Love and Glory
9 March 2009
“There’s glory for you!”
“I don’t know what you mean by glory,” Alice said.
“I meant, there’s a nice knock-down argument for you.”
“But glory doesn’t mean a nice knock-down argument,” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
Pace Alice but glory is a knock-down argument for the love of God, or at least it is a knock-down word to describe the effect of that love on his children. To know the love of God in the worship of him, to know him in the Sacraments of the Church is to know glory. It is to be taken out of ourselves, to be swept up in his eternal purposes. It is to feel love, to apprehend love, to know with absolute certainty what love is. We cannot come to the Sacrament of love, to the Mass day by day, week by week, Sunday by Sunday without being transformed by the love of God in Christ. Our transfiguration may not come upon us suddenly, in a blazing, dazzling light such as the disciples witnessed of Our Lord in the Gospel this morning. We may never have a dramatic mountain-top experience. But we will be changed. We are being changed. In this sacrificial act we allow the possibility of the transfiguration of ourselves, our souls and bodies, and our closer configuration to Christ in the divine glory.
The Transfiguration of Our Lord was a mountain-top experience and as the atmosphere on a mountain-top can be rarefied, perhaps we might feel that this Transfiguration is a rarefied theological or eschatological event which can only be spoken of in a rarefied theological language of metaphor and simile, analogy and allusion. But perhaps we can bring the experience down to earth, bring it down from the mountain to the plain of our existence and apply it to the mundane reality of our existence in the day to day. What happened after he came down from the mountain may explain for us what happened before.
As Jesus came down from the mount of the Transfiguration he was met by an excited and impatient crowd. The disciples whom he had left behind were being questioned by a party of scribes; voices were raised, tempers were out of control, and the situation was looking far from pleasant. It was a harassed group of disciples who heard the cause of their unpopularity explained to Jesus, as he and his three companions reached the centre of the disturbance. When the clamour was sufficiently calmed for him to hear what this was, he found it to be not one of the causes, great or small, which can usually be expected to arouse the anger of a crowd, but the failure of his disciples to work a miracle, to heal the lunatic son of a persistent father. Jesus, with his usual charity, came to the assistance of the unfortunate boy and healed his disorder. But the miracle he performed, however striking it was in itself, however much it added to his reputation, it was much less striking than the discussion which followed.
The disciples asked Jesus what was the reason for their lack of success; they had tried to heal the boy, and they had expected to be able to do so, but they had failed. Jesus did not say something like, “Because you are merely men, while I am Almighty God, you were not able to heal the boy,” but rather he said that it was, “Because of your unbelief.” They could not be blamed for attempting a cure by a miracle, but they could be blamed because the miracle did not occur.
It is a common, if mistaken, belief that the power of working miracles was unique to Jesus and it was his simply because he was God, and it was a power that could not be shared with the rest of mankind. But Jesus himself promised, “He that believes in me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do.” This promise has been fulfilled again and again throughout history. The truth of Christian experience is that miracles are the natural working of God the Holy Spirit in the world. They do not destroy the essential reasonableness of the world’s plan because they are necessary to a universe created and overseen by a personal God.
A miracle is something which does not accord with the laws which we presently understand to be the laws of nature, and it is something that signals the direct intervention of God in the affairs of the world. It would be unreasonable for God, having created the world, to have left it thereafter entirely to its own post-lapsarian devices, to follow its own particular system of laws, to abandon interest in it, as it would for the loving father of a family to draw up a series of precepts for the education of his children, and then to leave those rules to be carried out, without himself taking any further part in the family’s life. Fatherly love does not allow for that.
But if miracles are the natural working of God the Holy Spirit in the world, it would nevertheless be foolish to suggest that they are in fact frequent or normal occurrences. This was the case in the life of Jesus. The miracles he performed or accomplished were relatively few in his ministry, and he expected that it would be so in the lives of his friends and in the history of Christendom miracles are extremely rare events. The reason for that is the same as that which prevented the disciples from healing the lunatic boy. It is the lack of these essential qualities of faith and prayer and discipline. The divine condescension is that God chooses to work in the world through human channels; and without these three qualities such channels cannot be kept open. Jesus himself was hindered by the unbelief of his fellow-villagers at Nazareth; he spent whole nights in prayer; and all his life was a discipline of obedience whose culmination could only be Calvary. “He did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all.” To say that today the age of miracles is past is to say that the age of faith and prayer and discipline is past.
