On Thursday, there is more lost-history to contemplate. More Christian life unknown. Certainly, His Grace tacitly withdraws some measure of the veil of – more creative years. Though what he has to say does not overtly contradict received Church teaching.
His Grace moves the beginnings of Christian faith – the Church – as from stunned remains: Jerusalem razed – as our first generations looked back onto it.
This nexus of salvation-history – all history pointed forwards-backwards either way in faith in Jesus. As, in intervening centuries, disparate communities scatter through what is becoming a wreckage of Empire, spiritual waste, gather their scraps, and they begin to communicate. Truth-recalled – reverse-transcribed like RNA like a retrovirus – penetrated into the pagan world laid out for it – became life.
*
On Friday, His Grace moves The Death Of God. Directly, he talks about Ron:
‘It may be some of you sitting here now have experienced the death of a person who has been very close to you and of considerable importance in your life. I hope each one of you may understand something of the importance of what I am saying, when I say to you what you might think is my stating the obvious, namely that a loved one dying can tear our faith apart.
‘I can see one or two of you nodding as I ask you to think about this. It is an important reality of our faith. I ask forbearance as I say this. I should like to share with you a thought, that in that experience of death, there is a place where our Christianity lives, if it lives at all, and has its seeding ground. Paradoxically, in a sense, it becomes a place where we are most alive, through which our life as Christians blossoms.
‘There are those of you also who don’t yet fully believe in death. This is because you are young. Death is an idea, a concept, but still it is a long way away from you really. If or when a loved one is in the process of dying and then dies, you are perhaps not now experiencing your own mortality, despite the form of words that we use in our Lenten services.
‘But there is an understanding about death that you need to have, if you have any sense of becoming a Catholic priest. Christ died. Before he did so, he begged his Father, and he experienced anxiety, even in a spiritual sense, commuted, despair. I put it to you that our Christian faith is not quite real without our knowing that.
‘Now I think one thing we need to understand is that grief takes us beyond faith. What do I mean by that? Well, grief shatters us. It’s very difficult to understand on a theoretical level. Our very sense of how things ought to be is violated. We are not equipped to think of death, not by home-spun, natural mechanisms, which is to say apart from revelation. With death, all that we thought we knew is thrown wide open. There is an emptiness about grief. Even to committed Catholics, who go to church on Sunday, their Catholic faith can seem suddenly a long, long way away from them, to the point of its coming to seem quite irrelevant. I hope you don’t mind my saying to you that it can all become a bit fish-on-Friday.
‘Now, this is quite a thought to take on for you. When in the close and lived presence of death, a person’s Catholic faith becomes, not even a comfort, but rather instead absolutely irrelevant. It simply doesn’t begin to connect with the reality that person is now experiencing. In some important and significant respects, it might as well not be there now.
‘Now these are difficult thoughts, because it asks us something about our faith, and it asks some very searching questions about the reality of our faith. How far does that reality extend? Does it reach into and encompass the absolute void of death, which we simply cannot countenance, but which is the experience of many when loved ones die, just as it must have been to those first Christians that first Holy Saturday? I ask you to think very deeply within that time. Where are we when the apparently absolute hollowness of death strikes? Are we still good Christians then, or are we desolate?
‘You see, we claim a lot as Christians, and then death comes along and pulls the rug out from under us. There is a stripping away here. This is what I should like you to think about through these next days. I’d like to develop this as a theology of Holy Saturday, which lies between Cross and Resurrection. Where are we, when death strikes, when we may seem totally, utterly bereft of hope, when we are not ourselves, when we are lost to ourselves? And I should like you to consider that a greater and more holy reality can and must be found here.
‘In terms of theology, the Church remains by and large unusually silent about this day. Well, what really happens in churches? The nice Catholic women come in and prepare for Easter? There’ll be the flowers arranged, and there’ll be people – all of them, who lead such busy lives, wanting and given this opportunity to contribute – for the Easter Vigil. It’s as if the day is almost deleted, whereas considered most truly, this is toward if not itself at the heart of Catholic faith. Think about it. A church can so often constitute a very peculiar picture today, by virtue of our community activity, which can become in a sense a kind of communal covering over, as we obey our most natural and immediate human instinct which is toward life. God is dead on the Cross, and he has not been resurrected yet; he has not come back to life. There’s no Easter yet, only complete and abject loss and failure. If that is not the very seedbed of our Christian faith then I don’t know what is.’
