1. Energy and Repose
2. Creation and the Priest
3. The Ambassadors of Christ
4. Sins of the Priest
5. St. Paul, a Profile
6. Murmuring
7. Accidie
8. On Fearing God
9. Abandonment
10. Obedience
11. Perseverance
12. Conference on Prayer
13. Our Lady
14. Father and Mother
15. Death as a Friend
16. To-day
CHAPTER 1. ENERGY AND REPOSE
It was St. Augustine, I think, who first coined that fine phrase about the
nature of Almighty God which tells us that he is "semper agens, semper
quietus," always active, yet always at rest. Always active--we can read the
assurance of that all around us. The trembling of a leaf, the downward
plunge of a waterfall, the flicker of flames on the hearth; all that motion
is not self-originated. Look at a fly zigzagging endlessly between the
floor and the ceiling; all that capacity for motion is not merely implanted
in it but imparted to it from moment to moment from without. And we too,
with all our freedom of choice, are not sufficient explanation of the life
that beats in us. All the activity in the Universe, even if it is mediated
by angelic or human creatures, is originated by Almighty God. And all that,
even, is only a by-product, a faint echo, as it were, of an eternal
pulsation. Before suns or worlds were created, the Three Persons of the
Blessed Trinity exercised, in their mutual relations, the everlasting
activity of the divine life.
And yet, "semper quietus," always at rest. As the bush that Moses saw on
Mount Horeb burned continually yet was not consumed, so in God, who is pure
Act, there is no change of state, no diminution of force, no recovering of
wasted energies. When we are told that he rested the seventh day after the
work of creation, that is only a metaphor, only an analogy. While he
created the whole hierarchy of the angels, the whole system of the heavens,
that activity could never alter for a moment his eternal, inviolable
repose.
The divine perfections are mirrored for us, as completely as the conditions
of humanity allow, in the human nature and mortal life of our Lord Jesus
Christ. That, after all, is one of the great reasons for the Incarnation;
by reason of it we can read the mysteries of the Divine Nature translated,
so to say, into human language. And here too you will find that the two
qualities I have mentioned existed simultaneously, though they could not be
exhibited simultaneously. All through his ministry he is cramped for time;
he is in such a hurry to complete the work his Father has given him to do
that he has no leisure even to eat, as he preaches to the thronging
multitudes, and when he would pray, he must withdraw to a mountain and
spend in prayer the hours while the rest of the world is asleep.
We are accustomed to divide that Life, and quite rightly, into two
sections--the hidden life of thirty years, when he dwelt at Nazareth and
was obedient to Our Lady and to his foster-father St. Joseph, and the
public life of less than three years' duration, when he went about doing
good. But we should do wrong if we thought of those thirty years as years
of mere quiescence, or of those three years as years of restless activity.
During his hidden life he was at work in the carpenter's shop, he knew the
pinch of poverty and the necessity of daily toil. Monotony of occupation, a
life of drudgery, does not as a rule make for recollection and repose; if
it did, I suppose many of us would be in a fair way to becoming saints. Yet
during all those years in Our Lord's hidden life there was no stroke of the
hammer, no screech of the saw, which was not accompanied by a perfect
interior act of oblation. And in his public life, though the multitude
thronged about him, and his feet tired on the roads and at night he had not
where to lay his head, always he was consciously in the presence of his
Heavenly Father, always he was enjoying that presence in a manner which the
most highly privileged among his saints never dreamed of.
For the theologians teach us that Our Lord, as Man, was "simul viator et
comprehensor:" he lived in our world, and at the same time he enjoyed, even
as man, that full and open vision of God which is to be man's reward in
heaven. We cannot begin to understand such a conception; but it is
theologically certain that while he lay in the manger at Bethlehem,
stretching out his hands in helpless infancy to his Virgin Mother, while he
hung upon the Cross, every muscle wearied out with the strain of his agony
and every joint racked with suffering, he was even then enjoying in that
secret fastness the open vision of God. Our Lord was, all his life, at one
with the Church Militant and simultaneously at one with the Church
Triumphant. "Semper agens"--there was no incident of mortality, sin only
excepted, that he would not experience. "Semper quietus"--he achieved that
experience without ceasing to enjoy, even in his human nature, the rest
which is the supreme recompense for all human endeavor.
And if we expect to find the Life of God mirrored in the human Nature of
Our Lord, so we expect to find his human Nature mirrored in the Blessed
Sacrament. Here, too, he is always active, yet always at rest. Always
active; from day to day, through the hands of his priests, he offers
himself upon a million altars for the world's salvation. Not, indeed, that
he can labor or suffer or sorrow any more; that is all over; only once the
Agony and the scourging, only once the nails and the lance and the Crown of
Thorn. But the force which was generated, if we may so crudely describe it,
by the Sacrifice made once for all on Calvary still pulsates and energizes
in the Holy Sacrifice of the Altar. The Divine Victim is still at work,
fresh graces to be won, fresh needs to be met, fresh sins to be atoned for.
Think of a piece of music, that is finished, you might say, once for all
when the composer's hand makes the last scratch upon the paper. In a sense,
yes, but in a sense it has only just begun; the same piece of music will be
played again and again all the world over; the echoes of the original
composition will not die, it may be, as long as mankind lasts. So it is
with our Lord's sacrifice; in a sense the stab of the lance put the final
stroke to it, yet in a sense it has never ceased and never can cease while
the world stands. Christ still lives among us, his fellow-men, and because
he so lives, he is still at work. We go up to the altar with our hearts
full of desires and longings which our conscious thoughts can hardly
express; and all these desires and longings of ours are caught up and
whirled away from us by the continuous stream of intercession which goes up
from the Sacred Heart. It is a great furnace, this Sacrament of the altar,
a great work-shop of prayer; never idle for a moment, while there are human
needs to be met, and human tears to be wiped away.
Ever active; and yet, ever at rest--if we throw ourselves down, even for a
moment, before the Tabernacle, how deep is the peace that steals over us;
how the unruly motions of our hearts are stilled; how we can take refuge,
as in a sudden harbor, from the buffetings of worldly circumstance! The
flame that burns in the sanctuary lamp is, we know, a succession of flames,
just as much as the ignition of a motor-car; and yet how stilly it burns!
So that Presence, which the sanctuary lamp heralds and honors, is a center
of ceaseless activity, and yet the influence that breathes from it is, for
us, an influence of repose.
Sweet Sacrament of Rest--if you want to know what that means, you should go
to a place like Tyburn Convent in London, where they have perpetual
Adoration within a stone's throw of the Marble Arch. In summer, especially,
when the windows are open; you can hear the whirring and grinding and
hooting of the cars, the tramp of ceaseless passers-by along the pavement,
the distant echoes of the Park Orators, preaching a dozen rival creeds to
indifferent London. All that you hear, but you hear it as if it was the
noise of a different world; for where you kneel there is nothing but
stillness--the stillness of the two nuns at their post of adoration, the
undying, unflickering flame of the candles, and beyond that the monstrance
with its tremendous Burden of living Silence. Always at rest--hidden beyond
the reach of eye or sense, he who reigns so tranquilly in heaven reigns
tranquilly here; no motion, no breath betrays the presence of a God.
"Semper agens"--in the holy Mass he is still busy with his work of
reparation and intercession. "Semper quietus"--in the Tabernacle he enfolds
his worshippers with the sense of eternal peace.
The earthly Life of our Blessed Lord is mirrored again, though less
perfectly, less unmistakably, in the Life of his Church. The Church is his
mystical Body, animated by his own Spirit; we expect, then, to find in her
life some echo, some reflection of his. And the Church too, in her own way,
is "semper agens, semper quieta." Always active--her missionaries going out
to spread the Gospel in lands which have barely heard of her Master's Name;
her theologians still agitated with controversy, her preachers calling upon
men to repent; her priests shepherding their flocks and ushering them into
eternal life from the cradle to the grave. More than that, she has a part
to play in the world; political events affect her position, political
movements call for her condemnation or approval; she must ever be on the
alert, she must always live at high pressure. Her enemies are ready to call
her a busybody and bid her mind her own affairs; but she is wiser than
they--and knows that religion cannot be divorced from life; that political
movements and currents of philosophical thought must affect, in their
degree, the eternal welfare of men's souls. She is always at work, and if
you once ask yourself the question, Which of the world's rulers is the
busiest? Which of them works the longest hours, and takes the least
holiday? you will not take long to find the answer. It is the man in a
white cassock who rules without an army, almost without a territory, in the
Vatican Palace at Rome.
And yet for all this bustle of hers, there is a sense in which the Church
is "semper quieta," always at rest. For if you would know her true self, if
you would approach near to the innermost secret of her life, you must go,
not to the palaces of Pope or bishop, not to the courts of ecclesiastical
tribunals, or the lecture rooms of learned theologians. You must go to the
cells of Carthusians and Carmelites, of Trappists and Poor Clares, if you
want to know what the Church really is. Shut off from the noise of the
world and its dusty disputes, sheltered by their protecting walls from
public inquisitiveness and from the blare of advertisement, these
cloistered souls find an interior peace which is, if we would but realize
it, the breath of the Church's Life, the source of her triumphs, the solace
of her despairs. Look at a man or a horse racing; and then remember that
behind all that tremendous display of outward activity there is one tiny
valve which beats all unseen, all unheard, within the breast; and if that
beating were to cease, all the external activities would cease with it.
Something of the same importance belongs to those homes of silence and
recollectedness where men and women serve God in holy religion: there lies
the heart of the Church. Their restfulness is her secret life; the
power-house from which all her restless activity must spring. Go elsewhere,
and you will see the rippling of her muscles; it is in the hours of
contemplation that you will hear the beating of her heart.
II
"Semper agens, semper quietus"--such is the Life of Almighty God, the
direct Agent in all change, all motion, all becoming, yet himself
unchanged, unmoved, uninfluenced. "Semper agens, semper quietus"--such was
the Incarnate Life of Jesus Christ, when he went about as Man, toiling and
suffering for our sakes, yet never losing for a moment the interior peace
which they enjoy who see God face to face. "Semper agens, semper quietus"--
such is the Life of Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament; offering himself
day by day as a spotless oblation, atoning for our fresh sins and winning
us fresh graces, yet, in the Tabernacle, the Type and the Source of rest.
"Semper agens, semper quieta"--such, in its degree, is the life of Holy
Church, always restlessly at work over her business of world-conquest, yet
ever finding repose in the hidden lives of her contemplative children. And
now, what of your life and mine?
Is it too much to say that our lives ought to be modeled on the same
pattern, ought to bear the same hallmark, ought to have this double
character of energy and repose? If we are really to understand our
Christian vocation, that semper agens, semper quietus ought to be our motto
too. Always active; we cannot afford to stand still. Apart from the press
of our secular business, our home duties, our duty to the nation in a time
of peril, the need of making a livelihood, and so on, we have to work out
our own salvation, we are told-- the devil is only too ready to take
advantage of us if he sees us trying to mark time. And yet, always at rest.
Why else does the epistle to the Hebrews imply that we have already entered
into rest by becoming Christians? Why does the Sacred Heart say "Come unto
me, and I will give you rest"? There is a rest, even here, for the people
of God; there is, for every soul which has really learned to love our
Blessed Lord and to abide in his love, a fortress of interior peace which
no assault from the world can enter, no echoes of the world's anxieties
disturb. The soul which has learned to practice the presence of Christ, and
to be happy alone with him, has found something more than peace in heaven;
it has found peace on earth. That is how the Saints lived; that is how they
contrived to undertake such vast labors, such heroic mortifications. "You
are dead" St. Paul writes, "and your life is hidden with Christ in God". If
we only believed that, if we only understood that! Then indeed we should be
able to face the worst life has in store for us with careless eyes. You are
a good active Christian? Thank God. And now, since he has given you the
grace to be active in his service, ask one more grace of him; ask that you
may learn of him, learn of the Sacred Heart, how to rest quietly in his
love.
You see, we're so accustomed to divide our life into alternations of
activity and quiescence; we work and then we rest and then we work and then
we rest; what other arrangement is possible? And I suppose that most of us,
when we think of our retreat, think of it by a sort of pious metaphor as a
spiritual holiday; at other times of the year we are too busy to think as
much about God as we would like to; now we are at leisure to be, for once,
our true selves.
Perhaps it is simplest to put it in this way; that we ought to try and
expunge one phrase from our vocabulary as far as possible; I mean the
phrase "going out of retreat". We oughtn't, if you will excuse my saying
it, to go into retreat with the feeling that later on we are going out of
it, like a man doing a treatment at a spa in the hope that afterwards he
will find it has done him some good. We ought to be more like invalids who
are just preparing to get up, and are having a course of massage for their
legs so that when they do get up they will be able to walk. We are trying
to gain, in this week, a poise of the soul which will, please God, remain
ours. And we shall have succeeded, in proportion as his grace enables us,
when we have "come out of retreat", to live in greater recollection than
before; always active, because even our times of recreation will be filled
with a desire of living in his glory; always at rest, because the most ex-
hausting labors will never be able to distract our attention, entirely,
from him.
What is it, in its own nature, the habit of recollection? It doesn't mean
merely pulling yourself up and thinking seriously about your state of life,
your duties, your sins, your temptations, your ambitions, and the rest of
it. Recollection doesn't mean thinking about "your" anything; it means
thinking about you. Put it in this way--you and I are breathing all day,
but unless we are asthmatic we are not conscious of our breathing; we go on
doing it without thinking about it. Now direct your attention to the fact
that you are breathing, and you become conscious of it at once. You can
feel, you can hear yourself breathing. In the same way, we spend most of
our lives thinking without thinking about it; the attention of our minds is
directed outwards towards the objects of our thought, not inwards towards
ourselves thinking. Now direct your attention to the fact that you are
thinking; you become conscious at once of your own immortal soul. This
thing which is thinking all the time, which is thinking at this moment
about itself, is an immortal substance specially created by God, and
destined to survive to all eternity. It is nearer to us than anything else
can be. But you were not thinking about it until I suggested it to you just
now.
In the solitude in which we find ourselves we find God. Turn your eyes
outwards, towards the stars or the ocean or the sunset, and you will be
able to argue God's existence, but you will not attain to his presence. He
is present everywhere; but whenever you think of him as present, there will
always be some space, some distance, intervening between you and him,
unless.... Unless you turn back upon yourself, and look into your own soul.
There you will find him, with no barrier of space to cut him off, even in
imagination, from you. He is present in every operation of your soul; its
thoughts, it memories, its desires, all its activities, exist only through
the powers of motion which he lends to it. That, even in the natural order;
and in the supernatural order the motions of his grace are playing over
your soul all the time like sunshine over a pool. When you look for the
presence of God, do not worry about here and there; wherever you are, you
have only to look into yourself, and you will find him.
I wonder if we make a practice of doing that as much as we ought to, even
those of us who are living lives of serious purpose, and of regular
observance? Yet it is such an easy thing to do; not necessarily in our
times of prayer--though it is the best possible preface to our times of
prayer--but at odd moments during the day. You have to wait two or three
minutes for an engagement or a 'bus or a train; and your eyes wander at
once towards the people who are passing by, or even to the advertisements
on the hoardings--what advertisements! Those two or three minutes pass in
idle speculation; if you kept your eyes still, and suddenly turned back
your thoughts upon yourself, you will find yourself, just for those two or
three minutes, in the presence of God. Or you may use even a shorter
interval of time; when you are just switching over from one occupation to
another, you can pause just for that fraction of time, and look into your
own soul, and greet for a moment, as a soldier salutes his senior officer,
the presence of God there. The busiest day can be sanctified, if its
moments are thus punctuated by the recollection of God in the soul.
Let us be clear about it--no state of life, whatever opportunities of
prayer it gives us, however rigid be the framework of observance within
which it moves, will guarantee for us, of itself, the habit of
recollection. There will always be interests, attachments, ambitions ready
to distract our thoughts, and so draw us away from ourselves. There will
always be excuses for neglecting ourselves, for hiding ourselves away from
God's presence upon the pretext of serving him by our activities. Martha
can always put up a good defense against Mary. And, in proportion as we
allow that to happen, we are spoiling not only the temper of our spiritual
lives but, very often, the effectiveness of our work as well. We shall
become fussy, and impatient, and irritable, and despondent, and jealous,
and critical and sentimental, and generally unbalanced, and all that will
tell--will take away something from our efficiency, will hamper the value
of our actions, quite apart from spoiling the purity of our intentions. Our
influence on other people will be the less and the poorer, if we have no
roots of recollection in ourselves. "Semper agens, semper quietus," that is
the character which will tell. If you miss that, you will be "semper
agitans, semper agitatus;" you will live in an atmosphere of tension which
you will communicate to others, and so make life less happy and work less
fruitful both for them and for you.
So let us ask Almighty God if he will not deepen in us, in the course of
this retreat, the spirit of recollection.
CHAPTER 2. CREATION AND THE PRIEST
If a man should set out to go through the Bible, pausing and making a
meditation wherever he found material, he would be a dull fellow if his
attention was not caught by the second verse of it. "The earth was void and
empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God
moved over the waters." Creation still in the melting-pot; so that we have
nothing for our composition of place except a formless sea of
undifferentiated matter, dark, not by some effect of shadow, but with that
primal darkness that reigned before light was made. And over this inert
mass, like the mist that steals up from a pool at evening, moved, already,
the Spirit of God. Already it was God's plan to educe from this chaos the
cosmos he had resolved to make, passing up through its gradual stages till
it culminated in the creation of Man.
Deep in your nature and in mine, as we sit here, lies just such a chaos of
undifferentiated matter, of undeveloped potentialities. Psychologists call
it, the unconscious. It is a great lumber room, stocked from our past
history. Habits and propensities are there, for good and for evil;
memories, some easily recaptured, some tucked away in the background;
unreasoning fears and antipathies; illogical associations, which link this
past experience with that; primitive impulses, which shun the light, and
seek to disguise themselves by a smoke-screen of reasoning; inherited
aptitudes, sometimes quite unsuspected. Out of this welter of conditions
and tendencies the life of action is built up, your life and mine. And
still, as at the dawn of creation, the Holy Spirit moves over those
troubled waters, waiting to educe from them, with the co-operation of our
wills, the entire life of the Christian.
With us, he has set about that business in a special way. He has made us
priests; and there is a curious analogy, I think, between the process by
which God made man, and the institution of the priesthood. I hope you will
bear with me if I draw out that parallel rather in detail.
When did God make man? Why, at the very end of his creation, and (if we may
so say without irreverence) by a kind of afterthought. Already he had made,
on the sixth day, the beasts of the field; you quite expect to hear, after
that, "And there was morning and evening, a sixth day". But no, all was not
over yet. God said, "Let us make man, after our own image"--almost as if it
were a kind of sudden inspiration, like that of a child inventing a new
game: "Let us make man". That puts us in our place rather, doesn't it? To
think that God might have been content to make a world in which the plants
grew with no human hand to weed or to tend them, a world in which the
animals survived or perished according to the law of their nature, with no
human master to kill them, or to tame them to his purposes. But at the last
moment, God said, "Let us make man".
When did our Lord institute the priesthood? Well, in a sense on Maundy
Thursday, on the last evening of his mortal life. But he did not make his
intention clear until he met his apostles again on Easter Day in the
Cenacle; when he breathed on them and said, "Receive ye the Holy Ghost".
Once more, you see, it is a kind of afterthought; the work of our
Redemption is finished, death has been vanquished, and hell harrowed, and
the holy patriarchs have gone to their reward, and the reign of grace has
begun--and our Lord did all that without any priests to help him. He trod
the winepress alone, and of the people there was none with him. And he
could have achieved your sanctification and mine, could have spread his
gospel through the world and given mankind faith to justify them, charity
to sanctify them, without any priests to help him, if he had decreed to do
so. But no, at the last moment, a thought seems to strike him, "Let us make
priests".
Why did God make man? Partly, no doubt, because he wanted, from his
creation, a conscious response of gratitude. When he made sun and moon and
stars, and the earth with all its delicate beauty, its intricate
workmanship, he pronounced it very good, and the sons of God shouted for
joy, we are told, at this new thing that had come to be. But within the
material universe itself there was no answering cry of recognition. True,
the stars in their courses, the orderly process of the seasons, showed
forth the glory of God; true, the living animals could enjoy some confused
pleasures of memory and hope, and in doing so rendered a kind of mute
homage to their Creator. But amid all that wealth of multitudinous life no
conscious response was given, until he made man, to be, as we say, the
priest of creation; to praise God on behalf of those dumb, material things,
with a mind that could reason and a voice to express their thankfulness.
The priest of creation; the instrument through which the chorus of its
praise should thrill and become vocal at last.
But there was more than that; Almighty God wanted his creation to be taken
in hand for him. Why, we do not know; but the want is clearly expressed in
the account which scripture gives us, "There was not a man to till the
ground". God did not make man to be a kind of toy, a final piece of
craftsmanship more subtle, more delicate than all the rest. He made him to
bear rule over the birds and the beasts and the fishes; to be the viceroy
of his new dominion. He was to impose God's will on this planet; he was to
be a kind of tool by which God's action would express itself, through the
long centuries during which the visible order was to persist.
Why did our Lord institute the priesthood? Partly because he wanted to have
a special set of men who would have the freedom and the leisure to make a
whole-time job of his service. The rest of us would be so busy, earning our
daily bread and looking after our families and fulfilling our various
duties as citizens, that we should not be able to attend on him as
continually as we should have wished, to think about him as uninterruptedly
as we should have wished. Partly that, but partly also because he wanted
this new supernatural creation of his, the Christian Church, to be taken in
hand for him. As he would have man to look after the dumb beasts, to fold
them and guide them and feed them, so he would have priests to look after
the faithful, to fold them and guide them and feed them in the ways of the
supernatural life. He could have done without us, but he preferred to have,
once more, a kind of tool through which his action should express itself.
Tools in his hand, that is what we priests were to be.
How did God make man? Doubtless you have to make some allowance for the use
of figurative speech; we do not go to the book of Genesis for exact
chemical formulae. But when we are told that the Lord God formed man out of
the slime of the earth, it surely must mean this, whatever else it means--
that man on his physical side is one with the material creation which
surrounds him. We may strut and give ourselves airs, and tell one another
that we have conquered practically the whole of nature and it is only a
matter of time before we conquer the rest of it; but the fact remains, we
were made of the slime of the earth; dust thou art, as the priest says to
us on Ash Wednesday, dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. If we
are anything more than dust, it is only because God saw fit, of his free
bounty, to do something else. "God breathed into his nostrils the breath of
life, and man became a living soul." That lifeless thing, a mere toy of
dumb clay, which lies there on the ground--it is only God's inspiration
that has turned it into this wonderful creature we know and are, Man.
How did our Lord institute the priesthood? "When he had said this, he
breathed on them, and said, Receive ye the Holy Ghost. Whose sins you
remit, they are remitted unto them, and whose sins you retain, they are
retained." With one breath, God created the whole human family; with one
breath, our Lord instituted the whole Christian priesthood. As man is a
beast among the beasts, so the priest is a man amongst men; he shares their
passions, their weaknesses, their disabilities. And yet, when God breathes
into the face of a priest, a new thing, in a sense, comes into being, just
as when God breathed into the face of that clay image he had fashioned. It
was a kind of second creation, when our Lord spoke those words in the
Cenacle. It brought into the world a new set of powers, infinitely
exceeding all that man had ever experienced, all that man could ever
expect. It was a fresh dawn of life--supernatural life. Man could no more
have evolved into a priest than a beast could have evolved into a man; it
was a special creation, this time too.
What is the meaning of all that? It would have been possible, it might even
have seemed natural, that our Lord, having won our redemption for us,
should apply the fruits of that redemption to our souls without any kind of
priestly ministry to aid his purpose. Many who value the name of Christian
still find it reasonable to believe that he did just that; the priesthood,
they will tell you, belonged to the Jewish covenant, to the old Law; when
the mercy of God shone out to us in the face of Jesus Christ, the need for
all ceremonies and sacraments was done away. But it is not so that the
courtesy of our Lord Jesus Christ treats us. When he turned water into wine
at Cana of Galilee, he used no word, no touch, no gesture, to claim the
miracle as his own. "Fill the water-pots with water.... Draw out now, and
bear to the governor of the feast"--the miraculous transformation should
take its effect between the hands of the servants who were waiting on the
guests; they should have the apparent credit for it. And so it was when he
multiplied the loaves in the wilderness. He gave the loaves and fishes to
the disciples to distribute; it was in their hands, it seems, that the
multiplication took place. It is part of his courtesy, you see, that he
will thus associate human agents with himself, just when he gives us the
most startling proofs of his miraculous power.
And so it is with the Christian priesthood. Not only when he gives us,
under the forms of bread and wine, his own Body and Blood to be our food;
in all the Sacraments he is the true author, the true fountain of grace,
yet he will suffer a human ministry to intervene. "Receive ye the Holy
Ghost; whose sins ye shall remit, they are remitted unto them, and whose
sins ye retain, they are retained." But most, and most characteristically,
in the Sacrament of Holy Eucharist. When a priest baptizes or absolves, he
stands there, sits there, only to unseal the fountains of grace to the
faith, to the penitence, which knock to receive them. But when he stands at
the altar, the priest does something more; he takes upon himself the Person
of Christ, re-enacting in his name the ceremony which he performed on the
night of his Passion. A priest clad in the sacred vestments (says the
author of the Imitation) is the vice-gerent of Christ himself. He uses our
Lord's own words, identifies himself with the offering which our Lord
continually makes before the Father, of his own Body and Blood. How is it
that men can be found with the assurance, with the presumption, to do that?
The difficulty is solved for us by one golden phrase of St. John
Chrysostom's; we all know it. "When you see a priest offering the
Sacrifice," he says, "do not think of it as if it were he that is doing
this; it is the hand of Christ, invisibly stretched forth". The hand of
Christ invisibly stretched forth--that is the picture we should conjure up
to our minds if we are to think of the Mass as it really is. Aristotle, in
defining the position of a slave, uses the words, "A slave is a living
tool". And that is what the priest is, a living tool of Jesus Christ. He
lends his hands, to be Christ's hands, his voice, to be Christ's voice, his
thoughts, to be Christ's thoughts; there is, there should be, nothing of
himself in it from first to last, except where the Church allows him,
during two brief intervals of silence, to remember his own intentions
before God. Non-Catholics who come to our churches complain sometimes,
don't they, that the ceremonies of the Mass seem so lifeless, so
mechanical. But you see, they ought to be mechanical. What the visitor is
watching, so uncomprehendingly, is not a man, it is a living tool; it turns
this way and that, bends, straightens itself, kneels, gesticulates, all in
obedience to the orders given it-- Christ's orders, not ours. We do not
expect eccentricities from a tool, the tool of Christ.
In an ordination ceremony, the future priest is stretched out at full
length, face downwards, like a corpse, like a dummy, while the solemn chant
of the litany rolls over his head. He is waiting there like a dead thing,
for the Holy Spirit to come and quicken him into a new form of life; as
Adam's body waited, slime of the earth, for the informing touch of the
Creator's hand to turn it into a living soul. He is yielding his body to
Christ to be his instrument, as if he had no life, no will of his own. And
even when he has risen from the ground, his hands must be tied together
with a purificator, in token that he is the captive of Jesus Christ; his
slave, to drive and control at will. "I live, now not I, but Christ liveth
in me"--that is the protestation which these ceremonies make on behalf of
the newly-ordained priest. No life of his own, no liberty of his own;
henceforth he is Christ's.
