathy would quickly conquer it, and that this world remains alienated from the Church solely through the failure of its retrograde elements. Convincing though this thesis may at first sound, it is certain that such simplification fits in poorly with objective history.’
Blake
One is so accustomed to everything carrying a price-tag these days that it seems surreal to be offered something rich, instructive, and beautiful for free. But that is what happens if you go to the Fitzwilliam Museum to see William Blake’s Universe, on until 19 May. It is a fascinating show. I appreciated its endeavour of contextualisation, which goes beyond the obvious statement that Blake was a Romantic in a Romantic age. It stresses the conviction of several disconnected intellectuals around 1800 that Europe had gone spiritually bankrupt, that a new foundation must be laid. The very fact of such a collective conviction’s arising provides food for thought now. Apart from that, I largely agree with Jonathan Jones’s well-written critique, though I admit I am less enchanted than he is. Jones notes: ‘The point of Blake is the ebullient and unique totality of his vision, which you have to dive into and embrace.’ The totalitarianism of Blake has a suffocating aspect that this exhibition evidences, also in its juxtapositions. A morning’s dip was sufficient for me. Afterwards I was content to emerge into a sea of concrete daffodils.
Living Vastly
Today’s collect begins with a tripartite confession. It formally lists names of God. At the same time it defines the human condition: ‘Deus, vita fidelium, gloria humilium, beatitudo iustorum’. On this account, true life unfolds in response to fidelity and trust; glory, the conforming of our being to divine nature, is a function of illusionless self-knowledge, known in tradition as humility; beatitude, the durable perfection of happiness, correlates to just reasoning and action. We are recalled to a fundamental tension of the Christian condition: sublime aspiration presupposes realism and calls out for implementation in positive action. There are no short cuts in learning to sustain this tension. It calls for perseverance, creativity, and courage. It enacts a broadening of perception and of sensibility. To be a Christian is to learn to live vastly, to be drawn towards a horizon that forever broadens, though its coordinates correspond precisely to the intimate motions of our heart of hearts.
More Alive
With characteristic accents, Elizabeth Anscombe shares her remembrance of Ludwig Wittgenstein:
‘He had an extraordinary understanding of why people thought the things that they did think in philosophical argument, so that, when he undermined it, his undermining showed that he was getting at the nerve, the root: it was not a superficial refutation.
He also struck one as a great deal more alive than almost anybody else.
He also had an amazingly good judgement of what it was it was sensible to tell somebody to read, what was right for them.’
It is a wonderful tribute.
Learning to Pray
Before Mass this evening, I read this passage in Father Irénée Hausherr‘s Prière de vie, vie de prière, surely one of the most helpful books ever written:
‘There is talk of the “particular friendships” that are an obstacle to prayer. They are indeed. But it is above all “particular enmities” that render prayer impossible. Do not, then, do anything at all that would hinder you from giving yourself up, immediately afterwards, to peaceful silent prayer. For this to happen, “may God walk alongside you” [as Evagrius wrote]. That is to say: may no enterprise of yours be realised without prayer. The true path to contemplative prayer is life itself. It would be an illusion to dream of union with God by some means other than that practice which leads to contemplation.’
Undset in the East
Selma Ancira, distinguished translator of Russian literature into Spanish, shares an insight from ‘the book by Marina Tsvetaeva I’m in the middle of translating’. The great poet wrote to a friend:
‘And Sigrid Undset, have you read her? Kristin Lavransdatter. It’s a wonderful book. A Norwegian epic. The best thing that’s been written about the fate of woman. Faced with it Anna Karenina is a mere episode.’
Peregrine Falcon
The Ben Jonson epigraph, ‘Now thou but stoop’st to me’ all but sums up a poem by D.S. Martin that has accompanied me and in a way haunted me throughout Holy Week and Easter this year. It is a variation on the theme of the Hound of Heaven, though denser than Thompson’s famous text. At one level the key image is uncomfortable. The falcon is a bird of prey; its intentions are not benevolent. At the same time – anyone who has seen a falcon dive knows the reverence one feels, the stunning beauty of the spectacle. The associations evoked in a Scripture-soaked mind are relevant: we should not reduce the Bible’s likening of Israel’s God to an eagle (e.g. in Dt 32.11) merely to stuff for sentimental songs. There is exultancy and yearning in the last two lines. They seem to me appropriate for the Easter Octave. The invitation to effect a Sursum corda is ultimately an invitation to prepare for the definitive journey home, where the Risen Christ awaits us. We have here no abiding city.
The Fifth Evangelist
A reminder of my note from 2 April last year.
I think of something Elisabeth-Paule Labat once wrote: ‘there is more music in a single one of Schumann’s Kreisleriana or Kinderszenen than in an entire opera by Massenet, in a brief Bach chorale charged with mysticism than in the complete organ works, in themselves not uninteresting, of Pachelbel.’
