Emmanuel - Christmas Day 2001

Emmanuel

"Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means, God is with us." Matt 1.23

“Pooh”, said Piglet taking his paw.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing. I was just checking that you were there…” (The House at Pooh Corner)

I did a project on piglets when I was an undergraduate. It was really my room-mate, Andrew’s project - he was an applied biologist.

We weaned 6 piglets at two weeks, 4 weeks and six weeks. Then we jogged out to the university farm before breakfast each morning and weighed the 18 little piggies (easier said than done), each alone in their own snug little sty. The experiment was to see how early they could be safely weaned.

Sadly, our main finding was that piglets have little piggy nervous breakdowns when they are separated too early from the litter. They are social animals, and integral to their health and well-being is companionship, the warmth of others.

Piglet needed Pooh to be there.

Most mammals are social, and humans are no exception. We were not created to be alone, and we only sustain aloneness with some difficulty.

In the first chapters of the Bible we read of Adam naming the animals and finding none suitable for the companionship he longed for. But then Eve is created: bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh; a companion.

God himself is also a social being: Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the mystical, eternal society. And so it was natural for God to enjoy friendship with his creation. He walked in the garden with the man and woman, in the cool breezes of the evening.

Then in his incarnation, he became a tiny dependent baby, mewling for his mother’s milk and subject to Mary and Joseph for half of his life.

As a grown man too he needed friends. Jesus was fully human. He had many friends: men and women; he loved children and had presumably watched many grow up in his wider family and had doubtless played with the children of some of his disciples.

But he had an inner circle of close friends: James and John, and Peter - there with Jesus for the transfiguration; there in the Garden of Gethsemane - Jesus wanted them with him in his most agonising hour of decision. He goes off to pray, but keeps returning: “just checking that you are there, and preferably awake”. And they were there, after the women, at the resurrection. Of the three, Jesus had a Best Friend - John, who stands by his mother at the cross.

Now there is no more God, walking with us in the cool of the day. There is no more physical Jesus, ready to sit and chat, and share a drink.

But there is a profounder reality of God’s companionship.

For the virgin has conceived and born a son, and his name is Emmanuel, which means, God is with us.

He is with us in a number of ways.

Since he lived here on earth, and shared our joys and sorrows, he can empathise with us in all that we go through. He is not distant and unmoved, but he is with us in all the richness and vagaries of our lives.

Then he has taught us that all humans are made in his image, and are to be loved, second only to God. So all our kinships and friendships are part of God’s being with us.

We cannot hug God, but we can hold the hand of a friend to check that they are there. And in our turn we can sit with friends and strangers, and by our physical presence assure them that God is with them.

And if through the birth of this baby, Emmanuel, God is with us; then as St Paul says, God is for us and who can be against us? Christmas dispels any superstition that God is somehow out to get us; ready at the least excuse to consign us to hell!

The manger scene is charged with love and a self-giving God who longs still for the companionship of his creation.

But companions leave us and Christmas is always a reminder of the empty seats around the table. The disciples were filled with foreboding as they realised that Christ was leaving them, from the manger to the skies.
So he reassures them in his words of parting: “I am with you always, to the end of the age”. (Matt 28.20)

Here is an even deeper spiritual mystery. For it has been the experience of Christians through the ages, that by God’s Holy Spirit, they sense the loving presence of God; Emmanuel, closer than the breath on our lips.

It is of course very subjective, but nonetheless real for being that. Loving our partners and friends is very subjective, but nonetheless real for being that.

And what of Emmanuel, God with us, beyond the close of the age?

This has been a year with not a little grief and anguish. John the Divine lived in more uncertain and turbulent times than ours and in his vision, Emmanuel gives the ultimate reassurance of his presence and Being:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away." (Rev 21.1-4)

"Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means, God is with us."

Voice Crying in Wilderness

Voice in the Wilderness

“The voice of one crying in the wilderness” John 1.23

Advent is almost passed. Christmas is nearly here. The last penitents are queuing at the confessional. The purple vestments will soon rest from their labours until lent. The Christmas trees are in church but not yet bedecked. The shops are advertising their New Year Sales.

And on this last Sunday before the nativity of our Lord, that strange and uncomfortable cousin of our Lord comes crying in the wilderness. With prophetic vision he calls on us to understand rightly what we are about to enact.

With all the intuition of an artist, pursuing his lonely vocation from God, he draws men and women into the unimaginable purposes of God.