This slavery to which the priest commits himself does not begin and end
when he is saying Mass, when he is performing ceremonies. Ah, if only it
did! No, it is a life-time of service; a life-time during which the priest
must consecrate himself, must keep on consecrating himself afresh, to his
Master, if only for the sake of the flock which his Master has entrusted to
him. The merely mechanical part of a priest's life, the ceremonies he has
to perform, the sacred words he has to utter--these come easier to him with
use as time goes on. It is not so with the consecration of the heart. That
is in danger of growing more formal, more faint, as the love between
husband and wife is in danger of growing more formal, more faint, when the
bloom has rubbed off their romance. The priest, as the years pass, will be
tempted to settle down into a rut, to be satisfied with formal pieties and
think he is doing well enough. There will be disappointments, too, and
discouragements, to make him cynical and disillusioned. God forgive us, how
many of us become crooked tools in the hand of Christ!
Don't let's forget that man was created to live in a Paradise, and lost it
through a kind of claustrophobia. Even there. he could wish for wider
horizons. Do you remember the description of how Adam and Eve met their
Creator after the Fall? We are told that the Lord God walked in the
Paradise at the afternoon air, and called to them, "Adam, where art thou?"
And they? They had hid themselves away in the trees of the garden. Do not
let us waste time over discussing, in what sense he who is everywhere
present could be said to walk, at a particular time, in his Paradise; how
he, whose scrutiny is infallible, could need to search for his truant
creatures. The picture given us in the book of Genesis is at least amply
borne out by our own experience. Do not we know what it is to have offended
God, to be sought out by God, and to endeavor, by futile efforts, to hide
ourselves away from that Divine pursuit?
It is what the economists would call, I think, a vicious spiral. The more
we consent to sin, the more we neglect our prayers, because it would make
us uncomfortable to meet God like that; we should feel ashamed of
ourselves-- and besides, we should have to promise amendment. So we neglect
our prayers, and through the neglect of prayer comes fresh sin. I am not
thinking now of mortal sins, I am not thinking of people who give up prayer
altogether. But how easy it is, when we are being careless about deliberate
venial sin, or about the remote occasions of mortal sin, to funk meeting
God! To take refuge in the love of creatures, or even--heaven help us, what
strange beings we are!--to take refuge in our work, so long as it is quite
external to ourselves, just like Adam and Eve hiding among the trees of the
garden, so as to make certain that we are never left alone with God. And we
become blunt tools, rusted tools, in the hand of Jesus Christ.
He is looking for you, the tool that once glittered so bright with the oil
of consecration. He is looking for you, the lost shepherd. "I never seem to
come across him now" you may picture our Lord as saying; "I must see if I
can find him at the retreat". At some familiar turn of the walks,
consecrated for you, perhaps, by memories of youth, he is waiting for you.
In the cool of the afternoon air, when the busy jarring of your daily
interests, anxieties, grievances has died down, and there is peace in your
heart, he is waiting for you. In some passage of a book you have taken out
of the library, a book you have often read before without being specially
arrested by that passage, he is waiting for you. There will be a moment of
embarrassment, but it need not be more than a moment. You have only to cast
yourself down, with Peter, at his knees, and say, with Peter, "Depart from
me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord". He will not take you at your word.
CHAPTER 3 .THE AMBASSADORS OF CHRIST
The epistle for the first Sunday in Lent (2 Cor. vi, 1-10), try as we may
to make it sound as if it referred to the congregation, refers really to
ourselves. It is so plainly St. Paul's conception of what his ideal priest
ought to be like.
The Liturgy makes the whole passage somewhat mystifying by leaving out the
verses immediately before, which set the key for the whole. "We are
Christ's ambassadors, and God speaks to you through us; we entreat you in
Christ's name, make your peace with God." St. Paul's metaphor, then, is
that of an ambassador, and an ambassador delivering, on behalf of his
Sovereign, an ultimatum, a direct threat of war. The priest, at the
beginning of Lent, has to entreat his congregation not to offer the grace
of God an ineffectual welcome. So many graces missed already, and now the
acceptable time has come, the day of salvation; treat this Lent, brethren,
as if it was your last chance! Lent, you see, is a kind of sacramental
expression of the span of life that still lies before us, the time granted
us for repentance, for making our peace with God. If we do not make our
peace with God, then, at the expiration of the time fixed, of the days of
grace he has offered us, we find ourselves in a state of war with God, his
enemies, and eternally. It is an ultimatum we deliver; now or never, make
your peace!
So far, the moral has been for the congregation; the rest of the epistle is
a moral, entirely, for the priest himself. We are careful not to give
offense to anybody, lest we should bring discredit on our ministry; Christ
wants for his ambassadors, not just any sort of ambassadors, but
ambassadors trained in a school of Divine diplomacy. Not mere town-criers,
shouting out "Oyez, oyez!" so as to say, afterwards, that everybody in the
street has had fair warning; men entrusted with plenipotentiary powers, to
secure the renewed loyalty of the rebellious subjects, if there is any form
of persuasion that can do it. It is for the ambassador to ingratiate
himself with the people of the country he is sent to; make people love and
respect him, so that they may love and respect the master he represents.
To be the ambassador of Christ after a fashion, makes no great demands on
the priest. All he has to do is to get up every Sunday morning, read out
the Credo, and say "If you don't believe that, my dear brethren, you will
go to hell"; get up every Sunday evening, read out the Ten Commandments,
and say, "If you don't keep those, my dear brethren, you will go to hell".
The ultimatum has been delivered-- yes. But have we really been
ambassadors? John Wesley, when one of his sermons hadn't made much
impression, used to note the fact in his journal, and add, "I am clear of
these men's blood". He was a great man, John Wesley, but I don't like him
when he uses that phrase. Don't let us ever get into the habit of thinking
that after having given our congregation twenty minutes on the danger of
mixed marriages, and twenty minutes more on the importance of being in time
with the bench rents, we are "clear of their blood". Something more is
demanded of an ambassador; what? St. Paul goes on to tell us; not very
tidily, because he hadn't a very tidy mind; but perhaps more tidily than
usual.
Patience, a great deal of patience--that, he tells us, is the first thing
we need. And he goes on to give nine samples of the kind of things we have
to put up with, divided into three threes. "In times of affliction, of
need, of difficulty-those are the mental discomforts brought on us by the
vicissitudes of our work; "under the lash, in prison, in the midst of
tumult"--those are the bodily discomforts inflicted on us by our fellow-
men; "when we are tired out, sleepless, and fasting"--those are the bodily
discomforts inflicted on us by circumstance. The picture seems to us
highly-colored; do not let us forget that priests in many parts of the
world are having, now, to work under those conditions; times may change,
and we may have to ourselves. Meanwhile, patience is not less demanded of
us because the provocations to which we are accustomed are, by comparison,
pin-pricks. How difficult it can be when the faithful will try to
buttonhole us after Mass on Sunday; when we are tired out after the
confessional yesterday, sleepless after mutton-chops at half-past nine and
a long evening with the notices, fasting until after the last Mass is sung;
in affliction, need, and difficulty because we are already trying to
buttonhole so many people ourselves, trying to remember what it is we have
so importantly got to say to them; the last moment when we want to be under
the lash of the parish grouser, imprisoned by the parish bore, in the midst
of tumult, with the altar-boys kicking up a shindy all around us--and this
is the moment when, most of all, the parish sees us, and ought to see us at
our best!
You don't need to tell me that it is the fault of the laity. Only last
Sunday I preached to fifty school girls imploring them not to grow up into
the kind of people who buttonhole priests after Mass. But it is a splendid
opportunity, you know, for realizing our ambassadorship. It's very odd to
reflect what a lot of the good marks some of us will get at our last
account will be for keeping our tempers, just, with great difficulty,
keeping our tempers, at moments when nobody imagined we were in any danger
of losing them.
And then you have a list, I think, of four qualities which the perfect
ambassador ought to have. St. Paul always pitches his standard high. I
don't know how you are to translate that word "hagnotes." "Chastity", yes;
but the word has a merely negative sound. "Hagnotes" is a quality so pure
as to be terrible; it dazzles you, no embattled array so awes men's hearts.
A convoy passing through a country town, that endless stream of fortified
motion, how it takes your breath away with the realization of the terrific
thing modern war is! Something like that ought to be the purity of the
priest. Not just the insensitiveness of the bachelor, who finds women a
nuisance, not the furtive horror which tries to forget that sex exists, but
something unapproachable, blinding, on a different plane from thoughts of
evil. What a waste of God's gifts, when the life that is pledged to
celibacy is not a life irradiated by purity! When brooding regrets, or
cheap familiarities, tarnish the surface of that mirror which ought to
reflect Christ!
"Knowledge"--how curiously St. Paul compiles his lists! Only this is not
the kind of knowledge in which you can take doctorates. Always, I think,
the idea in St. Paul's mind when he uses this word is that of familiarity
with the things of the supernatural world, a familiarity which only comes
from prayer. "He was in the world . . . and the world knew him not"--it is
the opposite of that attitude which St. Paul means by knowledge; a
recognition which has grown into familiarity. The soil on which an embassy
is built belongs, by diplomatic usage, to the country which that embassy
represents. And the ground on which the priest's feet tread should be, as
it were, part of the soil of heaven transplanted to earth. The language of
heaven should be talked in the presbytery, as the English language is
talked in the British Embassy at Moscow. The layman who is in a difficulty
ought to say to himself, "I'll go and talk to the priest about it, he'll be
able to tell me; he knows God". The laity at large have the impression, and
rightly, I think, that we priests know our job. I sometimes wonder whether
they have the same confidence that we know our Employer.
"Long-suffering"--the difference between that and the patience we were
speaking of just now leaps to the eye. You can be patient about things; an
illness or a sleepless night; you are long-suffering only about persons.
More, you are patient with people when they bore you or badger you without
meaning any harm; you are long-suffering only where there is a sense of
injury. And this quality, in one of Christ's ambassadors, is evidently of
the first importance. We carry his ultimatum in our pockets; that puts us
in a very delicate position. On the one hand, we have to portray him to the
faithful as infinitely forgiving; we shall not do that if we are
unforgiving people ourselves. On the other hand, it will sometimes be our
duty to tell a fellow-mortal, "No, if you go on like that, if you persist
in doing that, there is no forgiveness for you, in this world or in the
world to come". Essential that the man who speaks like that should not be
thought to be putting any personal animus into the declaration; the sinful
soul must never be allowed to think "He is saying that because he has a
down on me". And that is what people are very apt to say; cast your mind
back to school days, and remember how when you were punished it was always
because that professor had a down on you. The priest, then, must be known
as one who personally harbors no grudges, who forgets an injury. When the
sinner is told by such a man as that that there is no forgiveness, he will
begin to take notice. Do let us beware of using phrases, even in fun, which
will send round the parish the impression that we are unforgiving people.
"Sweetness" will not quite do in English, though "suavitas" might do in
Latin, for "chrestotes." "Chrestos" is a word St. Paul is fond of applying
to Almighty God himself; "kindness" would do, but I think "graciousness"
does better. Here you have the positive side of the picture; our Lord's
ambassadors must represent him as being, not only forgiving to the sinner,
but gracious to all his suppliants. And if we are to represent our Lord to
the people in that light, we shall do it best by having a graciousness of
our own which represents his. There is a kind of universal benevolence
which sometimes makes itself felt, even in a very shy man, even in a very
reserved man, which does win souls. Everybody calls the priest "dear old"
Father So-and-so, if not actually "poor old" Father So-and-so; there are no
organizations in the parish and the accounts are in a frightful mess, but
somehow people go to church. It is "chrestotes" that has done it.
The pure-minded priest, the priest who is familiar with God, who is
forgiving, who is gracious--having asked all that of us, St. Paul goes on
to give us four resources we have to rely on, if we are going to face this
tremendous task. The Holy Spirit; I wonder if we think enough about all
that? I mean, we are apt, some of us, to be rather like the minister who
said "If I'm called upon to speak suddenly like this, I just say what the
Holy Spirit puts into my mind, but if you'll give me an hour or two for
preparation, I can do much better". We get into the pulpit without any
sermon prepared, because we have been prevented, by sick calls or some
other unexpected interruption, from giving it the time we meant to. And no
doubt the Holy Spirit does give us special assistance then, but isn't it
giving him a rather secondary role if we only expect him to help us out on
occasions like that? Surely we ought to pray to him more, try and make
ourselves more supple to his influence, than we do. After all, most of us
have known, in the confessional perhaps, what it is to say something which
we aren't in the least expecting to say, can't quite make out afterwards
why we did say it; isn't that perhaps meant to make us see that we have
more help at hand than we mostly realize? Isn't it meant to make us trust,
rather more, the occasional impulse we get to say something--only we're too
shy; to write a letter to somebody--only we're too slack? Don't let us be
neglectful in our devotion to the Holy Spirit; the ambassador has got to
keep in touch with Headquarters.
Then there is unaffected love, love unfeigned. It may be the business of
the ordinary ambassador to feign love; to pretend great friendliness
towards the country in which he is stationed, when in fact he feels no such
friendliness, and knows that his countrymen don't either. We are in a
better position than that; we are bound to our congregations by a real tie
of Christian fellowship, of pastoral good-will, which will triumph, if we
will let it, over many difficulties.
And then "the word of truth": or as we should say, "the truth of our
message". The ordinary ambassador is fairly often under an obligation--what
shall we say? Sir William Temple observed that an ambassador is one who
goes and lies abroad for his country. Let us say anyhow that he is often in
a position where he has to let the foreign statesmen he is conversing with
deceive themselves--about his own country's resources, his own country's
intentions. The ambassador of Christ suffers from no such embarrassment as
that; he is simply speaking the truth that is in his heart.
And finally, the power of God--we must not expect God to do miracles for
us; but he has waiting for us, if we will trust him, unexpected
providences; an important conversion, a big check, you never know what. So,
when its ambassador is not being listened to, a country will sometimes
reinforce his authority by making a demonstration, mobilizing its troops,
or something of that sort. Heaven does back up its ambassadors.
At this point St. Paul, whose thought plays about like lightning,
disconcerts us a little by apparently beginning to say the exact opposite
of what he has been saying before. He has been telling us how important it
is that the ambassadors of Christ should make a good impression, and then
quite suddenly he adds: "After all, what does it matter what people think
of us? Makes no difference at all". The reason is, I think, that (as you
will find at the beginning of the letter) people at Corinth have been
saying nasty things about St. Paul. They said he was a man you couldn't
trust, and he didn't like that. But he reminds himself now that what people
think of us doesn't in the least matter. Well, it isn't really the opposite
of what has gone before. I think if he had expressed himself rather more
coherently, he would have said, "It is the business of Christ's ambassador
to make the most favorable impression he can. Having done that, he must not
be in the least surprised if in spite of it people think ill of him; they
always will". And we, while (as I've been trying to point out) we have an
urgent duty to make people think well of us, must be quite unmoved, in
ourselves, by their approval or disapproval. It all means nothing.
We are to be armed on the right as well as on the left; your ancient
soldier carried his shield on his left arm, and fought that side first. But
it isn't really satisfactory only to have a pad on the leg that is facing
the bowling. No, we must be armed right and left with justice, by which I
think St. Paul here means innocence. It doesn't very much matter, because
he has got his metaphor mixed up; what he is trying to say is that we
should be equally steeled against undue blame and undue praise. "By honor
and dishonor, by evil report and good report". The best-looking girl in the
parish goes and marries a Protestant, when you've moved heaven and earth to
prevent it; and then you hear the Protestants are saying that you
deliberately threw her in the poor boy's way, so as to try and pervert him.
Don't mind; it won't do any harm. On the other hand, don't be too ready to
believe all the good you hear about yourself. The intense woman who says,
"Father, that marvelous sermon of yours"; the enthusiastic parishioner who
says, "Ah, sure, Almighty God sent us a good priest when he sent you,
Father"--write it off; that kind of thing won't save you any Purgatory.
Then the rest of the epistle merely carries a list of the unkind things
people say about God's ambassadors; the instances chosen are very much of
St. Paul's own day, and I fancy very much concerned with St. Paul's own
experience. He had critics at Corinth, and they had been saying that he was
a liar; that he was unacknowledged (that is, the other apostles didn't
recognize him as an apostle); that it didn't matter what his teaching was,
because he was probably dead in any case; or if not dead, so badly mauled
by the mob at Ephesus that he would be no use again; that he was always
writing tearful letters, and making people feel uncomfortable; that he was
always begging for money; that he had no rich friends, and couldn't expect
to make a success of preaching the gospel.
All that we probably shan't hear about ourselves. But we shall hear very
much that sort of thing said about the Church we love more than life. That
our claims are built on falsehood; that we are an insignificant force in
the world to-day; that we are dying out, or at least have lost so much
prestige that we shall never recover from it; that we are kill-joys,
preaching a medieval morality to a world which has grown out of it; that we
are always on the make, always in alliance with the rich against the poor,
with the Have's against the Have-not's; or, contrary-wise, that we are a
very provincial, middle-class set of people, we Catholics, what we do isn't
worth reporting, what we say isn't worth repeating. All that we shall hear
said, or read it in books and newspaper articles by people who don't like
us. But none of it matters; none of it matters a bit, as long as we haven't
been responsible, for giving a bad impression of the ministry we exercise;
as long as we, Christ's ambassadors, have done our best to do what nobody
can ever really do--represent him.
CHAPTER 4. SINS OF THE PRIEST
There are few more splendidly menacing phrases in the whole of Hebrew
prophecy than the words with which Amos, the first prophet whose message
has come down to us in writing, turns suddenly on the people of Israel in
one of its rare intervals of prosperity. He has announced God's impending
judgments on certain neighboring tribes, on Syria, Ammon, Moab, and so on;
and then, turning to the Israelites, he represents God as saying, "You only
have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will visit upon
you all your iniquities".
It is difficult to imagine anything which could have come as more of a
shock to the complacent theologians of his day. Israel was God's chosen
people, brought out of Egypt, led through the desert, enabled to dispossess
seven nations in Chanaan and occupy their fertile territory. Was it not
clear that a people so signally favored would continue to enjoy his
protection? True, there were backslidings and scandals; the Israelites
would adopt the worship of some heathen god side by side with their own
inherited traditions; there would be oppression of the poor, there would be
grasping covetousness or open debauchery among the priests, and so on. But
who could doubt, that if for a short while God's protection was forfeited
by these infidelities, it would be restored to his people for the asking,
after a decent show of contrition and amendment. As God's favorites, his
people could afford to take liberties with him, to treat him as an
indulgent Father; it was not likely that he would be hard on them
considering all the promises which committed him to maintain their cause
among the peoples. Them only God had known among all the families of the
earth; surely he would be tolerant towards their occasional lapses!
To which Amos replies, in words of thunder, "You only have I known among
all the families of the earth, THEREFORE will I visit upon you all your
iniquities". Because they had been given more chances; because a law had
been issued to them on mount Sinai purer than any other code the world
knew; because a long line of patriots and reformers had been sent to recall
them, when they needed it, to a sense of religion, THEREFORE the sins they
committed were the less excusable, therefore their punishment would be all
the more certain, and all the heavier.
I suppose there is always a danger that we Catholics shall be guilty of the
same miscalculation. Looking round us on a world which seems to have lost,
in such great part, its grasp of moral principle, a world in which we may
read in our newspaper how some spokesman of religion has been calling the
attention of our fellow-countrymen to the very existence of the Ten
Commandments, we are tempted sometimes to a vague feeling of self-
congratulation--after all, somebody's got to go to heaven. But what I want
to suggest at the moment is that we priests run special risks of our own in
this matter. Ordination has made us, in a special way, friends of Jesus
Christ; we are always in and out of church, always running God's errands;
he commissions us to speak in his name; our very faults arise so much out
of the nature of the work we do for him, through being in a hurry, through
being tired, through being lonely; all our life is so bound up with
religion, it is all such a family affair--surely, unless we go very far
wrong, he will not let us down? But I fancy if the prophet Amos heard us
thinking like that, he would say to us too, "You only have I known of all
the families of the earth, therefore will I visit upon you all your
iniquities".
Always, I think, though in different ways, the fact of being a priest
increases the malice of our sin. If we were really honest with ourselves,
I'm not sure we shouldn't tack that on to all the items of our confessions;
"I've been proud, and I'm a priest. I've been grasping with money, and I'm
a priest. I have offended against modesty, and I'm a priest. I have lost my
temper, and I'm a priest. I've been self-indulgent, and I'm a priest. I
have envied others, and I'm a priest. I've been idle; I, a priest, have
been idle. And all the other sins, which I cannot now remember, are the
sins of a priest".
May we just go through them, in an old-fashioned way, those seven capital
sins, fountain-heads of our sinning, ingredients which form the basis of
all those subtle flavors which our sins bring with them?
Pride first; pride will come first, even on such a list as this. Pride, in
its pure form, is seldom recognizable; but when it appears as ambition, as
vanity, as obstinacy, as touchiness, as self-sufficiency, as the love of
interference, it is common enough; not unknown among priests. You find So-
and-so a bore; look into your heart, and ask whether it was not because he
held the floor when you wanted to be talking. Your advice is not asked, or
is taken and not followed; you sulk. You are asked to undertake some job;
you excuse yourself-- nominally from humility, because you say you are no
good at that sort of thing, really because you can't bear the thought of
doing something badly, and looking a fool. In all that, you are coming
short of the priestly character. For the priesthood dates from the last
Supper; and the charter of its foundation is, "He that is greatest among
you all, let him be the servant of all; I am among you as he that serveth".
When those words were spoken, a servant meant a slave. To-day, slavery has
been abolished, and at the moment even domestic service seems to be
becoming a thing of the past. But always it will be the priest's primary
duty to serve; and a fault in humility cuts at the very roots of the
priestly character. It identifies you with the attitude of that first rebel
who said, "Non serviam."
Avarice, of all the capital sins, can be the most tragic, because it does
not die down with old age; sometimes old age brings it on. Personal avarice
is rare in priests, just because we are not in much of a position either to
indulge it, or to benefit by it. But it is possible for a man to become
avaricious when he is administering, quite conscientiously, funds committed
to his charge; and the delicate position in which our mission funds stand,
having to provide for the maintenance of the clergy as well as the
maintenance of the parish, gives a kind of edge to the eagerness with which
the acquisitive rector hunts pennies. Sometimes, too, with the feeling that
a good object justifies shady methods--a doctrine which we do not preach,
and have to spend a large part of our time explaining to Protestants that
we do not preach it; sometimes, with that idea vaguely in mind, a priest
will be guilty of graft or evasion which he would scorn to indulge in, if
it were for the sake of his own pocket. But avarice is avarice still, and
graft is graft and evasion is evasion still, however laudable the object
for which we are working.
And this sin is especially to be blamed in the clergy, for two reasons. In
the first place, there is nothing like avarice for shutting up the
sympathies of the human heart. The man who is always thinking about money,
whether in connection with football pools or in connection with the new
sacristy, cannot have his heart open, as the priest should, to the
troubles, the anxieties, the interests of others. And in the second place,
nothing gives so much scandal, of a suppressed kind, as the perpetual
suspicion that the clergy are on the make. One of the chief causes which
has long held up, and still holds up, the conversion of England, is the
fact that Protestants cannot go to our churches without submitting to a
long harangue about money, in the notices, in the sermon, or in both, which
nearly always takes the form of a scolding. Adrian Fortescue used to say it
was a Providence that Protestants always accuse us of charging five
shillings for hearing confessions, because as a matter of fact absolution
was the one thing you could get for nothing in the Catholic Church. There
is, at the moment, a distrust of organized religion such as has never
existed in England before. Can we do nothing to dispel it, by keeping that
clanking money-box out of sight?
Of sins against modesty I don't want to say much. God gives us this grace
in dealing with them, that it is in our nature to be ashamed of them. It
needs no proof that a priest who sins against modesty in such a way as to
involve the least breath of scandal, is false to his priesthood. Every
priest is a Joseph, set by our Lord over his household with a special view
to watching over its purity; a sheep-dog which starts running sheep is less
unprofitable to its master, than a scandal-giving priest is to his. That, I
hope, is clear enough to all of us. But even the secret sins of a priest
have a special danger for him. The effect of self-indulgence which sins
against modesty is, we are told, to turn a man in upon himself, make him
self-centered and selfish. Let us remind ourselves again that no priest can
afford to encourage in himself that fatal tendency we all have to
selfishness. Merely to get through our work, as work, without taking a
vivid interest in the people we are working for--how terribly common that
is, and how grievously it retards the reign of Christ!
And now, what shall we say about anger? May I say, quite bluntly, that we
priests in England are apt, I think, to be too brusque, too hectoring, in
our dealings with the faithful; there is too much of the drill-sergeant
about us? Scolding in the confessional, I suppose, means six souls lost for
one saved. But I am thinking more of our daily contacts. I admit that the
laity don't always make it easy for us. A lot of misunderstanding would be
saved if they would realize that the best time for buttonholing a priest
and having a cozy chat is not just before he says his second Mass on a busy
Sunday.
But those little outbursts of temper, even with the altar boys, even with
the beggars, what a lot of harm they can do! I wonder how much of the
leakage we often hear talked about is due to the plain fact that the people
are afraid of their clergy? The sons of Heli "withdrew men from the
sacrifice of the Lord"; what more terrible epitaph could there be on a
priest than that?
Let me be still more bold, and say that I think the worst possible scene of
clerical ill-temper is the pulpit. It's a very easy way of sounding rather
effective in your sermons; there are grievances you have been nursing all
the week--perhaps it is the stinginess of your congregation, or some
members of it; perhaps it is a piece of parish gossip that has come to your
ears, and made you genuinely indignant. You go up into the pulpit with
nothing prepared, and all your grievances come out with a rush and a roar.
There may be some Protestant husband who has been persuaded by his wife,
with infinite difficulty, to come to Mass just this once, and see what it's
like--he comes just this once, and he knows what it's like after that.
There may be some bad Catholic, already half-lapsed, looking about for an
excuse to call the Church hard names; what wonder, if after all that
torrent of abuse he goes home declaring that he has finished with it now?
The sacristan is delighted with you; when you get back to the sacristy, he
says, "My word, Father, you gave it them straight this morning". I think it
is a good rule, if the sacristan says "My word, Father, you gave it them
straight this morning", to tear up the notes of that sermon at once, if
there were any, and to ask God on your knees that he will never let you
preach a sermon like that again.
I don't want to talk much about gluttony. I don't even want to improve the
occasion by talking about the dangers of drinking to excess; unless for the
benefit of the younger fathers present I may be allowed to repeat to you
the advice I always gave to undergraduates when they were going to attend
public dinners; "Wait till you find yourself saying, Just this glass can't
do me any harm, and then, don't drink it". But I thought I would like to
say a word about self-indulgence generally on the part of the clergy as
that affects the question of scandal, and more than ever in these times. We
have lived so far in an England which tolerated class distinctions;
tolerated, therefore, sharp and obvious differences of income. The Catholic
clergy did not fit into any particular class; it was right that they should
not. Consequently, it was nobody's business to inquire whether the Catholic
clergy did themselves well or not. I don't personally believe that England
will soon have abolished class distinctions, or will soon have abolished
sharp differences of income. But I do think there will be a lot of talk
about these things, and there will be a large, discontented part of the
population which will look round jealously to see who is rich, and to
wonder why. In such a state of society, it will be a bad thing for the
Catholic cause if our clergy seem to be doing themselves too well; if their
cars look too new and they appear to be throwing their weight about when
they go off for their summer holiday. Because the clergy are a separate
caste, it is easier for people to generalize about their habits. And the
sin of self-indulgence will be all the worse in the clergy, because it will
bring the Church into disrepute.
