Digital Man
Among Ximo Amigo‘s paintings exhibited at the Encuentro Madrid is this one, entitled ‘Digital Man’. The formal reference is to a long painterly tradition of chiaroscuro; we might think of Georges de la Tour’s La Madeleine au Miroir. Whereas she, though, is rendered warm, present by the light that illumines her, her features accentuated, Amigo’s figure’s face is all but obliterated by the eery light issuing from his iPhone. He acquires an alien character. That is the great strength of the canvas. It represents a determined act of self-estrangement.
The picture is unsettling. One feels like passing it in a hurry. I found myself nonetheless compelled to pause before it — to let myself be challenged and examined by it. And to recognise an arresting account of a peculiarly modern experience of loneliness.
Dedication of the Lateran
‘What matters about the Lateran, the cathedral of Rome, is this: by its dedication, the mystical Church was shown, urbi & orbi, to be palpable and real. It was placed on the map. Constantine marked the Lateran out as a place of intersection. ‘Here’, he proclaimed, ‘our earthly city encounters that of heaven; here God’s kingdom impinges on ours.’ Like Jacob he discerned, in this transient world, the very house of God. When we recall his act of solemn dedication, we, too, say: God is with us! We give thanks for God’s mercy touching our lives in the Church, when we receive the sacraments, when we meet as church to worship, to serve. The Lateran, Mother of all churches, stands as a pledge of our ecclesial communion, making it visible. It is a wonderful gift! Yet it points beyond itself. That is the lesson taught us by our readings. A touch of Noli me tangere, of ‘Do not cling to me’, marks all manifestations of grace in this world.’
From a sermon for 9 November.
Putting up with us
Since the death of Cormac McCarthy on 13 June, tributes have been numerous. The world has lost one of its greatest, most challenging modern writers, brought up a Catholic. I have read with interest an appreciation by Valerie Stivers. It concludes with this beautiful reflection on one of McCarthy’s novels: ‘By the end of the final novel in the Border Trilogy, Cities of the Plain, the protagonist, Billy Parham, has seen much. In the final scene, a woman gives him a place to sleep. He can make little sense of his life and tells her, “I aint nothin. I dont know why you put up with me.” She responds: “Well, Mr Parham, I know who you are. And I do know why. You go to sleep now.” The Blessed Virgin Mary? Holy Mother Church? It’s foolish to try to pin McCarthy down. But it’s also foolish to ignore the invitation to rest in something, perhaps Someone, who knows us, even to the depths of our wickedness, and who puts up with us and knows why.’
House of Brede
Nuns in films these days tend to conform to two stereotypes: either they cheerfully respond to the spotlights, shedding inhibitions they never knew they had; or they embody gothic horror, subject to unimaginable captivities. There is not much verisimilitude in either extreme. I was thrilled when I discovered the other day that YouTube houses a flickering but still watchable copy of In This House of Brede, George Schaefer’s adaptation for the screen of Rumer Godden’s 1969 novel. Godden knew monastic life and understood it. Not for her saccharine or horrific caricatures. Brede, a Benedictine abbey modelled on known houses, is a place in which people learn what it really means to live, to give up illusion, not to encounter others as projections of one’s own loss or desire. ‘We had to learn’, says a key character, ‘to care less for each other and more for all the rest’, a model of the widening of the heart that engenders not estrangement but homecoming. Sr Philippa, played by Diana Rigg, speaks at the end of an ‘incredible sense of belonging – in the world’, recognition that can be a genuine fruit of contemplative living. The film is not perfect, but worth seeing.
Not la-di-da
It is sometimes supposed that studying ancient literature is a pastime for la-di-da layabouts wanting to seem clever or for irremediable nerds. What nonsense. The thing about great literature (and if people have bothered to transmit certain texts for centuries, there’s a good chance there’s greatness there) is that it takes us to the heart of things, enabling us to see clearly. I am stirred by Irina Dumitrescu’s piece on Beowulf in today’s TLS. It is the clearest commentary I’ve seen on much that we’re now living through, albeit at a distance. ‘[M]anufactured nostalgia is one way to make the violence of conflict bearable’. ‘Monsters can be vanquished – the hatred fomented between neighbours abides’. ‘How easy it is to miss the grief of others’. Dumitrescu notes that translators often ease the motif of fear out of the text. Why? ‘I have no proof, but I suspect some editors needed the Danes and Geats to be heroic for their great epic. The lesson of Beowulf is not the glory of war, though, but its inevitable failure. At the poem’s end a Geatish woman sings in grief and terror. She knows what war will bring: slaughter, humiliation and captivity.’
