Inscribed on the floor of Kings’ College Conference Hall (the old Kings’ Library with its famed vaulted ceiling)  in inlaid mosaic is the motto, “Initium sapientae timor domini;” which translates as, “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”  Of course this motto harks back to the origins of universities as religious institutions (and it is not a novel thought or comment to state that the modernist, the secularist might reject the precept) and is drawn from the final lines of Psalm 111:

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom;
all who follow his precepts have good understanding.

To him belongs eternal praise. (NIV translation)

The Psalm begins with a proclamation of God’s enduring power, and glory, and our dependence on Him, implicitly as a child on a father.  Perhaps – without wanting to posit a pantheistic God – the recent weather tribulations (snow at home, floods abroad in Australia and Brazil) have shown how powerless we are in the face of nature  (many of the Psalms and Canticles do draw on the power of nature: the thundering, the roaring of seas, and – ironically almost these last two Christmases, as it is part of the morning office for the Octave of Christmas – the exhortation that “frost and snow, bless the Lord” [Canticle from Daniel, Week 1, Sunday.]
A favourite prayer of mine is the well-known Serenity Prayer:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

To truly “live the prayer” means not just seeking to address those issues,  big and small, which plague us and rile us (whether it is taking steps to complain about the buses to the Ombudsman, or making an effort to objectively and critically view one’s own contributions to one’s own misfortunes and address these attitudes or shortfalls honestly, even if the initial cost seem greater than “doing nothing about it”) but being insightful enough of our own humble humanity to admit where we have little or no power and dominion, a concept hard to internalise in a modern, secular “I can/you must” productivity and targets-based society where we tend to build our own thrones of Midas gold and set ourselves to rule.  Midas acquistive nature was his own downfall (HE was not wise), while we tend to paralyse ourselves with hypertensive futile rage and bitterness.

A second part to the Serenity Prayer (I did not know until I searched for it) runs:

Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him
Forever in the next.
Amen.

A friend recently posted online about contentment being a question of the state of one’s soul: wisdom is the route to that state. Yesterday’s Morning Office (specific to the day, 12th Jan) had a reading from the book of Wisdom:

Wisdom is a reflection of the eternal light, untarnished mirror of God’s active power, image of his goodness. Although alone, she can do all; herself unchanging, she makes all things new. In each generation she passes into holy souls, she makes them friends of God and prophets. (Wis., 7:26-27)

Kabbalistic thought in Jewish tradition sees God as being manifest through ten Sefirot, of which one Wisdom; as Catholics (and Christians) we might see Wisdom as the Holy Spirit, guiding us to God: accepting our own human limitations and acknowledging the Authority of God – and living by his Commandments (or Precepts): to return to the initial verse cited, to follow the precepts of God shows a (wise) understanding of our own human place in a world.

Wisdom as an active force draws us to a revealed God, in all his persons and in the Eucharist, as the Magi were lead in their wisdom to the Word made Flesh, God incarnate in a manger – and as  within the co-dependent relationship of the Trinity  – walking with God in his ways, brings us to the wisdom of self-knowledge and peace.

Ask and it shall be given unto you,
Seek and ye shall find,
Knock and the door will be opened unto you,
Allelu..Alleluia.

And the song starts over, breaking off into descant rounds. A song many of us remember from our school assemblies, Brownies, Guides and – do they still happen? – evangelical  Bible camps happened upon during the Glasgow Fair on the beaches of Ayrshire. One camp tied the song into a pirate treasure hunt in the rock pools of the beach at Portpatrick, back in the days of jelly shoes towelling  jumpsuits.

While Faith is undoubtedly a treasure (a friend once said “the greatest gift  my parents gave me was to teach me my Faith,” a sentiment I hope my son will echo), and a treasure  inextricably linked to the other two theological virtues of Hope and Love, the song itself seems to have both become popularised and have fuurther popularised the “gimme” approach to prayer  (the voice of Faith), a not unusual approach to life in this post-Thatcherite society. Lack of Faith in God, replaced with Faith in individualism and “Almighty Dollar” begets increasing lack of Faith when God – confused with Santa – fails to deliver.

The New International Translation of  Matthew 7: 7  uses a present continuous in place of the present finite rendering the better kennt King James Version of:
“Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you,”
as
“Keep asking, and it will be given to you. Keep searching, and you will find. Keep knocking, and the door will be opened for you.”

I wonder if this better reflects the process of growing in Faith (and Wisdom), growing in and through all the gifts of the Spirit, that is referred to in the quotation. For while this passage continues  by referring to a father’s love for his son (or daughter), and his providing them in their needs: to ask and receive..to seek and find..to knock and find the door opened are not perhaps items on an immediately gratified shopping list. As part of the Sermon on the Mount, the content of Matthew 7, subtitled at Effective Prayer in the Jerusalem Bible translation, (v 7-11) the verses also has to be taken in the context of the whole Sermon of living a holy and faithful life: focussing on the metaphor of “entering” the door  that we stand knocking at  and which is:

“a narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” (Matthew, vv 13 &14).

Further still, I think both the phrases (ideas) of “ask and it shall be given unto you” and “knock and the door shall be opened unto you” turn on (require, even)  the process of “searching and finding” that bridges them; and, to return to the KJV translation (though it applies equally if less boldly in the NIV) in this bridging concept, the (grammatical) voice shifts from passive (be given, be opened) to active: the searching and finding involves our participation and commitment, our action.

