Those days are passed now, and in the past they must remain;
but we can still rise now and be the nation again
that stood against him, proud Edward’s army, and sent him homewards to think again.
Don’t tell me there’s a Scot among you, pacifist or not, who doesn’t feel some sort of thrill when you hear these words sung. I don’t doubt that our heads tell us that no one country is as such more important or better or worthy of love than any other, that borders are only lines on a map, that no-one has any right to build up one country to the detriment of another, and so on…still, our hearts know that there is another truth which must somehow be accommodated, because it is so universally and instinctively known that in trying to deny or suppress it we risk denying something fundamental about our very human nature.
Today’s celebration – because it is a celebration as well as a remembering, a celebration of courage, of devotion and of love – is a difficult one for many of us, myself included. I am not a Quaker, but if I ever become one it will be the uncompromising opposition to war and violence as much as the silence that will draw me. But I think that what I’ve just described could be a way into an understanding of Remembrance Day that even pacifists can make our own. There must be a reason why the Old Testament, the first instalment of the history of God-with-us, is so heavily based on patriotism, on passionate love for one’s country; why God based that first call not only on a nation but on a country, on a specific piece of ground, and why he instructed his people Israel to fight for it to the death.
The conclusion that I have come to is, first, that this is yet another example of the care with which God trains us by teaching us the easy things first and only later raising us to the more difficult ones, and, second, how badly we need something to love. Something to live for – something, indeed, to be willing to risk dying for. It is so important to us that we justify the most horrendous, or the silliest, things because they answer that need. Something in us tells us that apathy, all the same, is the most dangerous thing. It has been well said that for evil to triumph all that is necessary is for good people to do nothing.
Of course the devil can use anything. He can use enthusiasm, faith, and all these good things. But I am sure that the thing the devil likes best is what paralyses us, makes us give up, makes us not bother, lose confidence…that, of course, is why he so much loves guilt. And why Jesus said “I came that they might have life, and have it in abundance”; and why his chief commandment, the thing that we must absolutely do in order to be his disciples, even if we never follow a single one of his other commands, is to love. Love, and just-not-bothering, love and life not-in-abundance, are simply incompatible.
Earthly patriotism is not a Christian virtue. But the instinct towards patriotism is correct. When St Paul says that “our commonwealth is in heaven” and the author of the Hebrews that “here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.” they confirm that the patriotic instinct is a good and useful one, and give us the clue as to where it is properly directed. “Our commonwealth is in heaven” is not a metaphor. This world is important. Not only did God create it and put us here, he lived here himself, and gave us the patriotic instinct. He had it himself. But it is not ultimately to this world that we owe allegiance, nor to its standards of love.
And there is a reason for this. Because another statement that is not mere metaphor is that we are made in the image and likeness of God. And although they are not God-bearers as we are, there is something of God in all creation, and especially in all sentient beings. The idea that creation is evil is about as unChristian as you can get.
Some Christians believe that when the priest is at the altar celebrating the eucharist, he or she is acting “in persona Christi”, in the person of Christ. In some sense it really is Christ up there and not John or Clephane or Donald. I am sure this is right; but I am equally sure that what we are all on earth for is to act at all times in persona Christi; to see Christ in others and to be Christ to others. To be carriers of his Spirit and act according to his ways, and to sanctify, not deny, the instincts he has placed within us.
I remember a lengthy discussion once as to whether we should mind being loved simply because someone was “seeing Christ in us”. What’s the problem? If someone genuinely sees Christ in me – well, what could be better? The problem, I suppose, is that “seeing Christ in someone” is so often regarded as a last resort: there’s nothing lovable about this person but – hang on – they are surely loved by God and made in his image and so, well, I guess we can look at that, and gratefully avert our eyes from the reality of the person. A sort of spiritual equivalent of saying “Well, I’m sure his mother loves him.” This would be laughable if it were not so sad. Because that kind of love is the most perfect and the most unconditional, and the kind of love that Jesus is talking about. It is spiritual recognition of the very nature of the person who stands before you – and of yourself.
The difference between "godly love" (I mean what Paul calls charity) and other sorts of love is that in human love (of whatever kind) the “glue” that holds the two people together is "preference”. I prefer Jane to Mary and therefore Jane is my friend; I prefer Fred to Bill and therefore I’m married to Fred. Well and good – that is where we must begin. But in godly love the "glue" is God. In other words God holds the two people - made in his image and likeness - together. Which among other things explains why you can perfectly well love someone you don't like, or who has done dreadful things. And that’s how Jesus can call “Love one another” a commandment.
That glue is far stronger than the glue that holds together two Scots, two Hungarians or two children of Israel – which all the same is perhaps the best human analogy, one we all recognise, and the one around which today’s commemoration is based.
Rabbi Lionel Blue comments that God has given us the book of the Torah, but he has also given each one of us the book of our life. If we don’t find God there, we will never find him anywhere. If you want to see God, look at your neighbour. Or yourself. If you want to know how to love heaven, you could do worse than looking at how you love Scotland, how these men and women who lost their lives in the wars from the dawn of time loved their countries.
This world is one in which we see through a glass darkly – but we do see. The world is charged with the grandeur of God – yes; but I would rather say that the world, and the people in it, are transparent, and in it we see God, and his world – if we will only look.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Saturday, October 31, 2009
An All Saints Latin lesson
Omnipotens et misericors Deus, de cuius munere venit ut tibi a fidelibus tuis digne et laudabiliter serviatur, tribue, quaesumus, nobis, ut ad promissiones tuas sine offensione curramus.
Almighty and eternal God, by whose gift your faithful people serve you in a worthy and praiseworthy manner, grant, we pray, that we may run unerringly towards your promises.
The Carthusians, who, one might argue, are a touch too big for their boots, have a certain aversion to canonization: non sanctos patefacere, they say, sed multos sanctos facere: not to make many saints known, but to make many saints. The implication, intentionally or not, is that their standard are so high that nobody could ever reach them and be considered a saint. They do celebrate those Carthusian saints who have been canonized with as much vigour as any other Order, but they pride themselves on how few there are. For the nuns, indeed, there is only one: St Rosaleen who, though she has nothing to do with Roisin Dubh, would make a good dedication for an Irish house of nuns. Well, I don’t see why they are so sniffy about having their saints known; surely the more the better, and the greater the variety the better. Today’s feast, although it is mainly for the unknown saints (plenty of Carthusians, then) is encouraging because, quite simply, there are so many of them: a multitude that none can number, a vast cloud of witnesses. it would be even better (though impossible) to know the names and circumstances of each one.
But the Carthusians have got one thing right: when the obituaries are read in the chapterhouse, a select few are given the accolade “laudabiliter vixit” – lived in a praiseworthy manner. And, the implication is, if the Carthusians praise them, they must be praiseworthy indeed! Be that as it may, the word “laudabiliter” is spot on.
Digne et laudabiliter: that is very reminiscent of – indeed, means almost the same as – that other calm and prosaic description of the way a Christian should live their life: “iuste et pie”. Calm and prosaic, like so much true spirituality and mysticism; like Thomas Aquinas; and like all things that are seriously demanding. There’s no hot blood to get you through it; there’s no poetry or rhetoric or spin-doctoring to conceal the truth of it, the truth of its perfection and the truth of its exigency. Iuste, digne: as it should be, in a manner that measures up to the One whom we serve. Impossible, of course; the saints have done it because, as this week’s Collect tells us, God gives it to us as a gift; it is not our effort or our merit. Laudabiliter, pie: that does not so much go further as describe the first adverb: not merely worthy but praiseworthy; not merely rightly but rightly with devotion. Iuste et pie: St Paul’s little instruction to Titus is, though it does not immediately look it, an echo of the Beatitude of the pure in heart. That is well disguised by the very unsatisfactory translation of its second section in the English translation of the liturgy: “exspectantes beatam spem et adventum Domini” is rendered “as we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Saviour Jesus Christ”. Which is not what it means. Firstly, beata spes is not joyful hope; secondly, it is one of the two direct objects of the verb. If beata spes is not joyful hope, what is it? It is – and I know this is an unfashionable word – “blessed hope”. In other words, our hope of blessedness, of beatitude; and it is here almost in apposition to “adventum Domini”, the coming of the Lord. The phrase means “awaiting the beatitude that we hope for {hope in the strictly theological sense, of course} at the coming of our Saviour”. It is the reward of living iuste et pie, digne et laudabiliter, pure in heart: to see the Lord when he comes and to know him as Saviour, not as Judge. That is certainly the moment at which our beatitude begins; but according to St John, that is also what constitutes the beatitude itself. “We know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is”. And he also makes the link between our hope and the coming of the Lord; the two are effectively the same; and it is to that moment that we are to direct our lives and our efforts. “For everyone who has this hope in Him sanctifies himself, just as He is holy.”