Worry
The board of governors of the Jewish community in Oslo has issued a strong appeal: ‘It is imperative that more people use their influence to resist hate-speech of any kind. We invite all to avoid simplification and prejudice leading to greater polarisation and hatred.’ The appeal is noble, in many ways timeless; but it issues from concrete circumstances, provoked by threats and violence against Norwegian Jews. That such a thing should occur is shameful. Anyone is free to have an opinion about a political regime; entitlement to voice an opinion is fundamental to our notion of society. Though to translate antipathy towards a regime into acts of hatred against a people is not just simplification, it is idiocy. Nothing is a surer sign of cultural decadence than then fact that antisemitism again raises its ugly head. Instruments against decadence are informed insight, learning, humanity, readiness for conversation — and spiritual values. As our poet Nordahl Grieg wrote, only spirit can halt an accelerating drift towards death. We all have our part to play, indeed we are morally obliged to play it.
La Valse
Poulenc, at 22, was present when Ravel first performed La Valse for Diaghilev, who had commissioned it. ‘Ravel arrived very simply, with his music under his arm, and Diaghilev said to him, in that nasal voice of his: ‘Well now, my dear Ravel, how lucky we are to be hearing La Valse.’ And Ravel played La Valse with Marcelle Meyer, not very well maybe, but anyway it was Ravel’s La Valse. Now at that time I knew Diaghilev very well. I saw the false teeth begin to move, then the monocle. I saw he was embarrassed. I saw he didn’t like it and was going to say ‘No.’ When Ravel had got to the end, Diaghilev said something which I think is very true. He said ‘Ravel, it’s a masterpiece. But it’s not a ballet. It’s the painting of a ballet.’’ Nonetheless, the work has proved immortal. It has been subject to the most outlandish interpretations. This performance is terrific. Towards the end Marta Argerich, normally of such austere appearance when she plays, beams with delight.
Education
It is interesting to note what Sigrid Undset, a complex-free woman, wrote about sexual eduction in schools back in 1919.
“It goes against the modesty of children, against the modesty of any human being, even to imagine a casually gathered assembly forced to sit and listen to an exposition of sexual life. Not even the crudest presentation face to face could in reality do proportionately as much harm. It is said that this is done in order to keep sexual life from standing in a mystical light — as if it were not precisely the mystical light that distinguishes human sexual relations as specifically human; the mystique resultant upon the fact that we have dragged these relations through all available mud, and exalted them high above all the stars. This is precisely what children cannot understand: the infinite possibilities of baseness and exaltation. Only a human being possessed of the urge can understand it. For sexually indifferent natures the business will seem common, bizarre, ridiculous, and unpleasant — it cannot be otherwise for a normally developed healthy child.”
Response
In his recent autobiography, François Cheng insists he is no sage. Yet he writes wisely. He describes a nocturnal experience on a balcony in Tours, seated underneath the Milky Way: ‘I am there, in this grandiose night bursting with splendour, posed between the heavenly river and the earthly river. Compared to the incommensurable volume of the cosmos, my being is so minuscule it seems inexistent. My eye is no larger than a grape, my skull no larger than a coconut, yet I am he who has seen and known. At the heart of eternity, be it for a few seconds, all is not there for nothing, for this beauty has stirred my being. What is this inexplicable paradox? What is the design of the creative force, let us say the Creator, who brought about the cosmos and Life?’ The poet answers by means of further questions: ‘Could he have contented himself with the stars that turn indefinitely without knowing it? Would he not have needed someone to respond, beings graced with a soul, a spirit, as we are, to make sense of his Creation?’
St Luke
Today we keep the feast of St Luke. He was, writes Paul (Col 4.14), a physician. A physician, like a priest, gets to know humanity well. It is his privilege to accompany people through vulnerable, sometimes anxious stages of life. A good doctor becomes a good observer. That is quality amply expressed in Luke’s Gospel. Many of the best drawn profiles in the New Testament – the prodigal son, Zacchaeus, the woman bent double – are from his pen. His influence on our culture’s imagination is immense. It followed as a matter of course that he got a reputation for being a painter. To learn to see truly, to see ourselves and other people as we are, fragile but bathed in mercy, with a tremendous ability to transcend ourselves, to be transformed by God’s power, is an essential part of the Christian condition. Today we might ask: Do I see in this way? Do I want to learn to see in this way?