How do we search and when: I think of the RAF Search and Rescue helicopters, based until recently at Lossiemouth, and  so often seen and heard in the skies above the North Sea: I remember Piper Alpha, the Chinook crash and other oil-related and fishing-related losses at sea;  or of those lost on the Cairngorms, found after hours of searching in snow, wind, dark by the Mountain Rescue Volunteers.  Melodramatic connotations, but yet  symbolic of the pitfalls of life and the commitment involved in seeking “the narrow road…only a few find it”, and in the process many of us have long and murky “dark nights of the soul” the terror where nightfall and fog descents and we spend hours lost on treacherous mountains or where we we swim anchor-less in stormy seas. It is not gratuitous that  many of the songs of Southern Gospel Music feature lighthouses, ships, anchors. Our Lord Himself, familiar with both fishing and farming as ways of life, used not just nets and boats as symbols, but also used parable of the Faithful, Devoted Shepherd seeking out sheep lost in some “roch corrie”: sometimes the asking is a piteous bleat, answered by a crook around the neck “howking us up and leading us back to the sheiling”.  What is remarkable is how the metaphors of First Century Palestine still hold truth and resonate in  21st Century NE Scotland.

The phrase ‘the Lord helps those who help themselves’  is not, in fact, in the Bible but originates with Aesop and yet that is the inference we can on one level take from the verses quoted; however there is another aspect in which the” asking/receiving” cannot be divorced from the  active “seeking/finding”: verse 11 of Chapter 7 of Matthew (see above) speaks of God giving us that which is good for us.. it would be fatuous to use the trite excuse of “you did not ask the correct question”  or  yet, “you might not get what you asked for”, but prayerfully considering a problem, and taking it to the Lord for a solution can often result in us finding a way to work out an unexpected solution on our own. “Lord, let me win the lottery [to pay for a new boiler/afford a holiday/fix the bathroom]” may be answered with additional offers of paid employment or exchange of goods, or if we look hard enough, other options not often involving “handed to us on a plate”.  The road is hard and does involve our effort and commitment: work and sometimes sacrifice, of an extra coat, time, love.

James (the James, author of the book of the Bible) writes in 2:14 that faith without works is meaningless: “faith, if not accompanied by action, is dead” (NIV). It is the Grace of God, Grace visited on us and topped up in the Sacraments  that calls us to believe and sustains that belief but it is not “a one time” response to God’s call:

“Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me;” (Rev. 3:20).

but, in our bleating human frailty, a constant “asking” “seeking” and “knocking at God’s door” in the hope of finding the key to let us in: the keys are Prayer and the Sacraments. In the Sacrament of Reconciliation, God says to us “come awa’ in, Ah’ve been waitin on ye;” and – in the Eucharist, “ye’ll be needing yer supper”: the feeding of the lambs, the mission given  Peter and the other Apostles by Our Lord during the time between the Resurrection and the Ascension.  There is an old Scottish joke: if you go to someone’s house at suppertime in Aberdeen, they will say, “Come in, ye’ll hae brought the supper” and in Edinburgh, “Come awa’ in, ye’ll hae had yer supper’, but in Glasgow they say “Come awa’ in, ye’ll be needing yer supper.” We can meet this further with the Highland custom of

“the guest who having taken salt, can never be ejected” (Ruthven Todd)

(the crime of the Campbells not, the slaughter of their rivals the MacDonalds of Glencoe, as the unforgiveable action of guests turning against their hosts):  once we have answered Him and sat down with Him,  the Shepherd, will not reject us – when “awa’ frae the fauld. fit-sair and wearit” we have strayed “far awa’ frae the bracken,” we only need to ask for the path back to the shieling, “the path He kens best for us” (Psalm 23). If we ask for help, in this we will receive.

RIP Thomas Doerflinger, 11th November 2004 (Mosul, Iraq, aged 20)

RIP Shelly McKinney, 6th November 2009

Today my son and I heard the pipes as we were rummelling around the house after breakfast. We rushed through the courtyard to see the men and women of the University “Corps” marching up the street in Uniform, to practice for Remembrance Sunday.  For me the granite War Memorials are iconic representations of small town Scotland, the sun glinting on the mica in long, bored summer afternoons where the shadow  of the celtic cross stretches  over the cobbles.  I remember childhood Sundays walking past the War Memorial on the way home from Mass or on the way to the Ice Cream parlour.  Most of all I remember the names – Marshalls, Kirkwoods, MacDonalds,  Andersons  – Williams, Thomases, Roberts, Alexanders: the repetition of weel-kennt surnames and Christian names brought an aspect of “everyman” that a child could recognise.

As a child, however, the Wars (and war)  seemed distant, and the mention in the Kilsyth Chronicle of a rare name killed in action in Northern Ireland, registered only briefly.  I was sixteen and in France working, when that changed. Tante Michele (a distant relative in Normandy) drove us to one of the Normandy Cemeteries – I remember the explanation in French of the enclosure system of the farmers, I remember the khaki green BhS skirt and tee-shirt, and the white sandals, and I remember the brightness of the July sun reflecting, not off the grim granite, but off brilliant white which seared the eyes, and seemed stark against the blood red of the poppies.  Standard Grade history had not prepared me for the immeasurable quantity of headstones, Crosses and Stars of David, inscribed and nameless that filled this one cemetery, of the countless others in this small area of Normandy.