Hope does not deceive, we are told, because the love of God is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit; that, I take it, will be completely fulfilled at the moment when we see the Lord. But hope does not deceive – hope cannot possibly deceive – because it is founded upon the firm promises of God; and that is why I stressed before that when we say we “hope” for beatitude, that “hope” is to be understood as the theological virtue.
The phrase “to travel hopefully” is a very good description of the Christian life, if “hopefully” is taken in that sense. St Benedict and this week’s Collect would like us to run, the Collect (aware of the risks of that) thoughtfully asking God to remove all obstacles from our path as we do so. Well, running may be risky, but speed does have its advantages, as anyone who has tried to keep a bike upright at a snail’s pace in a traffic jam or behind a combine harvester knows. The Christian life is more like riding a bike than like going on foot: you have to keep moving or you will fall off. And as all good riders know, though not all act accordingly, it is not enough to keep the Highway Code – to ride digne et iuste. In the training book for the theory test there is a whole section on “attitude”: the way in which we keep the Highway Code, riding laudabiliter et pie – with, dare I say it, a pure heart.
Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see God. I have not yet worked out whether All Saints always falls in this week, always, therefore, has this Collect around it, but if so that is most appropriate. It is hard to see the saints as largely people like us, people who had to work to get to heaven, people who were not noticed in their lifetime and apparently did no heroic deeds of virtue and sanctity. But they were; and there is no reason whatever why we should not join them in glory. We do not need to be martyred or live immensely ascetic lives’ we do not need to “do” anything at all that is visible, much less extraordinary’ simply, digne et laudabiliter, to direct our intention towards God. It may not feel like serving at all; we may wonder what value our lives can possibly have in his eyes. But it is’ by his gift it is. Somehow in God’s eyes, to be pure in heart is enough; that is the service he asks of us. The form our activity takes is up to us’ if it is undertaken digne et laudabiliter, with a heart as pure as our desire and his ft can make it, then we need not worry about whether it is pleasing service or whether it will get us to heaven: it is the service he has chosen; and we are already there.
Almighty and eternal God, by whose gift your faithful people serve you in a worthy and praiseworthy manner, grant, we pray, that we may run unerringly towards your promises.
The Carthusians, who, one might argue, are a touch too big for their boots, have a certain aversion to canonization: non sanctos patefacere, they say, sed multos sanctos facere: not to make many saints known, but to make many saints. The implication, intentionally or not, is that their standard are so high that nobody could ever reach them and be considered a saint. They do celebrate those Carthusian saints who have been canonized with as much vigour as any other Order, but they pride themselves on how few there are. For the nuns, indeed, there is only one: St Rosaleen who, though she has nothing to do with Roisin Dubh, would make a good dedication for an Irish house of nuns. Well, I don’t see why they are so sniffy about having their saints known; surely the more the better, and the greater the variety the better. Today’s feast, although it is mainly for the unknown saints (plenty of Carthusians, then) is encouraging because, quite simply, there are so many of them: a multitude that none can number, a vast cloud of witnesses. it would be even better (though impossible) to know the names and circumstances of each one.
But the Carthusians have got one thing right: when the obituaries are read in the chapterhouse, a select few are given the accolade “laudabiliter vixit” – lived in a praiseworthy manner. And, the implication is, if the Carthusians praise them, they must be praiseworthy indeed! Be that as it may, the word “laudabiliter” is spot on.
Digne et laudabiliter: that is very reminiscent of – indeed, means almost the same as – that other calm and prosaic description of the way a Christian should live their life: “iuste et pie”. Calm and prosaic, like so much true spirituality and mysticism; like Thomas Aquinas; and like all things that are seriously demanding. There’s no hot blood to get you through it; there’s no poetry or rhetoric or spin-doctoring to conceal the truth of it, the truth of its perfection and the truth of its exigency. Iuste, digne: as it should be, in a manner that measures up to the One whom we serve. Impossible, of course; the saints have done it because, as this week’s Collect tells us, God gives it to us as a gift; it is not our effort or our merit. Laudabiliter, pie: that does not so much go further as describe the first adverb: not merely worthy but praiseworthy; not merely rightly but rightly with devotion. Iuste et pie: St Paul’s little instruction to Titus is, though it does not immediately look it, an echo of the Beatitude of the pure in heart. That is well disguised by the very unsatisfactory translation of its second section in the English translation of the liturgy: “exspectantes beatam spem et adventum Domini” is rendered “as we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Saviour Jesus Christ”. Which is not what it means. Firstly, beata spes is not joyful hope; secondly, it is one of the two direct objects of the verb. If beata spes is not joyful hope, what is it? It is – and I know this is an unfashionable word – “blessed hope”. In other words, our hope of blessedness, of beatitude; and it is here almost in apposition to “adventum Domini”, the coming of the Lord. The phrase means “awaiting the beatitude that we hope for {hope in the strictly theological sense, of course} at the coming of our Saviour”. It is the reward of living iuste et pie, digne et laudabiliter, pure in heart: to see the Lord when he comes and to know him as Saviour, not as Judge. That is certainly the moment at which our beatitude begins; but according to St John, that is also what constitutes the beatitude itself. “We know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is”. And he also makes the link between our hope and the coming of the Lord; the two are effectively the same; and it is to that moment that we are to direct our lives and our efforts. “For everyone who has this hope in Him sanctifies himself, just as He is holy.”
Hope does not deceive, we are told, because the love of God is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit; that, I take it, will be completely fulfilled at the moment when we see the Lord. But hope does not deceive – hope cannot possibly deceive – because it is founded upon the firm promises of God; and that is why I stressed before that when we say we “hope” for beatitude, that “hope” is to be understood as the theological virtue.
The phrase “to travel hopefully” is a very good description of the Christian life, if “hopefully” is taken in that sense. St Benedict and this week’s Collect would like us to run, the Collect (aware of the risks of that) thoughtfully asking God to remove all obstacles from our path as we do so. Well, running may be risky, but speed does have its advantages, as anyone who has tried to keep a bike upright at a snail’s pace in a traffic jam or behind a combine harvester knows. The Christian life is more like riding a bike than like going on foot: you have to keep moving or you will fall off. And as all good riders know, though not all act accordingly, it is not enough to keep the Highway Code – to ride digne et iuste. In the training book for the theory test there is a whole section on “attitude”: the way in which we keep the Highway Code, riding laudabiliter et pie – with, dare I say it, a pure heart.
Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see God. I have not yet worked out whether All Saints always falls in this week, always, therefore, has this Collect around it, but if so that is most appropriate. It is hard to see the saints as largely people like us, people who had to work to get to heaven, people who were not noticed in their lifetime and apparently did no heroic deeds of virtue and sanctity. But they were; and there is no reason whatever why we should not join them in glory. We do not need to be martyred or live immensely ascetic lives’ we do not need to “do” anything at all that is visible, much less extraordinary’ simply, digne et laudabiliter, to direct our intention towards God. It may not feel like serving at all; we may wonder what value our lives can possibly have in his eyes. But it is’ by his gift it is. Somehow in God’s eyes, to be pure in heart is enough; that is the service he asks of us. The form our activity takes is up to us’ if it is undertaken digne et laudabiliter, with a heart as pure as our desire and his ft can make it, then we need not worry about whether it is pleasing service or whether it will get us to heaven: it is the service he has chosen; and we are already there.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Si comprehendis, non est Deus
(Eccles 11,12)
As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother's womb,
so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things.
That reading from Ecclesiastes wasn’t intended to be a test of your attention span, honestly. I am quite sorry that this is a sermon and not a discussion, as it would be so interesting to know which verse or verses jumped out at each one of you. A friend used to say to me that whenever you read a Bible passage with attention, God underlines something in red for you. Or, as Kierkegaard said, the way to read the Bible is to remember at all times “It is of me this is spoken, to me this is said”. The Bible isn’t a book like any other. Well, of course it isn’t, it isn’t a single book at all but a library. But I mean more than that.
It’s obvious that the epistles of Paul are letters, from Paul to a specific group of Christians and, with the proviso that some things will not apply in different circumstances and to different people, to all people. But the whole Bible is a letter, or a collection of letters, from God to God’s people; and “God’s people” means every human being. We can read some parts of the Bible out of interest – historical interest, sometimes; cultural interest; literary interest. That’s fine, of course it is. When I look at old letters from my late friend Jo-Jo in South Carolina I am interested in what he tells me about his own life, what his grandmother says about the race laws in America in the last century, and what his wife experienced when on active service in Iraq. But if I just wanted to know about life on Death Row, segregation, and the US military, I‘d read a book. I read those letters because they are from Jo-Jo to me. And if the Bible is a collection of letters from God to me, from God to you, then that is the primary reason why we read it – if we do.
Life is difficult. If we have any sense we do not try to go it alone. In my opinion trying to go it alone, refusing to take wisdom from wherever it may be found, is the characteristic not of the adult but of the child, not of the strong person but of the person who is afraid that their weakness will be discovered. I once shocked a boss (I should say that I knew I was going to be resigning in a couple of days!) by saying “Yes, you know, I’m fallible, like most of the human race. Do you have a problem with that?”