A former Dean of Westminster, Michael Mayne, in his latest book, Learning to Dance, (DLT, 2001) suggests three abilities of the artist:

*they can show us what the world discloses when we learn to give it our full attention
*they can remind us of the hidden power of the transcendent
*and they can enable us, in Auden’s phrase, ‘to break bread with the dead’

In other words, they use the natural world, the supernatural world and our collective memory; to transform the here and now. And if this is true of the work of artists as I think it is, then it is also true of the ministry of John the Baptist.

He calls people out of the cities and villages into the natural world - the wilderness. He is a man of nature, with his camel hair clothes, leather girdle and his diet of locusts and wild honey. John somehow realises that his message of repentance and heart religion is better heard in the grandeur of God’s raw world.

Landscape and barren waste, raging seas and mountains, flowers and stars, the river Jordan in which John’s disciples are baptised - all are charged with greater significance, and all disclose deity. In the words of St Paul:

“Ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.” (Rom 1.20)

And even the beauty of man-made things can point to their divine Initiator if we will listen to our hearts. Here is CS Lewis:

“The books or the beauty in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust in them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing... They are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” (The Weight of Glory, SPCK, 1954, p8)

Secondly John reminds his followers of the hidden power of the transcendent. Matthew tells us that the voice cried in the wilderness: "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." (Matt 3.2)

The fabric of the temporal world is to be ripped apart by the birth of a baby. The virgin conceives; the supernatural invades the natural; the dawn from on high breaks among us and John declares he will baptise, not with the natural water, but with the transcendent fire of the Spirit.

Finally, John allows his disciples to break bread with the dead. Although what he preaches is in some ways new, he sees it only as a fulfilment of all that has gone before. The fullness of time has come and that spoken of by the prophets will surely come to pass.

This herald of Christ understands the present because he is soaked in the past. Sadly, the Christian voice is often a voice in the wilderness because so few in our society understand our roots. They do not break bread with the dead, they merely raid their tombs when it is convenient.

I read the little explanation on the back of a Celtic cross that hangs on my wall the other day. It is a copy from the original in St Kevin's Church Glendalough, in Ireland.

“A cross is the meeting of the horizontal and the vertical, yin and yang, feminine and masculine. In the Celtic cross the circle spins this union into infinity, into the cosmos, from the profane to the sacred.”

And there I was thinking it was something to do with Christ and Christianity! This is not breaking bread with the dead, it is breaking faith with the dead. Our collective histories and traditions are an essential part of responding appropriately to the present. It is impossible to appreciate where we are without acknowledging where we have been.

This is true at an individual level as well, and whether it’s sitting with friends and family this Christmas reminiscing, or telling our therapist, or reliving our past through Friendsreunited.com - these all enrich our present and help us to see more clearly where we really want to go.

Of course these three categories of Michael Mayne that we have been exploring in the ministry of John the Baptist, all find focus here at this altar in this mass.

These Holy Mysteries also

*show us what the world discloses when we learn to give it our full attention
*remind us of the hidden power of the transcendent
*and enable us, in Auden’s phrase, ‘to break bread with the dead’

In our Catholic tradition, the mass invites us to give our full attention to the physical world. It provokes our five senses of sight, taste, smell, touch and hearing. There is a physicality about the mass: about movement and eating, and gold and purple, and polyphony and pungency - which draws us beyond itself, and leaves us longing for Another Country and for the Beloved.

And then the Bread and the Wine remind us of the hidden power of the transcendent, mysteriously present in them - a power to transform us from mere animals scraping about the planet to survive; to spiritual beings made in the image of God; capable of beauty and heroism; of friendship and wonder.

And here we break bread with the dead: with the innumerable company of the saints all gathered around the altar. Our liturgy brings our collective memory of God’s saving acts into focus. It incorporates the truths grasped by those who have gone before us in the faith.

So we are called by God, in our turn, to follow John the Baptist as voices crying in the wilderness, always preparing the way for Christ, heralds of his coming; pointing men and women to the transcendence which is all around them if they will but turn and see; opening their hearts and minds to hear

“The voice of one crying in the wilderness”

Christ the King 2001

Christ the King

“To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honour and glory forever and ever. Amen.”
1 Timothy 1.17

Christ, the King of Glory.

It’s a funny word ‘glory’. As a boy, my theological development was greatly hindered because I had an Aunty Glory, and thought that all references were to her.

When I spoke at her funeral a couple of years ago I discovered she was named glory because my grandmother had given birth to 7 boys and when the midwife said ‘it’s a girl!’ the response came back - ‘glory be!’ And so she was.

I started looking at the origins of the word ‘glory’ while studying Isaac Newton at university. He taught himself Hebrew and Greek so he could better understand the Scriptures. And he was fascinated with the stories of Moses and ‘glory’.