John speaks of the Last Supper in a different way from the Synoptic Gospels. He omits, for example, the institution of the Eucharist, because the other Gospels and Paul have already spoken of this in their accounts of the Last Supper. Through chapters thirteen to seventeen, John gives an extensive account of Jesus’ teaching at the Last Supper, in which Jesus builds on his teachings so far and leads his disciples to a greater understanding of the love that they must share and of the way ahead [ … ]
Sometimes, when I read my Bible, I pause in the reading and say to myself: ‘This bit’s real.’ It would be fair to say, I have issues with Mary, because, contrary to what we are taught to say, Mary isn’t my mother. Rather: Mum is. One bit of the Bible-text says this: And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for people were saying, “He is beside himself.” … And his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside they sent to him and called him. And a crowd was sitting about him; and they said to him, “Your mother and your brothers are outside, asking for you.” And he replied, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” And looking around on those who sat about him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother.” (Mark 3: 21; 31-35.) Here she comes. She is in considerable distress. I can imagine that. I can relate to that. To save her boy from whatever he’s got himself into this time. And you’re not telling me there isn’t something inside that. Her boy is beside himself. Radical. Radicalized. Radicalizing. A misunderstood word. /ˈradɪk(ə)l/ adjective & noun. 1 Forming the root, basis, or foundation; original, primary. 2a Inherent in the nature of a thing or person; fundamental. b Of action, change, an idea: going to the root or origin; far-reaching, thorough. c Advocating thorough or far-reaching change. d Characterized by departure from tradition; progressive; unorthodox. ‘He has a demon! And he is mad!’ – thus ‘the Jews’. (e.g. John 10: 20.) Come home! It’s all she wants. His family want him back now. But it is an exclusive cult: there is an inside and there is an outside; and on the outside, they are not meant to understand, lest they be converted. He has defined himself as different from anything she was. Only at the end does Jesus say to his Mum – and with savage, bitter irony: ‘Woman, behold your son.’ And then he dies. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. We ask that we might find Mary in our hearts as a Yes! place for Jesus. It is also recommended that we pray to Jesus that we may be further in oneness with Mary. It is self-emptying, such that we only exist insofar as we are responsive to God’s Word. * Last term, and put-out to pasture, the old Archbishop Emeritus came over to stay for a few days and did the odd class with us. He spoke of Yes! as the meaning of Mary’s virginity. And we were not very nice about him. One or two took umbrage. One or two got the hump. In a sense, his Grace, the Arch, basically wanted to move anyone he’d ever known from a high-place – a mountain – received theological ‘truth’ – to an imminent, human plane. Earthing the spiritual. Recalibrating metrics of life’s believability toward a spiritual sense of things. He might have asked the impermissible question: what happened? His Grace described it. God’s love as a cloud. This descended upon Mary – and subsumed her. Within the cloud, Mary capitulated utterly. She became only and purely a response to God’s love. As he spoke, the Arch cradled her. He carried her in his lap – in his hands. His Grace was a consecrated bishop. He was faith. He sat squat, a rounded man, hands cupped and ankles crossed, fingers interlocked, with parted thighs. Rumpled, washed, speckled. A lifetime’s skin… There could be no doubt His Grace spoke through long-term personal relationship with Mary. It was Julian went for him: ‘So are you saying Mary was a Virgin? Or are you not saying Mary was a Virgin?’ Nasty. No, it wasn’t pretty. Julian twisting his silver ring. For a moment, what Julian had said to the Arch simply failed to communicate. No, for a moment, that dumped on the air meant nothing. Then His Grace said: ‘There is a range of possible meanings we may understand in the question of Mary’s virginity. For example, there are understandings of the word virginity entailed in the action of giving birth.’ Julian said: ‘Duh! So had she had sex or hadn’t she?’ Trigger words. No, it wasn’t pretty. On that went for a little while. At length, Julian’s point seemed reluctantly conceded. Then the Arch told us a new story, an additionally human event, the more to baffle us. Controversially, he told us that Mary could not have been Joseph’s first wife, for this would not have been the way of things in the society of that time. His belief was that Joseph must have taken Mary into his household through pity. That would be normal, he said, for Joseph to bring a young, vulnerable girl, who is about to have a baby, within his protection, not meaning to enjoy with her marital relations, but through kindness. ‘And this story of the inn and stable,’ the Archbishop said, ‘it can’t have been like that really. Joseph has travelled with Mary to stay with his family, at home in Bethlehem, and they don’t want Mary in their house, for reasons which I am sure we can understand. It must have been there was considerable resistance to Mary. But Mary gives birth, and who can resist a baby? That’s what happened. It must have been. ‘I’m convinced that must have been how it happened really.’ Later that term, toward the beginning of Advent, we met boys who had been here before, in Valladolid, and now were in regular seminary. They had heard and recited verbatim all the Archbishop had said to them. Their spot-on impressions of each of the fathers were scathing. […]
The poem reflects a meditation on human suffering and redemption, as well as a call for divine assistance to transcend the human condition. It is structured in two stanzas, each beginning with the poet’s reflection on human limitations, followed by a plea for union with God, and concluding with a hope for spiritual elevation [ … ]