I think it was Augustine who said “Si comprehendis, non est Deus”: “If you understand it, it isn’t God”. I’d go further. I’d say that since everything is charged with the grandeur of God, everything has God as its ground, then “Life, the Universe and Everything” is beyond our comprehension. The answer may as well be 42 as anything else. Which is why I am completely unfazed by Ecclesiastes and his cry of “vanity of vanities, all is vanity”.
I come back again and again to Kierkegaard’s comparison of the Christian life to floating over seventy fathoms of water (that’s 140 yards or 420 feet…a lot of water). I can never understand how people can consider faith to be a crutch. Real faith spends most of its time staring things straight in the eyes. Our moments of faith are when we say, with Job, “Though God slay me, yet will I trust in Him”. Real faith means living in reality, facing the apparent vanity, meaninglessness, keeping death ever before our eyes (that recommendation has a good pedigree – it comes from St Benedict, not me). Because death is the moment when everything but reality is stripped away.
Some of you may recognise this sentence: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face, with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind” Yes, it’s Karl Marx, Das Kapital, and it’s the description of life when the bourgeoisie are in power. It’s a bad situation, but it has its plus side, because it is the situation that leads to the proletarian revolution. Now I’m not talking politics here. I am quoting that sentence because I can see such a clear parallel with that terribly uncomfortable moment when the ground of certainty is no longer there, and we are floating above seventy fathoms, relying on faith alone, on unfelt faith alone, on the unseen and unknown God. “Si comprehendis, non est Deus”. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
That is probably the most precious and significant moment in the life of any human being. If you asked me to name the important moments in my life I wouldn’t mention any of the outward events. I would name those moments when all that was solid melted into air. When I took apart my faith (or it collapsed around me) and rebuilt it stone by stone. I can stand up here and talk like this because what I say comes from experience. I don’t do theory now, though undoubtedly you do need theory first to underpin and to some extent explain experience.
Just as it takes nerve sometimes to say “I don’t know”, so it takes nerve to know, to face, that ultimately it is between me – you – and God, and nothing else on earth has any real reality. We have constructed amazing cities, amazing machinery, we have domesticated the world and all that is in it. We have even had a good shot at domesticating cats. But we are alone with God as surely as was the first human being who discovered God’s presence in his cave.
Frightening? No, not really. Not when you face that realisation and its implications rather than turning away and distracting yourself. Esther prayed to God in a terrifying situation and said “For there is none other that fighteth for us, but only Thou, O God”. Indeed – but why would she need anyone else? We are alone with God – indeed we are, but who better to be alone with?
Theorising will tell us a certain amount about God. Definitions may help, as long as we don’t push analogies too far. But “si comprehendis, non est Deus”. We don’t theorise about our friends and the people we love, we get to know them.
And so I come back to the Bible. In my opinion there are two ways of getting to know God: God in his word and God in his creation. The book of the Bible and the book of my life. We are made, as I insist ad nauseam, in God’s image and likeness. We will discover an immense amount about God by looking at ourselves and all the other images and likenesses around us. As the Quakers say, by seeing “that of God” in each person. And we go to the Bible partly to see more images and likenesses, but above all to read God’s letter to me, to you.
You do not need to be a biblical scholar – trust me on this: I used to be one. The way to read the Bible is to read it knowing that God is saying something to you, personally, and you will hear it if you give it time. Read it slowly. And as soon as you spot the red underlining, stop and sit with it. Let it sink in and then have a talk with God about it, not forgetting to listen when God answers. It’s known as lectio divina and as prayer – and both are very much easier than you were ever told. Why don’t you start with that huge Ecclesiastes passage that we heard earlier? I bet you won’t get halfway through the first chapter before you see something that speaks to your own life. And the God with whom you are alone will suddenly seem a whole lot more real, more close and more reliable. And you will know that you are not alone at all.
And so let us pray: O you who are the fulfilment of the Law and the Prophets, Christ our God, you have carried out the Father’s will in its entirety. Fill our hearts with love and our souls with light each time we take your holy scriptures in our hands, you who live and reign with the Father and the Spirit, one God for ever and ever. Amen.
As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother's womb,
so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things.
That reading from Ecclesiastes wasn’t intended to be a test of your attention span, honestly. I am quite sorry that this is a sermon and not a discussion, as it would be so interesting to know which verse or verses jumped out at each one of you. A friend used to say to me that whenever you read a Bible passage with attention, God underlines something in red for you. Or, as Kierkegaard said, the way to read the Bible is to remember at all times “It is of me this is spoken, to me this is said”. The Bible isn’t a book like any other. Well, of course it isn’t, it isn’t a single book at all but a library. But I mean more than that.
It’s obvious that the epistles of Paul are letters, from Paul to a specific group of Christians and, with the proviso that some things will not apply in different circumstances and to different people, to all people. But the whole Bible is a letter, or a collection of letters, from God to God’s people; and “God’s people” means every human being. We can read some parts of the Bible out of interest – historical interest, sometimes; cultural interest; literary interest. That’s fine, of course it is. When I look at old letters from my late friend Jo-Jo in South Carolina I am interested in what he tells me about his own life, what his grandmother says about the race laws in America in the last century, and what his wife experienced when on active service in Iraq. But if I just wanted to know about life on Death Row, segregation, and the US military, I‘d read a book. I read those letters because they are from Jo-Jo to me. And if the Bible is a collection of letters from God to me, from God to you, then that is the primary reason why we read it – if we do.
Life is difficult. If we have any sense we do not try to go it alone. In my opinion trying to go it alone, refusing to take wisdom from wherever it may be found, is the characteristic not of the adult but of the child, not of the strong person but of the person who is afraid that their weakness will be discovered. I once shocked a boss (I should say that I knew I was going to be resigning in a couple of days!) by saying “Yes, you know, I’m fallible, like most of the human race. Do you have a problem with that?”
I think it was Augustine who said “Si comprehendis, non est Deus”: “If you understand it, it isn’t God”. I’d go further. I’d say that since everything is charged with the grandeur of God, everything has God as its ground, then “Life, the Universe and Everything” is beyond our comprehension. The answer may as well be 42 as anything else. Which is why I am completely unfazed by Ecclesiastes and his cry of “vanity of vanities, all is vanity”.
I come back again and again to Kierkegaard’s comparison of the Christian life to floating over seventy fathoms of water (that’s 140 yards or 420 feet…a lot of water). I can never understand how people can consider faith to be a crutch. Real faith spends most of its time staring things straight in the eyes. Our moments of faith are when we say, with Job, “Though God slay me, yet will I trust in Him”. Real faith means living in reality, facing the apparent vanity, meaninglessness, keeping death ever before our eyes (that recommendation has a good pedigree – it comes from St Benedict, not me). Because death is the moment when everything but reality is stripped away.
Some of you may recognise this sentence: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face, with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind” Yes, it’s Karl Marx, Das Kapital, and it’s the description of life when the bourgeoisie are in power. It’s a bad situation, but it has its plus side, because it is the situation that leads to the proletarian revolution. Now I’m not talking politics here. I am quoting that sentence because I can see such a clear parallel with that terribly uncomfortable moment when the ground of certainty is no longer there, and we are floating above seventy fathoms, relying on faith alone, on unfelt faith alone, on the unseen and unknown God. “Si comprehendis, non est Deus”. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
That is probably the most precious and significant moment in the life of any human being. If you asked me to name the important moments in my life I wouldn’t mention any of the outward events. I would name those moments when all that was solid melted into air. When I took apart my faith (or it collapsed around me) and rebuilt it stone by stone. I can stand up here and talk like this because what I say comes from experience. I don’t do theory now, though undoubtedly you do need theory first to underpin and to some extent explain experience.
Just as it takes nerve sometimes to say “I don’t know”, so it takes nerve to know, to face, that ultimately it is between me – you – and God, and nothing else on earth has any real reality. We have constructed amazing cities, amazing machinery, we have domesticated the world and all that is in it. We have even had a good shot at domesticating cats. But we are alone with God as surely as was the first human being who discovered God’s presence in his cave.
Frightening? No, not really. Not when you face that realisation and its implications rather than turning away and distracting yourself. Esther prayed to God in a terrifying situation and said “For there is none other that fighteth for us, but only Thou, O God”. Indeed – but why would she need anyone else? We are alone with God – indeed we are, but who better to be alone with?
Theorising will tell us a certain amount about God. Definitions may help, as long as we don’t push analogies too far. But “si comprehendis, non est Deus”. We don’t theorise about our friends and the people we love, we get to know them.
And so I come back to the Bible. In my opinion there are two ways of getting to know God: God in his word and God in his creation. The book of the Bible and the book of my life. We are made, as I insist ad nauseam, in God’s image and likeness. We will discover an immense amount about God by looking at ourselves and all the other images and likenesses around us. As the Quakers say, by seeing “that of God” in each person. And we go to the Bible partly to see more images and likenesses, but above all to read God’s letter to me, to you.