The sin of envy (or, if we may use the wider term, of jealousy) is one
which has devastating effects; effects, primarily, on the character of the
man who is addicted to it, and on his conversation. May I shelter myself
behind my own advancing years, and say that I think we older priests are
the worst offenders? For this reason, I suppose, chiefly--that a man seldom
reaches the age of fifty without beginning to feel a bit of a failure. And
we take it out of our neighbors by crabbing their performances. So-and-so,
who couldn't hold a candle to us at college, has gone ahead and become an
important person; and we find it necessary to be catty about that. The
religious next door get big congregations, make a lot of converts--but
then, look at the way they go about it. And all the rest of it; I'm afraid
our conversation isn't very enlivening, when the grievances begin to be
trotted out. All the time, you see, we are really trying to apply balm to
our injured self-esteem. I always liked the story of the American school-
master who was hauling one of his pupils over the coals for idleness, and
said he supposed the boy had a pretty considerable veneration for the name
of George Washington. And when the boy allowed he had, the schoolmaster
said, "Then let me tell you that when he was your age, George Washington
was head of his class." And the boy replied, "Yes, Sir, and when he was
your age he was President of the United States." No, we're not Presidents
of the United States; there are youthful ambitions that lie behind us,
unfulfilled. Are we much to blame, if we sometimes attack what seem to us
shallow reputations?
Let us be clear, at least, about this--the rector of a parish is
responsible in God's sight, not only for his parish, but for his curates.
The disgruntled, disillusioned rector can be a blight on young lives, can
throw a cold douche on young ambitions, as no one else can, and the results
may be appalling. "Try it if you like, my dear father, but you'll find you
get no response from the people, absolutely none; I've lived in this parish
twenty years, and I know them." How often that is the encouragement the
young curate gets, when he is rash enough to propose trying experiments!
And tell me, how much of that is due to the fear that another might succeed
where you have failed? Oh, the terrible dead-weight of that elderly
conservatism which is jealous of young men, because they are young; jealous
on behalf of old methods, not because they succeeded, but because they were
our methods, and no others must be allowed to succeed!
The last place on the list has a curious history. The medievals gave it to
"Accidie," a word which has gone out of use, and perhaps can be most
succinctly defined as getting bored with religion. That is a very real
danger; I only don't consider it here, because I want to devote a whole
meditation to it later on. To-day, we have substituted the word "sloth"; a
failing from which we all suffer, and one which none of us ever admits. I
think the best way of examining your conscience, if you want to discover
whether you are an idle man, is to leave on one side all the things which
interest you--and that, naturally, includes a great deal of your parish
work-- and concentrate on some side-line of your daily habits which doesn't
interest you; say, writing letters. Are you an energetic correspondent? The
clergy very seldom are. Or that book, a bit on the heavy side, which you
bought the other day, meaning to read it; how many of the pages are cut?
Idleness, with most of us, doesn't mean Iying in bed and doing nothing; it
means giving priority, always, to the things which interest us, and leaving
our other duties to queue up and take their turn, if they ever get a turn.
Watch idleness; it can become a sort of creeping paralysis, which can
infect even your priestly duties in the end. And an idle parish priest puts
out a light in God's Church.
He has not called us his servants, but his friends. That should be our
inspiration; that, also, should be our warning; shall he be in a position
to say to us, "It was thou, my own familiar friend, in whom I trusted"? If
so, what wonder that he should add, "You only have I known among all the
families of the earth, THEREFORE will I visit upon you all your
iniquities"?
CHAPTER 5. ST. PAUL, A PROFILE
I want to give you a profile of St. Paul as a human being, the raw material
which was towed into Damascus after that road accident; not so much a
panegyric as a portrait from the life. There are various reasons, I think,
why we should content ourselves with that treatment. Partly because the
moment you begin preaching a panegyric, every saint becomes very much like
any other saint. Partly because St. Paul had, I think, a great deal of
character; there was more in his natural, if I may borrow a word from the
French for which we have no word in English, than in that of many of the
saints. I mean, I think he would have been a remarkable and an interesting
man even if he had not been a saint, just as St. Francis of Sales and Dom
Bosco, for instance, would have been remarkable and interesting men even if
they had not been saints. Partly because the evidence is so full; I doubt
if there is any other human being, before St. Francis of Assisi, anyhow,
for whom we have so much material for constructing a biography; Cicero is
the only person who can at all challenge him there, and Cicero to tell the
truth was rather a dull person, which St. Paul was not. We have all these
very intimate letters of his, we have a careful account of a considerable
period of his life written by a great friend and disciple of his, who knew
how to write. So let us try and get underneath the halo and see St. Paul as
a living person. I think it will be possible, as we go along, to pick up
one or two hints about our own priestly lives; about the right way to
tackle ourselves and other people.
First of all, I think it is obvious that St. Paul had a quick nature; he
was the sort of person who speaks first and thinks afterwards. Our Lord
seems to have chosen people of that kind for the pioneer work of his
Church; St. Peter obviously was one, and I think St. Stephen was another.
He didn't choose only that kind of person; St. James, I should say, was
very much the opposite, a man of caution--listen to him telling the other
apostles the Gentiles ought certainly to be given the greatest possible
freedom, always as long as they don't eat things which have been strangled.
St. Paul was not that kind of man; he was the sort of man who rushed at
things. Watch him at Athens; he has not gone there to preach, he is simply
waiting till his friends join him, then he will go on to Corinth. But he
cannot bear the sight of all these people pretending to be philosophers and
at the same time worshipping gods of wood and stone; his heart was moved
within him to find the city so much given over to idolatry; he stops
everyone he meets and argues about it.
And because St. Paul's was an impulsive temperament, he says what he
thinks, sometimes, with startling vividness. When he is writing to the
Galatian Christians, for example, about the people who want to have them
all circumcised; "I would rather they should lose their own manhood, these
authors of your unrest". That is the kind of sentence which your modern
editor of a saint's life would be apt to leave out; and write in a bit more
about the spirit of patience which the holy man displayed towards his
enemies. Of course, I have no doubt at all that it was justifiable moral
indignation; but I refuse to believe St. Paul did not throw himself into
it. All through the Galatians, he is writing at white heat, and you can see
that he is riding himself on the curb; it's a wonderful specimen of a
letter from an angry man which just manages to avoid being an angry letter.
And then, there is another side to the picture; this impulsive temperament,
which makes St. Paul so indignant when a wrong is being done to the cause
of Christ, makes him infinitely tender as soon as repentance is shown. You
find that, for example, in his second epistle to the Corinthians. He had
written them a letter--I think it is generally agreed that it was not our
First Corinthians, but a letter now lost-- in which he called upon them to
administer discipline to an offender, probably someone who had slighted his
own authority. No sooner does he hear this has been done, than he writes
off to them in a very different tone. "Even if I caused you pain by my
letter, I am not sorry for it. Perhaps I was tempted to be sorry when I saw
how my letter had caused you even momentary pain, but now I am glad, not
glad of the pain, but glad of the repentance the pain brought with it . . .
You have done everything to prove yourselves free from guilt in this matter
. . The punishment inflicted on him by so many of you is punishment
enough for the man I speak of, and now you must rather think of showing him
indulgence, and comforting him." St. Paul is almost embarrassed by the
success of his own tactics; he never really expected the opposition to
crumple up as it has.
Some of us are impulsive by nature, and inclined by nature to go off the
deep end. Having a row with the parish, or a section of the parish, is
sometimes necessary. There has been a row, perhaps unnecessarily
precipitated by my shortness of temper, but anyhow, it seems to have done
good; the parish has rallied round properly, and the air has cleared. Now
is the time for me to score a double success, by taking my victory in the
right way. Not crowing over it, not throwing my weight about; not (above
all) victimizing any particular person or persons who are thought to have
been at the root of the trouble. No, just the opposite; soothing injured
feelings wherever I can by a deliberate effort of friendliness. And when
you want to show a person friendliness, the best way is often asking him to
do something for you.
Meanwhile, let us notice one thing about St. Paul when he was having a row,
or indeed whenever he was trying to get his own way--that is, Christ's way.
He always preferred to lead from weakness, rather than from strength.
There's very little doubt, I think, that when he speaks of "the power"
which is given him as an apostle he means miraculous power, such as he
exercised when he punished the magician Elymas with sudden blindness. And
there is always this threat in the background; when the apostle comes on
his next visit, he will know how to deal with people who obstinately oppose
him. But before that happens, he is always desperately anxious to win as
many people as possible to a better mind by appealing, not to his power,
but to his weakness.
That is the meaning of all that long epistle about St. Paul's hardships and
persecutions. He hated talking about himself; he always prefers the word
"We" to the word "I"; but on an occasion like this he deliberately went all
out to make the Corinthians feel sorry for him, so as to bring them up to
time by sympathy, rather than by fear. And in a quite different connection,
when he writes to Philemon asking him to be kind to his runaway slave
Onesimus, he could have taken a high line about it; Philemon was his own
convert, perhaps literally owed his life to St. Paul, but that is not the
appeal that shall be put in the forefront. "Who is it that writes to thee?
Paul, an old man now, and in these days the prisoner, too, of Jesus
Christ." I don't think that St. Paul liked appealing for sympathy any more
than most of us do. But he saw that if that motive would induce his
converts to do the right thing, it was a good kind of motive for them to
have; better than the fear of being struck blind on St. Paul's next visit.
Well, we are not in a position to strike our parishioners blind when they
disagree with us. We priests in our parishes are not even in a position to
threaten them with any severe spiritual penalties, beyond being turned out
of the choir, or something of that kind. But we have a sort of undefined
ascendancy in the parish, which is quite unlike anything that is enjoyed by
the Anglican Vicar over the way; very few people, in a healthy parish, like
to be on bad terms with the parish priest. And we are a little tempted, I
think, to trade on that fact; to crush opposition by a hint that anybody
who sees differently from the parish priest must be rather a rotten sort of
Catholic. That line--or perhaps "line" is too definite a word; that sort of
approach--is responsible, I am afraid, for a good many tragedies. That boy
who has only just left school, so that we still think of him as a kind of
fag, is earning four pounds a week now, and eager to assert his
independence. I wonder whether sometimes, when we want to put a stop to
what seems undesirable, or to have something done for us, we couldn't
afford to take the line, rather more, of saying "Look here, I'm in a bit of
a hole, I wonder whether you could help to get me out of it?" That, I
think, is what St. Paul would like us to say. I think it went against the
grain with him, but he did it.
In those ways, I think we are tempted to treat our parishioners rather too
much as children. Meanwhile, do we really treat them as our children? St.
Paul has an almost frightening phrase, you will remember, about that; "My
little children; with whom I am in travail again until Christ be formed in
you". It's a mixed metaphor, of course; St. Paul was never afraid of mixing
his metaphors. He thinks of himself, both as the mother who has borne these
children to Christ, and as the midwife who must see Christ born in them.
But what a terrible responsibility it indicates! Each soul in my parish a
soul in which Christ is to be born, and it is my job to see that that
happens! It was said to me long ago, by an old priest, "I've been in this
parish thirty years, and I've always paid my way". I don't quite know why I
mention that; let it be enough to observe that I can't imagine St. Paul
saying it. My little children, helpless, unformed as yet; capable of
developing so far in the right direction or the wrong direction; and the
responsibility, a great share of the responsibility, lies with me. And not
just in a crowd, so as to make me responsible for the general tone of the
parish, but each one individually. I am ready enough to call them "my
child" in the confessional, with a slight emphasis on the word "child";
have I always thought of the emphasis there ought to be on the word "my"?
That is worth remembering, if I ever find myself wondering whether I don't
show too much preference for the society of this or that person, this or
that family, in my congregation. I am not talking now of intimacies that
might bring danger with them, or even intimacies that might bring scandal
with them; but we all have our favorites; it would be hardly human nature
if we didn't. And I think there were certain people whose company was a
real refreshment to St. Paul, one of the few refreshments he ever allowed
himself in his busy, concentrated life. "There is one who never fails to
comfort those who are brought low; God gave us comfort, as soon as Titus
came." "I shall be sending Timothy to visit you before long; . . . I have
no one else here who shares my thoughts as he does." "Greetings from my
beloved Luke, the physician." Oh yes, St. Paul had his special friends.
What did he do about it?
I think his advice to us would have been, "By all means have your special
friends; only, be sure of one thing--be sure that everybody else in the
parish is your special friend as well". That, I think, is the moral of the
sixteenth chapter of the Romans. St. Paul had never been to Rome; yet he
fills his sixteenth chapter with two dozen personal salutations, to the
despair of the refectory reader. They had been refugees, presumably, at the
time when Claudius published his edict banishing the Jews from Rome, and
St. Paul had met them in the Levant. They did not suppose, I take it, that
they had made any special impression on the great missionary; how suddenly
splendid to hear their own names mentioned when the letter was read out, as
I expect it was, in the Roman Church! One or two of them were marked out by
terms of endearment, "Amplias whom I love so well in the Lord, my dear
Stachys, my dear Persis". But what did that matter to the rest of them, so
long as they were all there, Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermas, and all the
others?
Let me not ask myself, "Do I see too much of So-and-so? Do I spend too much
of my time with this particular family?" But ask rather, for a change, "Do
I see enough of all the other people who aren't So-and-so? Do I spend
enough of my time with other families, who don't amuse me quite as much as
this one?" I think it is nonsense to pretend that for most of us it is
possible to work fruitfully for the souls of our fellow-creatures without
establishing human contacts all the time. Yet it is very easy for a priest
who is not a good mixer to imagine that it is rather holy of him to pass
his life without saying a word except to his fellow-clergy. In such a lot
of our work we are, and are meant to be, holy machines, that it is easy to
forget the duty of being anything else. You go out after breakfast to give
some Sick Communions, and naturally you have your eyes on the ground, take
no notice of anyone who passes you. Then, in the afternoon, you go out for
a walk; there may be a temptation to go about even then looking as if you
were saying your prayers, merely out of shyness, or merely because you are
afraid of meeting bores. But what a difference it makes, when one goes out
for a walk with some parish priest, and finds that he has to lift his hat
to every second person he meets, stop and talk to every fifth or sixth!
What a lot of good they do without knowing it, those priests! What a lot of
harm can be done, sometimes, by a salute unreturned!
I mentioned just now my old friend who had paid his way for thirty years,
and perhaps seemed to contrast his point of view with St. Paul's. But not,
heaven knows, that St. Paul was not interested in the collections. There
never was such a beggar as St. Paul. I suppose if you analyzed his epistles
you would find that about one chapter in four is really talking about the
Jerusalem distress fund. The reason why one doesn't notice it more is
because St. Paul was a shy sort of beggar, an elusive sort of beggar. Look
at the innocent way in which he tells the Romans that he may be having to
go to Jerusalem to bring alms there: "Macedonia and Achaia have thought fit
to give those saints in Jerusalem who are in need some share of their
wealth . . . and indeed, they are in their debt. The Gentiles, if they have
been allowed to share their spiritual gifts, are bound to contribute to
their temporal needs in return". Wasn't he trying to make the Romans think
a bit? But even when he is openly begging, how gently he insinuates his
point; how tactfully he makes the Corinthians see that if they aren't
careful Macedonia will head the list of subscribers, not Achaia!
Perhaps there is a sort of a tail-end of a lesson for some of us there. We
are not all of us shy and elusive, when we get into the pulpit, about this
particular subject. You hear, not seldom, of lay people who don't go to
such and such a church because it's money, money, money week after week in
the sermons there. St. Paul managed to wrap it up, somehow, better than we
do. And also, he was very careful indeed not to give scandal by sounding
for a moment as if he personally was interested in the result of the
appeal. He would slave at tent-making rather than even have Pharisaical
scandal going round about his motives. It is our privilege to live of the
gospel; we must perhaps be a little extra careful, in these days, not to
look too much as if we made a good thing out of it.
One other point; for all his quick temperament, St. Paul was splendidly
free from jealousy. When he writes from his Roman prison to Philippi, he
explains how other Christians at Rome, who don't approve of him, have
started preaching the gospel all the harder, so as not to be outbidden.
"What matter, so long as either way, for private ends or in all honesty,
CHRIST is preached?" So it is everywhere; what does it matter whether Paul
or Apollo is the apostle of Corinth? I planted, and Apollo watered, but it
is God who gives the increase. Shall we remember, sometimes, those splendid
words used by a rather sensitive man, a rather touchy man, about the very
rivals who were being cried up as his superiors? Remember them, when the
queue at somebody else's confessional is a bit longer than the queue at
ours; when somebody else's sermons seem to draw a better congregation than
ours?
I have only just begun talking about St. Paul. I promised a profile of him,
and I've only given the skimpiest possible kind of vignette. But we can
fill out the picture for ourselves well enough by reading between the lines
of his epistles, "Be followers of me", he is not ashamed to say, "as I am
of Christ". Do we find it difficult, sometimes, to make out what our Lord
would have done if he had been faced with such and such problems of ours?
Let us see if we cannot find out what St. Paul would have done, and do
that; we shall not go very far wrong.
CHAPTER 6. MURMURING
There is a famous passage in his first epistle to the Corinthians, where
St. Paul warns them against some of their leading faults, and reminds them
that the same faults were found, and were severely punished, among the
Israelites in the wilderness. Idolatry, for he is writing to a church of
recent converts; fornication, since Corinth was notorious even in a
generally corrupt age, for the looseness of its morals; "tempting God",
that is to say, presuming on grace, because evidently there was a tendency
abroad, a Calvinistic tendency you might say, which was exposing his
converts to great spiritual dangers. And he adds a fourth warning, against
murmuring. I think the point of that was, that there were factions at
Corinth, parties which took their slogans from this leader or that; and it
reminded St. Paul of those ill-fated revolutionaries who questioned, in the
wilderness, the divinely appointed authority of Moses. "Neither be ye
murmurers, as some of them murmured, and were destroyed by the destroyer.
The children of Israel murmured--what a familiar phrase that is, to anybody
who knows his Old Testament! I shouldn't like to say how many times it
occurs in the Mosaic writings. And at first sight it seems a very
extraordinary thing, doesn't it? Here is a people to which God has showed
special favor, visiting their oppressors in Egypt with ten plagues from
which they themselves were immune; then delivering them from Egypt by a
miracle, dividing the Red Sea for them and bringing the waters together
again to drown their pursuers; leading them through the desert, watching
over them, giving them bread from heaven and water out of the rock,
promising them an end to their journey in a land that flowed with milk and
honey. And those are the people who seem to spend the greater part of their
forty years in the wilderness murmuring against God, or against the rulers
he has set up over them. It seems extraordinary, doesn't it? And yet . . .
I wonder.
Could God have done more than he does for us Christians, for us priests? He
has called us out of the world to serve him; he feeds us with the bread of
immortality; he opens to us the consolations of his Sacred Heart; and all
that is not enough to keep us from complaining, some of us complaining
almost continually, of the lines in which our lot is cast. Nor are we
content to bear a grudge against life in general; commonly at least we put
the blame on our fellowmen; on superiors who seem unsympathetic, on
colleagues who are uncongenial, on parishioners who are difficult. Will you
forgive me, Reverend Fathers, if I devote a whole meditation to this
uncharitable habit of grumbling, which does so much to mar the perfect
offering of our lives to God?
After all, you have got to remember, in excuse for the Israelites, that
Moses did lead them out into a wilderness. Sometimes, if their march did
not proceed according to schedule, their water supply was insufficient;
their food, however plentiful, had some of that monotony which belongs to
picnic fare. It was only natural for them to remember that in Egypt, for
all their servitude, they had no difficulty in providing themselves with
creature comforts: "We remember the fish that we ate in Egypt, and the
leeks, and the cucumbers, and the melons"--fish and leeks and cucumbers and
melons; watery sort of food, not much in the way of vitamins there. And yet
it is possible to look back with regret to such delicacies when you are
getting nothing to eat but manna and quails year in, year out. The life of
the wilderness is a life of freedom, but the freedom is won at the cost of
self-denial. And when you enter a seminary or a religious house, you are
entering a life of freedom, in a sense; you are emancipating yourself from
the clogging ties of worldly preoccupation. But in the outward scheme and
structure of your life there must be a certain constraint. Rules cramp you;
the average man is catered for, not the exception. It is not easy to live
contentedly in a wilderness, or in a community.
And there is another point to be remembered--going out into the wilderness
and shutting ourselves off from the world does bring us perilously close
together. While they were still in Egypt, the Israelites probably spent a
large part of their time murmuring against their task-masters, and no great
harm was done. While they were living in a strange land, their race-
consciousness, still so remarkable in our own day, fostered a spirit of
loyalty among themselves. When they got out into the desert and there were
no task-masters to murmur against, when they enjoyed no society except
their own, they very quickly began to find out each other's weak points. So
we, as long as we are living in the world, brushing up against a lot of
strangers every day, moving in a lot of circles which do not intersect,
find little temptation to spend our time in gossiping. But, once shut up a
set of human beings within four walls, and, heavens, how the tongues begin
to wag! No, living among your fellow-priests may safeguard you from every
other kind of sin; it is not going to safeguard you against sins of the
tongue unless you have a rule of perpetual silence.
Perhaps you will complain that I am really trying to treat two different
failings of our nature as one; our tendency to grumble about the
circumstances of life, and our tendency to criticize one another in an
uncharitable way. Well, it's quite true that they are two different
manifestations of an ungenerous temper; but I think it's also true that
they are two manifestations of the same ungenerous temper. Your grumbler,
as a rule, is also the man who can be trusted to pull a friend's character
to pieces. And there's a further point; I think the grumbling I have in
mind has usually a kind of personal tang about it; it is grumbling not
merely about things, but about people. There is a tendency to identify, in
a vague way, the faults you find in the system with the personalities of
those who exercise authority over you. "The children of Israel murmured
against Moses and Aaron"--not that Moses and Aaron were exempt from the
privations which were felt by all; manna and quails figured as prominently
in their diet as in anybody else's. But in order to voice a grievance
properly you must have names to connect it with; Moses and Aaron had let
them out into a wilderness, therefore they must be held responsible for any
lack of amenities which the wilderness presented. I am speaking in
parables, as St. Paul was; I don't know whether these parables will come
home to you; they would have come home to us in the seminary from which my
experience is drawn.
Now, I hope I shall not be understood as implying that there is no
difference between criticizing your equals and criticizing your superiors.
There is a different principle involved. But I want to consider the subject
of murmuring generally; that is, of criticizing your neighbors, whether
they are your superiors or your equals, merely by way of letting off steam;
by way of indemnifying yourself for the discomforts of every-day life. As I
say, it is a very difficult sin to avoid, when you are living in community,
whether it be a large or a small community. But I do want to put it to you,
for fear I might come short of my duty in giving this retreat, that
murmuring is a nine-fold sin. It is a three-fold sin against God, a three-
fold sin against your neighbor, and a threefold sin against yourself.
Murmuring is a sin against God because it betrays a want of gratitude.
After all, when you take a general view all round you, how pleasant other
people are! How confiding they are, how good-natured, how considerate! How
easily they win our sympathy, the moment we see them in a human light!
Somebody who always got on your nerves, somebody you were always inclined
to laugh at, suddenly has a bad accident, or suffers a family bereavement;
and at once you begin to remember his good points, to make excuses for his
failings--is that insincerity on your part? Why, no; but until he was in
trouble you never really saw him as he was, never thought of him as your
fellow-man. If only we were more simple, if only we didn't take things for
granted so, we should see the whole of mankind, I think, as a gigantic
conspiracy of kindness set on foot by Almighty God for our advantage; we
should be overwhelmed with gratitude for the good offices done to us, with
admiration at the fine qualities we see around us. Instead of which, we are
always picking holes.
Murmuring is a sin against God because it betrays a want of confidence.
When we criticize anybody, I am sure you must have noticed, it is not
because we bear him any kind of ill-will, oh dear no, our personal feelings
don't enter into the matter at all. No, we only mention it because it does
seem a pity that a person like that should be in a position like that, with
such possibilities for doing harm. It is wonderful how hot we grow in our
altruistic indignation on such occasions as this; we feel the Church is
being let down by being so unworthily represented in such and such a
parish, in such and such a post of importance--that's what we mind. I say
that this betrays a want of confidence in God. It was the spirit of the
Israelites, when they asked Aaron to make a golden calf for them; "Arise,
make us gods, that may go before us; for as for this Moses, we know not
what is become of him". It's all very well, but what can you do with a man
like that, who goes up to the top of a mountain, and leaves no word when he
is to be expected back? . . . You know, it's the want of trust in God that
makes us worry so much about the defects of his human agents. Believe me,
if the Catholic Church had depended on human prudence for her survival, she
would have gone into liquidation centuries ago. Every enterprise we
undertake is in God's hands; those who direct its fortunes, do so under his
overruling influence; to be so anxious about their qualifications is a poor
kind of homage to him.
Murmuring is a sin against God because it betrays a want of detachment.
There are very few of God's gifts which we use so lavishly, with so little
regard to mortification, as the gift of speech. So much unnecessary talk;
we surely ought to start cutting it down somewhere; and if we are going to
have a cut somewhere, what more obvious place to begin at than our
uncharitable conversations? Yet we don't seem to do it. How odd and how
humiliating, that the one self-indulgence we find it impossible to deny
ourselves should be this clatter-clatter of tongues over the shortcomings
of other people!
And besides all this, in murmuring you are apt to inflict a three-fold
injury on your neighbor. You injure the person you are talking about, the
person you are talking to, and the person you are talking in front of. The
person you are talking about, even if what you are saying is quite true,
and even if the accusation is really quite a slight one, so that it does
not take away his character. You are still belittling his stature in your
own eyes and in the eyes of others by putting your thoughts about him into
words. How often it happens that by summing up a person's character in an
epigram, or finding a nickname to suit some oddity about him, you manage to
pillory and perpetuate the memory of his shortcomings! And is there any
gift God gives us which ought to be used with more earnest discretion than
the gift of mimicry? You injure the person you are talking to; for this
business of talking scandal is like a game of battledore and shuttlecock;
either side feels bound to keep it up. You try it, next time somebody is
ventilating his grievances to you; let him go on, don't agree with him,
don't disagree with him; just retort with "Oh, really?" and "Is that so?",
and you will be surprised to find how soon the conversation flags. And
finally, if you air your discontentment in public, you do an injury to all
your listeners by setting them, openly, a bad example. Most of our sins,
you see, we are rather ashamed of; we feel fools, afterwards, if we have
lost our temper in public; we don't like to be caught out telling a lie.
But when we talk uncharitably we always imagine--too often, I'm afraid,
with justice--that our company enjoys it. So much the worse if they do; you
are lowering the standard of fraternal charity with every word you say;
and, if you are talking in front of people younger than yourself or less
important than yourself, you are setting them an example they will be only
too ready to follow. Probably at your expense, you know, the moment you
have left the room. How terrible it is to leave the room, when all the
company has been exchanging uncharitable criticisms for the last hour or
so!
And finally, by indulging this habit of murmuring you are spoiling in
yourself the virtue of humility, the virtue of patience, and your own peace
of mind.
The virtue of humility. What a fine fellow this self of ours is! How
generous, how tactful, how considerate, what a man of the world! How
efficiently, and yet how unostentatiously, he manages the work that is
entrusted to him; how carefully he avoids infringing other people's rights;
how edifying he manages to be, and at the same time how natural! And yet
humility teaches us that we are not to regard this fine fellow as a finer
fellow than his neighbors. Don't you see, then, that we ought to blind our
eyes to the tactlessness, the incompetence, and all the other defects of
those neighbors of ours? Otherwise the picture of this fine fellow will
dominate our imagination too much. At all costs we must avoid comparisons;
and how are we to avoid comparisons if half our conversation is devoted,
day in day out, to the shortcomings of other people? That Pharisee in the
temple would not have been guilty of the pride which sent him down to his
house unjustified, if he hadn't caught sight, out of the corner of his eye,
of that cringing publican beating his breast and making an exhibition of
himself. No, we must turn our eyes away, resolutely, from other people's
faults; it may give us time, you know, to observe that the fine fellow has
some faults of his own.