The word in Hebrew ‘kabod’, means heaviness or weight, and Newton became convinced that Moses had hidden the inverse square law of gravitational attraction in the text of the Pentateuch.

He had hidden it so that common people would not discover it and abuse the knowledge. This prisca sapientia, ancient wisdom, was there for the true theological scholar to discover - God would reveal it to him. So Newton spent years sifting through the Hebrew text with various mathematical cyphers. Newton needed to get out more…

The OT in fact develops the idea, not from the inverse square law of gravitational attraction, but from an eminent man who had heavy possessions; heavy bags of money; heavy responsibilities - and even many heavy wives. A heavy man displayed gravitas. (Four years at St Mary’s and sadly I’m fast developing gravitas.)

When the OT was translated into Greek, (the Septuagint of the 2nd and 3rd century) the word ‘doxa’ was used to translate ‘glory’. It comes from the root word meaning ‘to think’ or ‘to seem’ and in classical Greek meant reputation (what others think of us) and opinion (what we ourselves think). And this is tied up with fame, honour, praise.

There’s one more little element left in this etymological tale.

In Scripture, whenever God displayed his crushing heaviness of being, his glory, there was Light - lightening, or blinding light, or a shining cloud, or a pillar of fire - the Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Listen to these verses from Exodus:

Then Moses said, "Now show me your glory." And the LORD said, "I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the LORD, in your presence. But, you cannot see my face, for no-one may see me and live." Then the LORD said, "There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock. When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen." (Ex 33.18-23)

Moses is told it is unbearable and all God would show was the shadow of his glory - his goodness - his moral perfection and beauty.

So the glory of God is full of light. He dwells in unapproachable light. Christ, the King of Glory, is the effulgence (as St Paul puts it) - the shining radiance - of God’s glory. And in that light of Christ we see ultimate moral beauty.

As Christians, we are summoned to follow Christ, the King of Glory, so that as we feed on him, we too begin to reflect the glory of God. We become heavier, more substantial, more solid.

It is a great mystery of the Christian life, testified to by all the saints, that as we grow in faith, spiritual realities become, not more certain, but more solid, almost tangible.

“Solid joys and lasting treasures, none but Zion’s children know.” John Newton (Glorious things...)

In CS Lewis’s allegory about heaven and hell, Pilgrim’s Regress, and in the Narnia Stories - everything is more solid in heaven. The present life on earth becomes ‘thin’ and insubstantial, wraithlike in comparison. We live in the shadowlands.

Our society talks much of ‘spirituality’ - the buzzword of school Ofsted inspections. But there is little focus to that spirituality; and indeed often a denial that there is any objective ‘other’; the transcendent God seen in Christ the King of Glory.

Because of this absent substantiator in postmodern society; an absence of the One who gives weight to human existence, there is a lack of solidness in society, of glory, of weight. We are all surface and image.

Not that there’s anything wrong with a bit of surface and image occasionally. I was shopping in Cambridge with my image advisor on Friday. He steered me away from some very sensible looking trainers (those are a kind of casual shoe) in Clarks and I now possess a pair of almost indistinguishable trainers from Raw at only twice the price.

But if image is all there is, then we are empty, and manipulated by the fashions of the age.

Nietzsche of all people recognised this: “When there is the ‘death of God’ in a culture, it becomes increasingly hollowed out, ‘weightless’”.

One of my fellow students at theological college was good at everything. And he knew it. So nobody liked him very much. There was much schadenfreude when he was rusticated for a term for driving a mini car through the front doors of the college - I think substances were also involved. Someone pinned a large notice above his door with the single word in Hebrew:

Ichabod - the glory has departed.

It was the name given to Eli’s grandson Ichabod, who was born just after a particularly crushing defeat by the Philistines who also stole the Ark of the Covenant which represented the glory of God.

In fact it’s a rather tragic little story which the Jewish writer turns into a little joke at the end. “And it came to pass, when the messenger made mention of the ark of God, that Eli fell from off the seat backward by the side of the gate, and his neck brake, and he died: for he was an old man, and heavy. (I Sam 4)

So the grandson, born at the same time is called Ichabod, the glory has departed - or, the heavy one has departed.

Ichabod might be a suitable epitaph for the last 20 years: much spiritual interest but little spiritual depth or weight. Believe but don’t belong.

It is a simple truth of the Christian faith that we must not neglect the spiritual because of the ever pressing needs of the secular.

To neglect nurturing our relationship with Christ is to increase our superficiality and weightlessness. It is an ultimate vanity.

In our tradition music and liturgy play a great part in nourishing our spiritual life. Christ, the transcendent King of glory cannot be grasped by reason alone.

The glory of our music, our architecture, our liturgy - these are all supposed to draw us into the weightier glory of God.