You do not need to be a biblical scholar – trust me on this: I used to be one. The way to read the Bible is to read it knowing that God is saying something to you, personally, and you will hear it if you give it time. Read it slowly. And as soon as you spot the red underlining, stop and sit with it. Let it sink in and then have a talk with God about it, not forgetting to listen when God answers. It’s known as lectio divina and as prayer – and both are very much easier than you were ever told. Why don’t you start with that huge Ecclesiastes passage that we heard earlier? I bet you won’t get halfway through the first chapter before you see something that speaks to your own life. And the God with whom you are alone will suddenly seem a whole lot more real, more close and more reliable. And you will know that you are not alone at all.
And so let us pray: O you who are the fulfilment of the Law and the Prophets, Christ our God, you have carried out the Father’s will in its entirety. Fill our hearts with love and our souls with light each time we take your holy scriptures in our hands, you who live and reign with the Father and the Spirit, one God for ever and ever. Amen.
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris
“As we forgive those who trespass against us”
It can be difficult to forgive those who trespass against us; it is perhaps even more difficult to cancel their debts, which is what this petition of the Lord’s Prayer really says. When someone trespasses against us we can, especially if they apologise, smile magnanimously, say “Oh well, no harm done” and forgive them. It’s another matter if they owe us something, when they are not just trespassers but debtors: not only have they walked on to our land, they have killed our fatted calf and eaten it. Then we can’t say “No harm done” – where’s the calf? And however magnanimous we are, and even if they apologise, there remains in us the perfectly correct thought: “After all, they do owe me a calf”. We may not demand it back, but we would like it back all the same, and we wouldn’t say no if someone undertook to make them replace it. That may be forgiving those who trespass against us, but it isn’t what the Lord meant. To do what the Lord meant we have to make sure, as far as we can, that the calf is not replaced; because if the debt is cancelled, it’s cancelled: nothing is owed to us any more. As Stephen, the first martyr, said as they stoned him, “Do not let this sin stand” (on their bill or account); that is, scratch it out, cancel it altogether. Stephen was, I think, one of those saints who might have been rather hard to live with – he was definitely not the most tactful of Greeks. But his debts were cancelled, as he had cancelled those of his debtors.
“As” is probably the most awe-inspiring and frightening little word in the Bible. Kierkegaard said “if the command to love one’s neighbour were expressed in a way different from this little phrase “as yourself”, which is so easy to wield and yet at the same time has the tension of the eternal, then the command would not be able to overcome self-love as it does. This “as yourself” does not waver in its aim, but penetrates to the innermost hiding place where a person loves themselves. It does not leave self-love the slightest excuse or the tiniest escape-hatch.”
In the case of the commandment “you shall love your neighbour as yourself” the “as” is certainly demanding and inescapable. But it’s in other places that it becomes really alarming. The most obvious example is the phrase which opened this sermon; if we do not forgive our debtors, neither will our heavenly Father forgive our debts. And we call that fate down on our own heads by the word “as”: forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. That little word is one which, to quote Kierkegaard again, though out of context, “wounds from behind”; it turns harmless statements or commands into two-edged swords. Another example that jumps to mind is Jesus’ prayer “May they be one in us as you are in me and I am in you” “That they may be one as we are one”; “Love one another as I have loved you”. We are to have the same relationship – yes, the same – with the Son as he has with the Father. But today, faced with the Lord’s Prayer, I want to concentrate on the second commandment: our relationship with each other.
It was bad enough – or, if you like, good enough – to be told that we are to love our neighbour as ourselves. I wonder whether anyone has ever done it, with the single exception of the Lord. We certainly can’t do it by our own power, and that is why Jesus went on to even more impossible-sounding heights: we are to love each other as he has loved us; we are to love each other as God the Father loves God the Son; we are to be as perfectly one as the Blessed Trinity in whom there can never be the slightest hint of disunity.
That is the ideal for all our relationships. It makes our attempts at tolerance, reconciliation, inclusiveness and ecumenism seem pretty feeble. To misquote St Benedict, we lukewarm lovers should blush for shame.
St Silouan of Mount Athos said that the greatest height of sanctity was to love (or forgive) one’s enemies. I used to think this strange, as I haven’t any enemies, and would think most ordinary people are in the same position. But then my thoughts began to move in the direction suggested above and I realised how far-reaching this forgiving one’s enemies thing is. All debts, real or imaginary, are to be cancelled so that they no longer exist. No cause for disharmony must exist in me, in my mind, heart or actions. And since I am not God, I may not say “as” to my neighbours. It is sometimes easier to forgive one’s enemies than to cancel all debts in regard to a sort of person one can’t stand. I have to cancel that debt. The fact that I can’t stand that sort of person has to go. You can’t merely put up with a person when you have been told that, as far as you are concerned, the relationship to strive for is that of the Blessed Trinity. And that applies to everyone without exception, because God doesn’t make distinctions. All who want it may have the water of life, and have it free. This really is a serious business and I am the first person who needs to hear that. Love, not to the limits of human capacity, not even to the limits of the sacred human heart of Jesus but the love that is in God for God, a love so total that it is a Person. My love for my neighbour (and as Jesus told us clearly, everyone without exception is my neighbour) has to be such that it would, so to speak, breathe forth the Holy Spirit.
Impossible? Yes, of course it’s impossible. However much we love, however inclusively, if we love to the death, still that word “as” will rise up and condemn us. But it was the same Silouan of Mount Athos who heard from the Lord in a vision the words “Keep your soul in hell, and do not despair”. And the same Silouan who, following the ancient Orthodox tradition in which St Seraphim of Sarov stands out, taught that, if the highest Christian virtue is forgiving one’s enemies, the goal of the Christian life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit. We know that the water of life which we are all offered already in this life is the Holy Spirit. The Spirit welling up within us unto eternal life which we will be given, and given free, if we want it, is, as I’ve said, the personal love of God for God; there it is within us, the impossibility made not just possible but real.
Behold what love the Father has given us, that we should be called the children of God, and so we are. That isn’t just God’s own love for us, it is God’s own love given us to use, to love with. Tradition and Scripture insist in chorus that God, if he gives the commandment which is impossible for human love to fulfil, also offers to give us the love which alone can fulfil it, his love for our use, his Spirit. Is that so very difficult to acquire? Yes, it takes a whole lifetime of unseen warfare, of spiritual struggle. Is it so difficult to acquire? No, we have only to desire it. When John of Panephysis was asked a question along those lines, “he stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said: “If you will, you can become all flame.”
May the fire of the Holy Spirit, burning within the Trinity and within us, enlighten and enkindle us until the day when we know as we are known, and love as we are loved.
It can be difficult to forgive those who trespass against us; it is perhaps even more difficult to cancel their debts, which is what this petition of the Lord’s Prayer really says. When someone trespasses against us we can, especially if they apologise, smile magnanimously, say “Oh well, no harm done” and forgive them. It’s another matter if they owe us something, when they are not just trespassers but debtors: not only have they walked on to our land, they have killed our fatted calf and eaten it. Then we can’t say “No harm done” – where’s the calf? And however magnanimous we are, and even if they apologise, there remains in us the perfectly correct thought: “After all, they do owe me a calf”. We may not demand it back, but we would like it back all the same, and we wouldn’t say no if someone undertook to make them replace it. That may be forgiving those who trespass against us, but it isn’t what the Lord meant. To do what the Lord meant we have to make sure, as far as we can, that the calf is not replaced; because if the debt is cancelled, it’s cancelled: nothing is owed to us any more. As Stephen, the first martyr, said as they stoned him, “Do not let this sin stand” (on their bill or account); that is, scratch it out, cancel it altogether. Stephen was, I think, one of those saints who might have been rather hard to live with – he was definitely not the most tactful of Greeks. But his debts were cancelled, as he had cancelled those of his debtors.
“As” is probably the most awe-inspiring and frightening little word in the Bible. Kierkegaard said “if the command to love one’s neighbour were expressed in a way different from this little phrase “as yourself”, which is so easy to wield and yet at the same time has the tension of the eternal, then the command would not be able to overcome self-love as it does. This “as yourself” does not waver in its aim, but penetrates to the innermost hiding place where a person loves themselves. It does not leave self-love the slightest excuse or the tiniest escape-hatch.”
In the case of the commandment “you shall love your neighbour as yourself” the “as” is certainly demanding and inescapable. But it’s in other places that it becomes really alarming. The most obvious example is the phrase which opened this sermon; if we do not forgive our debtors, neither will our heavenly Father forgive our debts. And we call that fate down on our own heads by the word “as”: forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. That little word is one which, to quote Kierkegaard again, though out of context, “wounds from behind”; it turns harmless statements or commands into two-edged swords. Another example that jumps to mind is Jesus’ prayer “May they be one in us as you are in me and I am in you” “That they may be one as we are one”; “Love one another as I have loved you”. We are to have the same relationship – yes, the same – with the Son as he has with the Father. But today, faced with the Lord’s Prayer, I want to concentrate on the second commandment: our relationship with each other.