The virtue of patience. Almighty God means us to suffer; it is good for us;
and he means us to suffer not only from natural causes over which man has
no control, but from our fellow-men; from the mistakes, the misjudgments,
the misgovernment of our fellow-men. Most of us have some unlovable
qualities which we can't help; most of us do and say the wrong thing,
without meaning to; and besides that, there are our faults. Part of the
reason why God put you into the world was to exercise the patience of
others by your defects; think of that sometimes when you are going to bed.
It is a salutary thought . . . Your bad temper, your excessive
cheerfulness, your tiresomeness in conversation; he chose the right person,
didn't he? Well, if other people are being so admirably exercised in
patience by you, it seems a pity you shouldn't be exercised by them now and
again in your turn; that's only fair. The offering of patience which you
can make to God; the little things you have to put up with--and that
offering is to be made in silence. How it spoils that offering if you make
any comment on it, still more if you make any comment on it out loud, still
more if you make any comment on it in the presence of other people! You
must offer it to him like a casket of myrrh, not wasting the scent by
opening the lid before it gets to him.
Your peace of mind. That's the one thing you can't afford to lose, next to
your soul; even the Saints can't afford to lose that. Lose your peace of
mind, and you lose your concentration of purpose, your capacity for
recollection, your attentiveness to God's calls and inspirations. Now, a
strong antipathy, like a strong attachment, does interrupt, if only for a
short time, this peace of mind which is so precious to you; you cannot
think calmly, you are swept away by gusts of resentment and self-pity, the
grievance preys upon you, haunts you like a nightmare.
That is what happens, I mean, if you have really let murmuring get the
upper hand in your life, and things are not going smoothly with you. Even
worrying over trifles, how it can upset the poise and balance of the mind!
Either those trifles concern you personally, or they don't. If they don't,
then it is far better not to meddle in them at all; to tell yourself you
are in danger of becoming a busybody, and leave them on one side. Or they
do concern you personally, and you are tempted to criticize somebody from
whose conduct you yourself have to suffer. Believe me, you only add to your
grievance by taking it out for an airing. It is quite true that it may do
good to discuss it calmly with your confessor. Or, very occasionally, it
may be your duty to bring something to the notice of a person in higher
authority. But to chatter and gossip over your grievances never yet did any
good, never yet afforded any real relief; you only hypnotize yourself into
imagining your resentment to be stronger than it really is. It is a
conspiracy against your own peace of mind.
St. Thomas More, whose life was full of gracious customs, had a quaint way
of dealing with uncharitable conversation. Whenever people began to indulge
in it in his presence, he used to break in suddenly and loudly, as if
talking to himself: "They may say what they will, but I say that this house
is a good house, and the architect who built it is a clever fellow". I
don't mean that this formula would be equally useful to all of us; there
are presbyteries and religious houses which it would not be possible to
describe in that way without being suspected of paradox. But I think the
holy man's principle was absolutely sound--that if you want to put an end
to these sins of the tongue, you must start talking suddenly about
something quite different. Have some fresh topic of conversation up your
sleeve, ready to be released when people start exchanging grievances in
your presence. By such simple means, you may do more than you know to
preserve charity among your brethren, and win that special title to God's
sonship which is reserved for those who make peace.
CHAPTER 7. ACCIDIE
When the people of Israel invaded, under Josue, the territory of Chanaan, a
Divine oracle gave them directions about the treatment of the cities they
were destined to conquer. And those directions have, before now, been a
puzzle to many of us. The inhabitants of these Chanaanitish cities must be
put to the sword, apparently without any distinction of age or sex. How (we
naturally ask) could the God of mercy whom we preach to-day issue, three
thousand years ago, a command of savagery? How could he encourage his
chosen people in taking such bitter measures against their enemies? Were
the Chanaanites so desperately wicked, all of them, was their stock so
hopelessly degenerate, that they had deserved nothing less in the way of
retribution? It may be so. For myself, saving the better judgment of the
Church, I have always been tempted to imagine that the regulation we are
speaking of was a prohibition, rather than a precept. In those days, I take
it, and among those fierce children of the desert, when you conquered a
country and settled down in it you took one or other of two alternative
courses. Either you mixed with the conquered people, intermarried with them
and fused your national traditions with theirs; or you exterminated them
altogether, not sparing the women, who would introduce tamer blood into
your own virile stock, not sparing the children, who might grow up to
avenge their fathers later on. Since God wanted, above all things, to
preserve his people from the debased and idolatrous worship which the
Chanaanites practiced, he forbade his people to adopt the milder
alternative, and allowed their fiercer instincts to have free play. In the
conditions of those barbarous times, he let rough justice take its course.
Whatever we think about the literal interpretation of these stories, their
allegorical interpretation is surely plain and salutary. We Christians are
engaged--that is the point-- in a war of extermination against all that
keeps us away from God.
What I want to call your attention to is a curious exception which had to
be made when Josue carried out the command (or the prohibition) that was
given him. The Gabaonites (if I may refresh your memory with the facts)
realized that resistance to the invader was useless; realized, too, that
surrender would only mean massacre, since they belonged to the doomed
population of Palestine. They sent ambassadors, therefore, who pretended to
come from a distant country; in ragged clothes, with worn-out shoes, with
the very bread moldering in their wallets, to create the impression of a
long journey. And they succeeded in making a treaty with Josue, stipulating
that their lives should be spared, since they were ready to surrender at
discretion; before Josue found out who they really were, or where they
really came from. When the fraud was discovered, he could not go back on
his oath. He was directed to reduce the Gabaonites to the position of
slaves; temple slaves probably. They were to be hewers of wood and drawers
of water to the congregation of Israel; and so (adds the chronicler) they
remain to this day.
It may seem a strange flight of the imagination when I find, in those
Gabaonites who hewed wood and drew water for the service of the temple, a
parallel, and in some sort an encouragement, for Christian people, and
Christian people who are called to the splendid career of the priesthood.
But bear with me for a moment while I explain my parable. I think it is an
experience not altogether uncommon, commoner certainly than the polite
conventions allow us to admit, for a priest to wonder whether he has not,
after all, mistaken his vocation. Did God ever really mean him to be a
priest? Or did he mistake motives of human prudence, the good opinion of
his friends, some passing wave of enthusiasm, for the Divine call? There
was, perhaps, a time during his seminary course at which he felt scruples
about it all, and his confessor told him to disregard them, as scruples
should be disregarded; were they scruples? Did we, after all, impose on the
Bishop who ordained us, something as the Gabaonites imposed on Josue? Did
we make him believe that we had left the world far behind us, when in truth
it was still at our elbow? To be sure, if we deceived others, we managed to
deceive ourselves equally; we did not act in conscious bad faith. But,
while that may extenuate our guilt, it does not alter our mistake. We have
become priests, when God never called us to the priesthood. Miserable false
step; how are we to retrieve it?
Understand me, reverend fathers; I am not referring to those tragedies of
the priestly life which sometimes arise from a strong assault of
temptation. God help us all, it might happen to any of us, in our mortal
weakness, that a passion suddenly conceived, or long indulged through
carelessness, should force us into a false position; a position in which
great grace is needed to avert a disastrous decision. But I am not
thinking, now, of these major perils. I am thinking, now, of what is (I
fancy) much commoner; the position of a priest who has been, and remains,
faithful to his promises of celibacy and of ecclesiastical obedience; there
is no sudden crisis to be feared, and yet all is not well with him. Years
have gone by, ten or twenty years maybe, since his ordination, and the
first fervors have died away. It isn't that he doesn't do his job. He says
his prayers, makes a preparation and thanksgiving of sorts, a meditation of
sorts; he does all that could be expected of him to look after the souls
put in his charge; but he does it all lifelessly. The Divine Office becomes
more and more what the Church, in her grim realism, calls it--the office,
the thing that gets in your way. He is concerned, not to say it, but to get
it said. The Mass itself brings with it no feelings of awe, of mystery, of
content. The care of souls, which he used to find so interesting, is now
hand-over-hand work; they all seem to him much alike, much on a level, and
not a very high level at that. All the savor has gone out of his
priesthood; he sometimes thinks, even out of his religion. Was he, perhaps,
not meant to be a priest? There are so many useful and unselfish things he
could be doing, in a sick world, if he weren't a priest. Is it possible
that he has made a mistake?
Now, don't let's be in too much of a hurry to blame ourselves over all
that. One thing is lucidly obvious about human nature, and that is that the
thrill of novelty does wear off, and as you grow older you find less
natural zest about things which were once full of excitement and romance.
It happens, I suppose, to a more or less extent even in the most successful
of marriages. And it seems to me a very extraordinary thing that nobody
ever warns young priests about this; let me take this opportunity of
warning those of you who are only a few years out from the seminary. A
great deal of the thrill, a great deal of the interest which our priestly
duties give us at first is not supernatural, though we often feel as if it
was. A great deal of it is purely natural, purely human. The Mass and the
office interest us because of the poetry in them, because of the mystery in
them. We rather enjoy--if the cruel truth must be told--dressing up and
going through ceremonies in front of a watchful congregation; if we are the
kind of people who can do that sort of thing well. Work for souls is, of
all work, the most interesting, just at first. And all that human
satisfaction which we get out of our priestly duties is a thing which fades
away with the years; it is inevitable. And this very obvious but seldom
mentioned fact, which is useful as a warning to the young priest, may be
useful as consolation to the priest who is getting on in years. When you
complain that your priestly life seems mechanical and flat as compared with
what it seemed ten years ago, remind yourself in the first place that what
you have lost is, in great part, a merely human love of your job, and love
of doing your job well, which was bound to disappear in any case.
Yes, you say, that's all very well, but it's not quite my trouble. What I
mind about is not so much that I seem to get so little out of my religion,
but that I seem to put so little into it. Or perhaps I should put it in
this way, what I mind about is that I should mind so little. Just when I'm
in retreat like this, I feel ashamed of having so little love for God, so
little zeal for the faith and for the Church; but when I'm back at my work,
I'm conscious of all that, and I don't seem to care. I'm content to go on
in this mechanical way, and remind myself that lots of other priests are
probably in the same position. It isn't merely that my religion does
nothing to arouse my feelings; what are feelings, after all? The trouble is
that it doesn't really command the loyalty of my will. I'm afraid I don't
make my meditation; or if I do, it's only a token meditation now and again.
I find myself going onto the altar without having taken the trouble to
prepare myself, deferring my office till the last possible moment. When I
come across a soul which is hardened, ever so slightly, against the
influence of religion, I just shrug my shoulders and say, "Well, if he
won't, he won't; I can't help him". It isn't simply that I have got no
taste for my job; I haven't got my heart in my job. And that, surely, is a
matter of the will.
I know. That is the state, of course, which the spiritual authors call
tepidity. If you ask me to suggest a remedy for that, I should be inclined
to answer in two words, and those two words are "spiritual reading". I am
afraid that sounds a dull prescription. It recalls unprofitable half-hours
when you sat, as a divine or a novice, with Scaramelli open on your lap. I
don't think it is important, when we do spiritual reading, that it should
be something dull. On the contrary, we ought to take some trouble, more
trouble than we ordinarily do, about finding an author whose style and
whose outlook appeals to us. But having found our spiritual author, we
should give him his head. Don't skip, don't stray about, don't tell
yourself, "I think perhaps this is rather stiff going for a person like
me". Read steadily on, with an open heart, and God will find the right
passages to awaken your conscience where it is needed and as it is needed.
You can say office year after year, you can repeat any number of formal
prayers day after day, you can meditate, even, on approved lines, and yet
never hear God's voice talking suddenly to your soul. Your prayer has
become mechanized, and your mind, from long use, is shut to the
implications of it. But spiritual reading is a splendid trap to catch
souls. You are reading on, quite calmly, and all of a sudden a sentence
flashes out of the page, and you say to yourself, "By Jove, that's true",
and the next moment you say to yourself, "By Jove, that's me".
Having said so much about remedies, may I go back to where I was before,
and point out, what is almost certainly true, that this tepidity of which
you accuse yourself does go side by side with, and is partly caused by, the
phenomenon we were talking about; I mean, a slackening off, not altogether
due to your own fault, of your interest in spiritual things. That
slackening off, with some of us, is a matter of age; with some, a matter of
temperament; with some, a matter of circumstances--we are set down to do a
dull job, which is not really our job, and we lose heart and grow
disillusioned about what a vocation to the priesthood means. Very likely
you complain that the work you have to do isn't worth doing, or isn't your
work anyhow. Don't be too certain that that is the trouble. A doctor once
told me--I don't know if it's true, but he was a very famous doctor--that
you never ought to say you caught cold through sitting in a draught,
because you don't feel a draught until you've already got a cold. And I
think when a priest complains, not of difficulties in his work, but of the
dull, dead level of his congregation, that that SOMETIMES is just due to
the dull, dead level of the priest. But it is true, I think, that parish
work, and "a fortiori" work on the foreign missions, is calculated to keep
us up to the mark. And if for no fault of his own the priest who aspired to
serve God in that way finds himself turned into a professor, it isn't the
same thing. He misses that interplay of life with life, of mind with mind,
which is a grace God ordinarily gives us, to keep us fresh and supple. But
if that is part of the trouble, it is not, you admit, the whole of the
trouble. The fact is (you say) that things seem to have gone very flat with
me; and I should think that if I go through the motions of serving God,
it's about all I do.
Yes. Well, there's something to be said for going through the motions of
serving God. What I'm wanting to suggest, if there is anybody here who
feels like that about it, is something rather bold, something that might
even sound unorthodox if you stated it too crudely. You may think it has a
smack of Quietism about it. I can only say that it is the best light I
have, but I don't want anybody to pay any attention to it except in so far
as it seems to him a right and reasonable attitude that I am recommending.
At to whether God meant you to be a priest, stop worrying. He certainly
means you to be a priest now; your priesthood is contained, if not in his
antecedent will, at least in his consequent will. You may have crept in
under false pretenses like the Gabaonites, but he is faithful to his word,
and he promises us the graces we need for our state of life as long as we
do our part. He wants you, now, to be a priest, and a good priest. But in
the meanwhile the facts have got to be faced. There is this heavy tedium
which you cannot shake off, that makes your whole priestly life feel dull
and second-rate. You cannot, even under the search-light of a retreat like
this, detect any grave fault which you can amend, any obvious sacrifice you
can make to God, in the hope of improving the situation. You can only go
on, doing your best to serve God, with the dispiriting consciousness that
it is really only a second best, praying for greater fervor, for the
rekindling of your love. In what spirit are you to undertake that difficult
and ungrateful task?
That is where the Gabaonites come in. Tell Almighty God that he has, for
whatever reason, made you, at least for the time being, a hewer of wood and
a drawer of water in his service; it seems, for the moment, all you can
aspire to; very well, you will perform this humble office, faithfully, to
prove your love of him. You will go on doing that, if need be, all your
life through; not complaining that he has appointed you to this destiny, as
long as you can find no power in yourself to look higher. Make up as best
you can, by your humility, and by a kind of dogged obedience, for all the
priestly qualities he sees lacking in you.
You are preparing to go the altar. You feel certain that all will be as it
was yesterday and the day before; there will be no conscious response in
you to the sacred words of the liturgy, or even to the near approach of our
blessed Lord as he comes to you in holy Communion. It will all be a
mechanical routine, like filling in forms. Never mind; you are preparing to
offer this lifeless performance to God, all the more hopefully because for
you it is a thing without salt; you are doing it, not to please yourself
but to please him. Jesus Christ, our high Priest, is going to offer himself
in the Holy Mass, using you as his tool--his dull, uncomprehending tool;
you will offer yourself, motionless, into his hands. You will be acting
like a conscript soldier under orders, not buoyed up by any foretaste of
victory, any consciousness of heroism, but simply doing what he is told.
That shall be your sacrifice.
You take up the well-thumbed breviary, and arrange the tattered markers in
it. You know well what your office is going to mean; a verse or two read
with some sense of what the meaning is about, but alas, with no unction;
then a long rumination on your own affairs, starting off at a wide tangent;
then the bell that rings in your memory and recalls you to a sense of what
you are doing; always the same. A parrot, you feel, would do it as well. To
be sure, but at least you can take upon yourself the duties of God's
parrot; the beasts, too, praise God. Tell him that all this mouthing of
syllables is meant for his glory; you wish it could be something better,
but ask him to accept that. You are making a meditation, or a visit to the
Blessed Sacrament; why is it that your heart is dumb? You command an act of
thanksgiving, or adoration, whatever it may be; nothing comes--there is no
answer, in sensitive nature, to the call. You feel like a man trying to
drive a mule, when the mule doesn't want to go. Well, there is that
comforting verse in the Psalm, "I have become like a beast of burden in thy
sight; I was reduced to mere nothingness, and was all ignorance". This
nothingness, this ignorance, this blank which is all you have to offer in
the way of prayer is something to offer; keep still before God in the
consciousness and the confession of your own barrenness; reach out towards
him, humbly, in the dark. You go out to visit some of your parishioners;
what an opportunity for a priest with a real zeal for souls! With you, it
will be a few courtesies of conversation, a shy hint about the abstract
possibility of going to confession--nothing more. You, who ought to be a
shepherd to these people, no better, it seems, than a finger-post! Still,
you are a finger-post; the mere presence of a priest among them means
something. It is for others to do great things for God; it is for you to
offer to him the little good that is done by your ministry, asking him to
make you useful somehow, perhaps without your knowing it, to the souls he
wants to bring to himself through you.
God forgive me, if I have been encouraging any of you to acquiesce in low
standards; that has not been my intention. All I mean is that during those
intervals--please God, they are only intervals--in which our own want of
progress whispers the temptation to despair, we should rather turn our own
shortcomings into a motive for humility, and therefore into a means of
grace. Prayer is essentially throwing yourself back upon God; and when you
are going through a bad time spiritually, that may be the very best
opportunity for throwing yourself back on him, with all the more
abandonment because you feel you have nothing of your own to give him. It
may be, this bad time was sent you for that purpose; if things had gone too
smoothly with you, there would have been danger of taking pride in your own
efforts. Lord (says the old prayer) if thou wishest me to be in the light,
blessed be thy name; if thou wishest me to be in darkness, blessed be thy
name. Light and darkness, bless ye the Lord.
CHAPTER 8. ON FEARING GOD
If you read through the Hebrew prophets from end to end--not many people
do--the last of them, Malachy, strikes you with a sense of homeliness, and
almost of modernity. Partly because, except for one verse, his book is
intelligible throughout. But partly because he does not share with his
fellow-prophets their apparent indifference to all the externals of
religion. Of course, we quite realize that the Jews under the Old
Dispensation needed to be warned against merely external religion; for that
matter, we need it ourselves. But the prophets seem so obsessed with it;
look at the way in which Amos represents Almighty God as talking to his
people. "Oh, but I am sick and tired of them, your solemn feasts; incense
that goes up from your assemblies I can breathe no longer. Burnt-sacrifice
still? Bloodless offerings still? Nay, I will have none of them; fat be the
victims you slay in welcome, I care not. O to be rid of the singing, the
harp's music, that dins my ear!" Well, some of us aren't too happy about
our own choirs; and apart from that, we know that the Israelites of Amos'
time were worshipping Moloch on the side and oppressing the poor. But you
can't help feeling that a diocesan censor would have recommended the
prophet to phrase it rather differently.
With Malachy, you leave all that behind you. For him, there is one glaring
reason why Almighty God is discontented with his people; it is because the
priests are not doing their job. In particular, they are allowing people
who offer sacrifice to bring the worst of their cattle with them instead of
the best. At first sight, you would think that was the fault of the laity;
after all, it was the priests had to eat what was left over.... But no, it
was the priests' job to teach people the law, which laid it down expressly
that the victim of any statutory sacrifice must be a perfect animal,
without blemish. And the priests weren't doing that, apparently because
they had come to treat the whole of the Temple worship with disdain.
I suppose it was at the time when the people had just come back from exile,
and were living in pre-fabricated buildings, and everything was rather
utility; the temple itself, old people would tell you, was a very poor
substitute for the old one. And in the general atmosphere of
disillusionment, the priests had got disillusioned too; shrugged their
shoulders and said well what could you expect. "You think to yourselves,
The Lord's table is desecrated now; it makes no matter what food lies
there, what fire burns it. Weary work, say you, and dismiss it with a sigh.
Cursed be the knavery that offers the Lord gelt beast, when there are vows
a-paying, and all the while there is an entire beast left at home! Offers
it to the Lord of hosts, the great king, no name in all the world so
terrible. It is for you, priests, to see that this law of mine is obeyed."
"Mutatis mutandis" there is, as I say, something curiously modern about it;
you might easily mistake it for a rather sharp pastoral letter. And when
the prophet goes on to denounce mixed marriages, that does nothing to
dispel the illusion.
It would be easy, "mutatis mutandis," to give you a meditation on the main
theme of Malachy's protest. The poor Jew, fresh from years of exile, who
found that the latest lamb in his flock was a miserable-looking specimen,
and said, before he realized what he was saying, "That one looks as if it
would do for the Lord of hosts"--can we really cast a stone at him? Aren't
we too conscious of the lag in our own spiritual lives, when the Lord of
hosts asked us for our best, and we gave him our second best, if that--the
half-hearted sacrifice, the scamped job, the difficulty pushed aside when
it ought to have been faced? But I thought I would draw your attention to a
different aspect of Malachy's teaching, one, indeed, which is common to him
and to all his fellow-prophets--his insistence on the fear of God. "The
Lord of hosts, the great king, no name in all the world so terrible"; it is
not so much the want of generosity that surprises him, as the want of
salutary fear. He admits, to be sure, that there is another side to it.
"Son to father, servant to master gives his due; your father I, where is
the honor, your master I, where is the reverence you owe me?" Yes,
ungrateful sons, but, almost more evidently, foolhardy servants defying
their master's displeasure. The love of God is a phrase almost unknown to
the Old Testament; the prophets call upon Israel not to love God but to
fear him. Now for the reverse side of the medal; open your concordance
again, and you find that the New Testament writers talk to us about loving
God, not fearing him. If you cut out the references in Acts to "those who
feared God", which is only a technical name for the Gentile proselytes who
had adopted Jewish worship, if you cut out Old Testament quotations, how
many times do the authors of the new dispensation urge us to fear God?
About a dozen times, not more. The emphasis has exactly changed. Israel's
worship was fear with an undercurrent of love, ours is love with an
undercurrent of fear.
But the fear is still there. Our Lord, as we know, warns us to fear the God
who can destroy both body and soul in hell. St. Paul tells us that we must
achieve the work of our sanctification in the fear of God, and, more
surprisingly, encourages husband and wife to respect one another's rights
"in the fear of Christ". And to this day, when we catechize our people, we
enumerate the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit as Isaias enumerated them,
ending up with "the fear of the Lord". Fear has a place in Christian
spirituality.
What place? We mustn't disguise from ourselves the fact that there is a
difficulty here. Our Lord, you see, almost expressly reverses the language
of Malachy. "Your father I, where is the honor, your master I, where is the
reverence you owe me?"--that was the old basis of appeal, but our Lord
seems to revise it: "I do not speak of you any more as my servants; a
servant is one who does not understand what his master is about; . . . I
have called you my friends". St. Paul catches up the utterance as a slogan
of emancipation; "No longer then art thou a slave, thou art a son"; and,
more explicitly, "The spirit you have now received is not, as of old, a
spirit of slavery, to govern you by fear; it is the spirit of adoption,
which makes us cry out, Abba, Father!" And St. John is even more definite
about it: "Love has no room for fear; and indeed, love drives out fear when
it is perfect love, since fear only serves for correction. The man who is
still afraid has not yet reached the full measure of love". From such
passages as those you might easily infer that love is the specific motive
of all Christian action, and no other can be accepted as a tolerable
substitute. And I think you would probably find that many well-meaning
theologians, outside the radius of the Church's influence, do teach exactly
that. Fear of any kind, they would tell you, is a morbid affection of the
human psyche, and exists only to be got rid of. A theology which insists
upon hell is out of keeping with a civilization which wants to get rid of
capital punishment.
I don't think we shall get much help from our own theologians here. Their
chief interest in the subject is a rather squalid argument with the
Lutherans about attrition, and whether it is all right to repent of your
sins out of servile fear, as long as it is "simpliciter servilis" and not
"serviliter servilis." The subject of fear itself doesn't seem to interest
them much. So I think we may be allowed to make a few distinctions of our
own, without feeling that we are trespassing on their preserves. It isn't,
after all, a matter of dogma we are discussing; it is a matter of spiritual
emphasis. How big ought the fear of God to loom in our consciousnesses? "O,
how I fear thee, living God, with deepest, tenderest fears"-- there's
Father Faber at it again; is he exaggerating, as Father Faber sometimes
exaggerates? We want to get the thing in the right perspective, that's all.
Well, in the first place I would suggest this; we ought to fear God, but
not to be frightened of God. Mr. Belloc, as he so often does, makes a good
distinction there: "Fear I think, indeed, to be in the nature of things;
but terror, which is a sudden madness and paralysis of the soul, that I say
is from hell, and not to be played with or considered or put in pictures or
described in books". There are people with whom fear is, unmistakably, a
morbid affection, and there are people with whom the fear of God is a
morbid affection; I mean, the scrupulous. A wrong adjustment between fear
of God and trust in God, that is all scruples are; but they do exist, and
heaven knows they are hard to deal with. So let's concede that much to our
Protestant friends; to be frightened of God, to have a morbid fear of him,
is a bad thing. And incidentally, if we are in the habit of preaching hell-
fire sermons--most of us aren't--let's remember that there are three
scrupulous people in the parish and they will all be there.
Another point; we ought to fear God, but we oughtn't to be afraid of God.
To be afraid of a thing is to run away from the subject, try and blot it
out of your mind. And, what's worse, you don't do it deliberately, you do
it without knowing that you are doing it. And I think, in various forms,
being afraid of God is rather common. Sometimes it means, especially with
young people, sin leading to infidelity; unrepented sin makes the thought
of God a subject they are anxious to avoid, but they don't admit it to
themselves, they go on pushing away, pushing away the thought of God all
the time without knowing that they are doing it, until at last it just
isn't there. But you get the same sort of thing, I fancy, in the minds of
quite ordinary people, who are living, at least on the surface, quite
ordinary Christian lives. The thought of God makes them feel uncomfortable;
all that business about eternity, and invisibility, and not occupying a
position in space; he's too big to get inside their telescope. And so they
take refuge in devotions to our Lord and devotions to our Lady and the
blessed Saints instead; all those lovely devotions which are meant to make
it easier to think about God are, for them, a set of pious distractions
which allow them to think about something else. And it does make you wonder
if that isn't what's wrong with some of those people who are so full of
pieties and yet never seem full of piety. Nothing is more certain than that
we degrade religion if we let people think of Almighty God merely as a
terrifying figure in the background, throwing into relief, by his awful
unapproachableness, the tender human appeal of our Lord and his Saints. God
is there to be loved.
Well then, where exactly does fear come in? There's one ready-made solution
of the difficulty, which I've no doubt has been occurring to many of you;
much of the language used by the spiritual authors would seem to lend color
to it. It's this; that fear is meant for the half-hearted Christian, love
for the perfect Christian. After all, it takes all sorts to make a Church;
there will always be weaker brethren, incapable (apparently) of any great
generosity, unmoved by any appeal to the tender emotions, who have
nevertheless got the faith and mean, if they can manage it, to save their
souls. Very well then, if the love of God isn't a sufficiently powerful
motive, with them, to keep them out of sinful habits, or to produce
repentance when they have sinned, let the fear of God do it instead. To be
sure, they will always be rather Grade II Christians; but God is very
merciful, and they will scrape through somehow, as long as they evinced
some signs of compunction more gracious than the bare fear of hell. The
fear of God is not a very high motive, but it's a useful second-best.
