Colour Studies: Blood and Wine

My blood is the colour of a fine Burgundy or maybe a sweet Shiraz.  Due to a medical condition, I have to have blood drawn quite often, and the technician holds it up to the light and says, ‘Yes, it’s beautiful.’ The analogy between blood and wine when based on colour is evident to any careful observer.

            Furthermore, my blood has a secret life of its own, quite independent of my thoughts and desires.  I may feel wonderful, yet my blood knows that something sinister is going on.  I may think I’m in trouble, but my blood says that yet again, I’m worried about nothing.  The people at my blood clinic spin my blood, they check it and label it, and they say that nobody else’s blood gets mixed with mine.  Blood is private, no?

            Blood for public consumption would be a strange event.  But this idea is central to the Christian faith. The blood of Jesus undoubtedly contains many secrets too esoteric for humanity to know. Among these is the secret of life. Drinking this blood is said to give life, abundant and overflowing: the piety of the 18^th century envisaged bathing in it, washing ourselves in a spiritual fountain of blood, as Bach’s cantatas show.

            So I reflect on the paradoxical but popular literary and cinematic figure of the vampire, who gives death to mortals by drinking blood, obtaining thereby only a spurious life existing in darkness. The popularity of the vampire image seems to indicate an uncomfortable bridge between death and life in the secular mind.

            At the altar wine, having passed through the sanctifying fire of the Eucharistic Prayer, takes on the qualities of life-giving blood.  Drinking this blood cannot bring darkness to the body through which it flows. It brings light to the soul.  The bridge between death and life has been spanned by Jesus.

            As I travelled through the Yarra Valley yesterday the vineyards were alight with the glowing golden leaves of autumn.  This gold is a sign of wine harvested and wine to come, wine the colour of blood. Just as the Magi’s gold is a sign of wine and blood to come, blood and wine more valuable than gold.

Boston: Instruments of Mercy

I was at a concert the other night, of Thomas Adės conducting scenes from his work ‘The Tempest’. As I listened and watched, I began to think: ‘Where is God in this concert hall tonight?’ Is God, as is sometimes thought, directing the forces of this world in the same way that a conductor does a symphony orchestra? I wondered whether God is rather in the instrumentalists, whose skills and abilities — particularly the ability to respond — yes, and willingness, actually give voice to the music. Such an analogy is most notable when the instrument is the human voice, of course. Or perhaps God is in the instruments; or perhaps the divine lies in the sound created.

            The metaphor of a harmony in the world is an ancient one: harmony of the spheres maybe, song of the earth or dance of the stars, which from antiquity have been believed to govern human fates. But then  follows discord, even tempests.

            I woke next day to news of the Boston marathon massacre. It falls in the class of human events that, based on hatred, deny the harmony, the song of the world. It’s among the confrontations, alas almost daily across the world, between an ideal harmony directed by a loving God, and a ruthless reality imposed by violent humankind. Atheism is one response to the devastation of life and beauty caused by such events. The concept of God as a conductor of this symphony of disaster almost beckons disbelief.

            However graceful such an image, the divine director guiding a perfectly fitting world is, it seems to me, too small. God is unknowable, as Aquinas found out, but we can see how the world is filled with human ignorance and that disregard for the wellbeing of strangers that the ancients termed ‘hatred’. Anyone who can ignite bombs in the midst of crowds of random individuals clearly doesn’t ‘love’ others.

            If God is in the instruments, however — both instruments of love and rescue and their players — that might bring a closer vision. Christians believe that Jesus Christ is the ultimate rescuer, ‘reconciling the world’ to God, as it says in the liturgy. My own response to the tempests of human violence comes from another part of the same liturgy: the appeal for mercy. ‘Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy,’ we say. Thus we pray to the unknowable God: have mercy on those who suffer, on those who do, and those who fail to do, on those who pray and on those who do not believe. Thus we pray to the God whose ‘property it is, always to have mercy,’ but understanding, I trust, that mercy is conveyed from one to another only through the instrumentalists, ourselves.

Liber Scriptus: The Sensible Book.

I have to confess that I’m bi-graphical:  I have two handwritings. There’s the neat, show-offy birthday card writing, with rounded ‘o’s and graceful ‘t’s and ‘l’s, and then there’s the scruffy grocery list writing, with wonky slopes and squashed ‘g’s and ‘y’s.  Depending on mood and distraction, the same words might be written in different ways.

            This leads me to wonder if the presentation of writing reflects how we receive it. Whether the beautifully bound, gold-edged Bible (a confirmation present) is any more of a pleasure to read than the battered paperback volume in the backpack. Whether the gold-edged Bible is even read at all: perhaps it’s too precious to touch. Touch, that vital link with the inhabited world, can add pleasure to reading or it can repel.  I own a copy of a book on meditation so sensually produced —with its thick, creamy paper, its lavish but not overwhelming size, its lightness and substantiality combined — that just holding it is meditation for the hands.

            Then there’s the question of what is written in the book. Here I just mention another of the senses, hearing: hearing about writing, this time through music.  For Mozart, the words ‘Liber Scriptus’ in the Requiem Mass are a calm, fluent tenor solo in the midst of a classic trio, leading to the great choral heralding of “Rex Tremendae Majestatis” — the King of Fearful Majesty —coming to judge the world with justice: the final moment for God’s justice to prevail.  For Verdi, by the nineteenth century, it’s an operatic oration, setting the stage for a grand if terrifying drama. For Britten, who had seen Belsen concentration camp soon after its liberation, it’s a spine-chilling soprano declamation: an ambassador’s announcement of dreadful events.  ‘Liber Scriptus’ is the book in which are contained the deeds of humankind by which the world shall be judged.  It is the written book: these deeds cannot be altered; they have already taken place.

            Surely the Bible, a collection of books which is in one sense a history of the world (for there are many senses), contains these matters which must be judged: wars, genocides, invasions, deportations, imperial aggressions, repressions, persecutions; slavery, incest, rape, murder; betrayals, rejection of strangers entitled to protection; lies, greed, grinding down of the poor.  Hatred of neighbours; worship of money.  Vengeance, ruthlessness, self-interest as a way of life. Read the Bible, and you’ll be astonished at how little has changed in the last few thousand years.

           But there is another sensibility in the Bible, and especially in the Gospels. The figure of Jesus of Nazareth offers a way of compassion, a view of the kindness of God and the forgiveness of sins for those who repent.  To repent, forswear violence, and follow a way of goodness/beauty can’t change the words in the written book: events in which I (and sometimes a whole generation) have been implicated have already come to pass, and their consequences will play out in the mortal world.  But perhaps new words can be written, for there is a fountain of divine mercy — ‘fons pietatis’ in the liturgy —and it’s never too late to appeal for ever-flowing salvation.