The Loved One

It is a strange coincidence that I read Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One shortly after my first experience with leading funerals. The Loved One is a book about, well, funerals, or more precisely, the funeral industry. To an extent, it is a book about religion, or the lack thereof. It is a tragedy, which like all good tragedies looks like it’s going to end well, until the fateful moment of anagnōrisis when everything suddenly comes crashing down with calculated precision.

A friend of mine once said that Waugh was a misanthropist, and after reading The Loved One, I am inclined to agree. Not that he isn’t funny. His comments on the differences between Americans and Europeans are very flattering to Europeans. And his satirical approach to individualistic secular rituals is very gratifying to Catholics. So, as a European Catholic, I enjoyed the book immensely…until the end, which still makes me angry.

At the beginning of the book we meet Francis and his nephew Dennis. Dennis, a poet out of work, has just accepted a new job. Although his new line of work raises some eyebrows among his fellow British residents in California, he seems qualified enough. As he says, ‘The man they had before caused offence by his gusto. They find me reverent. It is my combination of melancholy with the English accent.’

As it turns out, his employer is the Happier Hunting Ground, a company that arranges funerals for pets. Somewhat like this:

‘I have a brochure here setting out our service. Were you thinking of interment or incineration?’

‘Pardon me?’

‘Buried or burned?’

‘Burned, I guess.’ …

‘And the religious rites? We have a pastor who is always pleased to assist.’ …

‘Mr Barlow, we’re neither of us what you might call very church-going people, but I think on an occasion like this Mrs Heinkel would want all the comfort you can offer.’

‘Our Grade A service includes several unique features. At the moment of committal, a white dove, symbolizing the deceased’s soul, is liberated over the crematorium.’

‘Yes,’ said Mr Heinkel, ‘I reckon Mrs Heinkel would appreciate the dove.’

‘And every anniversary a card of remembrance is mailed without further charge. It reads: “Your little Arthur is thinking of you in heaven today and wagging his tail.”’

His uncle Francis, however, is not doing so well. Chief script-writer in Megalopolitan Pictures (hē polis hē megalē, ‘the great city’, is a name used multiple times in the Apocalypse that rarely bodes well), at one time he goes to his office and finds it occupied. Apparently he has been fired, and, driven by despair, he commits suicide.

That is the set-up that brings Dennis to the awe-inspiring burial grounds of Whispering Glades, of which his own Happier Hunting Ground is only an imitation (or, as the stern people at Whispering Glades would say, a parody).

Whispering Glades has been conceived by an artist known as the Dreamer. A huge marble inscription at the entrance indicates that its purpose is to bring maximum happiness to the Waiting Ones and to provide a happy resting place for the Loved Ones, a euphemism for those who have passed away. Next to the marble block is a wooden signboard with the text, ‘Prices on inquiry at Administrative Building.’

As Dennis enters through a florist’s shop, he hears a woman saying on the telephone, ‘I’m really sorry but it’s just one of the things that Whispering Glades does not do. The Dreamer does not approve of wreaths or crosses. We just arrange the flowers in their own natural beauty.’

It is clear that Whispering Glades offers all the comforts of religion but experiences sharp discomfort with the idea of revelation.

It is at Whispering Glades that Dennis meets Aimée Thanatogenos (‘Loved One Born to Death’, of course). She is one of the cosmeticians whose job it is to make the dead look presentable. The author says some rude things about American women in general before describing Aimée as above average, indeed ‘decadent’:

Her hair was dark and straight, her brows wide, her skin transparent and untarnished by sun. Her lips were artificially tinctured, no doubt, but not coated like her sisters’ and clogged in all their delicate pores with crimson grease; they seemed to promise instead an unmeasured range of sensual converse. Her full face was oval, her profile pure and classical and light. Her eyes greenish and remote, with a rich glint of lunacy.

As the book progresses, an absurd but endearing love triangle unfolds between

1) Dennis, the cynical European imitator of beautiful things;

2) Aimée, the idealistic young woman, who writes frequent letters to the local newspaper’s Guru Brahmin at this critical time of her life; and

3) her great hero and example, true artist cosmetician of Whispering Glades, beautifier of the dead, austere and serene: Mr Joyboy.

The third party has not been mentioned yet, but he definitely has an eye on Aimée, and the feeling is mutual:

‘When I am working for you there’s something inside me says “He’s on his way to Miss Thanatogenos” and my fingers just seem to take control. Haven’t you noticed it?’

‘Well, Mr Joyboy, I did remark it only last week. “All the Loved Ones that come from Mr Joyboy lately,” I said, “have the most beautiful smiles.”’

‘All for you, Miss Thanatogenos.’