I wonder, is that really good psychology? Or anyhow, is it suited to the
age and the country in which we live? You see, if there is any truth in
what I was saying just now about the sinner being afraid of God and
consequently trying to run away from the thought of him, the threat of
punishments in a future life may have exactly the wrong effect, instead of
the effect you intended. He lives in a society which has largely gone
heathen, which openly scoffs at the idea that any such punishments exist.
How little is needed, to throw him into the arms of the free-thinker! Even
the careless Christian, is it our experience that the appeal to fear will
pull him up, commonly at least, when the appeal to love has failed? And, in
any case, can we really be satisfied with the notion that the gift of fear,
one of the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost, one of the seven gifts which are
to descend, mark you, on the Christ himself, is only meant for one set of
Christians, and those the least admirable?
No, it won't do. It won't do, I think, even if you revise the form of your
suggestion, and say that the gift of fear is meant to keep good Christians
out of sin at certain moments; moments of passion, when the love of God has
become obscured in our minds and we want some more violent check to hold us
back. The fear of God must be something more important, surely, than the
net which hangs under the tight-rope in case the acrobat should fall. And
what is all this about keeping us out of sin? Nothing is more depressing
than the habit we all have, if we are not careful, of talking about
religion as if it were a dodge for avoiding sin. Religion is man offering
to God the highest worship of which a rational creature is capable. And the
gifts of the Holy Ghost are not seven different recipes for avoiding sin.
They are seven facets which shine out on the perfect jewel of Christian
sanctity.
Perhaps we could put the thing more justly by altering the metaphor. Could
we put it in this way, that fear of God is the salt of a fully developed
spirituality? Not a food exactly; books of devotion do not, commonly at
least, encourage us to make an act of fear. No, but a kind of spice which
brings out, instead of destroying, the flavor of our sacrifice. You know
how, after some hair-breadth escape, when you have just managed to keep
your footing (say) in a place where losing it might have meant death, the
thrill of fear still pulses in you, side by side with the overwhelming
access of relief; and the two instincts, so far from contradicting one
another, seem to merge into one another--fear actually lends an edge to the
sense of relief. So it ought to be, surely, when you and I make an act of
confidence in the goodness of God. "Misericordiae Domini quia non sumus
consumpti;" the gratitude we feel for our preservation is only accentuated
by the contemplation of that gulf into which we so nearly slipped, that
gulf which still yawns beneath us. So, too, with our acts of love. They are
artificial, because they are selective, if we think only of the kindness
which has pardoned us. At the back of our minds, we should have a
consciousness of the justice which might have cast us away. The Object of
our love is a God of terrors, who might have rejected us, and would still
be worthy of that love we should then be refusing him. Moses, at the
burning bush, must take the shoes off his feet before he approached; there
can be no encounter with Deity which does not claim its tribute of dread.
Understand me, I don't mean to suggest that the thought of hell ought to be
present to our minds, or even present at the back of our minds, all the
time we are at prayer. You might as well suggest that it was impossible to
make an act of love to God without thinking about heaven. No, the
meditation of God's goodness to us in granting us an eternal reward is
meant to lead us on to the reflection, how good God is in himself. In the
same way, surely, the meditation of God's severity towards the impenitent
sinner is meant to lead us on; lead us on to the reflection how great God
is in himself; positive Justice, incommunicable Holiness. In that sense, if
you like, the meditation of hell is for beginners. Hell is only the
demonstration of the Divine Justice, and the Divine Justice considered in
itself is the true motive for our fear of God. Enough that we should
approach him with awe; there is no need for us to itemize his terrors.
May I add, that this posture of approach is particularly demanded of us
priests? Partly because, when all is said and done, the faithful so largely
take their cue from us; "Ay, says the Lord of hosts, the guilt is yours";
don't let us forget Malachy's reminder. Did it ever occur to you that each
of the letters which waits for you on your breakfast-table describes you,
on the envelope, as a man who ought to inspire awe? And we shall not be
reverenD fathers unless we are reverenT fathers first. And also because,
obviously enough, we priests are more tempted to irreverence, in church at
any rate, than the congregation are. We are behind the scenes all the time;
there is no distance to lend enchantment to the view. We can see the damp
patch on the sanctuary wall, they can't; we are distracted for the
hundredth time by the smirking look on the faces of those plaster angels
which look so impressive from the body of the church; perhaps there is a
spot or two of candle-grease on the altar-cloth; one of the altar-boys has
a cold, and has neglected to provide himself with a handkerchief. We are
tempted to hurry over the Mass, remembering other people's breakfasts; we
are tempted to say the words in a rather off-hand, detached way, for fear
of seeming affected or sanctimonious. One way or another, there is a
tendency, isn't there, for us to get rather slap-dash, rather casual, about
our appearances in church; and, you know, I think there is a danger of that
kind of external irreverence working inwards, and actually creating in our
minds a certain disrespect for the things of God. We need, sometimes, the
warning which Malachy gave to the priests of his own day: "Ask you, what
care was lacking, when the bread at my altars is defiled? Ask you what
despite you have done me, when you hold the Lord's table a thing of little
moment?" . . . "The Lord of hosts, the great king, no name in all the world
so terrible".
How little they matter, the external things! And yet, how little can be
made of us, if we don't get even the external things right!
CHAPTER 9. ABANDONMENT
I wonder if you find, as I do, that spiritual reading comes easier in
French than in English? The reason being, that so much of the world's best
spirituality comes from France; and that even when you get a reasonably
good translation (which you very seldom do), there are certain words in the
vocabulary of French piety which have no natural equivalent in English.
Such a word is abandon, the slogan (as people call it nowadays) of Pere de
Caussade.
The nearest word, perhaps, is "resignation"; but what a feeble rendering!
We have used it, like so many other words in the English language, in a
hundred trivial contexts, until its native force seems to have been lost
altogether. "Very well", you say, "I'm resigned"; you accompany the remark
with a shrug of the shoulders, indicating that it is no use quarreling with
the inevitable. Had you been consulted, had your advice been taken, at an
earlier stage in the proceedings, things wouldn't ever have got into such a
terrible mess, but it's too late to think of that now; very well, you are
resigned. As usual, other people's interests have been considered, not
yours; it is to be hoped that the arrangements made will suit them, because
for you nothing could possibly be more inconvenient; no matter, you are
resigned. How is a word like "resignation", with these overtones of
ungracious acquiescence, to do duty for abandon, that ecstasy of self-
surrender in which the soul of the devout Christian throws itself back upon
God?
This attitude of surrender I take to be a thing of the first importance,
not only for souls living very close to God, but for the average Christian;
and that at all times. There is no life so cushioned with ease, so hedged
about with convention, that tragedy may not blunder into it suddenly, all
unannounced, regardless of the proprieties. A moment of acute embarrassment
for the onlooker, if I may put it in that way, when disaster on a great
scale obtrudes itself into the life of somebody who has never, all his
life, thought about the will of God! How inadequate the receiving
instrument seems to be! But there are times when the pressure of public
events overclouds the outlook even of the most selfish, even of the most
thoughtless. There is but a step, we feel, between us and death; an
unforeseen, uncontrollable turn of affairs may plunge our whole world into
chaos, may strike at every life that is dear to us. This haunting
preoccupation at the back of our minds interferes with all our daily
intercourse, makes prayer a Purgatory of distractions. Then, if we have not
learned to abandon ourselves to God, how shall we do? We are shut up in the
dark with our despairs.
What is the precise nature of this act or attitude by which we throw
ourselves, utterly and (as we hope) irrevocably on God? There are two quite
different ways of looking at it, neither of which, taken by itself, seems
to add up. Is it to be an act of confidence, by which we tell ourselves and
God that we are sure he will bring us safely out of all our dangers? Or is
it to be an act of self-immolation, by which we tell God that we don't mind
whether we come safely out of our dangers or not?
In Holy Scripture, I think you can say that the emphasis is always laid on
an act of confidence. All through the Psalms this note of trust in God is
continually recurring; you might almost say that trust in God is what the
Psalms are about. And so it is all through the Old Testament, but always
with the understanding that God will deliver us from whatever dangers
surround us, if we trust him sufficiently. Obviously it is one of the
principal points in the teaching which our Lord gave to his apostles; St.
Peter ought to have known that he couldn't sink, the boat's crew ought to
have known that the boat couldn't founder, if they only had faith. And St.
Peter, learning his lesson from such experiences as that, has passed it on
to us. "Throw back on him" he tells us "the burden of all your anxiety; he
is concerned for you". That God looks after his own, and will not let their
cause go by default, even in this world, is a notion that has inspired
lovers of the gospel in all ages, sometimes almost to the point of
fanaticism. You read, for example, of the Moravian Brethren, an eighteenth
century sect who were energetic in conducting foreign missions, that they
wished "the Brotherhood had one or two ships of its own, so that their
immunity from sea risks might advertise to the world our Savior's hand upon
his people". No insuring at Lloyd's for them, you see; ships owned and
manned by the servants of the gospel would, quite evidently, be unsinkable.
Well, no doubt there is danger of superstition there; our Lord would not
accept Satan's challenge to jump off from the Temple roof. And there is
danger, perhaps, of a certain smugness, when you begin to tell yourself
that you are under God's special protection, almost assuming at the back of
your mind that other people are not. But when all is said and done, we are
committed, as Christians, to the doctrine of Providence. God does watch
over every one of us, and so orders our lives that everything conspires
together for good; if we make the right use of our opportunities, nothing
can happen to us that will not conduce to our advantage, here or hereafter.
To throw yourself into the arms of Providence, with the sure conviction
that everything will turn out for the best, is an attitude nobody can
quarrel with, as far as it goes. The only question is, whether it goes far
enough? Is that all the spiritual authors mean when they talk about self-
abandonment?
I think it is quite certain that some of them mean more than that. You see,
to throw yourself back upon God because you feel quite certain he will
protect you if you do, demands a great deal of faith, but it doesn't demand
a great deal of generosity. You are, after all, doing what is the best
thing for yourself. Aren't you making a kind of bargain with God, promising
him your confidence if he will give you, in return --well, if not a happy
life here, at least a happy eternity? What the mystics recommend to us is a
more intimate kind of abandonment; they want us to abandon ourselves to the
Divine will so utterly, so regardlessly, that we forget all about our own
happiness, even about the happiness of heaven. This attitude, I need hardly
say, was very much exaggerated by the Quietists of the seventeenth century.
By their way of it, a soul ought to be so absorbed in the will of God that
it would be a kind of infidelity even to wonder whether you were going to
be saved or not. We have the record of a priest, belonging to this school
of piety, who actually died praying God to send him to hell, as a just
punishment for his sins. It is no wonder that, at the end of the century,
these pedantries of devotion incurred a formal censure at Rome.
The God we Christians worship is a God of mercy and pardon; you must not
represent him as a Juggernaut, riding roughshod over the victims of his
justice, and demanding their acquiescence. But when you have cleared away
the exaggerations, it remains true that self-abandonment has been preached
by writers of undoubted orthodoxy in the sense of total self-abandonment,
giving yourself up to God without any reserves or afterthoughts; not asking
what destiny, joy or sorrow, is to be yours in this world, not overcurious
about the destiny that is to be yours in eternity. Which is the right
attitude, then, for you and me, as far as God gives us the grace to abandon
ourselves? An attitude of confidence that all will be well with us? Or an
attitude of indifference, which prefers to leave everything to him?
I wonder. Do you think it's possible that when we ask that question we are
making the mistake of trying to analyze too much, rationalize too much? I
rather suspect that there is a mood or attitude which comes quite natural
to us, to the Saints all the time, to you and me part of the time, of
wanting to throw one's hand in and let Almighty God take control instead--
without ever asking ourselves why we want that, or what we expect to be the
result of it. When I call it a mood or an attitude, I don't mean to imply
(as the words might seem to imply) that it is unreal or transient. It isn't
just the result of low spirits or of indigestion; it isn't a sort of
compensation or escape which we devise for ourselves when we feel left out
of things. No, it's something which is quite as likely to occur in our
moments of triumph as in our moments of defeat. I call it a mood or an
attitude, in the sense that it is not something we have thought up for
ourselves by any series of pious considerations; it is not a deliberate act
of the will which we make because we think we ought to make it. No, it is a
realization which seems to come over us without any effort on our part, and
I think it is a grace. It is somehow borne in upon us that all our
judgments, the judgments we make for ourselves, are simply meaningless;
that all our actions, the actions we do for our own human motives, are
simply worthless. We become ciphers instead of units in the scheme of
creation; we look in the looking-glass, and find that we are not there.
Everything is out of focus until it is focused not in ourselves, but in
God. And in that mood we fall back upon him, and tell him that we are going
to leave everything in his hands; we can find no rest until we rest in him.
If we go to the philosophers, and ask them to prove to us the existence of
God, one of their submissions is, that there must be Something which exists
necessarily, exists in its own right, and this is not true of anything in
that outer world which is perceived by the senses. Everything in the
material universe has a merely contingent existence; it just happens to be
there, but it might just as well have been something else, might just as
well not have been there at all. The argument is so rarefied that it makes
our heads spin a little; we look out of the window at a bird singing on a
tree, and dutifully assure ourselves that the tree might just as well have
been a telegraph pole, that the bird might just as well not have existed.
But (unless we are very metaphysically minded) the argument does not come
home to us until we apply it to ourselves. Is my existence necessary? Do I
exist in my own right? We have only to ask the question to see that the
answer is No. And yet, if I have an argument with somebody, I go away
convinced that he is wrong and I am right--I, not he, must be the center of
existence. If the whole world goes to war, I try hard to think of all the
people who will be inconvenienced by it in various ways; but what I am
really thinking about is how it will affect me and the people I personally
am fond of; I alone am treated as the center of existence. So important we
feel when we don't think about it, so unimportant the moment we do think
about it; is it wonderful that this sudden loss of balance in our own
esteem should make us want to fall back upon God?
Fall back upon him, not precisely with the object of finding protection in
the hour of danger, comfort in our troubles, guidance in our difficulties.
It is a more instinctive, a less calculating gesture than that; the
equilibrium which has been lost must somehow be recovered, and we know
there is no other way of recovering it, but in God. There is no time to ask
for guarantees or to strike bargains; when the internal front has crumbled,
there is nothing for it but unconditional surrender. In the logic of the
thing, your first step must be to give yourself into God's hands
unreservedly, not asking whether he has any use for you or any prospects
for you, but simply handing yourself over as so much scrap, to be disposed
of.
What happens afterwards is, I suppose, a matter of temperament; or perhaps
we ought to say a matter of vocation; or perhaps we ought to say that it
does not make much difference which word we use. There are some souls in
which the act of surrender gives rise to a wave of buoyant optimism; not
the foolish optimism of inexperience, but a grounded confidence in the
forces that work with them. God has a place for them to fill, a work for
them to do, on however small a scale; it may be the reducing of a parish
debt, it may be the rescuing of one soul from indifference, that is the job
allotted to them; but because they have identified themselves with the
designs of Providence, instead of choosing for themselves, it is certain
that Providence will not let them down. Difficulties exist only to be
overcome; discouragement is only sent to be a trial of our faith; if God be
for us, who can be against us? We can do all things through Christ who
strengthens us. And sometimes, there is no denying it, if you merely judge
by results, this strong trust in Providence is rewarded by the most
extraordinary interferences of Providence on man's behalf; until we are
tempted to think of self-abandonment merely as a policy which justifies
itself, a matter of quid pro quo--as if God were bound in mere fidelity to
reward us with success, and with conscious happiness, the moment we give up
our wills to him.
But of course that won't do. God's mercies are free mercies still, even
when we have done everything we could do to deserve them. And when we
abandon ourselves to him, protest to him that we are nothing and claim
nothing from him, are giving ourselves to him so that he can do what he
likes with us, is he never to take us at our word? You cannot read far in
the history of God's dealings with souls before you come across instances
in which he has done so. He accepts our offering, and leaves us none the
wiser; we remain fixed in a posture of self-abandonment without any means
of guessing that he has not abandoned us too. For years St. Francis of
Sales was convinced that he was destined to eternal perdition; for years he
went on all the same quietly serving God, for love of him and not for any
hope of reward.
That is an extreme case; but it is not, I think, at all uncommon to be left
altogether unconsoled, when you have made your act of surrender; to lean
upon God without any consciousness of support, to lose yourself without
finding him. Without telling us why, he wants us to go on stretching out
our hands towards him in the dark; the exercises of religion have no
attraction for us, we can chart no record of progress or growth in our
lives, even the attitude of self-abandonment is no longer accompanied by
any sweetness, any sense of relief. We seem held to it by some power
outside ourselves, that will not let us go back on it. And there is worse.
In an age like ours, so full of questionings and of false philosophies, the
mind which is not comforted by any relish in the practice of religion is
exposed, as on a bare nerve, to the chilling airs of doubt. It does not
lose faith, but the clearness of its convictions is dimmed; it maintains
itself by an effort, instead of basking in the sunshine of assured belief.
That, too, the Saints have known; at the end of her life St. Theresa of
Lisieux suffered, to the last, this obscuration of belief. God wanted her,
in this as in other ways, to be the Saint of our age.
We must take courage, then, and not be too ready to believe that all goes
amiss with us, if we do not experience, in spite of the honest attempt to
give ourselves to God, that lightness of heart and joy in his service which
others, differently constituted and perhaps called to a different vocation,
seem to regard as the natural consequence of their surrender. Perhaps they
even tend to shake their heads over us, and suspect that we are on a wrong
path; if we would listen to them, read their favorite authors, come and
hear their favorite preacher, it would do us all the good in the world. It
may be so; but more probably their vocation is not ours; God has called
them to light, and us to darkness. We do well to confess that our own sins,
our own infidelity to grace, have made us unworthy of any other treatment
at God's hands. It may be so, but more probably God meant us for this,
meant this for us; it is his way of dealing with us, and we must accept the
drudge's task of living by an obscure faith which feeds, but does not
inspire us.
Shall we say something about obedience? A difficult, and rather an awkward
subject. Is obedience a virtue? When we are quite small, we get the
impression that it is the only virtue. When somebody says "Go upstairs and
change your pinafore", if we go upstairs at once, without asking why our
present pinafore won't do, without hanging about and playing with the cat
on the way to the door, then we are a good child; our position is made. Of
course, there are plenty of well-meaning people nowadays who think one
ought never to tell a child to do anything, because it will have a bad
effect on its psyche; one ought to say "Darling, there's a nice clean
pinafore waiting for you upstairs; don't you think you would look rather
smart in it?" But on the whole that sort of thing happens in books more
than in real life; most of us, when we are quite small, are expected to do
as we are told. And then we go to school, and there are still a lot of
notices pinned up about changing our shoes and this and that; and when we
remember, we drift into an attitude of dazed compliance with these
regulations, except when we can't be bothered. Even when we can't be
bothered, we don't feel it as a grievance that older people should pin up
notices like that; we are vaguely conscious that it would be impossible to
run a school without some kind of discipline, so we suppose it's all right.
Then we leave school; and it suddenly becomes a question whether we ever
need obey anybody any more. It's true that in the Protestant wedding
service the bride is supposed to undertake that she will obey her husband;
but I think they generally leave that part out nowadays, and the Church,
with her greater sense of realities, says nothing about it at all.
Obedience, for us, is finished from now on.
And then the reflection occurs to us, "If obedience is really a virtue, why
is it that only children are lectured about it, and only people of school
age are expected to practice it?" Father Sebastian Bowden, of the Oratory,
told me once of a middle-aged man who hadn't been anything out of the way
pious but was a quite decent Catholic; only now that he was getting on in
life he felt he ought to do something more about it. So he came to Father
Sebastian and asked him about the Little Oratory, which is the sodality
they keep for lay people. Father Sebastian was delighted, and told him all
about the pious practices they had at the Little Oratory meetings, and the
man said, "Beautiful, beautiful". And then he told him about all the
indulgences that were attached to these things, and the man said,
"Wonderful, wonderful". And then Father Sebastian explained that the
brothers of the Little Oratory took the discipline twice a week, and the
man said, "It sounds just the thing for my boy Tom". Grown-up people--what
have they got to do with discipline? All right in the fighting forces,
you've got to have it there; but there, after all, it's only drill; it's
not a virtue. We are told in a general way that we ought to obey the laws,
and the civil power, but it's a curious thing that when people start
disobeying the laws and the civil power, as long as it doesn't happen to be
inside the British Commonwealth, we always say, "Splendid! I like to see
people sticking up for their liberties. How hateful it must be to live
under a dictatorship, and not be able to rebel whenever you want to!" Even
inside the British Commonwealth we usually have a conference or a royal
commission and give the people most of what they're asking for. As for the
idea that a workman has any sort of duty to obey his employers, that has
become hopelessly old-fashioned; of course you down tools the moment you
don't like the orders you are given. The love of liberty, that is what we
admire; if people obey orders, it's only because they can't be bothered.
And so we reach the conclusion that obedience isn't a virtue at all; it's
only a kind of graceful accomplishment which we learn when we are young,
but aren't expected to keep up, like skipping. And then suddenly we are
confronted with the fact of the religious orders. Here are men and women
all over the world, a great number of Christian people, and on the whole
the pick of the bunch, deliberately binding themselves by life vows of
poverty, chastity and obedience. Obedience--they go back into a sort of
holy second childhood, in which they are not their own masters any longer;
they don't have to make any decisions for themselves, only toe the line as
it is marked out for them by their superiors. Not quite as thoroughly as
the lay sister when the priest said, "It's a lovely day, isn't it?" and she
said, "I'll go and ask Reverend Mother". But there it is; you actually find
a whole crowd of people giving up their own wills and practicing obedience
for the love of God; surely there must be something in it after all?
Of course, you may say that obedience isn't exactly a virtue, it's a state
of life; just as poverty isn't a virtue, only a state of life. But the
spirit of obedience, anyhow, is a virtue canonized by the Church; if you
doubt that, you have only to read through one of those dreary old-fashioned
biographies of the Saints, where each virtue has a separate chapter to
itself; and you will be sure to find one chapter, generally a rather long
one, about the holy man's spirit of obedience. Now, it is obvious that the
religious orders are meant to set us worldly people an example; the way
they live is the kind of way we ought somehow to live, only they do it more
thoroughly, and as it were in a professional way. The example of the holy
religious, going through all their tremendous drill of sanctity day after
day, isn't meant to depress us with a sense of our own inferiority. It's
meant to encourage us in imitating, as and when our circumstances allow it,
the spirit of obedience in which their lives are lived.
The spirit of obedience--you see, during our school-days obedience was
there all over the place; bells were ringing, and notices were put up on
the board, and we were sent on errands, and we did our prep for fear of
what would happen if we didn't; but, was the spirit of obedience there?
Wasn't there a certain tendency to break the rules, and even a certain
unholy joy about breaking the rules, if it was pretty certain that you
wouldn't be found out? And even when you did what you were told, wasn't
there a temptation to do it rather slowly, rather grudgingly, keeping very
strictly to the letter of your instructions, so as not to take an ounce
more trouble than was absolutely necessary? Now and again, perhaps, when
you had had a jawing from somebody you respected, you had a sort of pious
fit which made you actually want to keep the rules; but it probably didn't
last long. Well, it was quite natural that it should be so; in every school
that I ever knew there is a kind of cold war going on all the time between
the pupils and the people in authority, and in practice both sides
recognize it. And you go to Christian doctrine class, and hear all about
penal laws and how they aren't imposed on pain of mortal sin; and if the
teacher is honest he explains to you that the rule about putting out your
light at a certain time is a law of that description. So you keep the rules
more or less, but you don't keep them in a spirit of obedience. "It's all a
silly lot of fuss" you say to yourself; "but anything for a quiet life".
Which is not, if you come to think of it, what the holy religious say about
their holy rule.
Well, it's not difficult to see what I'm getting at. The seminarist is a
sort of compromise, a rather uncomfortable compromise, between the school-
boy and the novice; between the school-boy who obeys because it will jolly
well be the worse for him if he doesn't, and the novice who obeys because
obedience is the choice of his life-time--he wants to have everything
arranged for him by superiors, so that he can be free to give himself
without interruption to God. To put it in another way, the school-boy is
supposedly being trained through discipline in order that he may become, at
the age of seventeen, a responsible person, capable of looking after
himself without interference from his elders. Whether this ideal is fully
realized, either at Eton or at Borstal, is quite another question, but we
needn't go into it; that is the theory of the thing. The school-boy is
deprived of liberty for a time in order that he may be able to use it
properly when he gets it. The novice, on the contrary, although the rules
of the novitiate may be stricter than the rules of religion in general, is
being trained in habits of obedience, so that he may go on obeying without
a murmur all the rest of his life. Anyhow, that is the theory of the thing.
Now, where exactly does the seminarist come in? Is he being trained through
habits of discipline in order that he may become, at the age of twenty-
five, a responsible person, capable of looking after himself without
interference from his elders? Or is he being trained to habits of
obedience, so that he may go on obeying rectors, and rural deans, and
Vicars-general, and bishops, all the rest of his life?
The answer, I'm sorry to say, is "Betwixt and between". No doubt you are
wondering why I give this meditation to you who are soon to be ordained,
and not to all the divines. For two reasons, I think. One is, that I
imagine you get conferences on the subject of obedience about twice a week
from your superiors. And the other is that one can't do much, in the course
of a single meditation, either to allay the scruples of the man who takes
rules too literally, or to curb the adventurousness of the man who doesn't
take them literally enough. But I wanted to say something to you about
obedience, because you are nearing that uncomfortable parting of the ways
when your whole attitude towards obedience comes up, necessarily, for
revision. On the one hand, when you go out on to the mission you accept the
responsibilities of a grown man. You have to decide for yourself whether
you will accept this invitation or that, whether you will take up this
hobby or that, whether you will read such-and-such a book or not; you can
no longer dispose of the difficulty by the simple formula, "I don't think
they'd want me to do that". On the other hand, you have not finished with
the duty of submission to superiors; you are part of the cadre of Christ's
army, and discipline is expected of you. In what spirit are you going to
meet that situation?
It's forty-four years now since I was ordained as a clergyman of the Church
of England. The head of my College gave me on that occasion, rather
pointedly, I thought, a book called "The Spirit of Discipline." I'm sorry
to say that I still haven't read it. What impressed itself more on my mind
was a meditation given during the ordination retreat, in which the preacher
referred to an old countrywoman he once knew who always pronounced the
word, not "DIScipline", but "disCIpline". He said he thought that was a
fortunate error on her part, because after all that's what discipline
really is--disciplin', being a disciple. The disciple, our Lord told us, is
not greater than his Master; and, if you come to think of it, what a lot of
discipline there was in our Lord's life! Think of the supernatural powers
he enjoyed, and then reflect how seldom he used them. He could walk on the
sea whenever he liked, but he went through all the inconveniences of a
journey by boat except on this one occasion which . was different. How he
controlled himself; you might almost say, how he cramped himself! For him,
submission to his heavenly Father's plan was everything. And you and I, who
are his disciples, must be ready to take our orders, to toe the line, as he
did.
After all, there is something to be said for cultivating the spirit of
discipline, even among the laity. Just because the laws of the country are
man-made laws, that is no reason why we should think it a fine thing to do,
to break them. Take the single, obvious case of driving on the roads--that
terrible total of accidents every month, which make peacetime as dangerous
to life and limb as war-time was. Every now and then a fuss is made about
it, and people write to the papers asking why we can't have wider roads,
and forbid pedestrians to use them, why we can't have stronger brakes and
larger road-signals and goodness knows what. The only thing they don't
mention is that nearly everybody breaks the law some of the time, and a lot
of people break the law most of the time, because they've no instinct of
discipline. They always hope that this is the one corner or the one hump in
the road that hasn't got a concealed car coming the other way, so they take
risks and pass the people in front of them. Sometimes it is, sometimes it
isn't.