It was bad enough – or, if you like, good enough – to be told that we are to love our neighbour as ourselves. I wonder whether anyone has ever done it, with the single exception of the Lord. We certainly can’t do it by our own power, and that is why Jesus went on to even more impossible-sounding heights: we are to love each other as he has loved us; we are to love each other as God the Father loves God the Son; we are to be as perfectly one as the Blessed Trinity in whom there can never be the slightest hint of disunity.
That is the ideal for all our relationships. It makes our attempts at tolerance, reconciliation, inclusiveness and ecumenism seem pretty feeble. To misquote St Benedict, we lukewarm lovers should blush for shame.
St Silouan of Mount Athos said that the greatest height of sanctity was to love (or forgive) one’s enemies. I used to think this strange, as I haven’t any enemies, and would think most ordinary people are in the same position. But then my thoughts began to move in the direction suggested above and I realised how far-reaching this forgiving one’s enemies thing is. All debts, real or imaginary, are to be cancelled so that they no longer exist. No cause for disharmony must exist in me, in my mind, heart or actions. And since I am not God, I may not say “as” to my neighbours. It is sometimes easier to forgive one’s enemies than to cancel all debts in regard to a sort of person one can’t stand. I have to cancel that debt. The fact that I can’t stand that sort of person has to go. You can’t merely put up with a person when you have been told that, as far as you are concerned, the relationship to strive for is that of the Blessed Trinity. And that applies to everyone without exception, because God doesn’t make distinctions. All who want it may have the water of life, and have it free. This really is a serious business and I am the first person who needs to hear that. Love, not to the limits of human capacity, not even to the limits of the sacred human heart of Jesus but the love that is in God for God, a love so total that it is a Person. My love for my neighbour (and as Jesus told us clearly, everyone without exception is my neighbour) has to be such that it would, so to speak, breathe forth the Holy Spirit.
Impossible? Yes, of course it’s impossible. However much we love, however inclusively, if we love to the death, still that word “as” will rise up and condemn us. But it was the same Silouan of Mount Athos who heard from the Lord in a vision the words “Keep your soul in hell, and do not despair”. And the same Silouan who, following the ancient Orthodox tradition in which St Seraphim of Sarov stands out, taught that, if the highest Christian virtue is forgiving one’s enemies, the goal of the Christian life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit. We know that the water of life which we are all offered already in this life is the Holy Spirit. The Spirit welling up within us unto eternal life which we will be given, and given free, if we want it, is, as I’ve said, the personal love of God for God; there it is within us, the impossibility made not just possible but real.
Behold what love the Father has given us, that we should be called the children of God, and so we are. That isn’t just God’s own love for us, it is God’s own love given us to use, to love with. Tradition and Scripture insist in chorus that God, if he gives the commandment which is impossible for human love to fulfil, also offers to give us the love which alone can fulfil it, his love for our use, his Spirit. Is that so very difficult to acquire? Yes, it takes a whole lifetime of unseen warfare, of spiritual struggle. Is it so difficult to acquire? No, we have only to desire it. When John of Panephysis was asked a question along those lines, “he stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said: “If you will, you can become all flame.”
May the fire of the Holy Spirit, burning within the Trinity and within us, enlighten and enkindle us until the day when we know as we are known, and love as we are loved.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Domine, ad quem ibimus?
Er, this is really last week's...and the one I put in last week is this week's...
"If our love were but more simple,
We should take him at his word
And our lives would be all sunshine
In the brightness of our Lord."
A bit naive, you might think? On the childish side of childlike, perhaps?
Maybe. But that hymn, which I have quoted several times before, was written by an old fashioned Catholic priest and scholar who had no time for modernism, liberals or situation ethics, and would not have thought much of the laxer ideas of some of us here at St. John’s. It was written out of an overwhelming love of God, certainly, but the humble love of a creature for his creator. Father Faber knew what he was talking about and he didn’t say - much less write - anything lightly.
I’d like to try a thought-experiment. A while ago I saw a sign outside one of the city centre churches. I wonder what your first reaction is to what it said: “Suppose everything that Jesus taught was true: what difference would it make?”
I’ve asked quite a few people that. I was particularly interested to know what non-believers would say. Interestingly most of them have been unable or unwilling to answer the question I actually asked. Most of them - and I was surprised at the vehemence of their reactions - took the opportunity to insult Christianity in the strongest possible terms. The two non-Christians who did give me a civil answer were, first, a Buddhist, who said something that, although it was based on a misunderstanding, moved me immensely. He said: “I would be desperately sad, because that would mean that hell would exist. I would volunteer to go to hell to show my compassion for all sentient beings.” The other was my friendly household agnostic, who said that he found it so completely inconceivable that he couldn’t answer. Part of his problem, I suspect, was that he knows rather more than most agnostics about the Bible and wasn’t sure where to start imagining.
It is true that if one starts thinking about all the details of what Jesus said it is hard to start answering the question, and even more so if we start arguing about what is authentic and what isn’t.
So let’s just concentrate on the basics - the sort of thing that CS Lewis called “Mere Christianity”.
That, somehow - presumably due to some sort of fall, though Jesus never specified - we need to be saved from our condition of potentially eternal separation from God (that, put simply, is what hell is). That God who created us loved us so much that he - his son - was born as a human being for our sake and for some reason had not only to live and preach and perform signs and wonders but die in a horrific way to effect that salvation. That he did it willingly and lovingly; and that he rose bodily from the dead, also for our sake, as, although it was quite unnecessary for the ‘effectiveness’ of our redemption, he knew we’d never understand otherwise.
And that somehow we have to unite ourselves with his life and death or we will not make that salvation ours.
My own first reaction to the sign outside the church, then, is ‘In that case Jesus Christ would be central not just to my life but to the world and its history; his coming into the world would rightly mark the change of the eras; it would be the central event in the many millions of years his world has existed, and in my life too.’
That is so, and that is summed up in St Peter's comment in today's Gospel:"Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God."
But it is striking that I, who have spent the best part of my life as a ‘professional religious person’, still frame my answer in the conditional: “If it were the case, then such and such would follow”, and make a statement which my life does not always reflect.
Only one of the Christians of whom I asked my question responded “What do you mean, ‘if’? It is all true.” while even the civil non-believers were quite clear that it is not.
What is the matter with us?
At St. John’s we are inclined not to avoid the difficult questions. While my non-believer friends found it impossible to ask themselves the question “what if it were all true?” I am sure that most, if not all, of us have asked ourselves the opposite question: “what if it were all false?”, and perhaps over and over again.
Perhaps, just perhaps, we do a little too much of that. We must do some of it; of course we must. We must do it in order to understand non-believers, & we must do it quite simply out of our nature as thinking & compassionate creatures. But perhaps, just perhaps, we become mesmerised by the difficult questions. It is true that faith is not knowledge. Doubt is part of faith. But I wonder whether that side of faith has not been over-emphasised recently - say increasingly over the last fifty years? I would not advocate blind faith, or the sort of faith which is so afraid of doubt that it will not talk, will not think, & becomes fundamentalist. We are so much freer in so many ways than our parents & grandparents were & that is undoubtedly a good thing.
But perhaps it is time not so much to call a halt to this as to realise what we are doing. To realise that perhaps we are coming at all this from the wrong direction. Listen to St. Paul:
Christ is the image of the invisible God; in him all things were created; all things were created through him & for him. In him all things hold together. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, & through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. The Father has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light; he has delivered us from the dominion of darkness & transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.
Supposing this were true? It is true. St. Paul does not - ever - deny the existence of darkness. The world is a terribly dark place. But Christ has died & Christ is risen & the darkness no longer has dominion over us.
And that is where we should be starting. We are not better than anyone else because we are Christians. We are not the only ones who will be saved from our sins. But we are the ones who have received & accepted God’s ultimate, though not his only, revelation & we should receive that as a blessing, not as a burden. To whom should we go? He has the words of eternal life.
We suffer as much as the non-believers do at the darkness of the world. But there must - there must - be one difference.
I have spoken before about the paradox of the good God & the darkness of the world. I will no doubt speak about it again & I will not solve it. There are some things which are too big for us, & perhaps we just have to acknowledge that & put our trust in God.
Because God is there & he is trustworthy. The world is dark, but God is light & in him there is no darkness at all.
So I am not suggesting that we stop asking ourselves the difficult questions; but I do suggest that sometimes we look at the other side of reality, which is just as real or more so. Could we try to be at least as confident in our side of reality as the non-believers are in theirs? Could we try to trust in God & rest in his light - just sometimes? In Julian’s words:
He said not: Thou wilt not be travailed, thou wilt not be tempested, thou wilt not be dis-eased;
But he said: Thou wilt not be overcome.