In one sense, that makes Aimée very lucky, as Mr Joyboy is a legend among the cosmetic staff:

As he passed among them, like an art-master among his students, with a word of correction here or commendation there, sometimes laying his gentle hand on a living shoulder or a dead haunch, he was a figure of romance, a cult shared by all in common, not a prize to be appropriated by any one of them.

However, against her own will, Aimée falls in love with Dennis, who says all sorts of irreverent things that scandalize and infuriate her, even as they secretly attract her. And he also pretends to write poems for her – poems which he steals from famous historical European poets, with varying degrees of success. But his ploys are insufficient. So when he meets the non-sectarian pastor at the Happier Hunting Ground, he asks him about the prerequisites for becoming a non-sectarian pastor. It turns out there are only three: the Call, money, and an audience.

Will Dennis succeed? Read the book and find out!

As the year approaches its end, I will finish this blogpost with a properly meditative quote from the non-sectarian pastor of the Happier Hunting Ground.

Dog that is born of bitch hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay…

Hic Sunt Leones

Today is the memorial of St. Leo the Great. I have long defended that it’s time for a new Pope to adopt the name Leo again. There’s not been seen a Leo in these parts for over a hundred years, and some Popes with the name have done great things. Of course, there was also an infamous Leo who is chiefly known for his inadequate response to a Augustinian priest somewhere in the Electorate of Saxony.

Out of curiosity, I have looked more closely into the thirteen Popes who adopted the name Leo, with an overview of their role in history. It is an interesting journey through time.

Leo I (440-461): called ‘the Great’, this Pope was both a theologian and a protector of civilization. He wrote the Tomus Leonis (‘Tome of Leo’), a book which explained the relationship between the divine and human natures of Jesus Christ. This was sent to the Council of Chalcedon (451), where the assembly of bishops greeted it with the chorus, ‘Peter has spoken through Leo!’

As patriarch of the West, he insisted on his own authority over the churches of Gaul, bringing about greater unity with Rome. He also made it clear that the Pope had been entrusted with the care for all churches in the world, writing to an Eastern bishop, ‘The care of the universal Church should converge towards Peter's one seat, and nothing anywhere should be separated from its Head.’

Leo also increased political unity in Gaul by mediating a dispute between the two highest officials in Gaul. One of those officials was Aëtius, first the friend and later the rival of Attila the Hun, who lived in Rome as a young man. It was that time.

In 452, Attila headed towards Rome, burning cities along the way. Leo rode out to northern Italy to talk to him at Lake Garda, as a consequence of which Attila halted his march and went elsewhere. Or so the story has always gone; Raphael even made a painting about it. It was a bit of a disappointment to read that Leo was only one of three imperial envoys.

For the literature lovers among us: Leo had a good ear for the sound of words, and his prose style (the cursus leonicus) had a long-lasting influence on ecclesiastical Latin.

Leo II (682-683): in his time, the Eastern Roman Empire had a lot of influence in papal elections. He was from Sicily, which was Byzantine territory. There were many Sicilian refugees in Rome, because the island suffered attacks from the Islamic Caliphate.

During his brief reign, he gave official approval to a Church council (Constantinople III).

In light of Leo I’s battle for papal authority, it is ironic that a quote from Leo II has provided an argument against papal infallibility. Leo II condemned Pope Honorius, who reigned half a century earlier, for being lax in the fight against heresy; in doing so, he described Honorius as ‘one who by unholy betrayal has tried to overthrow the unspoiled faith’.

Leo III (795-816): the Pope who on Christmas Day in the year 800 crowned Charlemagne, the first Emperor in the West after the downfall of the Empire three hundred years earlier. (Raphael painted the scene.) Charlemagne was convinced that it was his own duty to defend the Church, and that the Pope should pray for the safety and victory of the Empire.

As Leo I was active in Gaul, Leo III interfered in England – among other things, the home of the scholar Alcuin, whose intelligence and knowledge were invaluable to the school that Charlemagne started at his court. This school created a cultural unity in Europe that endured long after the Carolingian emperors dwindled.

As far as I am concerned, Leo III could be made a patron of ecumenical dialogue. When Charlemagne insisted that he should add the Filioque to the Nicene Creed, Leo refused; not because he disagreed, but because he was unwilling to change the profession of faith that Christians of the East and the West prayed in the liturgy. Not only did he refuse, but he gave the order to write the unchanged Creed on tablets of silver and display them outside St. Peter’s Basilica – a clear ‘in-your-face’ to his friend the Emperor.

Leo IV (847-855): a man whose reign was defined by the fight with the Arabs. These were not distant threats: a year before Leo’s ascension to the papal throne, Saracens invaded Rome and damaged the churches of St. Peter and St. Paul. Leo took the repairs in hand.

He also organized a naval league of ships from Naples, Gaeta and Amalfi, who defeated the Muslim pirates at the Battle of Ostia in 849. (Raphael painted this, too.) Just as a reminder: Ostia is the harbour where Augustine and Monica talked half a millennium earlier, in preparation for a voyage back to their home in North Africa.