And if laws are important, human conventions, the conventions of society,
have their importance too. We say of some people, in tones of admiration,
"He's so delightfully unconventional". Well, there are all sorts of ways of
being unconventional; some better, some worse. So far as outward appearance
and behavior is concerned, I don't think the reputation of being
unconventional is one which a priest ought to aim at. But that is all by
the way; we are thinking not so much of the way in which human laws and
conventions interfere with our liberty, as of the ecclesiastical obedience
we owe, whether to the rules which the Church lays down for us, or to your
superiors. What is our reaction to all that, after long years of enforced
obedience in the seminary? What is it, and what ought it to be?
I don't think there can be any doubt that we carry away with us from the
seminary the habit of discipline. We had the story at St. Edmund's, and I
suppose you have the same story here, of the cabman passing in the road who
waved his whip at the College and said "That's the priest-factory". And of
course there is a certain amount of seminary training that works by mass-
production; the mere drill. It's extraordinary to see how a lot of priests
in choir at High Mass know instinctively when to get up and sit down and
take their birettas off, all like one man, though you know some of them are
really saying office all the time. But it goes deeper than drill; the
newly-ordained priest is good at saying Yes, Father, and No, Father, and
has learned to fetch and carry, and doesn't mind getting up at
unconscionable hours in the morning. It is good for a man to carry the yoke
in his youth; and the Catholic priesthood all over the world has,
deservedly, the reputation of obeying orders. But mere obedience, though
it's certainly a good thing, isn't everything. I can imagine our Lord
saying, somehow, "Do not even the Communists the same?"
What you will not carry away with you from the seminary as a thing
automatically produced, is the spirit of obedience. It is for that you must
pray. It differs from the mere habit of obedience in three ways. It makes
you ready to do the maximum, not the minimum, which your commission
requires of you. It makes you ready to obey without murmuring, when the
thing you have been ordered to do goes very much against the grain. And it
makes you go on obeying orders when to do so is to risk great dangers,
perhaps death. Let me just draw out, for a moment, the implications of
that; only for a moment.
By God's mercy, you are going to be a priest. Don't forget that you are
also going to be the junior curate somewhere. Because you are the junior
curate, you will do all the least interesting jobs; the other curates will
see to that. You will find yourself down to talk to the Children of Mary on
Thursday evening; and you will be assured that anything will do for them.
If you let anything do for the Children of Mary, by the time you are a
rector you will be incapable of preaching a decent sermon. If you set about
your ministry in a slave-minded way, everything will turn to slavery. No,
when your rector tells you to preach to the Children of Mary, interpret
that as an order to preach well to the Children of Mary. Give good measure
from the start, and good measure will be poured into your bosom.
That first, then--interpret your instructions handsomely.
And next, let us hope your first curacy will be a great success. You and
your rector will get on like a house on fire; you will be telling the
bishop that you couldn't possibly be happier, he will be telling the bishop
he had no idea they turned out such nice curates nowadays. Now, what is the
temptation which comes to the bishop when that happens? I don't say he will
succumb to it, but the temptation will be to say, "It seems rather a waste
to have Father X working with such an easy-going rector as Canon Y. Let us
give Canon Y that very difficult curate whom everybody finds such a
nuisance; let us send Father X to that very exacting rector who can never
keep a curate more than six months". And your dream will be over; your next
curacy will be a time of probation, to test the metal you are made of. If
you can accept the exchange without complaining about it, then there are
some hopes of you. You have found the spirit of obedience.
And the third point--well, that is hardly worth developing. Thank God, the
Church has a good record of heroism. The disciple is not above his Master;
it may be, he wants you to be, like himself, "obediens usque ad mortem."
CHAPTER 11. PERSEVERANCE
The hymns used in the Divine Office--I mean, the earlier ones, which were
written by St. Ambrose or in the Ambrosian tradition--are perhaps deserving
of more study than they usually get. They are not easy; Latin is used as an
unwilling instrument to represent ideas deeper than it is qualified to
express, and the thought of the writer is often bafflingly obscure. Yet it
seems a pity that this early Christian poetry is skimmed over without
reflection by us who say office, and is known to the laity hardly at all. I
thought I would like to utilize one of them for the purposes of a retreat
meditation; it is the hymn we say every day at None, "Rerum Deus tenax
vigor." The subject I want to talk about will come out as we go on;
simplest, perhaps, to call it Perseverance.
The three hymns of terce, sext and none are obviously a sequence. They were
not meant to be recited one after another in rapid succession about ten
o'clock at night. They register three moods of the ordinary working day,
assumed for the purposes of argument to be a fine day, and with no nonsense
about Summer Time. There is the freshness of morning, there is the glaring
heat of mid-day, there is the languid cool of early evening. And behind
that, under the image of that, they register three moods of the full human
life; the ardor of youth, the concentrated effort of middle life, the
slackening off which comes with old age. Perhaps in the terce hymn the
point is made less clear; that is because the Church can never forget that
Pentecost happened about nine o'clock in the morning, and at nine o'clock
in the morning, every day, she must invoke the Holy Spirit. But in the
second verse you get down to the business of the day, "Flammescat igne
caritas, Accendat ardor proximos;" "May our charity burst into flame, and
set all around us on fire too". The ardor of youth; its eagerness to found
societies and start new magazines and write round trying to get people to
contribute; its impatience to make everybody see the world with its own
eyes--something of that we ought to recapture, even the oldest of us, when
we recite this hymn at terce.
When we get on to sext, we have to make allowances. We are so accustomed to
living in a temperate climate, that we forget the conditions under which
the Bible was written-- and, for the matter of that, the conditions under
which the breviary hymns were written. In Mediterranean countries, at any
rate during the summer months, the mid-day sun is an enemy; you ask to be
delivered from the pestilence that walks under the noon, you expect a
special bonus if you have borne the burden and heat of the day. That is why
our Lord says his heavenly Father "makes his sun rise on the evil and
equally on the good, his rain fall on the just and equally on the unjust".
Most people miss the order of the words; the point is that Almighty God
makes his uncomfortable hot sun rise on the evil--yes, but equally on the
good; lets his nice cool rain fall on the just--yes, but equally on the
unjust. At sext, then, we pray to the God who controls all these
vicissitudes of temperature, lights up the morning with brightness, and the
noon with burning flames, and our prayer is "Aufer calorem noxium," "take
away the injurious heat". Three hours ago, we were praying for a
conflagration, now we are beginning to think of the Minimax.
That all fits in, doesn't it? I mean, when you get down to it, the ardors
of youth are all very well, but one doesn't want them to last a life-time;
they are too tempestuous, too unregulated. Sooner or later a man has got to
grow up, and see things as they are, and make allowances for other people's
points of view; he has got to settle down mentally. Otherwise, he will be a
perpetual focus of strain and conflict; that is why we pray "Extingue
flammas litium," "damp down the fires of quarrelsomeness"; he has got to
learn to fit in. "Confer salutem corporum," "grant us bodily health"--
there, no doubt, the hymn is thinking of the hot noon and all its literal
dangers. But when it goes on "Veramque pacem cordium," "and true peace of
mind", it is thinking of man's life, and the more temperate judgments which
ought to come with middle age. No, not flabbiness, not readiness to
compromise; "true peace", not just any kind of peace. A man must learn to
possess his own soul before he really grows up.
So far terce and sext; and now we get on to the hymn I want to talk about,
which is surely the best of the lot. "Rerum Deus tenax vigor"--that line
alone would be enough to make a meditation out of. "O God, the persistent
sap of things"-- no, don't tell me I'm being irreverent, don't tell me I'm
using Pantheist language; that's what it says. And that's what we're
wanting to say all the time, only it's so difficult to get our minds
focused on it, let alone find any way of expressing it. As the sap lends
life to the tree, so God lends all things their existence. He is what gives
reality its realness; if he did not exist, things just wouldn't be there.
If you find the thought of God feeling remote from your mind, something
abstract, something unsubstantial, you have only to go on your way
repeating "Rerum Deus tenax vigor!" It is not just that he has created
things; if God ceased to exist, creation wouldn't slowly fade out, like the
ripples left behind by the stone you threw into the water. It just wouldn't
be there.
"Immotus in te permanens," "in thyself remaining ever unmoved"--while God
is everything to his creation, his creation is, strictly speaking, nothing
to him. He has a life of his own, altogether outside time, into which no
echo of our earthly jarring can intrude. "Lucis diurnae tempora Successibus
determinans;" he, the timeless, the unchangeable, maps out our existence,
yours and mine, by that time-succession which is the measure of change. And
each day is a working model, as it were, of that mysterious truth. The sun
marks out the hours for us, casts the shadow that creeps over the dial, yet
(as we know) the sun is not really moving; it is, as far as that is
possible to a created and material thing, "immotus in se permanens." No
wonder, then, that as we see the sun verging towards the western horizon,
we should be reminded of our own mortality; the thought of God's eternity
casts over our brief lives the shadow of impermanence. At None, we must be
thinking of old age; of how we pass, and God remains.
And our prayer, now, is "Largire lumen vespere," "When evening comes,
lavish thy light on us". It is a hackneyed thing to say, but there are
compensations about the melancholy of a summer evening. To be sure, the sun
has lost its strength, has become a spectacle to be contemplated, no longer
an influence to be felt; a chill has crept into the air; the light is
fading, and before long it will be impossible to read. And yet, as we know,
the dying sun has reserved his best splendors for the last; not till now
have we seen it making castles and bays out of the clouds that linger in
the sky, not till now has so soft a glow, so delicate a gradation between
light and shadow, picked out the beauties of earth. There is a calm about
us, a coolness, a sense of completion, which we missed hitherto. A hundred
poets and painters have immortalized the picture, but somehow it has not
been staled for us; it is a fresh revelation every time. And will not old
age, we ask, offer compensations of the same kind? Inevitable that a man's
powers should decline; that there should be less enterprise about his
decisions, less originality about his thought, less gift for making new
friendships, and so on. But surely there will be a kind of mellow radiance
about old age which will compensate us, if only in part, for what we have
lost? Our passions will have cooled, the demands we make upon life will be
fewer, we shall have gathered wisdom with the years; the experience of
living may be less rich, but there will be a peace of mind, a calmness of
view, which will help to compensate for all that. The sunshine of our days
will have gained in splendor what it has lost in intensity.
That guess we might make, even if we were still heathens, comforting
ourselves with the consolations of philosophy. But we are Christians,
breathing the airs of grace; and surely to us it ought to seem more natural
than ever, this idea of perfection in old age? We live with two lives
simultaneously; and one of them, the natural life, is evidently destined to
decline. The machinery of our bodies, like all machinery, wears itself out
at last, and that has its effect even on the mind; our memories become
weak, our attention is less capable of sustained effort, and so on. But the
supernatural life which grace implants in us is not subject to these
physical laws; all that is spiritual in us will survive the decline of our
natural powers. May we not even suppose that it will shine out more clearly
than ever in old age? As the shell of the natural wears thin, all the more
visibly will the light of the supernatural shine out in us. And we have,
most of us, before now met people--one or two people--in whom something of
that kind seemed to have taken place; old age seemed to have eaten away
their natural personalities, leaving nothing but grace. "Largire lumen
vespere," how attractive a thing, when you do see it, is that evening
splendor of a Christian life! "Quo vita nusquam decidat;" "let there be no
symptoms of decline"--so the hymn goes on to pray, and we can understand
what it means. Symptoms of decline there must be in the physical order;
hair and teeth and eyesight were not built for eternity. But in the
spiritual order the life of any devout person will lead up to a crescendo,
its last years will be its crowning years, ripe for heaven.
Forgive me if I ask, whether that is the impression you, personally, have
got about very old people in general?
Don't think that I am trying to poke fun at anybody; I am much too far on
the way myself to feel that it's a subject for amusement. But if you think
of the ordinary Christians you know who are over eighty, quite good
Christians, who have been going to the sacraments regularly for years and
years, and obviously mean to save their souls, isn't there reason to fear
that such people react in the wrong way, the unexpected way, to the near
prospect of death? We expect them to be calm and peaceful; instead, they
are crotchety, nervous, exacting, a constant burden on the patient
relatives who have to look after them. Instead of being content to fade out
of things and let their juniors have a chance, they are domineering in
conversation, and insist on having an audience for jokes and anecdotes
dating from their youth. Instead of taking a tolerant view about men and
things, such as you would have expected their long experience to have bred
in them, they are full of crusted prejudices, and voluble in their
criticism of people they dislike. They are touchy and jealous of their
privileges, just when you would think these toys meant nothing to them;
they boast of past achievement, just when the thought of approaching
judgment ought to humble them; they are greedy of their few remaining
pleasures, just when they ought to be weaned away from the enjoyments of
earth. "Quo vita nusquam decidat," no symptom of decline! Isn't it quite
common to find, in such people, that a whole world of imperfections have
survived into old age, some discovered themselves with old age, some,
perhaps, even developed in old age--symptoms of decline everywhere!
Please don't go away saying that I gave you a meditation only meant for
people over eighty. That isn't at all the point of what I am trying to say.
It is the hymn for None I am talking about, not the hymn for vespers, let
alone the hymn for compline. None corresponds, surely, to the time of life
at which we begin to feel that we are on the downward slope, without having
yet--or so we like to think--got down very far. We are old enough to have
begun watching, rather nervously, the habits of our seniors, wondering what
it feels like to be like that. We notice traits, foibles, crotchets in
them, which surprise and alarm us. Surprise us, because they don't fit in
with the picture we have formed of old age as a kind of mellow sunset.
Alarm us, because, when we come to think of it, aren't we getting just the
tiniest bit like that ourselves? Don't we find ourselves reluctant to be
helped into our great-coats? That reluctance is the first sign of old age.
Then it is that we ought to recite this hymn at none with particular
devotion, saying to ourselves, "This means me". "Sed praemium mortis sacrae
perennis instet gloria;" yes, by all means let us pray for the grace of a
holy death. But that shouldn't be all. Let us pray also for the grace to
avoid, and to fight down, those imperfections which so often mar old age,
looking out for them and meeting them and resisting them as they come.
That, surely, is involved in the notion of perseverance.
To be sure, in its ordinary theological connotation perseverance means
being in a state of grace when death overtakes us, that and nothing more.
But perseverance, like faith, like charity, can mean so much more than its
ordinary theological use would imply. It can mean, not merely staying the
course, but winning a race; not merely refusing to drop out, but finishing
(if I may put it vulgarly--I don't think St. Paul would have minded the
phrase) finishing with a sprint. To be always trying to go forward, and not
merely stand still, that, surely, is the first sign of being in the right
way. You feel so much happier, sometimes, about people who are fighting a
desperate battle against fierce and ignominious temptations, than about
people who just jog along, clear of mortal sin, and seem quite happy about
it. The Imitation of Christ, that bouquet of brambles which the piety of
the later Middle Ages has left to us, gives us a nasty dig in the
meditation on death. "Here you go" it says, "praying for a long life, when
for all you know a long life will be full of danger for you". The
reference, I suppose, is to mortal sins; but I think we can apply the same
consideration to our Purgatory. Is it really much use to us draining the
lees of life, if our old age is to be disfigured by all these
imperfections, this all-round deciduousness which is so exactly the
opposite of what the hymn tells us to pray for?
The none-tide of life, when we are beginning to feel the advance of the
years, has perhaps no more subtle danger than the temptation to mark time,
instead of going forward. A certain exhaustion has fallen even on our
mental powers, and effort is, more than ever, distasteful to us. We have
got accustomed to our own low standard of achievement; the very humility
with which we confess our past faults brings with it a kind of despair; we
are only second-class articles, after all. We have even, perhaps, without
quite realizing it, grown somewhat cynical about the possibilities of human
nature as a whole; we have seen so much falling-away, so much falling-off,
in the lives of our neighbors. Favorite authors, favorite prayers, favorite
subjects of meditation have lost their appeal; use has staled them for us.
I sometimes wish that Holy Church, in her great resourcefulness, could dig
out for us and canonize some Saint who only started to serve God when he
was about sixty. I don't know of one; even St. Thomas of Canterbury was
only forty-two when he started, and he was a martyr. Yet it must be
possible, or how did those laborers in the vineyard who came in at None or
even later get the same wages as the people who set to work when the bell
rang for terce? It would be a comfort to have just one!
At least let us do this, let us watch our habits. Those habits especially
which grow upon one, habit-forming habits. I mean, for example, lying
rather longer in bed, because we are not quite as young as we were. I mean
such things as monopolizing the conversation; that becomes easier and:
easier to do as we acquire more and more seniority, and incidentally as we
become a bit deaf. And again, complaining about things; as we grow older
and older we shall have more and more to complain about, and therefore if
we can manage to complain less about the things which we have to complain
about, we shall strike a fair average. And again, depressing other people,
particularly our juniors, with long diatribes about how the world is going
from bad to worse; that is a special temptation of old age, because we like
to console ourselves with the thought that the world we shall soon leave is
a world not worth living in. It doesn't do any harm to think that, but it
is extraordinary what a blight you can cast over your immediate
neighborhood by constantly saying that. All those things grow on one, and
without one's noticing it, that's the trouble. As I say, we can do
something to detect our own bad habits by watching our criticisms of other
people, whether in books or in real life. I don't mean we should watch
other people on purpose to pick holes in them; but if you do find yourself
registering a criticism of anybody a bit older than yourself, don't fail to
reflect, "Let me see, am I like that?"
"Quo vita nusquam decidat"--much must needs decline; our bodily powers, our
mental alertness, our appreciation of the savors of life. But, in so far as
we refuse to be got down by all that, there will be no decline, and the
clouds that gather round our sunset will be tinged with gold.
CHAPTER 12. CONFERENCE ON PRAYER
I want to give you a sort of meditation, or perhaps I should rather call it
a sort of conference, about prayer. But please let me do it on the
understanding that I am not laying down the law; I am simply contributing a
few suggestions for your common consideration. I would as willingly hear
what anybody else has to say, as say this myself. Partly because I don't
feel any special claim to speak on the subject, and partly because the
subject itself is one on which Holy Church leaves us so free to differ in
our opinions. It's an extraordinary thing, when you come to think of what
prayer is (or ought to be) to us priests, the atmosphere in which we live
and the thing we are paid to do, that there is no thesis about prayer in
the dogmatic theology we do in the seminary. I think the reason is that you
really can't lay down the law; the whole subject is full of paradox. And
for the most part, I shall be simply putting before you a series of
dilemmas, and indicating my own solution of them, without even hinting that
my solution is the right one; let each abound in his own sense. I would
speak first of all about prayer in the narrow sense, "rogatio," asking God
for favors. Then I would speak about prayer in the broad sense, "oratio,"
talking to God. And then I would say something about distractions, and what
we can do, the very little we can do, to avoid or overcome distractions
when we pray.
First of all, about asking for temporal blessings which we want for
ourselves. Our Lord has taught us to pray, "Give us this day tomorrow's
bread". We haven't time to discuss Greek, but I think that is clearly what
the words mean; we are not just asking for something on the table, we are
asking for something in the larder. On the other hand, he has told us,
"Take no thought for the morrow, what you shall eat, for your Heavenly
Father knoweth that you have need of all these things". I don't find that a
difficult dilemma to solve. I think he means that we should ask him for
temporal favors, and even (what we generally forget to do) ask him for
things which seem to come as a matter of course, like the baker's van.
(Bakers' vans don't come as a matter of course all over Europe.) But at the
same time he warns us to ask for the simple things, the necessities of
life, not the luxuries. And he warns us not to look too far ahead; tomorrow
is far enough. The remote future, what might happen to us, for good or
evil, is best left in his hands with a general act of resignation to his
will.
And then, about asking for what we want for other people. Here I don't
think it is very important to distinguish between temporal and spiritual
blessings, because after all there is nothing selfish about wanting our
friends to be happy and comfortable even in this world. The difficulty here
is, to my own mind, When somebody says "Pray for me, won't you?", and we
say, "Yes," what exactly are we committed to? (I think I've read somewhere,
but I may have dreamt it, that St. Francis of Assisi, on such occasions,
used to kneel down at once and say the prayer he was asked for, to get it
off his chest, so to speak. There was nothing St. Francis hated so much as
taking thought for the morrow.) How much does charity bind us to go on
thinking about all our friends, and all their needs? And there are a great
many people who need our prayers, and don't ask us to pray for them. Put
the dilemma in this way, if you like. If we were really unselfish,
shouldn't we spend the whole of our available spare time in saying Hail
Mary's for other people? And on the other hand, if we did do that, wouldn't
our prayer remain on a rather mechanical level, and could we ever hope to
advance in the ways of the Spirit?
All I would like to suggest there is a rough, practical solution. Avoid (I
would say) the kind of scruple which will interfere with your liberty of
spirit. Don't get your prayers cluttered up with a long litany of names
which cease to have any meaning for you because you have repeated it so
often. Don't ransack your brains, in your times of prayer, to make sure
that you haven't left out some of the people you ought to be praying for.
Don't dwell on the thought of the people you are praying for, imagining to
yourself the dangers they are in or the discomforts they are suffering;
that is waste of time. Just remind yourself of the names you want to
remember, and in doing so remind yourself that they are only types of
millions and millions of other people in the world whose needs you would be
worrying about if you knew them better.
Then fold them all up in an envelope, so to speak, and enclose them in your
prayers, the prayers you are just going to say; it may be the Mass, or your
office, or your private devotions, but obviously the Mass is best. If they
recur to your mind at all in the course of your prayer, think about them
for a moment but don't dwell on them. Let them be the undertones of your
commerce with God.
And then there's praying for spiritual favors for oneself. That at least,
you would imagine, ought to be fairly plain sailing. Well, I don't want to
upset anybody's peace of mind; but the more I read the spiritual authors,
the more clearly is it borne in on me that there are two distinct types of
Catholic piety which approach this subject in entirely opposite ways. There
is a piety which is so humble that it is asking for all kinds of spiritual
favors all the time. And there is the piety which is so generous that it
won't ask for any spiritual favors, except perhaps the gift of final
perseverance; I want God (it says), not God's gifts--or, still more boldly,
I don't want to get anything out of my prayer, I want it to be all giving.
When a soul is sufficiently advanced in the ways of the Spirit to realize
what a lot of things it needs, it has become so disinterested in its love
of God that it no longer wants to ask for them.
How are we going to resolve this dilemma? Why, I think the simplest thing
to say is that it doesn't very much matter which kind of prayer we make;
and that it is perfectly possible for the same soul to pray now in one way,
now in another. If we get into the habit of following our instincts in the
matter of prayer--which is certainly the right thing to do, because they
are not really instincts, they are God's invitations to the soul--then on
the one hand we shall not be shy about asking great things of God; heroic
love, if you will, martyrdom if you will. Only we should never, I think,
ask for spiritual consolations; those are God's treats, and it is bad
manners to ask for treats. And we should not gratify our imaginations, or
frighten them, by picturing to ourselves minutely all the sacrifices God
might call on us to make, all the sanctity he might see fit to bestow on
us; that is wasting time. On the other hand, if we feel moved to pray with
St. Ignatius, "Give me only thy love and thy grace, and I am rich enough, I
ask for nothing more", then I think God will be equally ready to accept
that form of prayer, and will not let us be the losers by it.
Well, now let's go on to prayer in its more general sense; not simply
asking for things, but doing our best to cultivate (if that isn't too
presumptuous a word) the presence of God in our souls. And there is one
difficulty about that which naturally occurs to all of us. The apostle
tells us to pray without ceasing; but we have all of us got our work to do,
and charity makes certain calls upon us, and we must even have a certain
amount of time for relaxation if we are to keep fresh; how are we going to
work all that in, without ceasing to pray? I can't do two things at once;
and yet at nearly every moment of the day I have two simultaneous duties; I
have to be praying and I have to be getting on with my job. There's the
dilemma.
Well, of course it isn't strictly true that it is impossible to do two
things at once. Holy people have, before now, managed to keep the presence
of God continually before their minds when they were engaged in the most
distracting occupations. I think it was Marie de l'Incarnation who had to
do the business accounts for a firm which was run by her family, and went
on praying all the time; though she admitted that she was glad of dipping
her pen in the ink sometimes, because one could think harder about God
while one was doing that. Still, we know that that is beyond our standard.
Let us think first about our fixed times of prayer, and then whether we
can't make some distant, faltering attempt in our own lives to realize the
ideal of prayer at all times.
Every priest ought to have a meditation time in his orders for the day. Not
necessarily before Mass; that is, for many of us, a time when we can't
reckon on having any leisure. Later in the day will do; and if anything
interferes, still later in the day. Only don't try to make it last thing at
night; if you haven't made it by the time you take your last meal, tell God
you wish you had been able to manage it, and leave it at that. A visit to
the Blessed Sacrament some time in the course of the evening is worth
thinking about, too, even if it only works out at ten minutes or so. Have
some time when you are at leisure to be with God, apart from the prayers
which are binding on you by obligation. And at the same time, try to
practice recalling God to your memory at odd times of the day. Some people
can make ejaculatory prayers, and mean them; I can't. Some people can make
a deliberate act of love to God whenever they hear the clock strike,
without getting into mechanical habits about it; I can't. What I would
suggest is that now and again, when you think of it, you should let your
mind fall back upon God in between your other occupations, just for a
moment; when you are reaching out for a cigarette, or when you are waiting
for a 'bus. Don't try to say prayers, exactly; just let your mind rest on
the thought of God. And if at any time you feel yourself particularly
pleased with life, let your mind fall back upon God and share your
happiness with him. Habits like that will be a sort of ground-work for a
more constant sense of God's presence.
And here's the next problem to decide; what kind of mental prayer ought we
to go in for? The kind that comes easiest to us, or the kind that comes
most difficult? If we always use the prayer that comes easiest to us, what
is it but a form of self-indulgence? If we use the prayer that goes against
the grain, aren't we presumptuously depending on our own effort, instead of
leaving everything to God's grace? Ought we always to be pumping up acts of
the will, as if everything depended on our own agency? Or ought we to let
our hearts rest lovingly on God, and be accused of self-pleasing? Mental
prayer seems to be either a form of pride, or a form of idleness.
I don't think there's any difficulty at all in solving that dilemma, as a
matter of principle. Do whatever God's invitation calls you to do. If you
find it natural to use your own effort, don't be afraid that you are
resisting grace. Grace and human effort aren't two separate forces, at work
side by side; it is grace that makes in you the effort which you make. If
God seems to call you to a more restful form of prayer, and your confessor
does not forbid you the use of it, make that your form of prayer, not
stopping to worry about self-pleasing. Prayer isn't self-torture; it is
talking to God.
But another objection to mental prayer is possible. What exactly is it
meant to do? Is it meant to train our imaginations, our affections, and our
wills by putting them, as it were, through a course of gymnastics? That is
the impression our reading sometimes gives us; but if so, we ask, is that
really prayer at all? Isn't it, at best, a kind of self-cultivation? Or is
mental prayer simply a way of doing honor to God? And if that is all, would
not it be safer to go on saying prayers, reciting the rosary or going round
the stations, so as to make sure we were doing something, not just idling?
We have been using mental prayer for years, and it doesn't seem to have
made much difference to our characters; have we any reason to think that
this form of worship is specially pleasing to God?
To that objection, I have only a word to say, which I will leave with you;
I may be quite wrong. I think mental prayer is imperative, if only to
plough up the mind and leave it fallow for God's inspirations. He may want
to tell you about something you are meant to do for him; and, although he
does not need our help in creating the opportunity for him, it seems to me
that we are wrong if we do not create it. All the Masses and all the office
we say can leave his voice unheard; we shout it down with our
importunities.