"If our love were but more simple,
We should take him at his word
And our lives would be all sunshine
In the brightness of our Lord."
A bit naive, you might think? On the childish side of childlike, perhaps?
Maybe. But that hymn, which I have quoted several times before, was written by an old fashioned Catholic priest and scholar who had no time for modernism, liberals or situation ethics, and would not have thought much of the laxer ideas of some of us here at St. John’s. It was written out of an overwhelming love of God, certainly, but the humble love of a creature for his creator. Father Faber knew what he was talking about and he didn’t say - much less write - anything lightly.
I’d like to try a thought-experiment. A while ago I saw a sign outside one of the city centre churches. I wonder what your first reaction is to what it said: “Suppose everything that Jesus taught was true: what difference would it make?”
I’ve asked quite a few people that. I was particularly interested to know what non-believers would say. Interestingly most of them have been unable or unwilling to answer the question I actually asked. Most of them - and I was surprised at the vehemence of their reactions - took the opportunity to insult Christianity in the strongest possible terms. The two non-Christians who did give me a civil answer were, first, a Buddhist, who said something that, although it was based on a misunderstanding, moved me immensely. He said: “I would be desperately sad, because that would mean that hell would exist. I would volunteer to go to hell to show my compassion for all sentient beings.” The other was my friendly household agnostic, who said that he found it so completely inconceivable that he couldn’t answer. Part of his problem, I suspect, was that he knows rather more than most agnostics about the Bible and wasn’t sure where to start imagining.
It is true that if one starts thinking about all the details of what Jesus said it is hard to start answering the question, and even more so if we start arguing about what is authentic and what isn’t.
So let’s just concentrate on the basics - the sort of thing that CS Lewis called “Mere Christianity”.
That, somehow - presumably due to some sort of fall, though Jesus never specified - we need to be saved from our condition of potentially eternal separation from God (that, put simply, is what hell is). That God who created us loved us so much that he - his son - was born as a human being for our sake and for some reason had not only to live and preach and perform signs and wonders but die in a horrific way to effect that salvation. That he did it willingly and lovingly; and that he rose bodily from the dead, also for our sake, as, although it was quite unnecessary for the ‘effectiveness’ of our redemption, he knew we’d never understand otherwise.
And that somehow we have to unite ourselves with his life and death or we will not make that salvation ours.
My own first reaction to the sign outside the church, then, is ‘In that case Jesus Christ would be central not just to my life but to the world and its history; his coming into the world would rightly mark the change of the eras; it would be the central event in the many millions of years his world has existed, and in my life too.’
That is so, and that is summed up in St Peter's comment in today's Gospel:"Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God."
But it is striking that I, who have spent the best part of my life as a ‘professional religious person’, still frame my answer in the conditional: “If it were the case, then such and such would follow”, and make a statement which my life does not always reflect.
Only one of the Christians of whom I asked my question responded “What do you mean, ‘if’? It is all true.” while even the civil non-believers were quite clear that it is not.
What is the matter with us?
At St. John’s we are inclined not to avoid the difficult questions. While my non-believer friends found it impossible to ask themselves the question “what if it were all true?” I am sure that most, if not all, of us have asked ourselves the opposite question: “what if it were all false?”, and perhaps over and over again.
Perhaps, just perhaps, we do a little too much of that. We must do some of it; of course we must. We must do it in order to understand non-believers, & we must do it quite simply out of our nature as thinking & compassionate creatures. But perhaps, just perhaps, we become mesmerised by the difficult questions. It is true that faith is not knowledge. Doubt is part of faith. But I wonder whether that side of faith has not been over-emphasised recently - say increasingly over the last fifty years? I would not advocate blind faith, or the sort of faith which is so afraid of doubt that it will not talk, will not think, & becomes fundamentalist. We are so much freer in so many ways than our parents & grandparents were & that is undoubtedly a good thing.
But perhaps it is time not so much to call a halt to this as to realise what we are doing. To realise that perhaps we are coming at all this from the wrong direction. Listen to St. Paul:
Christ is the image of the invisible God; in him all things were created; all things were created through him & for him. In him all things hold together. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, & through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. The Father has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light; he has delivered us from the dominion of darkness & transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.
Supposing this were true? It is true. St. Paul does not - ever - deny the existence of darkness. The world is a terribly dark place. But Christ has died & Christ is risen & the darkness no longer has dominion over us.
And that is where we should be starting. We are not better than anyone else because we are Christians. We are not the only ones who will be saved from our sins. But we are the ones who have received & accepted God’s ultimate, though not his only, revelation & we should receive that as a blessing, not as a burden. To whom should we go? He has the words of eternal life.
We suffer as much as the non-believers do at the darkness of the world. But there must - there must - be one difference.
I have spoken before about the paradox of the good God & the darkness of the world. I will no doubt speak about it again & I will not solve it. There are some things which are too big for us, & perhaps we just have to acknowledge that & put our trust in God.
Because God is there & he is trustworthy. The world is dark, but God is light & in him there is no darkness at all.
So I am not suggesting that we stop asking ourselves the difficult questions; but I do suggest that sometimes we look at the other side of reality, which is just as real or more so. Could we try to be at least as confident in our side of reality as the non-believers are in theirs? Could we try to trust in God & rest in his light - just sometimes? In Julian’s words:
He said not: Thou wilt not be travailed, thou wilt not be tempested, thou wilt not be dis-eased;
But he said: Thou wilt not be overcome.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
The Beatitudes
Both in sermons and in commentaries, people so often seem to see the Beatitudes - & much of the Sermon on the Mount - as a puzzle to be solved. How is it to be understood as a practical guide to life, as a sort of New Testament Ten Commandments, when so much of it is so “difficult”?
I am not going to add to the gallons of ink and the millions of spoken words that have been expended in commenting in detail upon the Beatitudes and the Sermon. Instead I am going to accept them as they are: if you want to be polite, paradoxical. If you want to be honest, they are crazy, unreal, even incomprehensible.
Yet they are central to Jesus’ teaching, to who Jesus was and to who we are.
No, Jesus was not saying that it is jolly to be poor, hungry and sorrowful. He did not expect you to cut off your hand, literally, if you are tempted to sin with it. He is trying to make us stop, rebel, and think. The impossible, the absurd, the contradictory, the apparently untrue, were his delight. They were his stock in trade.
The best way to make people listen is to startle them (remember Haydn’s Surprise Symphony?). And the best way to make them think is to make them rebel. As Kierkegaard rightly said, it’s no good telling people things; they have to get there themselves; to make them get there themselves, not to tell them, is your job...my job...what Jesus was doing.
So often, he is not trying to tell you about money, or mustard-seeds. He is trying to get you to see something. “O foolish and slow of heart!” “How long must I be with you? How long must I suffer you?” “Have I been with you so long, Philip, and still you do not know me?” How is it that you can’t see?
The Beatitudes are not like the Ten Commandments, to be learned by heart and carried out in detail. They are there, like so much of Jesus’ teaching - & his life - to be shocked by, nonplussed by; at the most, directed by. The Sermon on the Mount does not set out a law. It shows you an ideal you cannot achieve and possibly can’t even understand. “Be ye perfect(repeat, incredulously), as your Heavenly Father is perfect”? (repeat, incredulously)
It is, I think, quite likely that Luke’s version of the Beatitudes - which also includes the parallel Woes - is what Jesus actually said. It is certainly the more shocking. Matthew’s version seems to have been smoothed over, made, if you like, more ‘religious’. I suspect that what Jesus said was “Blessed are the poor, blessed are those who hunger and thirst...” It is an answer to the problem of pain, but not an immediately comprehensible one. It is not nice to be poor, to mourn, to hunger and thirst, to be persecuted. It is generally not a good idea, in this world, to be meek. And it is not unknown for peacemakers to struggle through life and meet a violent end.
My favourite childhood book was called “The Phantom Tollbooth”. It tells an Alice-like story of Milo, a small boy who entered a strange world by travelling, in his toy car, through a toy tollbooth. After many adventures he succeeds in reconciling two brothers who have been at war for as long as anyone could remember. At the start he was told there was a secret about his mission which he could only be told at its successful conclusion. What was it? he asks at the end. The reply is: “It was impossible.”
Well, it clearly was not impossible, because it was done: and yet it was impossible, and that was the magic of it. It was because it was impossible, rather than just difficult, that the story exists at all. Remember all those fairy tales and folk songs where the impossible is demanded: “Tell her to find me an acre of land (Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme) Between the salt water and the sea strand; Then she'll be a true love of mine. ...”
There is magic in the impossible.
Didn’t Tertullian suggest something of the kind when he said:
The Son of God was crucified: it does not make me ashamed, precisely because it is shameful.
The Son of God died: it is credible, precisely because it is absurd.
He was buried, and rose again: there is no doubt about it, precisely because it is impossible.