The captives from the Battle of Ostia helped to build the protective Leonine Wall around Vatican Hill, of which a part still stands today.

Leo V (903): he became Pope a year after the completion of the Muslim conquest of Sicily. But he had enemies closer to home. He reigned for two months, and his chief feat is a tax exemption for the canons of Bologna.

After that, a cardinal named Christopher proclaimed himself Pope and threw Leo into prison. It is likely that both were killed in 904 by the next Pope, Sergius III. Thus began the saeculum obscurum, also known as the ‘Rule of the Harlots’: a period in which the papacy was regarded as a source of income and military strength, over which Italian aristocratic families were fighting like dogs over a bone.

Leo VI (928): a Pope who was chosen by the senatrix Marozia, formerly the mistress of Sergius III. Leo’s immediate predecessor had been imprisoned and killed by Marozia.

He does not seem to have been a very bad Pope, mostly concerning himself with the ecclesiastical situation in Dalmatia (in the modern-day Balkan). He also forbade castrates from marrying and sent out a plea for help against Arab raiders. It looks like he died a natural death.

Leo VII (936-939): also chosen by the temporal ruler of Rome. He was possibly a Benedictine and gave many privileges to monasteries, especially Cluny. He also asked them to mediate in disputes.

Leo VIII (964-965): was an antipope before he legitimately became Pope. He was an important official at the court of Pope John XII and served as an ambassador to Emperor Otto I. The two were engaged in a struggle about the Papal States. Ironically, when Leo was sent on his mission to Otto, the Emperor was just besieging the Italian king in his Castle of St. Leo.

Otto marched on Rome; John fled; Otto appointed Leo to the papacy.

Otto left; the Romans rebelled; Leo fled to Otto; another Pope (Benedict) was elected.

Otto came back; Pope Benedict’s staff was broken; Leo was installed again. He spent his papacy conferring favours on the Emperor. This was the end of the saeculum obscurum.

Leo IX (1049-1054): a German Pope, and a saint. He promoted the order of Cluny. After being elected Pope by the Emperor and Roman delegates, he insisted on being officially elected by the clergy and people of Rome.

He reinforced the practice of celibacy and fought against simony (the sale of important positions in the Church). He was also involved in a dispute about Eucharistic theology. It’s good to see the Popes returning to their original calling.

At the time the Byzantines held southern Italy, but they were under attack from the Normans. They asked the Pope for military intervention, thinking that the Normans would be reluctant to fight the Pope. So they were, but they still soundly thrashed the papal forces at the Battle of Civitate (no, Raphael didn’t paint this). After his defeat, Leo went out to the Normans and was received with reverence, even though he was also taken as a captive.

Unfortunately, Leo IX helped set in motion the events that would lead to the great schism of East and West. He quoted (in good faith) a forged letter, supposed to be from Constantine, who had purportedly given authority over the Western Roman Empire to the Pope. This was not accepted in the East, and the impatience of Leo’s legate led to the mutual excommunications of 1054. Leo himself had died shortly before.

Leo X (1513-1521): this one also lived at a time of great schism. This time it was the Reformation, which broke out in 1517. The Ecumenical Council held under Leo’s watch (Lateran V) encouraged reform of the Church, but was not well implemented.

Leo was cheerful, with a pleasant voice and an intellectual sense of humour. He was a patron of the arts (and a big spender), and commissioned Raphael to paint the Vatican stanze. He was involved with the university, with literature, music and antiquities.

He was also the last Pope who was not a priest at the time of his election to the papacy.

Because he wanted to increase his nephew’s political prestige, he joined Spain and England in a war with France. This was disastrous for the papal treasury and soured the relationship between the Pope and the College of Cardinals, which tried to poison Leo. He used the situation to his advantage by executing one Cardinal and nominating thirty-one of his own.

Feeling threatened by the Ottoman sultan, Selim I, Leo tried to organize a truce throughout Western Christianity for the sake of a crusade. This was in 1517. It was a valiant attempt, but it failed, and the religious turmoil that would soon break out made such a peace impossible forever.

In the movie Luther he is depicted as strict and cruel, but the picture I get is that he would be a great conversation partner for dinner (as long as you wouldn’t try to poison him).

Leo XI (1605): nephew of Leo X, from the Medici family. He reigned less than a month. He felt an early vocation to the priesthood, but his mother would hear nothing of it. He became a courtier, was knighted and struck up a friendship with a man twenty years his senior: Philip Neri (later canonized).

After his mother’s death he became a priest, then bishop and cardinal. He fulfilled a diplomatic position in France. Because he was popular with the French cardinals, he was elected Pope rather than Robert Bellarmine (also later canonized). But he was already 70, and the inaugural ceremony wearied him so much that he died within a month. That’s why they called him Papa Lampo, ‘Lightning Pope’.

