Happy Easter!

Wishing a happy Easter to all readers of this blog.

    Had Christ, that once was slain,
    Ne’er burst his three-day prison,
    Our faith had been in vain —
    But now hath Christ arisen.

from G. Ratcliffe Woodward’s hymn ‘This joyful Eastertide’

Wells Cathedral, Somerset, from the south-east.  April, 2018.

Good Friday

The clouds have gathered.  It is the year’s darkest day, and utterly bone-dry.  Today not a single Mass will be celebrated in the whole world.

Here is a fragment of Venantius Fortunatus’ hymn Pange lingua gloriosi: (not to be confused with St. Thomas Aquinas’ later hymn, which was inspired by this one), sung by Westminster Cathedral Choir.

Notre-Dame Stands

Well, we have a great deal to be thankful for.  The damage done to Notre-Dame Cathedral by Monday’s fire, though awful, and costing us the lovely nineteenth-century spire (in French called flèche, the same word as for ‘arrow’) seems not to have been as catastrophic as it all appeared.  The greatest relief to me, after the news that the fundamental structure was sound, was that the three rose windows are safe.  Safe!  Most of the medieval fabric is more or less all right, too, apart from several vaults in the transepts.  The high altar, the belfries, the organ, and the relics have also sustained only slight damage.  Perhaps my piece yesterday seems like an overreaction, but it wasn’t, really: it might easily have been very different.  That was the sight of impending total disaster.  The rose windows had a very narrow escape, and so did the belfries.  But for the extraordinary valour of the fire brigade — who acted at considerable risk to their lives, and even the extraordinary pictures only hint at their bravery — I think we all know it could have been the end.  

It has been a horrible shock.  But I am not the first to point out that good things have, very quickly and clearly, come from this episode of suffering.  Already, though nasty, it has had a purifying effect.  There are many of us who now have a much keener sense of our love for this cathedral — perhaps all the great cathedrals — and a keener love of beauty.  Perhaps many will ask themselves seriously why this is.  Perhaps we will come to rediscover the reason for which the cathedrals were built, and that can only do us good.  As it is, there has been a monumental outpouring of generosity and solidarity for the rebuilding fund.  And there are smaller details: the story of the fire brigade chaplain who rescued the Crown of Thorns, and there were the remarkably level-headed comments of a 22-year-old, of whom I might otherwise have never heard, who was quoted by the BBC.  And there was the extraordinary sight of people kneeling and singing prayers for France’s spiritual heart, the beloved church that stands on the island in the Seine where, even before the fullness of the Gospel was brought to France, God and man agreed to meet.

I think those prayers were answered.  The cathedral is still standing and we still have the rose windows — those are words to savour.  I suppose one thing I might have put differently yesterday was my lament that this was an age in which churches are destroyed, rather than created.  Well, now we have an opportunity to rebuild one of the greatest cathedrals of Christendom.  It is an opportunity to which only the long task of finishing the basilica of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is comparable: the duty to make the gift of a lasting and glorious house of God to the generations to come.

Meanwhile, let us all uphold beauty and make beautiful things, however simple.  We cannot pretend any longer that we do not still love and need them.

Notre-Dame: The Price of Love is Grief

Thank God that the fundamental structure of Notre-Dame Cathedral has been saved from yesterday’s fire.  I imagine that it is in no small part due to the bravery of the Parisian fire brigade that it has been possible to type that sentence.  So thank God for them as well.

The problem with signing up to this business of the Christian faith is that it is accompanied by risks, such as the risk of cultivating a heart sensitive to all that is beautiful.  And the risk of loving: as well as loving people, loving the beautiful things in which they have expressed the deepest truths and which generations have preserved.  If you believe in such a thing as absolute beauty, then you cannot just shrug off the loss when beauty is destroyed.  It means unavoidable pain.

Pain and rage, because, in this age of destruction, this is yet another loss we cannot afford to sustain.  Why our Church, again?  That is not to wish destruction on anybody else, but we are on the ropes as it is, we on the ground trying to defend the faith we love.  Now we are confronted with a horribly symbolic sight, the incarnation of our fears: the material, as well as the spiritual, fabric of our Christian heritage going up in catastrophic flames, beyond our power to save.

Why France, whose sorrow never ends?  And why must this beautiful building be ruined, while every week a smug, ugly addition is topped out in our cities?  Have we not had enough destruction?  Why do sinners’ ways prosper? as Gerard Manley Hopkins paraphrased the prophet Jeremiah.  What does one do in an age in which churches are not built but destroyed?

Millions have stood or knelt in this mighty cathedral.  When I spent some time in Paris as a student, I was one of them, quite often taking advantage of the privilege of being able to come to Mass here, and otherwise I spent a lot of time under its roof.  Around the 850th anniversary of the laying of the cathedral’s foundation stone, I had the unforgettable experience of running my fingers over the new bells cast in celebration, when they were displayed along the nave before being hung.  Later I heard the tremendous sound they made on (I think) the first Sunday they were rung.

Worse grief is suffered all the time by people around us: the bereaved, the dying, the abandoned, the downtrodden.  And I know that the French, whether believers or secular, will show their mettle now as much as ever, and they will not be defeated.  But the gratuitousness of a blow from an unexpected quarter… It is for moments like these that we have the Psalms; their rage, their grief, their remonstration with God who gave us all things and to whom all things return.  And this is why we have Holy Week, to remind ourselves that we are not alone.

And this on the eve of Benedict XVI’s ninety-second birthday, for which I had meant to write a celebratory tribute.  A strange mixture of blessing and sorrow life is indeed.

‘La France pleure sa cathédrale’ on Padreblog: https://www.padreblog.fr/la-france-pleure-sa-cathedrale

But Men Made Strange

Today our parish’s Youth Choir sang for Palm Sunday Mass, and one of our hymns was My Song is Love Unknown: Samuel Crossman’s words set to music by John Ireland.  I am sure that this is one of the greatest treasures of English hymnody.  There is such coiled power in these deftly-crafted words; such truth in this effortless rhyme and metre.  Crossman (1623-1683) managed to mingle profound tenderness with plain speaking, sincerity with irony, remorse with mercy and great theological learning with directness.  The remarkable mood and accomplished craft, and the understated intimacy, remind me of George Herbert: every time I read the words, there seems to be something new to notice.  And, in spite of the disarming directness of Crossman’s first person, there is nothing embarrassing about it: he speaks in such a universal way that the song has lost none of its power in nearly four centuries.  Of course, it is also true that the mystery on which he meditates is undiminished:

 He came from His blest throne

 Salvation to bestow;

 But men made strange, and none

 The longed-for Christ would know:

 But O! my Friend, 

 My Friend indeed,

 Who at my need 

 His life did spend.

This Wikipedia article gives all seven verses.

The drama of Holy Week, which has been drawing near all through Lent, is upon us.  Last week all  the statues and crucifixes in church were veiled in purple for Passiontide.  (The shocking sparseness of churches stripped for Holy Week is another, hidden reason for our usual custom of decorating them).  Today we heard the account of the Passion read, entering into the joy of the Palm Sunday crowd, only to sprinkle our tongues with the same crowd’s later bitterness and sarcasm, and to be drawn into its mad obsession with Barabbas.  Now the stage is set: the clouds are gathering and, together, with apprehension, we enter into these mysterious, shadowy days.