That is usually condensed as “Credo quia impossibile” - “I believe it because it is impossible”.
Or, as Jesus said, “With humans it is impossible. But with God all things are possible.” Of course they are. But they have to be impossible - and acknowledged as impossible - with humans first.
When things are clear, but very difficult, (some of the Ten Commandments or St. Paul’s lists of do’s and don’t’s) the result is discouragement. When they are impossible or absurd, there is space for magic - or for divine power.
Over and over in the Christmas liturgy, from the oldest Roman texts to the newest carols, you find this effort to express the shockingness, the absurdity, the sheer impossibility of the Christmas story - of Christianity, then, as it gets more impossible as the story progresses. Have you read the Athanasian Creed? Try it sometime. Three Persons in one God is absurd. True God born as true man while still remaining true God is absurd. The death of the Son of God is absurd. God cannot die. Come to that, creation from nothing is absurd. It cannot be. And there, where we come to a stop, is the space for the divine.
People talk about “fruitful tension”. To me the effect of these absurdities, these apparent untruths, these contradictory statements, is not so much a fruitful tension as an explosion in my brain. In the familiar phrase, it blows your mind. It must blow your mind. God - is - mind-blowing.
It is when we realise that we can’t do it, that we haven’t even begun, that divine power is let loose. That is what Jesus is trying to do.
So often we object to his parable in which the master orders his servants about & then does not thank them, & Jesus adds: “So you also, when you have done all these things that are commanded you, say: “We are unprofitable servants; we have done that which we ought to do.”
Why do we object? Do we think we are already perfect, when even St. Paul knew otherwise?
Kierkegaard remarks that it is always the stupid pupil who puts his hand up after ten minutes and says he has completed the assignment. He thinks he has completed it because he has not even understood what was required.
The point is that you have never finished. There is never a moment at which you have done it all. Like young Milo’s mission to reconcile King Azaz the Unabridged & his brother the Mathemagician, it is impossible.
But, you know, that is the Good News. It is absurd - but it is true. It is impossible - but it happened. We need no longer fear the incomprehensible, the vastness of the universe in comparison to our insignificance. We no longer need to fear anything at all. For God has overcome the world. He has led captivity, and our limitations, captive. In those frightening things, the absurd, the impossible, the apparently untrue, all we need see is his magic, his divine power; his resurrection - and ours.
I am not going to add to the gallons of ink and the millions of spoken words that have been expended in commenting in detail upon the Beatitudes and the Sermon. Instead I am going to accept them as they are: if you want to be polite, paradoxical. If you want to be honest, they are crazy, unreal, even incomprehensible.
Yet they are central to Jesus’ teaching, to who Jesus was and to who we are.
No, Jesus was not saying that it is jolly to be poor, hungry and sorrowful. He did not expect you to cut off your hand, literally, if you are tempted to sin with it. He is trying to make us stop, rebel, and think. The impossible, the absurd, the contradictory, the apparently untrue, were his delight. They were his stock in trade.
The best way to make people listen is to startle them (remember Haydn’s Surprise Symphony?). And the best way to make them think is to make them rebel. As Kierkegaard rightly said, it’s no good telling people things; they have to get there themselves; to make them get there themselves, not to tell them, is your job...my job...what Jesus was doing.
So often, he is not trying to tell you about money, or mustard-seeds. He is trying to get you to see something. “O foolish and slow of heart!” “How long must I be with you? How long must I suffer you?” “Have I been with you so long, Philip, and still you do not know me?” How is it that you can’t see?
The Beatitudes are not like the Ten Commandments, to be learned by heart and carried out in detail. They are there, like so much of Jesus’ teaching - & his life - to be shocked by, nonplussed by; at the most, directed by. The Sermon on the Mount does not set out a law. It shows you an ideal you cannot achieve and possibly can’t even understand. “Be ye perfect(repeat, incredulously), as your Heavenly Father is perfect”? (repeat, incredulously)
It is, I think, quite likely that Luke’s version of the Beatitudes - which also includes the parallel Woes - is what Jesus actually said. It is certainly the more shocking. Matthew’s version seems to have been smoothed over, made, if you like, more ‘religious’. I suspect that what Jesus said was “Blessed are the poor, blessed are those who hunger and thirst...” It is an answer to the problem of pain, but not an immediately comprehensible one. It is not nice to be poor, to mourn, to hunger and thirst, to be persecuted. It is generally not a good idea, in this world, to be meek. And it is not unknown for peacemakers to struggle through life and meet a violent end.
My favourite childhood book was called “The Phantom Tollbooth”. It tells an Alice-like story of Milo, a small boy who entered a strange world by travelling, in his toy car, through a toy tollbooth. After many adventures he succeeds in reconciling two brothers who have been at war for as long as anyone could remember. At the start he was told there was a secret about his mission which he could only be told at its successful conclusion. What was it? he asks at the end. The reply is: “It was impossible.”
Well, it clearly was not impossible, because it was done: and yet it was impossible, and that was the magic of it. It was because it was impossible, rather than just difficult, that the story exists at all. Remember all those fairy tales and folk songs where the impossible is demanded: “Tell her to find me an acre of land (Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme) Between the salt water and the sea strand; Then she'll be a true love of mine. ...”
There is magic in the impossible.
Didn’t Tertullian suggest something of the kind when he said:
The Son of God was crucified: it does not make me ashamed, precisely because it is shameful.
The Son of God died: it is credible, precisely because it is absurd.
He was buried, and rose again: there is no doubt about it, precisely because it is impossible.
That is usually condensed as “Credo quia impossibile” - “I believe it because it is impossible”.
Or, as Jesus said, “With humans it is impossible. But with God all things are possible.” Of course they are. But they have to be impossible - and acknowledged as impossible - with humans first.
When things are clear, but very difficult, (some of the Ten Commandments or St. Paul’s lists of do’s and don’t’s) the result is discouragement. When they are impossible or absurd, there is space for magic - or for divine power.
Over and over in the Christmas liturgy, from the oldest Roman texts to the newest carols, you find this effort to express the shockingness, the absurdity, the sheer impossibility of the Christmas story - of Christianity, then, as it gets more impossible as the story progresses. Have you read the Athanasian Creed? Try it sometime. Three Persons in one God is absurd. True God born as true man while still remaining true God is absurd. The death of the Son of God is absurd. God cannot die. Come to that, creation from nothing is absurd. It cannot be. And there, where we come to a stop, is the space for the divine.
People talk about “fruitful tension”. To me the effect of these absurdities, these apparent untruths, these contradictory statements, is not so much a fruitful tension as an explosion in my brain. In the familiar phrase, it blows your mind. It must blow your mind. God - is - mind-blowing.
It is when we realise that we can’t do it, that we haven’t even begun, that divine power is let loose. That is what Jesus is trying to do.
So often we object to his parable in which the master orders his servants about & then does not thank them, & Jesus adds: “So you also, when you have done all these things that are commanded you, say: “We are unprofitable servants; we have done that which we ought to do.”
Why do we object? Do we think we are already perfect, when even St. Paul knew otherwise?
Kierkegaard remarks that it is always the stupid pupil who puts his hand up after ten minutes and says he has completed the assignment. He thinks he has completed it because he has not even understood what was required.
The point is that you have never finished. There is never a moment at which you have done it all. Like young Milo’s mission to reconcile King Azaz the Unabridged & his brother the Mathemagician, it is impossible.
But, you know, that is the Good News. It is absurd - but it is true. It is impossible - but it happened. We need no longer fear the incomprehensible, the vastness of the universe in comparison to our insignificance. We no longer need to fear anything at all. For God has overcome the world. He has led captivity, and our limitations, captive. In those frightening things, the absurd, the impossible, the apparently untrue, all we need see is his magic, his divine power; his resurrection - and ours.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Iustus quidem tu es - late again
When faced with a passage like “if you walk in my ways and obey my statutes and commands as David your father did, I will give you a long life”, and similar passages, I am afraid the only thing I can do is struggle; I can’t produce tidy answers, only pointers and suggestions. All I can do is take you with me on my struggle and hope that somehow, something will make sense to you...and to me. If you have no problems with it, please do feel free to stop listening now.
That sentence put me in mind of Psalm 1, with its unequivocal statement of “just deserts in this life”: Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked: he is like a tree planted by streams of water, that yields its fruit in its season; and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. The wicked are not so but are like chaff which the wind drives away.
It’s great poetry, and very stirring; and in certain frames of mind it is very consoling; there are times when we all need to hear this. We are trying so hard, and everything is going wrong – but Things Will Change.
However, there is other, equally great poetry, which says things that are, in general, closer to our experience; Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it this way:
TThou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners' ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?
Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause.
Equally great, and in part equally inspired, since the first two lines are lifted bodily from the twelfth chapter of Jeremiah.
So what are we to do with sections of the Bible, such as that psalm, and this reading in which God tells Solomon that if he is righteous and godly he will receive earthly blessings? When our own experience tells us that things just aren’t like that?