So on this Feast of Christ, the King of Glory, as he is exalted in the beauty of the music, as he is lifted up in the sacraments, as we contemplate Christ: crucified, risen, ascended and glorified...

...so may this weight of glory make us people of substance, able to serve Christ the King; able to offer solid joy to others.

“To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honour and glory forever and ever. Amen.”
1 Timothy 1.17

Review - Life's a Beach

Life’s a Beach

Mike Yaconelli
Messy Spirituality: Christianity for the rest of us
Hodder & Stoughton £6.99 (0-340-75635-7)

Here are 50 or more anecdotes loosely making the point that there are no slick formulae for guaranteed spiritual growth. “Spirituality is complex, complicated and perplexing - the disorderly, sloppy, chaotic look of authentic faith in the real world.” Mike Yaconelli is a popular speaker on the ‘postevangelical’ circuit and at UK events such as Greenbelt. He is an ageing, hippyish youth worker who pastors a little church in California which seems to attract the socially challenged like a gate with ‘Vicarage’ on it.
All these anecdotes are seasoned with biblical illustrations and in a very non-theological and accessible way he explores the spiritual concepts of openness, closure, rejection, via negativa, deficient discipleship and accidie - without mentioning any of them. With the great unchurched in his mind (and perhaps overchurched American evangelicals) he eschews both theological jargon and all the great historical spiritual writers. There are quotes and stories however from many of the gurus looked to by late 20th century ‘broad’ evangelicalism: Robert Capon, Jacques Ellul, Eugene Peterson, Henri Nouwen.
Yaconelli’s love of God and of people who feel rejected by more formal church structures is evident. “Spirituality is not about competency, it is about intimacy” he asserts. He has no time for those who mistake conformity to evangelical culture for the pursuit of God, and whatever your church style, he leaves you feeling slightly uncomfortable and wondering how inclusive many of our congregations really are.
This is a good book for those who have started well in the faith, but who are beginning to lose the plot and feel disheartened. I read it one morning on the beach in Gran Canaria and it made me feel better about having forgotten to take my Divine Office Book with me.

Church Times

Review - Thinks...

Thinks...

David Lodge
Secker & Warburg, 2001, 342pp, £16.99

It’s a campus novel and it’s a good read, as ever with David Lodge. His fluid and deft narrative style always makes me wonder whether I can bother to read on after the first few pages, and then you get drawn into the layers of the thing. Although this book starts with nine pages of self-conscious stream of consciousness - he’s full of self-parody - and then settles down to more recognizable Lodge. But here we have more than just a well-written campus novel.

Thinks... is also a very stimulating and informative postmodern encounter with the self, under the guise of an incidental exploration of cognitive science and artificial intelligence (AI). If you let it, the book has you staring into a literary mirror wondering who the person staring back at you really is, and whether your thoughts are hard-wired into your brain. And whether God is a virus.

Yes, there’s a good story, with bitchy university dons, and love affairs and lotharios and pushy wives and clever talk from High Table polymaths. (Although this is set in the fictional University of Gloucester in 1997 where there is no High Table, but a lot of characters very like the media dons on Channel 4 and Radio 4 .) But this is more than a story and certainly not a parable or extended metaphor. The quirky title, Thinks..., gives you a hint of your final destination.

Lodge admits that it was an article in The Tablet (John Cornwell’s ‘From Soul to Software’, June 1994) that set him off down the now well-worn trail of human identity, consciousness, language and brainworks. The trail may be well-worn, but the territory is still mostly uncharted. So it’s science, it’s philosophy and of course it’s theology - often Roman Catholic theology - not Lodge’s theology, but that of his characters. His ‘Acknowledgements’, at the back of the book, forms a ready bibliography of major publications on the trail in the 1990s. (I happened to be reading Ian M. Banks Look to Windward, his latest Culture novel (Orbit, 2000), while I was reading Lodge. The Culture presents another challenge to much Christian thinking on the role of machines, AI, and the hybridization of computer software and humans. And I am also reading the final part of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy, The Amber Spyglass, (Scholastic, 2000) which is a darkly creative approach to the human soul in the machine. And while I’m at it, I suppose I should commend my current ‘heavy’ reading, Fergus Kerr’s Immortal Longings (SPCK, 1997) which represents a philosophy of religion approach from the angle of transcendence and ‘what is human?.)

This is an enjoyable novel, full of different styles: narrative, parody (including Irvine Welsh), diary, email exchanges... and will get you hooked after the first couple of chapters. It might also send you off to find out more about human consciousness and more about the nature of human identity and how that fits in with our theology of eternal life.

Third Way