And now it is time we said something about distractions in prayer. The
first difficulty here is, I suppose, What is the good of my talking to you
about distractions in prayer? Either they are voluntary, in which case
there is no advice to be given except, Stop them; or they are involuntary,
in which case no advice can be of any use. Well, of course the dilemma
there is only an apparent one. Let us get rid of a great deal of unreal
talk about voluntary distractions. Oh, I know the Catechism tells us that
those who think neither of God nor of what they say are offending God; a
sentence which has done infinite harm. It may be good theology, but it
isn't real life. The distractions we are really concerned to avoid aren't
voluntary; they are only semi-voluntary--venial sins at the worst, and for
the most part only imperfections. And we can do something--not much, but
something--to avoid them. Don't choose a room where the wireless is on when
you say your office. Don't, if you can help it, say your office late at
night, when you are tired. Don't try to squeeze it in at odd moments just
before the next meal, so that you will be in a hurry. Find out which makes
you less distracted, saying it all in a lump or spacing it out, and vary
your practice accordingly. (Very few priests seem to think of saying only
one of the day hours at a time; but that is what the day hours were meant
for.) Don't artificially create strong interests in your life which will
buzz in your head during your times of prayer. And, as I was trying to say
earlier on, try to cultivate the habit of letting your mind go back to God
and rest on him at odd moments during the day. That will give you more
chance of finding yourself recollected when you come to perform the opus
Dei. If you are honest with yourself in observing one or two rules like
that (another one, by the way; don't do odd jobs like opening the window or
stoking the fire while you are saying office), it will be safe to assume
that the distractions which still remain are INvoluntary. Distractions at
Mass nearly always are.
And another dilemma meets you when you are told in pious books that you
ought to fight against your distractions. How can I fight against them (you
very reasonably ask) and go on saying office all the time--still more go on
saying Mass all the time? The fight against distractions is a distraction
in itself. Hard enough for the men who rebuilt Jerusalem under Nehemias, to
work with trowels in their hands and swords ready at their sides for fear
of hostile attack; it would have been worse if they had had to carry a
sword and a trowel in the same hand, and that is what I'm expected to do!
Personally, I think that dilemma is a perfectly genuine one, and on the
whole people should not be encouraged to fight against distractions, if
that phrase has any meaning. Or rather, let me distinguish. I think many of
us find that there are times in our prayer when everything is going
swimmingly; when our attention is caught up to God, without any special
effort of our own, when a warm glow of devotion seems to animate us,
unaccountably, while we pray. Even at these times, distractions may come to
us; and at these times we may (I don't say exactly fight against them, but)
brush them aside without much difficulty, like Abraham fending off the
birds that would have come and eaten up his burnt sacrifice. Quite gently,
not arguing with them; simply saying to yourself, "Not now; some other time
will do to think about that".
But I'm only recommending this when our prayer is at its best. When it's on
a more ordinary level, and you are hard put to it to keep yourself in God's
presence at all, to fight against your distractions is like trying to fight
against a wasp which is buzzing round you; for some reason, the beast seems
only the more anxious to settle down. No, when you come to yourself and
find that your attention has been wandering, perhaps for a whole nocturne
together, simply put your nose down into the book again and try to
recollect yourself. Don't even make an act of contrition about it, just
then, leave that till you say the "Sacrosanctae" after compline. One other
hint I would give you for what it is worth; if you find that you are
fidgeting, kicking a leg or drumming with your fingers on your knee, Stop
fidgeting. For some reason, recollection is easier, I think, when you are
keeping quite still.
And now for a last dilemma. If I find that my prayer is, or know that my
prayer is going to be, a mass of distractions, though they be involuntary
ones, is it worth while trying to pray at all? (I'm thinking of prayers
which are not of obligation now.) Wouldn't it be better to do some
spiritual reading or even go out and do some visiting instead? Because you
have told me that prayer is thinking about God, and if I'm not thinking
about God, I don't see how I am to describe myself as praying. Here I would
return a decided answer; Never give in like that. Go through the motions of
praying, if that is all you can do, and when you have finished, offer it up
to God in a spirit of great humility. Tell him he knows your fashioning,
knows you are but dust; deplore the natural weakness which makes it so hard
for you, his creature, to do the thing you were put into the world to do.
Confess to him, at the same time, the habitual want of seriousness and
purpose in your life which prevents you attaining recollection when you
want it. Tell him you wish your prayer had been one long peaceful
aspiration to him; unite it with the prayer of our Blessed Lord while he
was on earth, and ask to have it accepted with that mantle cast over it.
Offer to God your will, the will that is so weak, and has achieved so
little. Then perhaps (who knows?) this distracted prayer of yours may be
more acceptable to God than the most fervent prayer you ever offered in
your life. He wants us to throw ourselves at his feet; he does not need to
be told that we are sinners.
I think that when our account comes to be audited at the Judgment, the
record of the prayers we said will be a surprise for most of us, and, for
very many of us, the surprise will not be a disappointment.
CHAPTER 13. OUR LADY
I have to talk to you about our Blessed Lady. I hope you will excuse me if
I do not give you a theological statement about our Lady's position, and
her privileges. For some reason, if there is one supposedly English word
which annoys me and depresses me, it is "Mariology". Some other preacher,
no doubt, might give you a strictly theological discourse on the subject,
and send you away with awakened minds, and full hearts. If I made the
attempt, my efforts would present, I know, the character of dried seaweed.
No, we will have no Mariology. We are just going to talk about our Blessed
Lady.
Only, by way of putting our thoughts into some kind of shape, we will
tackle the subject on the lines of history. Every human being exists, in a
sense, from eternity to eternity. From eternity, you and I existed in the
mind of God. But we existed only as a thought in his mind; the actual world
got on well enough without us, and, until the last few negligible moments,
our entry into it was neither expected nor desired. Then, for a few brief
years, the light of actuality caught us, like the shadow of a stranger
passing your window blind. This was our "life"; these years were given us
to cut a figure of some sort in the world, and leave a memory behind us.
That memory is short and fading; even the fame of great men in the past,
although it lingers, becomes distant and unreal; loses its clearness of
outline. I just want to point out that our Lady's history is the exact
opposite of all that. Her presence in the world was expected and desired,
by all those chosen souls who shared God's counsels, ever since the moment
when Adam and Eve lost their Paradise. When she came to us, it was her
first preoccupation to cut no figure in the world at all. And since she
left it, the memory of her has become closer to us and more real to us than
ever; its outlines have actually become clearer to us with the lapse of
time.
The ancient Greek dramatists, as we know, took their stories from a common
stock of familiar legends, so that the audience always knew, from the
start, how the play was going to end. You missed, therefore, something of
the thrill which the modern play-goer expects. But, in revenge, you had the
comfortable feeling of being in the know, when the characters on the stage,
supposedly, were not. This gave rise to the enjoyment of "tragic irony",
when some character on the stage "spoke truer than he meant to"--used
language which became more appropriate if you knew, as the audience did and
the actors didn't, the ins and outs of the story; knew, for example, that
Jocasta was Oedipus' mother when Oedipus only thought of her as his wife.
And I think a Christian, reading the Old Testament, has something of the
same advantage. He knows the end of the story; and consequently all the
events, and even sometimes the language, of the Old Testament, will have a
new meaning for him.
I don't know what it would be like reading the Old Testament if you were an
orthodox Jew; that's different. But if you imagine yourself as a crass
atheist reading through the Old Testament, I think you would find that it
has its "longueurs." It is, after a fashion, the history of a people; but
it is very untidily told, with long gaps, and a disproportionate emphasis
on a few leading ideas. But if you read it as a Christian the whole thing
comes to life. The story of it begins with the Fall, and the prophecy that
the seed of the woman will be at war with the serpent, crushing his head;
we realize that that is the promise of a redemption. And the drama of the
Old Testament is that this redemption is continually just going to come
off, but never does. The climax is still there awaiting us, when we turn
over the page from the Old Testament into the New.
And we know that the end of the story, like the beginning of it, is to have
a heroine as well as a hero. Almighty God has been represented as saying to
the serpent, not, as we should expect, "I will put enmity between thee and
the man", but "I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and . . . her
seed". What we are on the look-out for, then, all through the Old
Testament, what keeps us on our toes all the time, is looking for a woman
who will come up to the required specifications; the woman whose obedience
will reconnect that link between the human and the divine, which Eve's
disobedience has fatally severed. Here, for instance, is Sara, the wife of
Abraham; long past the age of child-bearing. Angelic visitors announce that
she is to have a son; and Sara, at the back of the tent, laughs. She won't
do; she laughs. Isn't it tantalizing, the way that situation recurs, the
situation we are all waiting for, when an angel appears to announce the
birth of a son? First to Sara, before Isaac is born; and then to the wife
of Manue, before Samson is born; and then, but this time to his father, St.
Zachary, before John the Baptist is born; and always it is an anticlimax.
Isaac is the child of promise, but the promises are not fulfilled in him;
Samson is the deliverer of his people, but only from the Philistines; and
John the Baptist is not the Light, he only comes to bear witness of the
Light. A series of announcements, but the Annunciation has not come yet.
..
All through the Old Testament you get that curious feeling of having come
across this situation before; and then you remember that it's not quite
like that--you are going to come across it later on, when you reach the
gospels. All that enormous preoccupation with the survival of king David's
succession; when Bersabee comes to David in his old age, and claims the
right of her son Solomon to succeed; or when Athalia kills all the princes
of the blood royal except one, Joas, who is saved by his aunt Josaba--what
does that remind you of? Yes, the massacre of the Innocents. The only
importance of all this, really, is that the kings of Juda were our Lord's
ancestors; if Joas hadn't been saved, our Lady would never have been born.
Bersabee is actually mentioned in the list of our Lord's ancestors; so is
Rahab, the woman who was responsible for the fall of Jericho--the one weak
spot there, just as our Lady was the one weak spot in Satan's domination of
the world. So is Ruth, claimed in marriage by her kinsman.
And it's not only among the ancestresses of the Holy Family that you find
coming events cast their shadows before them. Look at the other women of
the Old Testament; neither Jael nor Judith quite comes up to our ideal of
womanhood, and yet, because of what they stood for, the deliverance of
their people, both Jael and Judith are hailed as "blessed among women".
Esther, again, delivered her people, by interceding with the great king, as
only she--he tells us so himself--had a right to intercede. Even in its
most blood-thirsty passages, the Old Testament is always recalling these
gracious memories to us, as when we watch Respha, the daughter of Aia,
weeping over her sons that were crucified. It is the art of Virgil that,
all through the Aeneid, he strikes a chord of mystery by prophecies and
hints of things yet to come. You get the same impression in the Old
Testament; but the Old Testament is not art.
There is a well-known passage in the Proverbs, where the Divine Wisdom is
represented as assisting in the work of creation; "I was at his side, a
master workman, my delight increasing with each day, as I made play before
him all the while; made play in this world of dust, with the sons of Adam
for my play-fellows". This audacious passage has been utilized by the
liturgy for recitation on certain of our Lady's feasts. And I like to think
of her as the world's play-fellow; a slight, girlish figure, appearing and
disappearing all through those long centuries when the world was without
hope; playing hide-and-seek with us till the time came. All the women of
the Old Testament seem, if I may put it in that way without irreverence,
only imperfect studies which the artist has executed, and then put on one
side. Anna, for example, the mother of Samuel, how like the "Magnificat,"
in some ways, is her song of triumph! And yet, how it falls short of the
"Magnificat!" A preliminary draft, which wouldn't do.
She came, so long expected, so long desired; you do not introduce the
heroine in the first scene of the drama. And when she came, did she occupy
the stage, did she take the lime-light? She, the lime-light? Saints and
theologians have pored over the gospels, picking up every trace of her,
like men hoarding the relics of spilt treasure; how narrow is their field
of search! And notice that the moment her Son is born, she appears only in
connection with him, only as subordinated to him. "Going into the dwelling,
they found the child there, with his mother Mary"; and after that, she is
not even mentioned by name. "Take with thee the child and his mother"; "the
father and mother of the child were still wondering over all that was said
of him"--see how she has become anonymous, even when he is Iying in her
arms. And when she finds him in the temple, what does she say? "Think, what
anguish of mind thy father and I have endured." "Thy father and I"--it
sounds natural to us; but can you quote me another sentence in the Bible,
another sentence uttered in antiquity, in which the speaker does not come
first? "Shall I and thy mother bow down to thee?"--so speaks the uxorious
Jacob. "Or I only and Barnabas"--so speaks the infinite courtesy of St.
Paul. But our Lady has more than good manners, she has utter humility;
Joseph's grief comes first, because it matters most. All those years of her
girlhood, what is left of them? Only a few legends. All those months when
she followed her Son on his travels, and what can we glean from them? Only
a few references, something less than gracious. Then, for a moment, she
appears on Calvary; then, for a moment, she lights up the Cenacle. And the
rest is silence; no word of her life, or even of her death; she has left us
without a trace, without a tomb.
Such was her life; and since then, what has her fame been? On the whole, it
has left very little mark on the earliest Christian literature. That, as we
have seen, she came to undo what Eve did, was obvious from the first. You
can trace the idea, I think, in St. Paul; St. Paul was very Fallminded. "It
was Adam" he writes, "who was created first, and Eve later; nor was it Adam
that went astray; woman was led astray, and was involved in transgression.
Yet woman will find her salvation in the Child-bearing"--that is, in our
Lady's Child-bearing; no other interpretation gives any sense to the
passage. I suspect that we ought to interpret another obscure saying of St.
Paul's in the same way; "if woman takes her origin from man, man equally
comes to birth through woman"--so he writes to the Corinthians. Did he
merely mean that every woman has a father, and every man has a mother?
Scarcely worth saying; besides, men have fathers, and women have mothers.
Much more probably he is reminding us that if Eve came to us through Adam,
the Second Adam came to us through the Second Eve. St. Irenaeus, in the
second century, draws out the parallel explicitly. But texts like these
come to us only as occasional confidences, they were not, it would seem,
the commonplaces of Christian thought.
What are we to conclude? That the Christians of the first age thought
exactly as we do, felt exactly as we do, about the Blessed Virgin, but for
some reason--reverence, perhaps-- made little public allusion to her? I
suppose that was, a hundred years ago, the explanation which found most
favor; even Newman's doctrine of development was suspect in his day. But I
think it is now more generally recognized that there has been a progressive
unfolding of Catholic theology, on this as on other subjects. If you
compare the decree which defined the Immaculate Conception with that which
defines the Assumption, I think you will notice that whereas Pius IX is
concerned to emphasize the unchanging deposit of faith, Pius XII rather
points us to a growing conviction, as the centuries went on, about subjects
which had at first been a matter of hesitation. The Church has made up her
mind.
Clearly, the great Christological heresies of the fourth and fifth
centuries did much to concentrate attention on our Lady as the hinge,
without which our view of the hypostatic union can get no leverage. If our
Lord was born, not merely from her, but of her, then he was truly Man. If
he was at the same time truly God, then she was, and must be called, the
Mother of God. Hence her new title of Theotokos; she becomes a theological
symbol of the utmost importance, and she takes the highest possible rank
accordingly. In the liturgies of East and West alike she is celebrated in
sonorous phrases, and from the half-dome of the basilica her dark icon
looks down, challenging our faith. The orators, too, begin to spread
themselves, and by the seventh and eighth centuries they have become as
diffuse and tedious about our Blessed Lady as any modern preacher. By the
time of Charlemagne, at latest, I think you can say that our Lady was
honored as widely, as publicly, as explicitly as she is to-day.
As much honored, yes, but was she as much loved? It was left for the Middle
Ages to teach us that. How on earth the Middle Ages, with all their
barbarity, produced the whole notion of romantic love--of woman as
something set apart, sacred, to be deserved, if she could be deserved at
all, only by knightly devotion--is something I could never understand. But
there it is; there are Dante and Beatrice, there are the troubadours;
nobody disputes the fact. And nobody, I think, doubts that it was all bound
up with a new attitude towards the person of our Blessed Lady; a spirit of
knightly devotion which had grown up towards her. Writers as anti-Catholic
as Comte and Lecky assure us that all our modern ideas about the dignity of
womanhood come down to us from the opinion men had of our Blessed Lady in
the Middle Ages. After all, why do we call her "our Lady"? It's not an
official title; at least, only in the Church of England. If you look at the
official calendar of the Church of England you will find the 25th of next
month put down as the Annunciation of our Lady; but we call it by its old
name, the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin. The Reformers took over,
instinctively, the pet name for her (as it were) to which Europe had grown
accustomed; she was our Lady, we were her knights--the thing was as simple
as that.
I should dearly like to go on about the Counter-Reformation and the
centuries which followed it, but we haven't time. What about the history of
the last hundred years? Most people outside the Church would say that in
the course of a hundred years the Holy See has compelled the faithful to
proclaim, on pain of heresy, the doctrine of our Lady's Immaculate
Conception, and the doctrine of her bodily Assumption into heaven.
Personally I think it would be nearer the truth, though of course not quite
true, to say that the faithful have compelled the Holy See to proclaim
those two doctrines. Compelled it to do so, I mean, by the unanimity of
their faith in, and the warmth of their devotion to, the two doctrines in
question, while they still remained undefined.
And the fact behind that is surely a deeper sense among the faithful at
large about the unique dignity of the Blessed Virgin, and of the privileges
which are likely to have been hers. If you are criticizing the Church from
a detached point of view, from the outside, you explain that as you will.
But if you have the faith, you are almost compelled to admit the principle
I suggested at the beginning of this conference, that the fame of our
Blessed Lady is destined by Providence to grow, not to dwindle, with the
years; hers was never the common lot. Let us not conceal it, the effect of
all this is a great deal of publicity; and modern publicity is often marred
by vulgarity and hysteria. We shall not, all of us, like all the pieties
and the bondieuseries which go with our Lady's cult. But underneath it,
there is something deeper at work. I think she is, in a sense, closer to us
nowadays than she was to earlier generations of Christians. She is
something more to us than a theological symbol; nor do we think of her, in
the manner of the Middle Ages, as the patroness of this or that
institution, a religious order, or a parish, or a guild.
Rather, to each of us, she is a personal romance. Because a natural
instinct makes us unwilling to discuss such things in public, I will leave
it at that. The real secret of her influence on our lives is something
undefined, something indefinable.
CHAPTER 14. FATHER AND MOTHER
King Solomon, the peaceful successor of the warlike king David, is the type
in many ways of our Blessed Lord. And much has been handed down to us in
connection with his name which has reminded the Church, with her keen eye
for mystical coincidence, of our Blessed Lady. Most of the Scripture
lessons we recite on our Lady's feasts are taken from the books which
belong to King Solomon's tradition. I want to speak now of our Blessed
Lady; but I want to take as my starting-point a story of King Solomon's
court which is not usually connected with the thought of her.
We all know the story of the two women who came before the king with a
dispute about the identity of their children. Both lived in the same house,
each had a child; one of the children died in the night, and it was not
clear, next morning, whether the dead child had not been substituted for
the living one. King Solomon, called upon to decide which was the true
mother, ordered that the living child should be cut in half, and a half
given to each. Obviously, it was only a gesture; as a solution of the
difficulty it would have been, not only cruel, but ineffective. The
gesture, however, was enough; one woman was prepared to accept the award,
the other rejected it, even if it should mean losing the custody of the
child. And the king had no hesitation in proclaiming that she, the woman
who would not have the child murdered, was its true mother.
One detail about the story I think we are apt to miss. Why did the rival
claimant welcome the suggestion that the child should be cut in two? There
was a dead child already, and it was hers; why could not she be content
with that? The answer, I think, is that the woman's acceptance of the award
was a gesture, no less than the award itself. She didn't want the murder to
happen; didn't think that the murder would happen. She fancied that she
would be identified as the true mother, if she expressed herself content to
receive half her rights, rather than nothing. A true mother (so she will
have argued in her own mind ) is above all things possessive about her
child; alive or dead, it must be hers, her property. And if I insist on my
claim to half the body, the king will take it for granted that the child is
mine, and will hand it over to me, still living. Of course she was wrong.
The true mother, obeying an instinct rather than a calculation, knew
better; she knew that motherhood, real motherhood, is not possessive; its
genius is just the opposite. A real mother does not want the child to
belong to her; she wants to belong to the child. Though she should die in
giving birth to it, or in defending it against attack, she wants the child
to live; her life, her being has passed into it; she will live only in and
for the life that has sprung from her. Let the child live, at all costs;
even though she, the true mother, should never fondle it in her arms and
listen to its cries and watch its smile again.
This instinct of maternity has never been verified as it was verified in
our Blessed Lady. No mother has ever lived for her child as she did. From
the moment of the Nativity, she is content to recede into the background;
to let our Lord live his own life, fulfill his own destiny, without a
shadow of selfish interference on her part. She does not always understand
why the sacrifice of her own feelings is necessary; "Son, why hast thou
dealt thus with us? Thy father and I have sought thee in sorrow". But she
is content with the answer, that he must be about his heavenly Father's
business; she treasures up the saying and makes conjecture of its
significance in her heart. The Heart of Mary--we recognize its purity, its
tenderness; do we always recognize its considerateness, its willingness to
let our Lord go his own way? When she stood on Calvary, her offering, like
his, was complete; but her offering, like his, did not date from that
moment; it was a life-long renunciation. For three years he gave himself;
for all those three years she gave him--relinquished her own claim upon
him, which would have bidden her dissuade him from the course he took; let
him fulfill the destiny his heavenly Father had appointed for him.
We priests have a special claim, in more ways than one, to the patronage of
our Blessed Lady. Our hands are privileged to touch his Eucharistic Body as
hers were to hold and tend his natural Body. When we consecrate, he is born
anew by a kind of sacramental birth; when we offer the bloodless sacrifice
of the Mass, we associate ourselves with it as she associated herself with
the sacrifice of Calvary. But I wonder whether we give as much thought as
we might to a different side of the same truth; namely that she ought to be
our model not only in our relation to the divine Mysteries, but in our
relation to our spiritual children as well. For fear that the language I am
going to use may seem strange and unhallowed by tradition, let me call your
attention to the fact that our Lord expects his priests to exercise a
motherly care over the faithful. He has told us that whosoever does the
will of his Father in heaven becomes thereby his brother, his sister, and
his mother. And St. Gregory, you will remember, interprets that phrase for
us in one of the third nocturns. He says that you may become as it were the
mother of Christ by preaching to others, and so bringing Christ to birth in
their hearts. And St. Paul makes that claim especially for those engaged in
apostolic work. "My little children"--so he writes to the Galatians--"with
whom I am in labor afresh, until Christ be formed in you". By preaching to
them and converting them he has already shown himself a mother; and now,
working and praying for their perfection, he is undergoing the pangs of
motherhood afresh; he cannot be satisfied until Christ be fully formed in
them.
I say, then, it is good Christian doctrine that the priest ought to be the
mother as well as the father of his parish. His labors for men's souls make
him, from one point of view, their father in Christ; make him, from another
point of view, Christ's mother in them. Are we to say that that is an
unreal distinction; or at any rate that it has only a mystical, not a
practical importance? I don't think so. There is a difference, after all,
in our common experience between a father's and a mother's love. The
father, however great be his attachment to his son, cannot help thinking of
the son as a continuation or a repetition of himself. If the father's
influence is allowed to have its way, the eldest son is called by the same
name, is sent to the same school, is apprenticed to the same trade; and
every request the son makes is unreasonable, if it can be met with the
retort, "I didn't do that when I was your age". Oh, the father's love is
unselfish enough, but it is not a considerate love; it doesn't allow for
the son's having ideas of his own. Whereas the mother doesn't think of her
son as a continuation of herself; rather, she thinks of herself as existing
for the sake of her son. In spite of all the years have brought, she still
thinks of him as her baby, growing up under her delighted eye. She cannot
always plead for him to have his own way, but always she wants him to
develop on his own lines, to realize his own character. It is for that she
lives.
You see, now, what I am leading up to. A priest may be a father to his
people, a genuinely loving father, winning everywhere affection and
respect, and yet be too fond of having everything his own way. He has got
his own ideas how the parish ought to be developed, about the sort of pious
institutions which are to flourish in it, the sort of parochial
entertainments that are to be got up, the sort of way the church is to be
fitted out. If he resembles the true mother in the story of King Solomon's
judgment, it's only in his rooted objection to having the parish divided in
two.... And it's the same with his people individually; he has strong ideas
about what Jack ought to do and whom Jill ought to marry; he wants
everybody to join his pet sodality, regardless of whether it's really meant
for them, he knows exactly what prayers they ought to say and what hymns
they ought to be made to like, and it's all splendid, and it's Yes, Father
and No, Father from morning till night, only--only, you see, it may happen
that the parish has suffered from developing too much on his lines instead
of developing on its own lines. It may be that some of the souls in it--not
many, but some--have been stunted in their natural aspirations or in their
spiritual growth by being too much at one man's beck and call.
Don't let me seem to be finding fault; it is superhumanly difficult,
especially when we grow elderly, to avoid the temptation of running
everything our own way. But bear with me if I try to sketch for a moment
the character of a priest who is a mother to his parish, who makes our
Blessed Lady his model, not only at the altar but in the parish at large.
My little children, with whom I am in labor again, until Christ be formed
in you! He doesn't want the parish to reflect his personality, but his
Master's. If he is the rector of a parish, he wants what is best for the
parish, not what he planned, what he prefers; that site for a church he
bought with so much difficulty, and now the population has shifted in
another direction--very well, it must be sold; this newfangled devotion,
which the curate wants to introduce, it was never heard of when he was at
college, but . . . the people want it; very well, let them have it. Rector
or curate, he directs the souls of the faithful, watches over their lives
and careers, with a view to what is God's will for them, though it be at
the expense of his own self-importance. Do people leave his confessional,
and go to another? He is glad; it shows they have found a sympathetic
confessor somewhere. Is a soul continually slipping back into the same
sins? If there is any chance, he works and prays for that soul's amendment,
instead of writing it off as incorrigible. Does a soul feel drawn towards
higher paths of prayer? He does not try to dragoon it into the ways of
solid piety which have served him; he encourages it, helps it, to follow
its own bent. Some layman in the congregation is a bit too fond of running
things, is always wanting to get up movements and sign protests; the priest
encourages that too, except where it is necessary to keep the peace with
others, doesn't throw cold water on all the enthusiasm and add one more to
the ranks of the parish Yes-men. You suspect him of weakness? Well, no
doubt that is his temptation. But it is his ideal that I recommend to you;
the ideal of letting Christ form himself in every soul, letting Christ
express himself in every activity in the parish, instead of interfering all
the time, at the risk of hindering.
And what I've been saying will apply--do remember this --to your preaching.
There is one point about preaching which is all-important, and is nearly
always forgotten; you aren't talking to a crowd of people; you are talking
to one person, the person God means your sermon to help. You can't give a
guess who it is; but you can fix in your mind the image of a specimen
person, the sort of person there is in the Church. Don't spend your time
trying to put the fear of God into Continental politicians who aren't
there, or arguing with heretics who died about fifteen centuries ago.
Choose an imaginary soul that is there or might be there, and try to
interpret that soul to itself; to make it see where God's will is leading
it, what plans God has for it. Actually, the person your sermon will help
will be somebody quite, quite different from the person you imagined, with
quite other problems to face. But that person will be helped, because you
were trying to bring Christ to the birth in Christian souls, you were not
just letting off pious platitudes in the air.
Whenever you pass by the Christmas crib, and see there the figure of our
Lady, gazing down in wonder and awe at the life that is sprung from her and
yet is so independent of hers, think of yourself as a priest working for
God, and remember that that must be your attitude, watching closely every
soul in your parish, and not content until you see Christ formed again in
it.