Leo XII (1823-1829): as an indication of how much times can change, this Leo was the only Pope in his century with a Cardinal for a nephew. Like Leo XI, Leo XII also had experience in a diplomatic position, namely in Switzerland. During his lifetime, Napoleon abolished the Papal States, at which the future Leo secluded himself in an abbey for a few years.

He was conservative in his outlook and did not want to make any compromises with the new revolutionary order. Against French opposition, he was elected Pope, having served the preceding Pope as vicar-general. Because he was physically unhealthy, he had argued against his own election, but to no avail.

He lived frugally and tried to soften the financial strain on the inhabitants of the Papal States (reestablished in 1814) by reducing taxes and other measures. It did little good for the internal economy.

Leo’s conservatism fueled his attempts to get everything in the Papal States under direct Church control, such as schools (where he made Latin the obligatory language) and charitable institutions. Jews were not allowed to own property under his watch, and all residents of Rome were required to listen to expositions on the catechism, whether they were Catholic or not.

Leo XIII (1878-1903): the oldest Pope (died at 93) with the third longest pontificate. The first Pope who ascended the Holy See after the Papal States had been definitively abolished by Victor Emmanuel II. It took a while before the Popes could accept this, and so Leo lived in the uneasy time when the Pope considered himself to be ‘prisoner of the Vatican’.

He made great contributions in the realm of theology. With his encyclical Aeterni Patris, he gave a new impulse to the study of St. Thomas Aquinas, making it normative for seminaries as well as Catholic universities. The importance of Scripture for theology, too, was underscored in Providentissimus Deus. Leo was open to Eastern Christians and wanted to protect their rites, preventing the ‘latinization’ of Eastern Catholics. He also had a strong devotion to the Virgin Mary and was known as the ‘Rosary Pope’.

Of course, he is also (in a sense) the founder of Catholic social teaching, the first Pope to devote an encyclical to social inequality: Rerum novarum. This tried to sketch a middle road between capitalism and communism. Later Popes wrote new and ‘updated’ social encyclicals on various anniversaries of Rerum novarum.

He was the Pope with whom St. Therese of Lisieux had a brief audience.

Leo XIII rests in the Basilica of St. John in Lateran, whose dedication we celebrated yesterday.

To conclude, it is said in an Eastern kontakion to St. Leo the Great:

Seated upon the throne of the priesthood, glorious Leo,

you shut the mouths of the spiritual lions.

Magdalena

Magdalena is a book about a woman; more particularly, the author’s mother. The author is Maarten ’t Hart, a famous Dutch author, born in Maassluis in 1944. He was raised in a strongly religious Reformed environment, but lost his faith early in life and became an atheist. He is also a biologist and a lover of classical music.

Unlike Richard Dawkins, Maarten ’t Hart is not given to writing polemical treatises. Many of his works are fragments of memory. Yet he rarely mentioned his mother in other books, because she had asked him not to write about her until her death, which eventually came to pass in 2012.

The author is a subtle painter of portraits. One cannot help feeling a mixture of affection and dismay at many people who feature in Magdalena; most strongly towards the mother herself. Concerned about the well-being of her children (especially the spiritual well-being), but with limited knowledge and interests, and plagued by the recurring delusion that her husband is seeing other women (which leads to frequent bitter tears and recriminations), she is a cathartic character, inspiring pity and fear in equal measure.

The reader is as surprised as the author to discover, after many pages or many years, that young Magdalena shared her bed with one of her father’s servants for multiple years, in utter secrecy but also in complete chastity. Somehow it fits and is quite credible, but not less surprising for that.

The book contains polemical passages against the strict Biblical faith of the author’s youth, sometimes interwoven with the memories. I found it particularly fascinating to read how fourteen-year-old Maarten goes to the harbour to find out how long it takes to get an animal aboard a ship, and then calculates how much time it would have taken to get all two million animal species aboard Noah’s ark – not in order to disprove anything, but out of genuine teenage curiosity. He finds out that the time required amounts to almost three years, which does not correspond to Genesis 7:10, ‘And after seven days the waters of the flood came upon the earth.’

His mother (who seems to have had no sense of humour and even less of the absurd – a defect compensated by her son) used to tell him that he should not trouble his head about the Bible, but simply believe like a child. ‘I am a child,’ Maarten would tell her, ‘but I don’t believe like a child.’ And his mother would reply, ‘It’ll come to you when you’re older, then it will be easier for you to believe like a child.’