Political activism – a synonym for misunderstanding – meant that for many years I would find and wear only a white poppy.  The understanding of the horror – the extent of the death of youth – in the Wars (I had read Vera Britten) made me determined not to “glorify war” but to work and campaign against war.  What changed that was my friendship with “Thomas’ mom”.  Thomas Karl Doerflinger died in Mosul, Iraq on the 11th of November, 2004, aged twenty.  For me, the date of his death stopped me in a way no other death in war has done, and both forged a friendship with Thomas’ mom, and brought together the individual tragedy of one mother’s loss with the collective horror I had seen shining in the gravestones in Northern France 22 years before. And, for the first time  in my lifetime war dead are more numerous now, with the sad, steady increase of deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq.

While there is a time to do so,  “now” (Remembrance Sunday)  is not the place to discuss the notion of “just war” or capitalist motivations of current campaigns in oil rich countries: November  is a month to remember and to pray for all our dead, and Remembrance Sunday (and Armistice Day) a time to remember the sons, husbands and fathers who died in war, as men (though some barely) and especially in their role to others.

The death of a child – at whatever stage in their life – has become something more alien to us with improvements in neo-natal and childhood healthcare.  Although the words of Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne’s Land o’ the Leal, http://www.myspace.com/wendyarrowsmith written for a close friend of hers, make it clear that the death of a child, is untimely and a pain that never fully heals.

Land o’ the Leal

I’m wearin’ awa’, John
Like snaw-wreaths in thaw, John,
I’m wearin’ awa’
To the land o’ the leal.
There ‘s nae sorrow there, John,
There ‘s neither cauld nor care, John,
The day is aye fair
In the land o’ the leal.

Our bonnie bairn ‘s there, John,
She was baith gude and fair, John;
And O! we grudged her sair
To the land o’ the leal.
But sorrow’s sel’ wears past, John,
And joy ‘s a-coming fast, John,
The joy that ‘s aye to last
In the land o’ the leal.

In another track, To be a soldier,  on the same album as the song above,  (Now Then),  Wendy Arrowsmith sings incredibly poignantly of a mother’s loss of her son in Iraq, in which we see the loss of “a child”, underscored by the lullaby tempo of the melody. Time does not heal so much as bring accustomedness to loss, the vacuum never filled but less empty, with overflow from other areas;  and yet,  in the words of Rossetti:

Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For, if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

Nevertheless, it is meet we should remember all our dead:

To everything there is a season,
and a time to every purpose under heaven….

A time to weep, and a time to laugh:
A time to mourn and a time to dance; [Ecclesiastes 3; 1-8]

The lines from Christina Rossetti’s poem Remembrance are preceded by “it will be late to counsel then or pray” which  – of course does not reflect the Catholic (and Jewish) teaching of praying for the dead;  it is not perhaps the dead, alone, for whom we pray but the living, in their loss, often a loss of “identity” as mother, wife, sister, as that relationship ceases to exist completely or in regard to the person who has died. Thomas’ mom often mentions that she no longer knows if she should reply with the answer “three” or “four” when she is asked if she has children;  and in terms of society, even today, no longer being a wife or mother can affect one’s standing and interactions in a community, beyond that which modern society struggles with the grief of others.

Death is a natural experience in life: “the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the Lord” [Job 1:21]; untimely death is, however, harder to process than a death that occurs at the end of a long illness or a long life. In Latin countries – as was heretofore the case – there is an outward embodiment of mourning (in dress and cultural customs), as of course is the case with sitting shiva in Judaism; theologically – in terms of Judaism – there is the issue of a different understanding of the afterlife,  inasmuch as we as Christians and Catholics understand it, which makes the sorrow of the death of someone close more extreme.  There is, however, a demonstrable psychological value in a degree of ritualisation of mourning, because while “there is a time to mourn”, the counterpoint of “a time to dance” bounds that mourning and limits it.  And so it should be:  as Catholics we hope to meet again with those who have gone before, and prayer can be a way – on many levels – of reminding us of that fact.

It may no longer be the case of taking up the “quarrel with the foe” as in John McCrae poem Flanders Field, but remembering both the horror that is war, in terms of loss of human life as a total, and each individual loss and the tragedy that may entail, as well as the soldiers’ sacrifice of life for the end of peace and justice.  As those who profess to be pro-life, even if – retrospectively – we may classify a war as “just”, the value we place on the sanctity of life is such that we should count and remember each man and woman who dies in war, and ensure that no loss is gratuitous.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young.

Straight of limb, true of eyes, steady and aglow.

They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,

They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning,

We will remember them.

This post is dedicated  to the memory  both of Lee Ann’s son, Thomas and of my late friend, Shelly McKinney who died unexpectedly this past week.  Of your charity, please pray for the repose of their souls, and all those fallen in the current war, and for the healing of those they leave behind.

And let perpetual light shine upon them.
May their souls and the souls of all the faithfully departed,
Rest in peace.

“Follow ye, follow ye, wha wouldna follow ye
Lang hae ye lo’ed us and trusted us fairly
Chairlie, Chairlie, wha wouldna follow ye
King of the hieland hairts, Bonnie Prince Chairlie”.