Oratorio
Christian proclamation has always been pluriform. The mystery of the Divine Word exceeds what words alone can express; so art comes to the rescue – painting, music, sculpture, and architecture. A Norwegian oratorio based on the life of the apostle John was premiered in May this year. The music, ambitiously conceived, was written by Ole Karsten Sundlisæter to beautiful texts by Dordi Glærum Skuggevik. Musically speaking, I’d say the strongest parts are the most lyrical, like Mary’s account of the resurrection (‘31.10) or the dialogue between Jesus and John that follows John’s question, ‘Are you Lion or Lamb?’ (‘52.58). The sword that pierced Mary’s heart is powerfully, maternally evoked: ‘I understand so little! Your paths recede into death and the night, into darkness and the thicket. I gave you my ‘Yes’, but not to this!’ The Light shines in the darkness, to transform it. The message from John’s Gospel here finds an articulate, contemporary voice.
John XXIII
The name of John XXIII, that beloved pope, is often invoked a little reductively. We like to think of him as a rotund, friendly old fellow who cracked jokes and opened windows. These associations are not untrue; but they are incomplete. There’s an austere aspect to Pope John’s magisterium we should not forget. I find it helpful now to re-read his encyclical Paenitentiam agere dated 1 July 1962, in view of the opening of Vatican II. By this letter, he asked all Catholics around the world to help prepare the council — how? By doing penance. ‘Doing penance for one’s sins is a first step towards obtaining forgiveness and winning eternal salvation.’ Leading mankind to salvation is what the Church is about. An Ecumenical Council, ‘a meeting of the successors of the Apostles, men to whom the Saviour of the human race gave the command to teach all nations and urge them to observe all His commandments’, must be preceded by a global examination of conscience and concrete signs of repentance, like those adopted by the Ninivites at Jonah’s preaching. The ‘manifest task’ of the Council, wrote John XXIII would be ‘publicly to reaffirm God’s rights over mankind, whom Christ’s blood has redeemed, and to reaffirm the duties of redeemed mankind towards its God and Saviour.’ Have we today that same priority, or are we more concerned with what we perceive as God‘s ‘duties’ towards us?
Home
News from the Middle East is so awful, opening such dreadful vistas, that I am left numbed. Hamas’s terrorist attack, its hostage-taking are inexcusable; at the same time Israel’s political course prompted a BBC journalist to ask a pundit yesterday, ‘Could Israel not see this coming?’ I keep thinking of a sequence from Spielberg’s Munich from 2005. Avner Kaufman’s Mossad unit, working secretly, winds up in Athens sharing let accommodation with a Palestinian group. Tension is high, yet there is the possibility of encounter at a human level. There’s a wonderful scene with a radio. Out in the hallway, the leaders of each unit talk – really talk, with a flicker of understanding. They could be brothers. A door could be opening. At the end of the exchange, one says, as if speaking for both, ‘Home is everything’. The following day they are fighting each other to the death. There is a parable in this. Unravelling now in the Holy Land is the curse of Lamech, ‘If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold’ (Genesis 4.24): a spiral of vengeance with no end. Men must choose to end it, led by the voice of God, one of whose Biblical names can be read to mean, ‘He who says: Enough!’
Fosse
On a visit to Lisbon in Eastertide this year, I was touched to see the poster on the right. There he was, Jon Fosse, whose voice seems to me so quintessentially Norwegian I wouldn’t know how to begin to translate him, quite as a matter of course, seemingly at ease, on a billboard in Portugal, unselfconsciously cosmopolitan. Reading the press this week, I’ve been struck by the repeated stress on the universal aspect of Fosse’s work. He is, of course, deeply rooted in a global culture. It is wonderful to have a distinguished poet who is himself a translator, used to grappling with sense, noting that his version of Kafka’s The Trial aspires to the utmost accuracy, ‘each and every word’ having been weighed, who can say about the Greek playwrights, ‘they have very distinct voices, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles. It’s very easy for me to hear and to write that voice in the way I write, in my language, in this time’. The universal in the particular, the particular in the universal: a perennial give-and-take that can be a cliché, but which in cases like this Nobel Laureate’s is electrifying because the creative act of writing is such a serious, essential business for him. Wisdom is born thereby, and beauty, a song like no other song.