That it is possible to interpret the Bible differently is not an idea that occurs anywhere in Magdalena; the ‘take it or leave it’ mentality is too strong. [Edit: except perhaps for a passing encounter with a female Protestant preacher, who however offers little of substance.] Catholics are briefly mentioned twice and associated with child abuse both times – for instance in this passage (clunky translation mine):

There I stood, on that deathly silent square next to the train station. The bell of the Great Church was tolling, the clock of the Immanuel Church was tolling, the clock of the Christian Reformed Church was tolling, and I also heard many other ways of tolling. I even seemed to perceive shrill, pedophiliac Papist tolling.

One can hardly deny the pleasantness of the style. It is strange that someone with so many literary gifts should really consider the following argument compelling (although it is not quite clear whether the author still believes in its force, or whether this was a teenage meditation):

Strange, really, that Jesus says that, if you do not accept Him as your Redeemer, you should count on it that after your death you will wail in the outer darkness and gnash your teeth. When you die, and end up in the coffin, your teeth will be there as well. Often those are more or less the last bits of a human that they find after years, so in the outer darkness you will not have any teeth available to gnash with, nor a set of false teeth either.

The book is still quite worth reading, because of the strange real people in it, much stranger than superficial ‘weirdness’. The ending, however, is an anticlimax: it describes the mother’s funeral. The strange circumstances of her death are described with attention and dignity, but the funeral is hardly anything more than a highly negative commentary on the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. The body may be interred, but it seems that the author is still trying to drown out the sound of his mother’s teeth gnashing over his unchildlike unbelief.

Some of Maarten’s questions, in a modified form, are mine as well. Today I start reading for my studies in fundamental theology, about the theme of divine revelation. Two books have been suggested to me: Models of Revelation, by Avery (Cardinal) Dulles, and Divine Discourse, by Nicholas Wolterstorff. So now I am going to start reading the former, against a musical background of Johannes Ockeghem – the Missa ‘De Plus en Plus’ and the Credo ‘De Village’.

To Cuiviénen ...

Cuiviénen is (or was) a lake, a ‘starlit mere’, in a forgotten corner of Middle-earth – forgotten because none of the action of The Lord of the Rings takes place there. Its name is derived from cuivië (‘awakening’ or occasionally ‘life’) and nen (‘water’).

It is the place where the Elves wake up. Consciousness stirs in them; they open their eyes and see the stars, the only light present in Middle-earth at that moment. And while they look on those lights, they hear ‘the sound of water flowing, and the sound of water falling over stone’.

Ted Nasmith has made a lovely illustration of the scene.

In a casual aside in the middle of the description, there is this – to me one of the most heart-wrenching passages in the Quenta Silmarillion:

In the changes of the world the shapes of lands and of seas have been broken and remade; rivers have not kept their courses, neither have mountains remained steadfast; and to Cuiviénen there is no returning.

Some of the best stories involve a return; the return to one’s place of birth or old school, or a meeting with an old friend; the comfort of seeing that some things stay the same, the discovery of how you yourself have changed, but also the sweetness of the memory that only the place itself can recall. (For Dutch readers: someone had this experience recently while visiting our house.)

All this is denied to the Elves. To Cuiviénen there is no returning.

I was invited recently to come to an open evening of the Navigators Student Union, a Christian movement that aims to train Christians ‘to know Christ and to make Him known’. It started its ministry to university students at the University of Nebraska, and opened its first Dutch chapter in Delft.

The person who had invited me was temporarily absent, so I knew no one there, but I was cordially invited to come over with one subgroup to the Bible study. A kind student lent me his bike and I accompanied the others through the city to a private room.

During the informal chatting prior to the Bible study, the two other new people asked me what I studied.

‘I just finished my Theology studies,’ I said.

‘How old are you?’ one of them asked.

‘Twenty-six,’ I said.

‘You’re old,’ he deduced.

‘How old are you?’ I said.

He turned out to be seventeen – younger than my brother who is already 7 years younger than I am.

In the course of the conversation, I became uncomfortably aware that I was indeed old. There was a time when I could simply go to meetings like these and present myself as an interested student. But I am no longer a student.

I remember Bible studies from my student years, when I would wait for questions, think about them seriously, and give the best answer I could give (with a strong readiness to debate opponents). Now, I was constantly aware of group dynamics, thinking about the intention behind the questions that were asked, and biting my tongue to refrain from giving all-too-complete answers that would kill thought rather than stimulate it.

The 17-year-old had a vaguely Christian background; he was intelligent and curious, but he did not know what theology was or where the book of Genesis could be found in the Bible. So I did my very best to come across as just another guest (which I was), not as a teacher, even if I was a bit grey around the temples.

It was a good and open conversation, a bit awkward at times, but Bible studies tend to be that.

Still, it was unsettling to sit there, feeling all the time that I was too old for a student group. When did that happen? Was I not irresponsible and free enough to pass for a student? Not filled with grand impractical thoughts, overconfidently expressed theories, shadowy dreams about the future, the urge to know everything about things that were interesting, a serious pretense of seriousness, and a strange docility?