The bitterness running deep in Scotland following the Glorious Revolution which saw the Young Pretender’s failed attempts to overthrow King William, interwoven with the  religious oppression of the period of the Covenanters, (Penal Times) and the peculiar mélange of perfidy and betrayal – of society’s code – which lead to the Massacre of Glencoe, played no small part in creating a community,  with already closely structured rules of kinship and alliegance, which bereft of a leader and  aglow strong feelings of disenfranchisement – though worse consequences were to come following the ’45 rebellion (indeed, it is still an act of treason to utter the toast. “tae him wha lies o’er the water”), so, a community ripe for a leader who would bring salvation and retribution, for it is thus it was marketed, and the Highlanders did trust Chairlie with a passion, which continued well beyond the bourach of Culloden.

A sad aside is the fate of Flora MacDonald, who after languishing in the Tower for her part in abetting Charlie’s escape to the ship lying of the shores of Scotland which would bear him back to France,  married her cousin and went with him as German George’s representative to the Carolinas where – in the War of Independence – she once more ended up on the losing side. Dick Gaughan writes a moving account of her life in the song Strong Women Rule Us All.

A modern historical view would  sum up the whole Young Pretender “crusade” as somewhat sad, ill-advised, illusionary and inevitably bound to fail from the start – and categorise his followers as deceived, if not desperate, but that is to disregard the issue of trust, in and of its place, both in the historical moments of the Jacobite Uprisings, in which there were more than one political stooge set up for the expediency of the  hegemony: Scotland seems a nation sadly fated to have enthusiastic but somewhat foolhardy and ill-advised monarchs, not least Marie Stuart;  but also to disregard the place of trust in the human psyche.

Today’s (Shorter) Evening Office (Week 3, Tuesday) focuses on the question of trust, not one of the three theological virtues, but one taking from and informing the virtues of both Hope and Faith: the motto of the United States is “in God we trust,” born initially of a nation founded on the precept of freedom of religion – and from taxes – although the irony of the motto’s first appearing on a coin is not lost.

Trust is then a fluid concept born of Self’s belief in “Other” and the belief of “Other” in Self, to use Existentialist terms – each relationship flow informs the other, inasmuch as trust must be on some level a two-way process.  Or need it be so?  Certainly in practical terms to live without trusting in this world, results in bitterness, the extremes of which are not so much the political paranoia of the survivalist, but in the disintegration of persona in not knowing who is who in terms of truth., in this two way process. While there might be some value – in terms of external relationships in that wee statement beloved of  some Cognitive Behavioural Therapists that, “what other people think of me is none of my business”, it does depend on an established,  integrated and relatively cohesive (and possibly, objectively validated) sense of Self; if one’s own sense of Self is constantly at odds – at war even – with whom one is told one is (or one is told one is various contradicting Selves) it leads to fragmentation, and in more extreme circumstances, some degree of disassociation.

There are no winners in terms of adult survivors of childhood abuse by parents – the affective bond with one’s  carer(s) is inevitably damaged to some degree, but research suggests that “the deleterious effects of destructive childhood relationships” can be overcome or repaired by, “taking into the self either admirable qualities of important others or characteristics of relationships with important others” (Jerry M. Lewis, “Repairing the Bond in Important Relationships: A Dynamic for Personality Maturation“ Am J Psychiatry 157:1375-1378, September 2000); this internalisation is part of a process of rupture and repair, both as infant and adult (and an interesting corollary with the Sacrament of Reconciliation in its fullest manifestation).  Both rupture and repair are necessary to this growth, a normal part of childhood development wherein the child learns effective coping mechanisms, and where despair becomes joy.  Hope, and evidenced trust. It is no surprise that Lewis goes on to add, “Internalization of a pattern of unsuccessful repair leads to a limited and often later self-fulfilling relationship style”; this is so often the case with survivors of abuse – where the ability to trust one’s own innate sense of who one is (or might be) becomes eroded, and the “survivor” continually seems to seek validation of a negative sense of Self (and inhibit the reparative process).

The concept of being  “like a child”  in terms of trusting and being appears in the second Psalm (130) of today’s evening prayers:

“Truly, I have set my soul
In silence and peace.
As a child has rest in its’ mother’s arms,
even so my soul.”

And the Antiphon picks up the advice from Matthew 18: 3: “Unless you become like little children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven”; while in the case of the citation from Matthew, the reference is to humility – the juxtaposition of this quotation (as Antiphon) with the first of the evenings Psalm, 124:

“Those who put their trust in the Lord
are like Mount Sion, that cannot be shaken,
that stands for ever,”

ties in the idea of a child’s blind faith, hope and trust in a parent, as the Lost Sheep trusts in the Shepherd, as the Prodigal Son trusts in the all-forgiving and all-embracing love of the Father of whom we are all beloved Children, fashioned in His likeness.  Trust in this innate worth of each human, known to God and loved by Him, runs through Old Testament and New, and informs doctrine, as well as  Encyclicals such as Humanae Vitae.  This immutable identity of ‘intrinsic’ worth, however, depends on Faith (and so is not so much essential in terms of the individual, however much essential objectively and externally: on an individual, subjective level, Self is still, (être) pour soi): a leap of Trust

For if we are to align the theological virtues with the Persons of the Trinty, where the Spirit is Hope, the Father is Love and the Son is Faith.  The ultimate act of Trust – of Faith not the “thy will be done” of words of the Lord’s Prayer but the “thy will be done” of the Garden of Gethsemane:

“He went away a second time and prayed, ‘My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done.’” (Matthew 26: 42).