Subversion
Professor Ritchie Robertson recently wrote about Willa and Edwin Muir: ‘The religion with which the Muirs were most familiar was Scottish Calvinism, and they roundly rejected it. Edwin tells in his autobiography of seeing, in a Glasgow slum street, a young man repeatedly hitting another for no apparent reason. To remonstrances, the aggressor replied, “I ken he hasna hurt me, but I’m gaun tae hurt him!”. In retrospect at least, Muir found this an image of Calvin’s predestination: God has decided before the beginning of the world who will be saved and who damned, and mercilessly inflicts a punishment which its victims have done nothing to deserve. Muir explored Calvinism further in his hostile biography of John Knox (1929) and in a remarkable essay, “Bolshevism and Calvinism” (1934). The Calvinist and Bolshevist elect, he argues, both consider themselves saved and anticipate with satisfaction the damnation or extinction of sinners and bourgeois.’ The aptitude human beings have for institutionalising, then rationalising their subversion of high ideals is fascinating and redoubtable.
Subversion
I keep thinking of something Professor Ritchie Robertson recently wrote about Willa and Edwin Muir: ‘The religion with which the Muirs were most familiar was Scottish Calvinism, and they roundly rejected it. Edwin tells in his autobiography of seeing, in a Glasgow slum street, a young man repeatedly hitting another for no apparent reason. To remonstrances, the aggressor replied, “I ken he hasna hurt me, but I’m gaun tae hurt him!”. In retrospect at least, Muir found this an image of Calvin’s predestination: God has decided before the beginning of the world who will be saved and who damned, and mercilessly inflicts a punishment which its victims have done nothing to deserve. Muir explored Calvinism further in his hostile biography of John Knox (1929) and in a remarkable essay, “Bolshevism and Calvinism” (1934). The Calvinist and Bolshevist elect, he argues, both consider themselves saved and anticipate with satisfaction the damnation or extinction of sinners and bourgeois.’ The aptitude human beings have for institutionalising, then rationalising their subversion of high ideals is fascinating and redoubtable.
Lejeune
Is there any person in recent times who strikes you as embodying the full meaning of chastity?
For the full meaning of chastity we must look towards the Word made flesh. But yes, I can think of individuals who incarnate this quality in signal ways. The first who comes to mind is Jérôme Lejeune, the discoverer of Trisomy 21, a husband and father. I have read some of Lejeune’s letters to his Danish wife Birthe, which reveal the depth of their relationship, marked by deep affection and respect; but I also think he represents chastity more broadly, in his way of dealing with patients (in a marvellous documentary you can hear the mother of a child with Downs say something like, ‘Seeing Dr Lejeune hold my son taught me to receive him as my child, not a problem’) and in the moral courage with which, to stay true to his convictions, he relinquished his career.
Synodos
It is endlessly fascinating to see how the word of Scripture illuminates specific situations in unexpected ways. Today’s Mass readings follow a cycle established decades ago; they are not specifically intended for the first retreat day of the Church’s synod; yet their message to this assembly called to ‘walk together’ in the Spirit is inspiring. The Church is challenged: ‘You say, ‘The way of the Lord is not just.’ Hear now, O house of Israel: Is my way not just? Is it not your ways that are not just?’ (Ezekiel 18:25). In the words of the Psalm we respond: ‘Lord, make me know your ways. Lord, teach me your paths. Make me walk in your truth, and teach me’ (Psalm 25:4f.). In the Gospel Jesus says to the chief priests and the elders: ‘John came to you in the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him’ (Matthew 21:32). St Paul meanwhile summons us to ‘put on the mind of Christ’ (Philippians 2:5). It is an arduous proposition, bidding us read whatever signs our times suggest in the fiery, purifying light of him who is the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, the same today, yesterday, always.
Prerogatives
Gregory the Great, bishop of Rome 590-604, speaks directly to our times. There are good historical reasons for this — in many respects, mutatis mutandis, the circumstances of his times resemble ours. This is in itself a useful insight for us, convinced as we are of our exceptionalism in every area. In a text given us today in the office of readings, Gregory writes of Michael the Archangel: he is sent ‘so that by his action and name [meaning ‘Who is Like God?’] it may be given us to see that no one can do that which it is God’s prerogative to do’. That is precisely what we now fail to acknowledge. We are determined to be demiurges, claiming the right to create our own reality, then to demand, increasingly by means of litigation (here‘s a current example), that others affirm our self-proclaimed reality as really real, enabling the triumph of subjective perception over what is objectively given. We are increasingly up against an epistemological battle. The old prayer to Who is Like God has lost none of its pertinence: defende nos in proelio.
Good King Wenceslaus
Not to answer violence with violence; to keep our hearts open towards those in need; to pray deeply in times of persecution; to be prepared for sacrifice: we know these imperatives well. Nonetheless, to find them embodied in a specific existence, be it one that unfolded 1100 years ago, is at once unnerving and thrilling. It shows us that it is possible to follow the commandments, even in apparently impossible conditions.
