On Sermons

Children’s author William Mayne wrote four books about the choir school of Canterbury Cathedral where he had been a pupil. In these stories choirboys could be called out for devising games to be played during the sermon. Somewhat like the joke now going around that choristers should wait for the sermon to check their mobile phones.

            Why sermons? What does a sermon do? Clearly it teaches; it has a purpose to educate often through elucidating the Scriptures. This is why you don’t interrupt a sermon. They don’t seem to be interactive. In some churches asking questions after the sermon is encouraged, but that would be disrespectful during the sermon itself. A Baptist friend told me a sermon doesn’t come from the pastor but it comes from God through the Scriptures. ‘It’s loving and it’s free,’ she said. So you listen. Every proper church service needs a sermon, or at least a homily.

            I like Dominican spirituality. ‘Praise, bless, preach.’ And what is preached is veritas: the truth. The truth is contained in the Gospel, or, rather, the Truth is Jesus Christ. Preaching this is a responsibility and an honour. Listening is a privilege and a blessing. Study, preach, listen, be present. Now.

On Learning the Collects

Children once had to learn the collect off by heart every Sunday. What value in this practice? Such memory work is no longer asked of children: reciting poetry, learning Shakespeare, learning collects. But maybe adults could ask it of ourselves.

            Collects remind us of the passage of seasons and shape of the year, something the commercial secular dimension distorts for its purposes. Some collects are very old, coming down from Late Antiquity: a collect gathers up history, without which we have no guide to this world. A collect is concise, prayer in a nutshell.

            Collects begin with a vocative: O God, Everliving God, Blessed Lord, teaching us divine address. And divine qualities follow: ‘who has caused all Holy Scriptures to be written for our learning.’ The God who does. We pray precisely: ‘keep us … from all things that may hurt us’ and for why? To accomplish the things that God would have done. In Jesus’ name, collects will conclude.

            Memorising collects can be a meditative practice. Mindfully recollecting – ‘Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them’ – we can return to them in times of stress, distraction, or self-criticism. It brings a touch of the divine to ordinary negativity. It places us in the divine calendar, at home in our minds.

On Compassion for the Body

In a Mindfulness course, I heard of self-compassion. Everyone suffers. Our own suffering is also worthy of compassion. Mistakes, emotions, confusions can be viewed objectively, with kindness, not subjectively with fear or a need to win.

            Compassion for thoughts and feelings, even for actions can be understood, but what about compassion for the body? St. Francis called his body ‘Brother Donkey,’ mistreating it for many years. St. Paul thought the body should be disciplined to win the race. What about those of us whose bodies cannot win?

            The body is the brain’s field of play. Movement in distant nerves, chemical exchanges, hormonal flows, relaxation states, desires, excitements, breathing, growth and aging: the brain at play. Gentleness with the body is gentleness with the brain.

            Moderation, taking care, providing safety, avoiding haste or violence are gentle behaviours. Can we show this gentleness to our suffering body? Would it make the body itself gentler, easier to manage, feeling understood and so understanding?

            Gentleness refers too to the quality of being well-born, of honourable lineage. The body has this quality: God’s image in human form. Does such a body deserve harsh treatment, impatience, or neglect? Or should a Spirit of kindness, graciousness and good temper rule our dealings with our bodies, the site of so much suffering and compassion?

On Lectio Divina

I’ve been reading His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. Part science fiction, part theological reflection, Blake and Milton, high fantasy and modern physics. This includes the idea of parallel worlds.

            The monastic practice of Lectio Divina seems similar to me. It’s a way of reading scripture that puts you into a parallel world which informs and infuses us. I read the first eight verses beginning Mark: ‘John did baptise in the wilderness, and preach the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins.’ Because I’m reading King James, I get ‘did baptise’ which appears to me. It’s emphatic. In this parallel world where all the land converges on Jordan River John stands as a marker. I can see the prophet, preparing to baptise the Lord.

            What did John do? He did baptise. He preached. He preached the baptism of spirit, after the water. When I read this passage again, I get the word ‘remission.’ I would dearly love a remission of illness. John preached the remission of sins. Yet it was Jesus who has the actual power to forgive sins. On third reading, John baptised in the wilderness. Are we not in wilderness, much of the time? In this parallel world, some healing is taking place. It’s a world worth exploring: Lectio Divina is one way.

           

On the Body and the Blood

I’ve just received a little over nine bottles of a substance derived from other people’s blood. Nine is the number Dante associates with his blessed lady Beatrice: so much so, that she’s said to be the number nine. Her name calls her a Blessing; her number calls her a miracle. Dante’s maths makes three the sole factor of nine, and three is comprised of Father, Son and Holy Spirit (three in One) the root of miracles.

            Many in hospital were needing miracles. Not only the patients, but the staff were contending with illness, distress, and close calls. A nurse told me she was in this country looking after her dying sister. Another had been a cancer patient on this same ward. A doctor had two sick family members. Being a nurse, a doctor, or a priest won’t exempt you from the suffering all around. The truth of suffering is Buddhism’s first Noble Truth.

            Can the blood of others entering the body contribute to miracles? In Dante’s day it would have seemed so. The blood of one Other in particular carries miraculous power. The recovered nurse believed her faith had made her well. ‘Others can cure,’ she said, ‘but Jesus heals!’

On Temperament

Distractibility, persistence, focus, physical sensitivity, calmness, flexibility, are examples of inborn temperament. Times of sleep and waking, mood, and appetite may be natively determined. We see already in children that one is imaginative, another boisterous, one analytical, one instinctively attuned to the feelings of others. Worry, I’m told, is a genetic trait.

            Characteristics can be learned. I’ve seen extraversion taught to small children, and optimism is famously teachable. What can’t be unlearned may be controlled by various means, though the underlying tendency to care or to jump around may remain. Proust thought our repetitive mistakes, what he called our vices, were the key to our selves. I surely know that certain situations require attentiveness if I’m not to fall to disaster; often I know it too late, and this after decades of experience.     

            Experience modifies. Sometimes it moderates; sometimes it tends to extremes. The hot quick temperament and the cool cautious one may face the same experience with differing results. It’s at the conjunction of temperament and experience that character is formed. The temperament that’s tempered by experience has become the quality of the person, for good or ill.

            While temperament is of God, experience comes from the world. The resulting character is ours to use for life and love and blessing.

On Gravity

George MacDonald wrote a charming story called The Light Princess, about a girl with no gravity. Without gravity, she floated about, neither stable on earth nor sensible in mind. The key to gravity was tears. Grave is a slow solemn tempo in music, a critical situation, a dangerous pass. The grave is where the body lies down.

            But gravity makes us able to walk in the world. It gives each thing its proportional weight. Gravity is the general attraction of everything in the universe, affecting matter, time and space. Without it, would anything hold together?

            What then is frivolity? Is it horses for courses? (Some view horses’ paces weightily.) Celebrities and crime? The serious life’s work of many journalists. Fashion, comedy, or laughter? Is it lack of weightiness, wisdom, or depth? Does each kind of frivolity have its own gravity, based on the attraction of things for one another?

            Veronese shows Jesus at the Resurrection, leaping up from the tomb full of life and lightness. Do we have the hope of losing gravity at the general resurrection, when our deeds call us to account, and the soul commits again to the body? How would gravity behave in a new heaven and a new earth?