A prayer repeated in the final moments of the physical prayer or sacrifice  of Christ’s Crucifixion, the defining act of Faith:

“Jesus called out with a loud voice, ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.’ When he had said this, he breathed his last.” (Luke, 23:46).

That Christ in His physical humanity had to pray strenuously three times – the spiritual parallel of  His bodily falls under the weight of the Cross – gives us, in our own humanity, Faith to Trust in and through our doubts in our identity as Children of God; the confirmation, not just in the Redemption of the Resurrection, but the in persistence shown in the Garden and along the Via Crucis: at times  for us acts of Faith, but perhaps born – albeit through the labour of Despair – from more realism than the passion of the Jacobites. And in finding – and clinging to and trusting in that sense of Self in God (which might,  as in the Gospel Reading of Monday 0f the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time (Year 1), set daughter against mother) then, as with Charity – where one gives “without counting the cost, labours seeking no reward”, one can move towards trusting others freely, without the bindings of expectations.

The Three Virtues, St Machar's Cathedral Stained Glass Window

There are three theological virtues, as three (theological) manifestations of the One God.

“And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love,” and certainly,  while “ubi caritas et amor, ibi Deus est (where charity and love are, there is God)”, there is -further- a fundamental interdependency between each of the three theological virtues: a mutual relationship, emanating from God,  Of course, charity and acts of corporeal mercy can exist seemingly separate from God, at least in the minds of those without belief in God, although I might argue that all such manifestations are God’s Spirit breaking through, inasmuch as God informs and drives everything, as ultimate Signifier: God is, love but one of the ways in which He shows it.

Today’s  second reading (13th Sunday of  Ordinary Time, Year B),  again from Corinthians (II Corinthians, 8: 7ff),  spoke of  love as charity in the  un-seeking sharing what one has to spare which reflects the exhortation of Christ to give to the poor,  both materially (and on the eve of the Feast of Ss Peter and Paul, one might argue spiritually in our going out to “fish for men”); but, what is love, or charity?  Not eros, of course, but agape; according to St Paul,  in the passage which begins with the words reflected in the stained glass window above,  (the passage read -iconically- at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales):

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. ²If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. ³If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

⁴Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. ⁵It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. ⁶Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. ⁷It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

⁸Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. ⁹For we know in part and we prophesy in part, ¹⁰but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. ¹¹When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. ¹²Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

¹³And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

I Corinthians, 13

Love is, therefore, of the Fruit of the Spirit, and the foremost.  It is interesting that the translations render it thus, as a singular “fruit” despite the seven elements:

^“22But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, ²³gentleness and self-control.”

[Galatians 5]

A singular fruit – manifest in various ways, if indivisible in its cohesive Unity (and origins); somewhat like the Trinity, perhaps, and attributes which -all- cannot exist within us, perhaps independent of the Spirit’s working.

St Paul was, of course, a Rabbi and orthodox at that; those Pauline letters written by him or by his adherents will be informed by many of the tenets of then contemporary mainstream Judaism (for all he asserts in Galatians, that in Christ there is no circumcised and uncircumcised, circumcision being one of the talmudic mitzvot, an outward sign of God’s covenant with Israel, the progeny of Abraham; and another recent reading in this year’s Daily cycle),  and in Paul’s use of the imagery at the end of the first long passage from Corinthians - in translation at least – of mirrors and vision, we see the traditional Jewish image, kabbalistic and with echoes  to (Christian readings of) The Song of Song’s (if I remember correctly), of shrouding or obscuring – a partial view – of Truth,  with regard to the experience of God; and indeed our own identity (inasmuch as our likeness to God, in our Souls); a parallel to the lifting of Paul’s own blindness through light.  Also redolent of Paul’s rabbinic heritage, is the parallelds in the passage from Galatians with that from Micah (repeated elsewhere in Hosea too):

He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

[Micah 6:8]

So, as Christians, we are called to acts of Corporeal and Spiritual Mercy, which have their roots in the talmudic mitzvot;  although colloquially “mitzvah” is translated as an act of kindness, the concept of mitzvot - the plural - is more closely circumscribed than that and includes the twice daily reciting of the Shema, as well as  giving thanks for blessings received, and saying “grace”, as Our Lord gave thanks at the Last Supper for the bread and wine before Him, and as the Eucharistic Prayer itself in the words “Blessed are you Lord God of all Creation”, includes a grace.  While Christ is the Second Adam, the Messiah and, so, we live in a Messianic Age (and from a Jewish perspective, the Messianic Age will sweep out many of these old Commandments – Maimonides enumerated over 613 ) where,  for Christians, his Bodily Sacrifice on the Cross is the New Covenant with the world rather than just the Chosen People,  and while Christ Himself spoke of the new commandment of loving one’s neighbour, in Mark (12, 28) when Jesus is asked which of the commandments is the most important, He replies to the questioning Scribe, incontrovertibly (citing the words of the Shema):

29 “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

The acts of spiritual and corporeal acts of mercy are just that: manifestations of loving one’s neighbour, even if tough love sometimes, and so acts that go beyond charity.  In this respect – (tough) love of neighbour – they retain elements of the 613 talmudic mitzvot:

• To instruct the ignorant;
• To counsel the doubtful;
• To admonish sinners;
• To bear wrongs patiently;
• To forgive offences willingly;
• To comfort the afflicted;
• To pray for the living and the dead

The corporeal acts of mercy are more charity-based, perhaps:

• To feed the hungry;
• To give drink to the thirsty;
• To clothe the naked;
• To harbour the harbourless;
• To visit the sick;
• To ransom the captive;
• To bury the dead.