There are two easy answers. One is to look at such passages, and others, in the Bible, say “This is all rubbish” and discard the whole thing, and probably Christianity, and all religion, into the bargain. To shut your eyes to the word of God in the Bible.
The other is to say “Well, it’s the Bible so it must be true; if you are suffering you must in fact be a sinner”. To shut your eyes to the word of God in real life.
Neither option is acceptable; indeed, these two options are the same option, the unacceptable option of refusing to look with both eyes, refusing to see the word of God wherever it is; refusing to think and search and take risks.
We do have to remember that the Bible is not a book but a collection of books; and that while undoubtedly, as Paul said, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness”, it has to be used correctly.
At times, when we are learning something, it is useful to go back to an earlier stage. But at a certain point we have to decide that the previous lessons are learned, and move on. And that is the case with the lesson that God is here teaching us through Solomon. It’s a twofold lesson: that God cares about us; and that he wants us to act rightly and according to his spirit.
The way to teach a child to “be good” is to reward good behaviour and punish bad behaviour and to reinforce that with threats and promises. I’d be concerned if an adult needed that treatment; but if it is never given, then there’s a fair chance that the person may never acquire the concept of good and bad.
Perhaps that straightforward correspondence between righteousness and prosperity is how things really were when God first starting bringing up his children. We don’t know. But quite clearly it is not so now and there is no profit in expecting it to be so, or claiming it is.
I think one problem is that for most of us over a certain age (and most of us here just now ARE over that certain age!) Christianity is the background to our lives; we received a basic formation in Christianity, in Bible stories, and in the “general respectable behaviour” expected of good Christian folk.
The result is that to some extent we take it as read that we know about God, about Christianity, And we don’t realise that in that, as in everything else, we need to grow up. We need to stop wondering why, or complaining that, God doesn’t treat us like children any more. You wouldn’t try to teach a three-year-old fuzzy logic; and God didn’t try to teach the newly-monotheistic Israel the concept of doing good for the love of God and his kingdom. The Christianity appropriate to a child is not sufficient to build an adult life or understanding of God on; just as the first rigid rules about grammar and spelling are not sufficient to understand poetry. Both are necessary; both have to be grasped and then superseded. We must continue to move on and to grow, even if it is frightening. Paul put it this way: “when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” His understanding of God and how to serve him did not gain him earthly prosperity, nor did he expect it to. It led him to persecution, imprisonment and a violent death.
And his comment on that was “what has happened to me has really served to advance the Gospel…I hoe that now as always Christ will be honoured in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain”. He does not understand how, or need to feel safe. He has the courage to float without constantly feeling for the sea-bed below him. It seems to me that that is a grown-up response, from a grown-up man.
We are growing, as Paul says elsewhere, into the stature of Christ, but we are not quite grown. And while there’s no doubt that some things are obviously good for us and some obviously bad, we do not always know the difference – but God does. If we ask for bread to eat, we won’t get a stone; but if, because we are still half-grown, we do ask for a stone, we may find that we are given bread all the same, and may not realise until much later why we did not get what we asked for. When St James says that if we don’t get what we ask for it is because we don’t pray as we should, he does not mean that we haven’t been subservient enough, not used the correct formulas, or missed out a semi-colon in the Collect. He means that we haven’t grasped that God is bigger than the things we have asked for.
Ultimately, it all boils down to trust – and doesn’t it always? Trust that God’s gift, and the joy it brings, is always greater than we can imagine or ask for. The psalmist got it right when he said “Thou hast put more joy into my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound”. What God promised Solomon is no longer enough; what he gives us now is himself.
And that is not always immediately satisfying, or even immediately obvious. Some of us may wait a lifetime.
I’ll let Hopkins have the last word, as he had the first; as he turns away from his own troubles and complaints, and towards the beauty of God’s creation, and realises that the only answer – always – is to turn back to God, and pray, and wait, for his gift of his Spirit. I think this is a prayer that many of us could make our own.
See, banks and brakes
Now leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build -- but not I build; no, but strain,
Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.
May He send to all of us the rain that will make us grow in Christ. Amen.
That sentence put me in mind of Psalm 1, with its unequivocal statement of “just deserts in this life”: Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked: he is like a tree planted by streams of water, that yields its fruit in its season; and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. The wicked are not so but are like chaff which the wind drives away.
It’s great poetry, and very stirring; and in certain frames of mind it is very consoling; there are times when we all need to hear this. We are trying so hard, and everything is going wrong – but Things Will Change.
However, there is other, equally great poetry, which says things that are, in general, closer to our experience; Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it this way:
TThou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners' ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?
Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause.
Equally great, and in part equally inspired, since the first two lines are lifted bodily from the twelfth chapter of Jeremiah.
So what are we to do with sections of the Bible, such as that psalm, and this reading in which God tells Solomon that if he is righteous and godly he will receive earthly blessings? When our own experience tells us that things just aren’t like that?
There are two easy answers. One is to look at such passages, and others, in the Bible, say “This is all rubbish” and discard the whole thing, and probably Christianity, and all religion, into the bargain. To shut your eyes to the word of God in the Bible.
The other is to say “Well, it’s the Bible so it must be true; if you are suffering you must in fact be a sinner”. To shut your eyes to the word of God in real life.
Neither option is acceptable; indeed, these two options are the same option, the unacceptable option of refusing to look with both eyes, refusing to see the word of God wherever it is; refusing to think and search and take risks.
We do have to remember that the Bible is not a book but a collection of books; and that while undoubtedly, as Paul said, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness”, it has to be used correctly.
At times, when we are learning something, it is useful to go back to an earlier stage. But at a certain point we have to decide that the previous lessons are learned, and move on. And that is the case with the lesson that God is here teaching us through Solomon. It’s a twofold lesson: that God cares about us; and that he wants us to act rightly and according to his spirit.
The way to teach a child to “be good” is to reward good behaviour and punish bad behaviour and to reinforce that with threats and promises. I’d be concerned if an adult needed that treatment; but if it is never given, then there’s a fair chance that the person may never acquire the concept of good and bad.
Perhaps that straightforward correspondence between righteousness and prosperity is how things really were when God first starting bringing up his children. We don’t know. But quite clearly it is not so now and there is no profit in expecting it to be so, or claiming it is.
I think one problem is that for most of us over a certain age (and most of us here just now ARE over that certain age!) Christianity is the background to our lives; we received a basic formation in Christianity, in Bible stories, and in the “general respectable behaviour” expected of good Christian folk.
The result is that to some extent we take it as read that we know about God, about Christianity, And we don’t realise that in that, as in everything else, we need to grow up. We need to stop wondering why, or complaining that, God doesn’t treat us like children any more. You wouldn’t try to teach a three-year-old fuzzy logic; and God didn’t try to teach the newly-monotheistic Israel the concept of doing good for the love of God and his kingdom. The Christianity appropriate to a child is not sufficient to build an adult life or understanding of God on; just as the first rigid rules about grammar and spelling are not sufficient to understand poetry. Both are necessary; both have to be grasped and then superseded. We must continue to move on and to grow, even if it is frightening. Paul put it this way: “when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” His understanding of God and how to serve him did not gain him earthly prosperity, nor did he expect it to. It led him to persecution, imprisonment and a violent death.
And his comment on that was “what has happened to me has really served to advance the Gospel…I hoe that now as always Christ will be honoured in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain”. He does not understand how, or need to feel safe. He has the courage to float without constantly feeling for the sea-bed below him. It seems to me that that is a grown-up response, from a grown-up man.
We are growing, as Paul says elsewhere, into the stature of Christ, but we are not quite grown. And while there’s no doubt that some things are obviously good for us and some obviously bad, we do not always know the difference – but God does. If we ask for bread to eat, we won’t get a stone; but if, because we are still half-grown, we do ask for a stone, we may find that we are given bread all the same, and may not realise until much later why we did not get what we asked for. When St James says that if we don’t get what we ask for it is because we don’t pray as we should, he does not mean that we haven’t been subservient enough, not used the correct formulas, or missed out a semi-colon in the Collect. He means that we haven’t grasped that God is bigger than the things we have asked for.
Ultimately, it all boils down to trust – and doesn’t it always? Trust that God’s gift, and the joy it brings, is always greater than we can imagine or ask for. The psalmist got it right when he said “Thou hast put more joy into my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound”. What God promised Solomon is no longer enough; what he gives us now is himself.
And that is not always immediately satisfying, or even immediately obvious. Some of us may wait a lifetime.
I’ll let Hopkins have the last word, as he had the first; as he turns away from his own troubles and complaints, and towards the beauty of God’s creation, and realises that the only answer – always – is to turn back to God, and pray, and wait, for his gift of his Spirit. I think this is a prayer that many of us could make our own.
See, banks and brakes
Now leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build -- but not I build; no, but strain,
Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.
May He send to all of us the rain that will make us grow in Christ. Amen.
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