On Saturday, I will go on retreat. One week later, I will be ordained. From that day I will walk around in Delft as a minister (Latin for diakonos) of the Church. It still seems light years away. But when it happens, nine centuries from today, what other things will I be too old for?

To Cuiviénen there is no returning.

But from Cuiviénen there is a road to walk.

Though the beauty of the Quendi in the days of their youth was beyond all other beauty that Ilúvatar has caused to be, it has not perished, but lives in the West, and sorrow and wisdom have enriched it. And Oromë loved the Quendi, and named them in their own tongue Eldar, the people of the stars; but that name was after borne only by those who followed him upon the westward road.

Vows

With the diaconate ordination approaching, I have taken time to look at the liturgy, including the questions to which the candidate is expected to answer ‘I am’. I had always understood that this was the moment at which the candidate took vows of celibacy and obedience. This is true, in a way. Yet the wording of the questions surprised me.

To me a vow is a solemn promise to do something or abstain from something. No doubt this is the intention behind the questions (an intention which I take seriously!). But what is literally asked is, ‘Are you willing?’

That is all – the will in the moment which is expected to endure, and which the candidate is expected to protect.

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus’ long journey towards Jerusalem begins with the sentence, autos to prosōpon estērisen tou poreuesthai eis Hierousalēm – ‘He fixed his face to go to Jerusalem’.

Incidentally, prosōpon means not only ‘face’ but also ‘person’.

In Parenthesis

There are pitfalls in doing what I do. One of them is the tendency to prose. The religious illiteracy and malpractice of our days has made of the collared caste patient explainers – ‘now we do this’, ‘this symbolizes that’. We are caught in a decaying ritual system which we are feebly trying to reanimate with more words and yet more words. We do not push down deep; we are afraid of breaking ribs.

And so I took time for poetry this morning: In Parenthesis, by David Jones. Years ago I read another work of his, which my father bought for me second-hand from an online antiquarian – The Anathémata. Fragments from that poem shot through my head when I attended my first Mass on the feast of Christ the King.

In Parenthesis conveys the experiences of being a young soldier in the First World War. Well, one set of experiences, selected and stylized, but not necessarily polished. It comes with a recommendation from T.S. Eliot, who tells us, ‘As for the writer himself, he is a Londoner of Welsh and English descent. He is decidedly a Briton. He is also a Roman Catholic, and he is a painter who has painted some beautiful pictures and designed some beautiful lettering. All these facts about him are important.’

One of the fascinating things about Jones is that he does not seek to make himself intelligible. He writes free verse, often in paragraphs rather than lines, in various carefully controlled registers of sophistication. His vocabulary is phenomenal, and once in a while he will throw in a Welsh name or term. (I have looked up a table of Welsh pronunciation once or twice, but I keep forgetting.) But legato and staccato, with short military barks and with unfolding sentences containing compound adjectives, he conveys an atmosphere even if the meaning of the words is not always clear. At times distant, at times uncomfortably close, but never chatty and trivializing.

The brotherhood and camaraderie of the young men, not thinking of death, is unspoken, pervasive, and recognizable.

It is a book to be read slowly and out loud, not grasped but savoured.

Four fragments. First, an example of echo and reflection:

When you’re ready No. 7—sling those rifles—move them on sergeant, remain two-deep on the road—we join 5, 6 and 8 at the corner—don’t close up—keep your distance from No. 6—be careful not to close up—take heed those leading files—not to close on No. 6—you’re quite ready? —very good.

Move on . . . move ’em on.

Get on . . . we’re not too early.

Informal directness buttressed the static forms—ritual words made newly real.

The immediate, the nowness, the pressure of sudden, modifying circumstance—and retribution following swift on disregard; some certain, malignant opposing, brought intelligibility and effectiveness to the used formulae of command; the liturgy of their going-up assumed a primitive creativeness, an apostolic actuality, a correspondence with the object, a flexibility.

The mechanics and reveries of marching, with hints of Anglo-Saxon poetic forms:

So they would go a long while in solid dark, nor moon, nor battery, dispelled.

Feet plodding in each other’s unseen tread. They said no word but to direct their immediate next coming, so close behind to blunder, toe by heel tripping, file-mates; blind on-following, moving with a singular identity.

Half-minds, far away, divergent, own-thought thinking, tucked away unknown thoughts; feet following file friends, each his own thought-maze alone treading; intricate, twist about, own thoughts, all unknown thoughts, to the next so close following on.

With practice comes theory:

They were given lectures on very wet days in the barn, with its great roof, sprung, upreaching, humane, and redolent of a vanished order. Lectures on military tactics that would be more or less commonly understood. Lectures on hygiene by the medical officer, who was popular, who glossed his technical discourses with every lewdness, whose heroism and humanity reached toward sanctity.