In love, through, from love of God, whose nature manifest as Father, Son, Spirit is Love (amor in Latin), is born not just  caritas but also compassion, patience, kindness, peacefulness, self-restraint, peace, and joy; Faith is enumerated as that which is Fruit of the Spirit, and Faith is, perhaps (God’s Faith in us and our Faith in God) something which cannot exist separate from Love (in a filioque manner): all that which matters.  Hope, likewise is perhaps born of love of God, of experiencing (however imperfectly, as humans) the Fruit of the Spirit,  but also inseparable from Faith.

Today’s Gospel reading (also Friday’s) recounted both the story of the  Jairus’ daughter  – and the Faith he had in Jesus ability to heal his daughter – as well as the haemorrhaging woman, unclean and destitute: an outcast in her society whose understanding of (Faith and Hope in) Christ’s healing powers (Love) such that she knew she need only touch the hem of his gown.  Equal to Jairus’ and the bleeding woman’s faith and hope, was that of the Centurion with the ailing servant (in Matthew) who understood”ust say the word, and my servant will be healed.”; words we repeat before receiving the (healing) sacrament of the Eucharist, and  it was a meet reminder at a Baptism during Mass last Sunday, when Fr James reiterated that it is in all the sacraments that Christ (God) is present (not just the Eucharist) as a healing force, where healing is unifying that which separates us from God and one another.  Faith brings hope of being healed through grace,  here on earth and of Eternal Salvation.

The Shema Yisrael of modern Christianity, might be then – not as I had been thinking the Benedictus of Morning Office, though that too has its’ undeniable beauty and its place, but  that which restores us and our world view, to its’ place in the Infinity of Universe:

Glory be to the Father, the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.

A concept perhaps beyond our human imagining, tied as we are to time and place.

But, does an identity (as  sister, daughter, or mother) still exist if the relationship is no longer there, through damage  or severance  or loss  of whatever kind, or death?  And how does one integrate the various whos that that one is,  into one unfragmented identity, when these different external identities are just that – different in what people sees of one and how what they see or perceive is received.  Who is the ultimate Signifier of one’s persona, who knows us in our entirety, our worst and our best?  The ultimate Signifier is Logos, without which nothing has significance:

⁷ Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?

⁸ If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths,  you are there.

⁹ If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea,

¹⁰ even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.

¹¹ If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,”

¹² even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.

¹³ For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

¹⁴ I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.

¹⁵ My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth,

¹⁶ your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

¹⁷ How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them!

¹⁸ Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. When I awake, I am still with you.

[Psalm 139]

While God may be the ultimate Signifier who gives meaning, the functional integration by Self of the different selves into one harmonious Self is more fraught.  I know who made me and why – and even what to do with the being  that I am.

God made me.

God made me to know him, love him and serve him in this world, and to be happy with him for ever in the next.

God made me to his own image and likeness.

This likeness to God is chiefly in my soul.

Offering up the hardships of daily life may be a very Catholic act or form of prayer, and the concept of redemptive suffering alien, if not heretical, to more reform forms of Christianity. Yet Christ entrusts and charges us with being like Him being servants to those we meet, inasmuch as the symbolism of washing their feet is to serve (or if not servants, then hosts, itself a powerful concept in terms of connotations with  the Eucharist), and – following the washing of the feet -  Jesus says,

“Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command,”

Whilst we may not be able or called – all of us – to be Maximilian Kolbes who lay down our lives, offering up the greater and lesser hardships is something we can do, and Josemaria Escriva wrote of turning even our humdrum and bothersome daily activities – he might have said the pormenores – into prayer.

So we can and should offer up Self. A sense of Self in terms of place and time in God’s universe does not mean one is a doormat but a valued sentient being of the Creator, and created in His likeness, a creature of love; to be like God, but

“…the man who is God
Lord of Eternity, dwells in humanity,
Kneels in humility, washes our feet”.

To serve in love, and humility, knowing that while we are loved each and every one of us, grains of sand, sparrows’ feathers, as individuals..in being in God’s image however, it is not about us, but about what we can, to quote Kennedy, do. The Fruits of the Holy Spirit, as with the ein sefirot of Kabbalisitic thought of the Jewish Midrash period (I think), are certainly manifiestations through which we can experience God, in his workings in the world through others, and through us. Radiations of God we reflect out from us, but which need our humble compliance to shine, which compliance is the replacing of I with You.
Humility is then, though not a Fruit of the Spirit per se, intimately linked with charity. However, it would be disingenuous to pretend that we can, as humans, ignore our needs, for while Christ was Man, He was also God, and we are but humans. We can, however, reflect God through our words and actions, as we intend in our morning offering each day; we will, as Christ fell under the weight of His Cross, fall under the weights of our own Crosses most probably (in thoughts, words, deeds and by omissions). There is a humility in accepting both this (through our examinations of conscience) and the need for help from others to walk our own daily Via Crucis – from the Veronicas and Simons who come into our lives, in whatever manifestations and for whatever duration. There is humility in knowing our frailties, acknowledging them (apologising without justifying, if necessary) and receiving help. The sin of Pride (hubris), that which keeps us from accepting our humanity, from accepting charity and perhaps from accepting salvation is the flipside of humility. It is not just the self-righteous Holy Wullies though, that we would do well to avoid becoming, but adopting the misplaced sense of Self that would lead us to be isolationist islands, scorning of the help proffered by others, however small, and ungrateful of such help when we cant but accept it.
It is not just the recognition of the hand of God relfected in the hand that hands us a well timed facecloth, or asks with concern and a smile if everything is ok,  but a recognition of our own sweat needing wiped, of our own wounds needing salved and bound, our own flesh and blood humanity, and our own mortality (all too fragile). And it is about hands, whether or not one endorse hand holding during the Pater Noster, the symbolism of community, supporting one another, is both powerful and valid.