Some of you won't be working in parishes, but you will be dealing at first
hand with human souls. You will be teaching, perhaps; or later on you may
even find yourself a professor at a seminary. If that is to be your work, I
think you will see that all I have been saying applies equally here. There
is a vanity in most of our natures which disposes us, if we are not
careful, to make plans too easily and too self-centeredly for the lives of
others. Rows and rows of school-boys turning out just like you, rows and
rows of divines turning out just like you--what could possibly be more
suitable? What could possibly be more pleasing to Almighty God? And there
is a much more pardonable kind of unimaginativeness, which will make you
want to take your pupils and train them up a wall to be just like some
favorite saint, some great man you have known, all one type, taking after a
common father in God. But still, you see, it's possible to have too much of
that sort of thing. God is so rich in devices for planning out the nature
of a human soul; there are so many tendencies and aptitudes in us which are
destined to distinguish one man from another, and do already distinguish,
if we will look for them carefully, one boy from another, that these hand-
over-hand methods can't always be a success. When you find yourself in a
position of authority over others, be at pains to study their
possibilities; train them, but train them to be the people God meant them
to be, not necessarily the people you want them to be.
Or perhaps you will find yourself more of a free lance, carrying out, as a
preacher, the characteristic work of your order. Still remember that you
are under our Blessed Lady's patronage, and that she wants you to be the
mother of Christ in the souls to which your words are uttered. You will
find yourself moving about from place to place, always with a congregation
different from last month's congregation, and with very little chance of
knowing what sort of people it is you are talking to. That fact will bring
a temptation with it; the temptation to say the same thing everywhere, or
the same set of things everywhere, very much in the same words, and hope
for the best. The prophets, you will remind yourself, felt themselves bound
to declare God's word to his people, whether they would hear or whether
they would forbear; those who rebelled against the message did so at their
own peril; it was not the preacher's fault, so long as he had discharged
his conscience by fulfilling his embassy. The Sower, you will remind
yourself, went out to sow his seed, and the effect of the process varied
here and there, not because the seed cast was different, but because it met
with different measures of receptivity in the soil. So you are scattering
your pearls broadcast, and you are not to blame if there are swine which do
not appreciate them.
Yes, all that's true. But do remember, when you get up in a pulpit, that
you are not speaking to a crowd of homogeneous units; you are speaking to a
collection of individual, perhaps of highly individual, souls. And your
business is with the individual soul; you should always be talking to one
person. And you shouldn't be trying to pump information into that person,
or trying to knock down that person with clever arguments. You should be
trying to interpret that person to him or to her self; to develop the seed
of faith, to fan the flame of charity, that is in that soul, to bring it to
the birth, that Christ may be formed in it. What you have to deliver is not
a mere message, but Christ imprisoned in men's hearts.
CHAPTER 15. DEATH AS A FRIEND
It is customary, in a formal retreat, to make a meditation on death. And it
is customary to make that meditation as uncomfortable an affair as
possible; to dwell on all the accumulation of suffering and uncertainty and
loneliness and terror which may, which must to some extent, accompany it.
The reason for that is, if I may put it baldly, that formal retreats aren't
really meant for the sort of people who go to retreats. They are meant for
people so wrapped up in worldliness, living so much for the moment, that
the bleak, obvious truths which arise from any consideration of man's
destiny pass them by. But most of the people who go to retreats do not
really need to be reminded about death; they are pious folk who learn a
great deal about it from their prayers, elderly folk who feel that it is
coming near, priests and religious who spend a good deal of their time
going to funerals. Very often they are introspective, imaginative sort of
people, who are inclined to dwell on the thought of their last end almost
more than is good for them. And I wonder whether it is really very much
use to feed our terrors by reminding ourselves of grim details about the
sick-room and the graveyard? More especially when those details don't
really come into the picture--why should we brood, for example, on the
noise which the earth makes when it rattles on a coffin-lid? When it is our
coffin-lid, we shan't mind whether it rattles or not.
So I thought we would try to put the other side of the case, try to remind
ourselves about the comforting aspects of death, treat death for once as a
friend. Of course, it is salutary for us to reflect that the goods we
possess, the pleasures we enjoy on earth only belong to earth; that we
can't take the goods away with us when we die, that the pleasures are only
short-lived. But I think it is also salutary for us to reflect that the
disabilities under which we labor on earth won't go to the grave with us
either; that the anxieties which constantly occupy our minds on earth are
short-lived too. It may help us to get the whole thing in perspective, to
deal more confidently with our scruples and despairs, if we acquire the
habit--sometimes, not all the time--of shamming dead, and seeing what they
really look like. Let's look forward for once not to the unpleasant but to
the comfortable side of death. And when I say "death", I'm not thinking
merely of dying but of being dead. Although we can only form such a vague
and imperfect picture of the conditions in which we shall find ourselves
the moment after death, I think we ought to do the best we can; to erect a
sort of periscope which will give us some glimpse of what happens on the
further side of the ridge which bounds our horizon. However remotely, the
experience of the soul before death and its experience after death must be
continuous.
No two people think alike on this subject, and I can see there is an
objection which you may feel inclined to raise from the start. "There is
one overmastering terror (you say) which, I think, will certainly assail me
on my death-bed; I shall be afraid that I am lost. After all, nobody can be
certain that he is saved, and the shadow of the particular judgment just
round the corner will be the only thing present to my mind. And if, after
death, there is any interval before my judgment takes place, surely that
fear will loom larger than ever? The comforts and the certainties of earth
left behind, I shall see clearly what it means, to be saved or to be lost,
and still I shall have no guarantee that I am saved."
Well, I rather doubt whether that picture is true in fact. Somehow, with
the weakening of the physical powers, it is not often that a very sick man
can concentrate his attention on a terror which has hitherto been so vivid
to him; he tends to give up worrying, and to drift with the stream. That
may be a danger for some of us; for most of us, let us hope, it will be a
mercy. And after death--can we really imagine that there is a moment, even
a moment, after death in which the soul, still unjudged, is in doubt of its
own eternal destiny? There is only one author in our language, as far as I
know, who has really tried to work out these problems, and that is Cardinal
Newman in the "Dream of Gerontius." And he gets out of the difficulty by
supposing that time in a future world is measured by some standard quite
other than ours. The "Dream of Gerontius" is a sizable poem, and Sir Edward
Elgar turned it into a quite long opera; but the action of it is supposed
only to occupy a split second. And the soul as it passes out of the body is
already, according to Newman, conscious that it is saved; its judgment has
already begun, although the sick man's friends round the bed-side have only
just started saying "Subvenite."
Well, we can't tell whether Newman was right; we can't tell whether there
will be an interval, or whether we shall be conscious of an interval,
between death and judgment. Even if there should be some interval of
uncertainty, I think the virtue of hope will be so strong in us that the
sense of conflict which it sets up in us will no longer be painful as it is
here. No, there may be very holy persons who, for their greater perfecting,
are allowed in their last moments to feel that same sense of abandonment
which our Lord felt; there may be great sinners who seal their doom by a
final sin of despair. But for the rest of us, who have tried to follow
Christ and put our confidence in his mercy, I think there will be no room
for great anxiety of this sort; before death, the body will be too weak,
after death, the spirit will be too strong.
Let us consider, then, first, some of the mortal disabilities which will
slip away from us when we lie on our death-beds; which will seem, when we
have passed beyond death, so remote that we shall wonder, if we think about
them at all, that we ever thought about them so much. What a lot of nervous
wear and tear you and I take out of ourselves by worrying; how much, at the
back of our minds, we are detained by the thought of dreadful things which
might happen to us, or to people in whom we are specially interested, or
even to the world at large! Death at least takes us beyond the reach of all
that; events here have no longer any power to affect us.
"Duncan is in his grave; After life's fitful fever he sleeps well; Treason
has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison, Malice domestic, foreign levy,
nothing Can touch him further."
But indeed, there's no need to quote Shakespeare at you; holy Scripture
itself points out the same moral, in a passage of Isaias which is very
generally misunderstood. "The just man dies, and no one takes it to heart"-
-we suppose it to mean that the just man dies unpitied, and the text is
actually used with that sense in the liturgy of Holy Week. But that is not
the prophet's meaning; what he is saying is, "See how good men die, how the
friends of God are borne away from us, and none has the wit to see trouble
is coming, and the good man must be spared the sight of it!" All those
anxieties of ours, about the world going from bad to worse, and the Church
being in peril, and so on, do not lessen with old age; rather, they grow in
intensity, because we are out of touch with our younger contemporaries. But
when old age ends in death, and death fans out into eternity, they cannot
hurt as they used to, we are leaving them behind.
No, do not tell me that we are selfish, if we find relief in that. The
point is, not that we care less about these things, as we draw further away
from the world and closer to God, but that we worry less. The Blessed
Saints in heaven care, but they do not worry; and the most unselfish people
you and I have known on earth were not worriers. We do not abandon the
world to its fate, with a shrug of the shoulders, when we leave it behind
on our death-beds, we leave it in God's hands--where it always was. The
trouble, you see, with you and me is that we haven't nearly enough
confidence in God's goodness, not nearly enough patience in waiting for him
to work out his plans as he sees best; and this unresignedness of ours sets
up echoes in the nerves which are for ever coming to life and tormenting
us. But when the frayed nerves, from mere exhaustion, cease to tingle, and
more still when this body of ours is left behind, and we have no nerves to
be the repositories of our anxiety any longer, then the whole thing
straightens itself out. So far as it is given to us, then, to know what is
going on in the world, we shall care still; but we shall not worry.
So much for what lies beyond our power to help: between the leaves of a
newspaper. But what a lot of worrying we do, besides, over the things which
immediately concern us, with our needs, liabilities and ambitions, with the
plans we make from day to day. It varies, of course, with temperament, it
varies with our state of life; some people have a great gift for taking
things calmly, some people's lives are so much of a routine that the strain
of apprehension is lightened for them. But it is true, isn't it, with all
of us, and noticeably true with some of us, that our lives have a constant
background of solicitude; we are always looking ahead to the next
unpleasant or arduous or embarrassing thing that lies in wait for us. It
may be a tough job of work, it may be a difficult interview, it may be an
important decision--whatever it is, it looms up on the horizon of the
future, and when we have reached the horizon, when we have ridden over the
crest of the wave, with a momentary sense of relief, all at once the next
anxiety heaves in view; how on earth am I to deal with So-and-so? How on
earth am I to get through such and such a task creditably? I don't mean we
are thinking about these embarrassments all the time, but they are there
all the time, on the fringe of consciousness, and we know how a sleepless
night will set them whirling round in our heads, like trees in a high wind.
It is one of the minor consolations of illness, that for the time being we
can lay aside all this burden of the mind, and live for the moment. And
when we come to our last illness, if we know it to be our last illness,
that sense of freedom will be intensified; death cancels all engagements.
Imagine yourself to be now on your death-bed, how many important messages
would you want to be entrusting to those who stood round you? Not many. No
doubt, there will be twinges of regret; such a task has been entrusted to
you, and it was well on the way to getting finished; a pity that you should
be going out just now, leaving it in the air.... Yes, but if it is worth
doing, another will finish it, and perhaps make a better job of it than you
would have; it is all in God's hands. And this sense you have on your
death-bed, of letting go the reins of life, is only the prelude, surely, to
a fuller emancipation from all earth's cares, when earth itself has slipped
away from you. Gerontius says in Newman's poem:
"I went to sleep; and now I am refreshed;
A strange refreshment: for I feel in me
An inexpressive lightness, and a sense
Of freedom, as I were at length myself,
And ne'er had been before. . . ."
He may have been thinking of that sense of lightness which the soul must
feel when it is separated from the body, merely in being liberated from a
thousand minor bodily discomforts, to which we have grown so used that we
hardly feel them. But I think the lightness went further than that;
Gerontius had left behind him all that burden of cares of which we have
been speaking. And shall we sometimes try to get the better of those cares,
which so distract us at our devotions, so injure our peace of mind, by
shamming dead? Oh, I know they are not sinful, but they must, in some
measure, be our fault; or why did our Lord tell us not to feel them? "Do
not fret, then, over tomorrow; leave tomorrow to fret over its own needs;
for to-day, to-day's troubles are enough." If we are ever to realize the
splendid spirituality of Pere de Caussade, by living all the time in and
for the Sacrament of the Present Moment, perhaps shamming dead will help
us; we shall learn to see those cares as imaginary.
There are other specters that haunt us and disturb our peace of mind which
are sinful; though very often, I think, not so gravely sinful as we feel
them to be. I mean the injuries which have been done us by others, real
injuries or imaginary, which we find it hard to forgive; I mean the
judgments which have been passed on us, unjustly, we think, which our pride
will not allow us to forget. We have tried, again and again, tried
desperately, to dismiss these grievances from our minds, but always they
came back again--with redoubled force, it seemed, as if they were all the
more greedy for having been starved so long. Well, on our death-beds it
will be part of our chief business to forgive our enemies, and I think
under that term we ought to include our critics; and perhaps then we shall
not find it so difficult; pray God we may not.
We shall be helped, you see, in that last hour by the consciousness that
these things do not after all matter very much; they look very small and
trumpery beside the tremendous realities of life and death which lie before
us. And after death, they will simply not be there. How much we shall
remember, then, of the life we lived on earth, it is impossible to say;
memory, as we know it, is stored up in the cells of our brain, and those
will no longer be with us. But Newman ingeniously suggests that a
disembodied spirit may yet perceive echoes of its old, familiar experience,
just as a man who has lost a leg may still feel a twinge of pain in the toe
that is not there. If we do remember anything of these earthly affronts,
which we cannot remember on earth without a surge of anger, beyond death we
shall know that they were nothing. To that extent, at least, we shall be at
peace.
We have spoken, so far, only of some of the negative advantages which death
brings with it, of the inconveniences from which it delivers us. It is time
we should remind ourselves, just for a few moments, that there is another
side to the picture. These earthly disabilities of ours grow less, when the
cords that bind us to life wear thin; when the cords snap, they disappear
altogether. But meanwhile, death, which brings us closer to God, brings
positive advantages with it. We are not speaking, now, of the joys of
heaven; even the moment after death, with an unexplored Purgatory in front
of us, there will be positive gain. And it will be correlative with the
negative gains of which we have spoken.
If our anxieties about the world we live in slip away from us, finally,
with death, it is because we shall have learned trust in God. Not
necessarily on our death-beds, though it may be that unexpected mercies
await us there. But immediately after death we shall, I suppose, be aware
of it, because we are no longer walking by faith; the time of probation is
over. That is why Gerontius' first experiences after death include the
consciousness that his angel guardian is close at his side, bearing him
along. Trust in God, which meant such a difficult struggle even in our best
moments hitherto, has now become part of the atmosphere we breathe. Even
during the interval--if there is an interval--between death and judgment,
we shall be so conditioned by that atmosphere of trust that there will be
no sense of insecurity, though we are still unjudged.
And if the cares of daily living slip away from us with death, it is not
only because they no longer concern us, but because we have learned, at
last, resignation to the divine will. Oh, on our death-beds this
resignation will perhaps be half-hearted enough; we shall fall back upon
God because we have nothing else to fall back on, accepting his will
because we know it is the only thing we are going to get. But after death,
once more, it will be an experience most of us have never had in this life-
-the experience of really wanting God's will to happen, instead of just
saying we want it to happen when we don't. If we have any means, then, of
knowing about what is happening on earth, we shall not be asking anxiously
for news of some project we were once concerned in. Not because it no
longer matters, but because we shall see it now as part of the general
scheme of God's providence, not as something which was helped along by us,
something which is going to reflect credit on us.
And if our grudges and grievances slip away from us with death, it isn't
just that the people towards whom we felt ill-will no longer matter to us,
citizens of another world than ours. It is because the love of God will now
express itself in us freely and naturally, not laboriously by fits and
starts. We shall not, to be sure, make our perfect act of charity until we
see the face of Christ in judgment. But the habit of charity, which has
been implanted in us by Baptism, will surely have its free exercise in the
interval--if there is an interval--before we are judged. We shall see the
people who wronged us as our brothers in him; we shall smile at the unfair
criticisms that once injured us, knowing that they are man's judgments, not
his. During that interval, if there be any interval, we shall experience
love imperfect, love expectant, but untrammeled in its exercise, because
there will be no love of creatures to turn our thoughts away from it. Even
if that were all, if there were no heaven to follow, is not the experience
of such love enough to make us say, with St. Francis, "Welcome, Sister
Death"?
CHAPTER 16. TO-DAY
St. Paul in his epistle to the Hebrews tells his fellow-countrymen to
"exhort one another every day, while it is called to-day". In obedience to
that maxim, I want to give you now a meditation on that very simple
subject, the space of twenty-four hours. I don't want you to think of this
day in particular, I want you to think of some specimen day when you are
not in retreat, an ordinary working-day, and see what considerations the
thought of it will suggest.
Almighty God has given us, for the ordering of our lives, an alternation of
day and night. "Dies diei eructat verbum, et nox nocti indicat scientiam;"
each day, as it were, waves its greeting to the last, bids us pick up again
our interrupted works, renew our plans, our hopes, our anxieties. Man goes
forth to his work and to his labor until the evening; then night comes, and
with a kindly smile puts away the toys we poor mortals make such a fuss
over, shuts our books for us, draws a great black coverlet over our lives.
So each day is separated from the next by a thin black line of oblivion. As
the darkness closes round us, we go through a dress-rehearsal of death;
soul and body say good-night to one another. And then morning comes, and,
with morning, a rebirth.
Each day is thus a life in miniature. And the very conditions of our
existence take away from us that excuse which is man's favorite excuse when
he wants to avoid action and neglect his salvation; namely, that we do not
know when to begin. "Dies diei eructat verbum," yesterday whispers its word
to to-day, and the word is, Begin. For to-day is unique; it has never
happened before, it can never happen again. For one moment it is all-
important, fills the stage; tomorrow it will have taken its place in the
unreal pageant of dead yesterdays. It has a significance, then, all its
own; but this significance belongs to it because it is related to a series.
We may think of it as the beginning of a series, the first day of a new
departure in our lives. Or we may think of it as one day among others, with
the same duties, cares, temptations as the others. Or we may think of it as
the last of a series; one to-day will be the last of all our to-days, with
eternity for its infinite tomorrow, and it may be this.
First, then, we will think of this day as the beginning of a new departure.
How shall we begin? Not by any frantic efforts of our own; we will begin by
listening to the voice of God. "Hodie si vocem eius audieritis, nolite
obdurare corda vestra." He speaks to us in three ways; by the direct
suggestion of our consciences, enlightened by grace; or by some outside
stimulus, a word heard, a passage read in a book, an opportunity suddenly
offered; or in the third place through the voice of our superiors.
We mean to hear God's voice to-day, if he will speak to us directly through
conscience. Perhaps there are already words of his which we have rejected
or set aside, but not quite managed to forget; they still echo in our ears,
like some human utterance which comes back to us after a little, although
we were not attending to it at the time. His voice has suggested, that in
this or that small matter we should reform our habits, that we might serve
him better by making this or that small sacrifice. And we heard that
suggestion, but said to ourselves, "Oh, well, that can be done any time; I
can start any day I like". Yes, but any day is no day, and the only
solution of your difficulty is to-day. "Haec est dies quam fecit Dominus;"
this is the day when God meant you to start. "Et dixi, Nunc coepi;" the
long shelved invitation is to be accepted at last. Or perhaps there is some
quite fresh inspiration which he wants to give us, something that has never
come into our minds before, whether small or great. We don't want to miss
that, but we shall be in danger of missing it, if the echoes of the world
are buzzing round us ALL day. So we will try, sometimes, to lift up our
hearts to him in moments of leisure, snatched between one occupation and
the next; just that fraction of time when the mind says to itself, "That's
that; and now, what next?"--that is the moment for a single, brief
elevation of the mind to God. In that interval of silence, perhaps we shall
hear his will expressed for us, just as a man turning over his
correspondence will come across some important letter he thought lost.
We mean to hear God's voice to-day, if he will speak to us by outward
signs. In particular, that means that we want to say or hear Mass, and to
recite the Divine Office with attention to the words. God can send a
message to us through some phrase which we have recited regularly for years
and years, and know by heart; he will let the words stand out from the page
for us in quite a new light, if he wants to. But it isn't only when we are
engaged in holy pursuits like Mass and the Divine Office that God can make
the chance phrase speak to us. I remember once getting a letter from a
lapsed Catholic in Australia who said he was coming back to his religion as
the result of a sentence, not bearing the smallest relation to theology,
which he had read in one of my detective stories. If we will try to live
close to God, the whole world of our experience becomes a blank sheet for
him to write his messages on.
Above all, we mean to hear God's voice to-day, if he speaks to us through
our superiors; we don't run the risk of being fanciful, in accepting such
commands as from him. If in any way we have deserved rebuke, we want to be
rebuked; if there is any extra duty for us to do, we want to be made to do
it; if it is something we shall probably do badly, we will welcome the
humiliation which that involves.
So much for what may come any day, God's inspirations; now for what does
come every day, our sins. We want, if we could, to make a heroic resolve
that we will never commit those sins again, but we have tried, and we don't
seem to be able to reach them at long range like that; experience has made
us despair of these resolutions. Very well, then, here is a second use we
may make of the magic word "to-day". Instead of worrying about whether we
shall ever commit those sins again, let us simply resolve not to commit
them to-day. "Dignare Domine die ISTO sine peccato nos custodire;" let us
see if we can't cheat the devil, like some grasping creditor, by saying
"Not just yet; not to-day". And let us ask simply for the grace which is
needed to avoid those sins just in the sixteen hours that lie between bed-
time and bed-time. "Die isto," let us make to-day a holiday from our venial
sins.
This day without sin--as it is such a special day, we will avoid, his grace
helping us, those little daily repeated irreverences by which we offend
him. And particularly in connection with Mass and Communion, the daily
bread of our pilgrimage. That crowding out of preparation for Mass by
unnecessary lateness and unnecessary hurry; that cutting short of our
thanksgiving upon some plea of other business; a mere margin of five
minutes or so which makes all the difference between treating God as our
Friend and treating him shabbily. All those little irreverences, the daily
blemish with which we spoil our daily burnt-sacrifice.
This day without sin--as it is such a special day, we will especially avoid
sinning against ourselves, by the wrong use of God's creatures. Walk out in
the early morning, and look at God's creatures, how beautiful they are,
with the dew still clinging to them, and the new sunlight turning them all
to silver; the flowers fresh as buds, the air pure, the birds singing as if
they had never known what it was to sing before. St. Gertrude says that you
ought to offer your heart to God every morning as a rose with the dew still
on it. In that early morning air, you recognize that every dawn is a
rebirth; nature seems virgin, untarnished, only waiting for your sin, like
a second fall of man, to rob it of its innocence. Well, to-day, as it is
such a special day, we will try to keep that freshness and innocence of the
morning in our hearts all day; we will not give in our names to that
conspiracy which defaces God's creatures by misusing them.
This day without sin--as it is such a special day, we will avoid sinning
against our neighbors. Here it will not do much good if we think about a
day spent in retreat; at such times we are artificially protected against
most of our uncharities. But think of an ordinary, specimen day of your
life; after all, one day does not differ a great deal from another in a
sedentary life such as we priests have to lead. You know the people you
have to live with; the little faults of manner and of behavior which get on
your nerves all the more surely, because they are repeated from day to day-
-it may be a blundering sacristan, it may be an untidy presbytery maid, it
may be one of your own colleagues. I wouldn't mind so much (you say to
yourself) if it wasn't for the repetition of the same nuisance, day in day
out. Very well, then, that's splendid; since to-day is to be such a special
day, different from all the rest, you won't take any notice of it, just for
once; this is the day which the Lord has made, you will rejoice and be glad
in it, not waste it in grousing. You know the little unnecessary
relaxations which tempt you to neglect your work or your spiritual duties;
to-day, God's day, you will not be guilty of wasting your time--God's time.
If you are in a parish, you know the tiresome sort of people who will come
to the door and want to be interviewed; difficult not to give them the
rough side of your tongue, when the manner of their coming is for one
reason or another so inconsiderate. But to-day, with this gladness in your
heart, you will greet them as brothers, with a cheerfulness which is
infectious, which lightens their burden as well as your own. A smile at the
presbytery door--how much difference that can make to life's tragedies!
If you are members of a teaching order, you ought to know yourselves by
now; and you ought to know your neighbors an enclosed life has that
advantage at least. There is class to be taken at such and such hours, such
and such authors to be read, or subjects to be studied; such and such
mistakes will be made--with a little experience you know even those. And
you will want to be angry with the wrong people as usual; not with the boys
who are idle but with the boys who are stupid; not with the boys who
misbehave but with the boys who fail to amuse you when they misbehave. You
will be tempted to spoil some, to fly into a passion with others: you know
their names already; be on your guard, and the temptation will lose half
its force. You will have grievances, too, against your colleagues, against
A who always keeps his class five minutes after the proper time, and B who
always leaves the duster where you can't find it. Then in recreation you
will be talking to So-and-so, who makes you want to snub him; to So-and-so,
who tempts you to uncharitable conversation. Well, to-day none of these
things will disturb your peace of mind, or involve you in any imperfection.
"Hodie eris mecum in Paradiso," this day thou shalt be with me in Paradise-
-let us remember that to-day may be the last of its series. When you go to
bed, you will wind up your watch just as usual, your letters will be
speeding this way and that, assuring your friends that you are well. And
then, in the night, just a click in the mechanism of your body, a moment of
horror in your dreams; and tomorrow morning the bell will be tolling for
you, and your soul will have met God in judgment.
"Hodie eris mecum in Paradiso;" the penitent thief made an act of perfect
contrition. He had done nothing to deserve such an opportunity, but he
found and he caught the hour of grace. Mercy and pardon were all about him
that day, and he gained the first plenary indulgence. Let us, then, to-day,
while it is called to-day, hasten to ask pardon for our old sins with the
penitent thief. For we too in times past have lived only for the day; we
too, like those of whom the Wise Man wrote, have said reasoning with
ourselves, but not right, "Come, and let us enjoy the good things that are
present, and let us speedily use the creatures as in youth; let not the
flower of the time pass us by, let us crown ourselves with roses before
they be withered". And now all that is yesterday and is nothing; to-day is
the reality, and that day our last this side of eternity. "Cogitavi dies
antiquos, et annos aeternos in mente habui;" they are gone, those
yesterdays, so brief, so fleeting, and nothing lies before us but an
endless tomorrow.
And, as if that were not enough, there crowds in upon us, this last day,
the memory of all we have left undone. All the inspirations that went
unmarked, the calls that were left unheeded; all the opportunities of
kindness that were never repeated, all the time we wasted on trifling
things. "Quaesivi residuum annorum meorum," we say with King Ezechias; we
have looked for the rest of our years, and there was nothing left; "dum
adhuc ordirer, succidit me," God is cutting us off from life when we are
only just beginning to live for him.
"Ecce nunc tempus acceptabile, ecce nunc dies salutis;" we can efface to-
day, with salutary tears, the memory of those sins whose debt, tomorrow, we
must needs expiate by suffering. Let us derive, then, from this word to-
day, not only an inspiration for the future, the future that may be so
different if we will use to-day aright; not only a warning for the present,
to make us avoid this day the temptations that every day beset us, but an
attitude, also, towards the past; an attitude of abiding penitence. Let us
remember our sins each day, as if we had no more space left for sinning;
let us weep over them, as if this were our last opportunity of contrition.
And he, who returned to heaven with the penitent thief for his escort, will
shorten our Purgatory and hasten to unite us with himself. "Hodie si vocem
audieritis"--it can never be too early to begin our conversion. "Hodie eris
mecum in Paradiso"--thank God, it can never be too late.