And lastly, my hands-down favourite description of waking up:

Reveille at 4.30 with its sleepy stretching and heavy irksome return of consciousness – the letting in of the beginnings of morning, an icy filtering through, with the drawing back of bolts; creeping into frowsy dank recesses, a gusty-cool, wisping the littered surface of body-steaming hay. The gulped-down tea, the distribution of eked-out bacon, the wiping dry of mess-tins with straw—they must carry this day’s bread. The score of last-minute scamperings and searchings for things mislaid and the sudden heart thump at small things of importance remembered too late—no use now—leave the bloody thing.

Too Old For This ...

Last week, I found something light to read during mealtimes – The Gospel according to Tolkien by Ralph C. Wood, an attempt to shed light on (Catholic) Christian themes in Tolkien’s work. It contains many glimpses of insight and interesting facts. On occasion it irritates. It is meant to be ‘not a scholarly study so much as a theological meditation’, and few meditations (my own emphatically included) entirely escape the self-indulgence of the pulpit.

For instance, the overuse of adverbs to mask tautology:

Tolkien’s providentially ordered cosmos is immensely varied and complex. Its unity is not dully monolithic but interestingly differentiated.

Dramatic eulogies to placate Heideggerians:

By giving special qualities and powers to each of these beings, Tolkien reveals the wondrous particularity and divine givenness of many things that we take for granted.

Confident references to Scripture with dubious use of the superlative and comparative:

Yet it is the voices of Job and Isaiah whose cadences and sentiments resound most clearly in Tolkien’s tragic sense of our human mortality. [two quotes]

More pertinent still for understanding Tolkien’s sense of the world’s melancholy is the book of Ecclesiastes.

Equating ancient and modern worldviews under the heading of Latinate adjectives, possibly invented for the purpose:

Our Scandinavian and Teutonic forebears were thus mortalists: they believed that Ragnarok would mean the final destruction even of heaven and hell. So are most modern men and women mortalists also – except that the ancient Ragnarok has been replaced with the contemporary dread of terrorist attacks and nuclear strikes.

Conspiratorially restricting the intended audience:

Our Scandinavian and Teutonic forebears …

The strident denunciation, on one page, of two contemporary evils in apparent contradiction with each other:

The hobbits are unabashed lovers of food, enjoying six meals a day. Not for them our late-modern and quasi-gnostic obsession with slimness. …

The hobbits’ physique reveals this same paradox that greatness may be found in smallness. Tolkien makes them diminutive creatures in order to challenge our obsession with largeness.

Clumsy rationalizing explanations of characters’ natural actions:

Most often the hobbits sing for joy rather than consolation, for in their singing they break into a transcendent realm beyond their own small world.

Trying to clarify Tolkien’s views and making him sound like a nutcase in the process:

Tolkien believed that he had not devised his magnificent mythical world so much as he had found it – indeed, that it had been revealed to him by God.

You might think that this is a very negative review. So it is, but only because I have chosen to be mean and curmudgeonly. I could just as easily pick out a number of passages that taught me something new or helped me to make new connections. But I have had two thesis advisors (one agnostic, one Catholic) of a very analytical nature; they believed that if an argument was worth making, it was worth making soberly and with the caution that the subject required. Their love for literature did not suffer because of it; but their compassion was sharp as they bent over the enigma of the fever chart.

It was one particular passage in Wood’s work, at the very beginning, that got my particular attention. He tries to defend Tolkien against the charge of being a male chauvinist, on the grounds that there are hardly any women in his work and that these are depicted in an idealized way. Wood argues:

Tolkien’s women are not plaster figures. Galadriel the elven princess proves to be terrible in her beauty – not treacly sweet and falsely pure; in fact, she is an elf whose importance will diminish once the Ruling Ring is destroyed. So is Éowyn a woman of extraordinary courage and valor, a warrior who can hardly be called a shrinking violet or simpering coquette. Though we see but little of Arwen … there is nothing saccharine about her character.

This is a weak defence, because it assumes that there is only one way to idealize women, namely by making them weak-minded and naïve. But a woman ‘terrible in her beauty’ is just as much idealized. Have you ever met someone like that walking across the street or chatting with her friends? (Well, I have, but then again, I am an incorrigible idealist.)

Although Wood’s defence is unsatisfactory, I can let Tolkien get away with idealizing women because his men are also idealized. Middle-earth is an idyll, even if it is painted in chiaroscuro. It is a place where all vices are intellectual and spiritual; where great grief exists, but no awkwardness; where indignation is expressed without a stammer and desire without a hoarse voice. A woman in that rarefied atmosphere can be terrible in her beauty; in such a world it is possible that a man and a woman meet and find themselves unable to move a muscle for a long time, moved as they are by shared astonishment. And this clarifies something about our own world.