“Oh wad some power the giftie gie us
Tae see oursels as ithers see us” (To a Louse, Robert Burns).

We are all in need of seeing our louse-ness (which is particularly apt), our beetleness if we want to be more Kafkaesque.
In seeing our own needs and frailties, in finding the graces (and accepting help) to work through them and move on, we grow: “this too will pass”, as someone I admire greatly sustained me by saying through much of 2008. In accepting our own failings and frailties, our own:

“air cùil ghrod an Glaschu
far bheil an lobhadh fàis,
agus air seòmar an Dùn Èideann,
seòmar bochdainn ’s cràidh”

“foul-smelling backland in Glasgow,
where life rots as it grows;
and on a room in Edinburgh,
a room of poverty and pain,” (Calbharaigh, Sorley MacLean)

we can increasingly see need in others, and how that need manifests itself and plays out in flesh and blood terms, in terms of wounds no less deep and weeping for all they may not be visible or of the flesh. Our suffering, our acknowledging our suffering and embracing it, but also embracing the wherewithal to move through and on from that suffering (even if, like Christ we sweat blood, and fall more than twice, and need our own Cyrenian to help us bear the load) that suffering unites us to God the Son in His Passion, and we become more like Christ, with the understanding and grace to love others – like us and like Christ – in their suffering, moving from being Self-centred to God-centred.

Works may not alone save us, but works with and of compassion, empathy, and through faith bring us closer to God, in the Suffering Servant and progress our understanding of God.

Saint Ignatius’ prayer talks of “to give and not to count the cost..to labour and as for no reward”" which is not just loving one’s neighbour but forgiving, out of hand.  They key of course is love – to love God with all one has, and to love one’s neighbour as oneself.   God the Father loves with no expectation of return, gives with no obligation to repay (we have Free Will).  As Father Keith pointed out today, it is a pivotal three way relationship: and in examining this further – until we understand and feel God’s immense and infinite love for us, given without counting the cost (blood, broken bones, suffocation), we miss a component part; once we begin to understand that love, and love ourselves, we want to pay back that love in loving our neighbours. If we think the relationship is merely God and us, we are indeed missing the point…we need neighbour.

Love your neighbour.. as yourself.  To love oneself,  one must forgive, both oneself, also others, and do so with compassion. In loving self, there is an understanding of keeping oneself safe and out of harm’s way.    This may mean that forgiveness does not include reconciliation in a real and tangible sense.

Our neighbour is of course, not so much the cheery, ever-helpful “auntie” next door who is there to help before you even ask – everyone finds it easy to love her – our neighbour is the person who pursues you savagely without apparent cause.    And it is the letting go of hurt and desire for a purposeless revenge that is the mark of forgiveness.  In forgiving one’s neignbhour – in full knowledge of what they have done and what they might very well do again, one lets go any impact their future acts might have on us emotionally, and wishes them well – or prays for their healing and happiness, for their peace and path back to God.  The cheek is turned 490 times – not to a slap (if it can be avoided, and in some cases forgiveness may mean that the person is no longer in one’s life) but to wish or pray for their happiness as we wish or pray for our own. We put ourselves our of reach of their hurt, in part by perhaps expecting nothing in return.

Pride and a misplaced sense of our role in this stands in the way.  Justice and judgement is not ours to meet out for the most part, outwith the judicial processes of the land, and to wish for (or seek)  revenge damages – not our neighbour or not soley our neighbour but ourself.  Dis-integrates the bonds of forgiving love God the Father wants to wrap us  in, not as servants or slaves (as today’s readings specified on the Feast of the Holy Trinitiy) but as Sons.

The Serentiy prayer speaks of, serenity and courage:

Lord grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

but driven by wisdom.  It is not something that sits easy with our modern humanity to accept that which we cannot change- another hubris that holds us – we want dominion  beit over nature, bus timetables or the acts of our neighbours.  We believe ourselves all powerful. And yet, what we can change is ourself, or our sense of self and how we see the world. We cannot chose or change how someone will act, but the guinea stamp may be how we react to that ourselves, and the gradual understanding of different reactions render us more or less discontent.

A wise friend of mine recounted to me the words of a priest, that in the case of those who have hurt us, we should pray, pray, pray for blessings on them.  There may be in  this an element of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, inasmuch as the establishing of a (new) habit after six weeks of continuous behaviour (also a signiicant time watershed in the process of grief).  In praying so, it is oneself that changes.. not so much death of Self but the reintegration of, would psychoanalysts say Ego? in the embracing arms of God.