The friends and disciples of Jesus today are a small group in the midst of a progressively non-Christian country and world which, from a vague sympathy and toleration, seems more recently to have moved towards anger and impatience, and here and there breaks out into open hostility perhaps as a reaction to incendiary fundamentalism that taints all religions in the eyes of the ignorant. The reason is the failure to heal what is a world gone mad, a world and a society that has lost sight of God. And that reason is cogent enough, bleak and personal. We have failed. If the earliest disciples were culpable for their inability to work a miracle, we as their successors are not blameless if we fail to allow, to facilitate those miracles which God longs to work through us.
It is impossible to be blind to the madness of the world. That dislocation from our higher purposes has led us into the state that we are in. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that a pursuit of individual greed and self-gratification divorced from a sense of social obligation: the love of neighbour and their welfare and well-being has led us to this abject contemporary reality. And the crisis of capitalism through which we are passing is as nothing when seen in the context of real and debilitating poverty around the world. Not merely material and economic poverty, severe, de-humanising and extensive as it may be, but the impoverishment of spirit and ambition, cultural and intellectual deprivation, the poverty of expectation, the spiritual desolation and the emptiness of human souls that wreaks havoc on the human capacity to love.
There is a horrifying timelessness about all this. In some research I was doing a few days ago I came across a sermon by one of my predecessors, Father Kent White. Before becoming a Priest Librarian, he was the curate of S. George, Tredegar in the 1930s and he preached in this Chapel about the social conditions in his parish:
“Some live crowded in houses whose only function seems to be the exclusion of fresh air and the provision of rent for a far-distant landlord. The roof leaks, the walls are damp and verminous, the windows are patched with brown paper, and an oppressive smell of decay and unsatisfactory drains makes the whole house foul. Some, and these are mostly quite young, are grossly overworked and underpaid. The days of sweated labour are by no means past, and the law allows a low wage for a young employee, while he dare not complain for fear of losing his work altogether. Others, and these are nowhere few, spend their whole time in looking aimlessly and hopelessly for work, or standing idle and unwanted at street corners.”
Although written nearly seventy years ago, it still has a frightening relevance. It is not the whole of society. It is not true of every part of the country or of the world but it is sufficiently prevalent to be a cause of scandal and a rebuke. Unemployment and impoverishment are evil in themselves and in their economic consequences of depression and they are disastrous in their spiritual and emotional consequences of bitterness, indifference and depravity. There is all the difference in the world between the holy poverty of S. Francis and the wretched poverty of the most deprived areas. Whoever has been to blame in the past, and it is easy to blame almost anybody, the present victims seem caught in the wheels of a machine from which they can see no possibility of escape. The outcomes of apathy or violence are to be deprecated: of course they are. And all must be responsible for the living of a moral life. But economic circumstance bears heavily on the individual and it is not always open to individual initiative to ameliorate burdensome consequences. Society also has a responsibility. Societies should be mutually bound in good times and bad. But it falls to those of us who bear the mark of Christ through our baptism and impress the cross of Christ daily in our prayer and worship to bear a substantial responsibility. Only from the Church Catholic can the necessary miracle legitimately be expected.
There is, of course, a familiar argument that the cure of social evils is outside the Church’s scope. Her commission is to save souls; and that it is perfectly true. Her commission is to bring men and women to God, to urge the holiness of living, to cultivate the spiritual life and discipline of worship, to set our sights on heaven. But to say that the Church, particularly the Catholic Church, should not be concerned with housing, or industry, or unemployment, or poverty, or material deprivation, or education, or the squalor of cultural impoverishment and of limited horizons is simply wrong. This argument ignores one of the simplest and most direct lessons of the Crucifix, the lesson of love. For the death of the Saviour shows the depth of the love of God for every single human soul – for me, but not for me only, for you but not for you only, for all of our neighbours, however unlovely or unresponsive they may appear to be. If such is God’s love for my neighbour, then, if I am in any sense a lover of God and an imitator of Christ, I cannot be indifferent to that neighbour’s welfare; while, if I really love him, and desire the well-being of his soul, I cannot but be concerned with his lack of proper housing and decent employment.
The great miracle of the Incarnation resulted in the redemption of the souls of men; but Our Lord still had time to heal their leprosy, to enlighten their blindness, and to cure their deafness. He forgave the sin of the paralytic; but He did not refrain from restoring his health. So, too, when He commissioned the twelve to preach the coming of the kingdom of heaven, He also told them to heal the sick, to cleanse the lepers, to raise the dead and to cast out devils. He transformed their physical conditions and he transformed their lives. As surely as he transforms and transfigures the bread and wine of our offering to His Body and His Blood, so he transforms our lives so that we might love as he loves us, so that we can play our part in the transformation of the world to his everlasting glory. As the Psalmist reminds us: “Defend the poor and fatherless: see that such as are in need and necessity have right. Deliver the outcast and poor: save them from the hand of the ungodly.”
Father William Davage Custodian of Dr Pusey's Library