The concentration of music, intelligence, and pathos contained in Bach’s Passions is miraculous. I have no other word for it. Jeremy Begbie has spoken of Bach’s music as ‘resonant witness‘. Justly, the Leipzig Master is known as the Fifth Evangelist.
If you want to go deeper into what we’re in the middle of on Holy Saturday, listen to this.
Choose Life
Abortion has again become a prominent subject in public debate. Norway’s Council of Catholic Bishops has just presented a statement on a proposed change to our country’s legislation on abortion. You can read our statement here. Here is a note about it on Vatican News.
It is heart-rending that reasoned discourse on abortion is often drowned in violent polemics or even sabotaged by violent gestures, as recently happened at the meeting of a pro-life student group in Manchester.
One of the most important things the Church can do, it seems to me, is to remind ourselves and others of just how complex this matter is, of what vulnerabilities are involved, of the responsibilities we carry. It is crucial to remember to see the subject from more than one angle. We need quietly authoritative statements like this one by Andrea Boccelli. Or like David Scotton’s in I Lived on Parker Avenue.
Hammarskjöld
The person, destiny, and legacy of Dag Hammarskjöld exercise perennial fascination. Interest has been nurtured in recent years by works of enquiry. Roger Lipsey’s Dag Hammarskjöld: A Life from 2015 is recognised as a watershed in scholarship. In a different register, Mads Brügger’s investigative film Cold Case Hammarskjöld (2019) opened the Pandora’s Box, hung with multiple locks, of the 1961 plane crash in which Hammarskjöld died. It signals conspiracy theories the viewer (left, as Ann Hornaday wrote, feeling ‘shockingly uncomfortable’) wishes were less persuasive. Last week Per Fly’s epic Hammarskjöld was launched in the Norwegian cinema. It raises questions – not least regarding the legitimacy of inventing a key character supposed to embody a tendency in Hammarskjöld’s life. Nonetheless, the film impressed me. I found the portrayal credible. One is left with much to think about that is of relevance. Faced with today’s array of global emergencies, one wishes one could look towards the UN as an objective arbiter fit to be an agent of peace only to discern, again and again, complexes of partial interest. The thought of Hammarskjöld prompts the question: Where on the international political scene do we now find voices worthy of our trust?
A Pastor
A recent conversation about Gregory of Nyssa’s De hominis opificio, a treatise for our times, taught me that the best Greek edition is still reckoned to be that of the Reverend George Hay Forbes (1821–75). I found an obituary of this singular man appended to a memoir of his brother. ‘An illness in early childhood had left him an incurable weakness of the limbs, […] but his ardent soul could not be satisfied without reaching onward to the highest form of service possible to him.’ This service was not least a matter of loving the Lord with all the resources of his mind. He was immersed throughout his life in the study of ancient texts. That did not make him aloof. People did not experience him as distant. This appears from the moving account of the day of his funeral: ‘While every window was darkened and every bell tolling, the whole population of the place, headed by the municipal authorities, followed the coffin down to the water’s edge where the steamer awaited it that was to convey it to the beautiful cemetery at Edinburgh. They watched the vessel quit the shore and then when they turned away there was many a touching token of the sad sense of bereavement which smote upon their hearts, as they felt that they should look upon his face no more.’
Remembering Well
In a strong statement issued yesterday, the Permanent Synod of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church recalled the importance of realism and responsible remembrance in discourse pertaining to Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine: ‘Ukrainians will continue to defend themselves. They feel they have no choice. Recent history has demonstrated that with Putin there will be no true negotiations. Ukraine negotiated away its nuclear arsenal in 1994, at the time the third largest in the world, larger than that of France, the UK, and China combined. In return Ukraine received security guarantees regarding its territorial integrity (including Crimea) and independence, which Putin was obliged to respect. The 1994 Budapest memorandum signed by Russia, the US, and the UK is not worth the paper on which it was written. So it will be with any agreement “negotiated” with Putin’s Russia.’ The synod further remarks: ‘It is worth mentioning that every Russian occupation of Ukrainian territory leads to the eradication of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, any independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and to the suppression of other religions and all institutions and cultural expressions that do not support Russian hegemony.’
Lætare
There’s a festive expectancy in our liturgy. The Church likens Lent to a pilgrimage. Today we stand on a promontory with a view on Jerusalem. We rejoice in the distance already covered. We rejoice that our destination is in sight. In the collect we pray for grace to ‘hasten towards the solemn celebrations to come.’ There has to be a spring in our step. We are called home. The word ‘home’ has a sweetness unmatched by any other word. Our home is not necessarily where we come from. Think of Israel: the men and women who came home to the Promised Land had never seen it before; they were born abroad. Many of you gathered here will have had similar experiences. The home you have made for yourself is premised on a departure, in some cases a painful departure, from an original home that no longer feels like home. Where am I at home? Where do I belong? These questions are crucial for us humans. They’re not always easy to answer. (From a homily for Lætare Sunday)
Rembrandt
The Jonathan Sacks Foundation, thank God, still circulates the rabbi’s texts. This week’s reflection on the Parashat Vayakhel cites Rav Kook‘s observation: ‘Literature, painting, and sculpture give material expression to all the spiritual concepts implanted in the depths of the human soul, and as long as even one single line hidden in the depth of the soul has not been given outward expression, it is the task of art to bring it out.’ Elsewhere the Rav wrote about his habit of going to see Rembrandt paintings in the National Gallery: ‘We are told that when God created light [on the first day of Creation, as opposed to the natural light of the sun on the fourth day], it was so strong and pellucid that one could see from one end of the world to the other, but God was afraid that the wicked might abuse it. What did He do? He reserved that light for the righteous in the World to Come. But now and then there are great men who are blessed and privileged to see it. I think that Rembrandt was one of them, and the light in his pictures is the very light that God created on Genesis day.’ This light, Sacks adds, unveils ‘the transcendental quality of the human, the only thing in the universe on which God set His image.’