There is an further analysis of this parable of the Good Samaritan – I believe I read once – perhaps by Benedict XVI, or so my recollection – in which he maintains that by extension, Christ  the Victim on the Cross or on the Altar is also embodied injured man lying in the ditch whom the Samaritan stops to help -the sacrificial victim , rejected by His own, but acknowledged by the foreigner (as was Jesus when the Samaritan woman gave him to drink). This would fit with Jesus telling us that in giving the hungry food, and the thirsty water (Matthew 25: 34-40).

We are called, as Saint Ignatius says, to give and not to count the cost, to toil, seeking no reward save that of knowing that we do Thy will. The paradox of being Christ to all we meet and in seeing Christ in everyone we encounter.  The gazed upon and the gazer, the signified and the signifier. And this we cannot do with out the Logos, Himself both these things.

“The two characters in this story are relevant to every single human being. Everyone is “alienated,” especially from love (which, after all, is the essense of the “supernatural spendor” of which we have been despoiled); everyone must first be healed and filled with God’s gifts. But then everyone is also called to become a Samaritan — to follow Christ and become like him. When we do that, we live rightly. We love rightly when we become like him, who loved us all first (cf. 1 Jn 4:19).” (Jesus of Nazareth, Joseph Ratzinger)

Yet,  if we have to love our neighbour as ourselves we must first love ourselves.  Self love that is not phyrric nor self seeking (and we are all capable of that) but love of self that is full of compassion, and a sense of self based on serenity, and that is able to integrate the fractured and to let go of that which cannot be integrated – fractured, broken edges that cut or harm us, however that manifest itself – but to let go with a blessing rather than bitterness. (To wish others ill hurts only ourselves and heals nothing).

From the Cross God the Son forgave many, and welcomed others into heaven.  Would Jesus have forgiven Judas Iscariot? We are taught that Judas’ sin was – most of all – that of Despair, belief that he was beyond redemption. We are all assured  of God -  Son and Father -’s forgiveness if we seek it, whatever the bio-chemical imbalances that blur that reality: none of us too evil or sinful that we cannot be forgiven.

And in seeking forgiveness and reconciliation we must heal our relationships with others, with God and equally – maybe most – importantly with Self.  Until we acknowledge and forgive ourselves our own shortfalls, we cannot move forward in loving our Self, and until we love our Self  (recognise our status as  Child of God, for whom God the Son was made man and died)  we cannot love those around us.  But, basic early years psychology, we need the appropriate affective bonds with the God the Parent, the integration of place and value in our persona: security.

Who is, then, my neighbour, is perhaps not so much the question, as who am I?

There is a star whose beaming ray
Is shed on ev’ry clime.
It shines by night, it shines by day
And ne’er grows dim wi’ time.
It rose upon the banks of Ayr,
It shone on Doon’s clear stream -
A hundred years are gane and mair,
Yet brighter grows its beam.

Chorus
Let kings and courtiers rise and fa’,
This world has mony turns
But brightly beams aboon them a’
The star o’ Rabbie Burns.

To continue a bit on the theme of rhythm and time – we are but drops in an eternal ocean and it is perhaps not hubris but interesting to see the focus modern societies – modern political agglomerations – place on their own politics in terms of the global.

Scotland, for all we are a nation fraughtly torn between a view anchored on the past (battles one and lost, betrayal and too often, World Cup disappointments) and the future, a dichotomy bedecked with trite tartan fripperies, yet perhaps we have both a sense of place and time within the world.  My great grandfather’s words of advice to his young grand-daughter: Never shake hands with a Campbell, they are not to be trusted (advice his grand-daughter repeated to her grandson, resulting in his informing an American tourist of that name, that he was not to be trusted); yes the massacre of Glencoe was over 300 years ago yet still living in folk memory.   One thing I was aware of when an American friend (a MacDuff by heritage) visited me and I was showing her round Old Aberdeen (::waves to Lee Ann!::) is the perspective of history.  I live in a house built in the 1980s but the house nextdoor to me was built in – I think – 1300, and the Cathedral round the corner, built in the 1100.  There is a sense of place in this.  These buildings (and moreso even the likes of the burial stones at Clava or the chambered cairn at Maes Howe in Orkey) humble us to our place in time.

Kings and courtiers will rise and fall, and nations come and go (and, God willing, come back to full nationhood again).. and time keeps rolling on.  Buildings will stand impassive to puppet kings, parcels of rogues, and the artillary that took pot shots at Rouen Cathedral, how much more does God remain unchanged by “change” to use an American political leitmotiv.  Human institutions  or political constructs are temporary, as indeed our time here -and any happiness here- on earth.

Emily Bronte summed it up quite perfectly in the middle few stanza’s of her poem No Coward Soul is Mine (one of the first non-Burns poems I learnt by heart, from a book given me by a Church of Scotland minister when I was young):

Vain are the thousand creeds
That move mens hearts: unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main,

To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by Thine infinity;
So surely anchored on
The steadfast Rock of immortality.

With wide-embracing love
Thy Spirit animates eternal years,
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.

Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.

Not then the star of Rabbie Burns that rises through the rhythms of seasons, days and years, but God, unchanging God.  In the light that shines from God we should seek to illuminate, not difference, but the human bonds that hold us – frail and fallen – together, the needy Christ in the sufferings of our neighbours. Only then, will we be, “the warld o’er” “brithers” “for a’ that”.