The standard set by the Gospel cannot be relativised. It reveals its potential only when lived out without half measures, when, for the sake of gaining it, we lose ourselves. Thereby we see that our poor lives can, by grace, bear fruit for the kingdom. Such fruit never decays. Even after several centuries it is a source of life, joy, strength. It is radiant and unfading.
Death of Stalin
The rehabilitation of Stalin has for years been a fixture of Russian public life. I thought it time to watch at last Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin from 2018. Quite how one might make of this subject a comedy had defied my imagination, but Iannucci did somehow manage. The cast is exceptional. Made up largely of theatrical actors, it confers on the film something of the dignity and intensity of a play performed on stage, which in turn justifies liberties taken with historical details and sequence. We are given to observe the dissection of a body politic reduced to a corpse. The only ligament left holding it together is fear. ‘The humor’, wrote Anthony Lane in The New Yorker, ‘is so black that it might have been pumped out of the ground. To defend the film as accurate would be fruitless. Yet the compression of time is allowable, because the panic and the fawning dread […] ring all too true. Here is a society on the verge of a nervous breakdown.’ Unsettling light is thrown on things going on right now.
Enjoyment
In Marilynne Robinson’s Jack the eponymous hero, persuaded of his dissoluteness, ever expecting the worst, is told by a preacher: ‘Mr Ames, if the Lord thinks you need punishing, you can trust Him to see to it. He knows where to find you. If He’s showing you a little grace in the meantime, He probably won’t mind if you enjoy it.’ I thought of this while watching a decent documentary about Mahalia Jackson. Thomas Dorsey said: ‘The key to Mahalia was very simple: she enjoyed her religion.’ Having grown up with Jackson’s voice (my mother had LPs), still feeling immensely comforted by it, I wonder if this is not what I’ve always sensed, somehow, without articulating it. Mahalia, a key player in the civil rights movement, had known hardship; she had few illusions about life; yet the visceral vocal power of this woman, who ‘took the beat from the nightclubs back to the church’ is charged with joyful zest. Coming to think of it, most of us could probably risk enjoying our religion a little more.
No Walk in the Woods
The Prelature of Trondheim now has an Episcopal Vicar for Synodality. What is that supposed to mean?
Our Holy Father Pope Francis likes to point out that the synodal process in which he invites us to take part seeks to learn from the Oriental Church’s experience of synodality. A qualified representative of that Church, Bishop Manel Nin, reminds us that the ‘shared journey’ at stake is not a matter merely of a crowd of believers going together for a walk in the woods, as it were, but that the Church — the ecclesia or called assembly — must walk together with Christ. The chief task of an Episcopal Vicar for Synodality is thus to help the bishop ensure that everything that happens in the Prelature, in administration and pastoral care, is focused on the Lord Jesus Christ and his Gospel, our source of new life.
From my letter to the faithful.
Art & the Weather
I smiled when, on the escalator into the Arrivals lounge at Oslo’s airport, I saw this display. It was nice to be told that a pleasant evening was waiting outside; also to see that the supposedly congenitally dour existentialism of Norwegians is able to wink at itself. Munch’s Scream is one of the world’s best-known paintings, an emblem of fright. Yet how lovely the setting is. It was the beauty of an evening rich in contrasts that pierced Munch in Nice in 1892, causing him to record the experience both with colours and with words: ‘I walked along the road with two friends, then the sky all at once turned into blood, and I sensed a great scream sounding through nature.’ There is palpable terror; perhaps also hopeful anticipation. What Munch sensed could have been birth as well as death. In any case, his record enables us, 131 years down the line, to recognise within one man’s moment of crisis the loveliness of a Mediterranean sunset. And thereby to gain a perspective on our own inward moments of extreme agitation.
Building Material
Ida Görres wrote Bread Grows in Winter in 1970. She affirmed the ‘great and promising sowing’ that had taken place at the Second Vatican Council, yet was shaken by the amount of sheer deconstruction going on in the Church. In the middle of it all, and in her own perplexity, she determinedly looked out for those trying to build on the Council’s true foundations. ‘It is for them that we, the elderly, the ones bowing out, must preserve the ground plans and seeds that now have been all but forgotten. Who knows, we might see a generation after this that will be tired of their fathers’ delight in pulling down and will look for material with which to construct time-bridges between what has gone before and what will be their own today. Development does not happen in straight lines or on a single track, the way we would like; it zigzags and spirals. At the next great turning point, the old and the true must be at hand for those who seek it. It must not have been ground to smithereens in a waste truck.’ This task, said Görres, is entrusted to two groups above all: ‘the bishops and the little ones in the people of God’.