Oikoumene
I have spent the past forty-eight hours at a pastoral congress in Sweden on ‘The Heart’s Discipleship’ organised by the journal Pilgrim, to which I am privileged to contribute as a columnist. There were over 300 participants from a broad spectrum: Lutheran, Free Church, Catholic, and Orthodox. Conferences and seminars were excellent; conversations were deep; liturgies were prayerful; the atmosphere was cordially hospitable. The fact that such an encounter is possible at a time when the wind has largely gone out of the sails of institutional ecumenism is significant. I am strengthened in a core conviction: the way to Christian unity, a Gospel imperative, must set out from personal encounters; it will proceed through friendship and mature through trust, which takes time to develop; its goal will be a deepening of life in Christ, the Truth, nothing less; its impetus will be the call to conversion; along the way shared silence will be at least as important as a multitude of words.
Nugax
At Lauds today, the Church gives us this prayer among the intercessions: ‘Libera nos a malo nosque a fascinatione nugacitatis, quae bona obscurat, defende’. The English breviary translates, ‘Set us free from all evil; show us in the confusion of our lives the things that really matter’. That is woefully inadequate. The phrase ‘fascinatio nugacitatis’ occurs in the Vulgate translation of Wisdom 4.12 and has deeply marked Christian consciousness. In Latin, ‘nugax’ refers to something (or someone) that is trifling or frivolous. Lewis and Short render ‘nugacitas’ as ‘drollery’. The nugacious tendency draws us away from earnestness, from engagement. It distracts us, persuades us that nothing really matters much. It seduces us with entertainment and prospects of immediate satisfaction. It seems innocent but in reality, as the prayer says, it ‘obscures the good’. It subverts the very categories of good and evil. It is ultimately joyless. ‘Nugacitas’ sums up contemporary pop culture in a nutshell. It is beneficially countercultural to pray to be ‘defended’ from it. We are called to be mindful of essential boundaries. A fragment by Pascal reads: ‘Fascinatio nugacitatis. That passion may not harm us, let us act as if we had only eight days to live.’
Silence & Darkness
Werner Herzog’s 1971 documentary The Land of Silence and Darkness is ostensibly a portrait of Fini Straubinger, a philanthropist devoted to the care and instruction of the deaf-and-blind, having herself lost hearing and sight after a childhood accident. More fundamentally the film is an induction into a mode of existence redoubtable in its intensity and abstraction. It lets us intuit the possibility of solitude so overwhelming that the mere thought of it is shocking. Herzog is a keen, unsparing observer, sometimes outraged by what he sees: certain scenes would be unthinkable in contemporary reportage. Yet there is deep humanity in his gaze, and respect for the unknown grandeur of pathos in certain destinies. The final sequence, showing a man cut off from human commerce embracing a tree, is a poetic statement at once beautiful and searingly painful. The articulate Miss Straubinger speaks of the Seelengwalt, violence of soul, afflicting the deaf-and-blind. Its specificity is incomprehensible to anyone who has not known it; yet this extreme experience points towards a universal aspect of the human condition. This film, difficult at times to watch, is deeply affecting. It raises timeless, necessary questions.
Finis terrae
On a pastoral visitation this morning to the isle of Leka at the northern frontier of the prelature of Trondheim – an island over which sea eagles fly, whose strangely coloured rocks are of a kind otherwise only found in America – I remembered Christ’s injunction reported in the Acts of the Apostles, ‘You will be my witnesses to the ends of the earth’, and thought, ‘Well, here we are’. It is impressive to encounter the austere majesty of the scenery and the gracious, hospitable kindness of a small community determinedly making a living in this place, as people have done for ten millennia. How to respond and correspond to the Lord’s missionary call? By remembering, precisely, our smallness and God’s greatness; by being humbly mindful of the long history of which we are part; by listening in quietness to the Word by which all things were made; and by believing in the Word’s continued, effective power to make the weak strong, to create something out of nothing, to heal any wounds – as today’s collect reminds us in its audacious affirmation: ‘Lord God, you love innocence of heart, and when it is lost you can restore it.’