When idealization occurs in the real world, however, I find it rather chafes my patience. Another book I am reading is Reclaiming our Priestly Character by Fr. David Toups, who has merited the title of Doctor in Sacred Theology (S.T.D.). He argues that priests will lead more stable and happy lives if they are convinced that the priesthood, once received, can never be lost. So far, so good. But a passage like this, about the road leading there, makes me uneasy:

Through a searching discernment, the candidate has sifted out the misleading tugs of self-interest and the always corrosive distortions with which the spirit of evil infects the human heart. So purified, the seminarian places before the Trinity his heart’s desire clarified in the light of the Spirit, so that God may confirm the decision at hand.

This is a beautiful and highly stylized description of a decision-making process that tells me exactly nothing about what actually happens. At moments like these I think: I’m getting too old for this …

Corruption

Quite some time ago I happened to find a Conrad novel among the discarded books. It was a work I had never heard of, Nostromo, not nearly as famous as Heart of Darkness. An intriguing story, set in the fictional, dysfunctional South American republic of Costaguana.

One of the protagonists of the story, Charles Gould, comes from a British family which has been established in Costaguana for a while. Born in Costaguana, he has received his education and married in Britain, as is the custom in his family. During this period, he receives letters from his father, who is angry and desperate at having been granted ownership of an abandoned silver mine. The government expects revenues which Gould senior cannot deliver, so they demand the money from Gould himself, in the form of fines and other juridical measures. All he is capable of doing is writing frustrated epistles to his son Charles, exhorting him never to return.

Charles meets Emilia in Italy and the two become a couple. The narrator remarks:

Charles Gould did not open his heart to her in any set speeches. He simply went on acting and thinking in her sight. This is the true method of sincerity.

Then death intrudes. Charles receives the news that his father has died, and draws the conclusion that the anxiety over the silver mine has killed him. (I am summarizing; the scene in the book, told in a long flashback, is brooding, foreboding, all silences and eruptions.) At once he comes to the conviction that his vocation consists of turning the dead, lethal silver mine into a life-giving thing – an improvement on his father’s helpless attitude.

Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions. Only in the conduct of our action can we find the sense of mastery over the Fates.

So Charles Gould returns to Costaguana with his wife Emilia. And they succeed: the San Tomé silver mine blooms beyond belief, with financial backing from the US and a British working ethos among the employees. Several times it is referred to as an imperium in imperio, a state within a state; its economic strength gives it a measure of independence from the government. The narrator remarks about the Goulds:

It was as if they had been morally bound to make good their vigorous view of life against the unnatural error of weariness and despair.

Charles Gould hopes that the mine will bring prosperity to Costaguana and thus establish the conditions necessary for law and order to arise. At one point he explains this to his wife, and ends with the remark:

‘What should be perfectly clear to us, is the fact that there is no going back. Where could we begin life afresh? We are in now for all that there is in us.’

However, because he is such a power in the land, he has to deal with all sorts of political figures. With corruption being prevalent everywhere, from the established government to the bandits roaming the wild, it is difficult to do this without being implicated in the messy affairs of Costaguana. Charles chooses to go his own way and observe a scornful silence as much as possible.

At the beginning of Chapter II.6 we see the couple again. Charles has just started voicing the threat of blowing up the entire mine, thus sending the country back into certain chaos. Doña Emilia complains that there is an sense of unreality about everything:

‘My dear Charley, it is impossible for me to close my eyes to our position, to this awful…’

She raised her eyes and looked at her husband’s face, from which all sign of sympathy or any other feeling had disappeared. ‘Why don’t you tell me something?’ she almost wailed.

‘I thought you had understood me perfectly from the first,’ Charles Gould said, slowly. ‘I thought we had said all there was to say a long time ago. There is nothing to say now. There were things to be done. We have done them, we have gone on doing them. There is no going back now. I don’t suppose that, even from the first, there was really any possible way back. And, what’s more, we can’t even afford to stand still.’

This is how corruption has done its work: eroding the passions, whittling away at the sincerity of the determination, leaving hollow the decision once taken. Charles has stopped thinking and acting in Emilia’s sight, which is the true method of sincerity. Thought is blinkered; it has become instrumental. Action has ceased to be spontaneous; it follows a predetermined pattern. The mine has succeeded – but has Charles?

Light in Darkness

For the past two-and-a-half years, I have been reading Light in Darkness by Alyssa Lyra Pitstick, intermittently, picking it up and putting it down, probably forgetting ninety percent of it in the meantime. Anyhow it’s a recommended read for anyone interested in the 20th-century theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. I read his Verbum Caro and enjoyed it; he undoubtedly has many good insights and writes beautifully.

Pitstick, however, argues that Balthasar is inconsistent at certain points with himself and with the Catholic tradition. She does so very lucidly; few of her many words are superfluous. With analytical rigour, she indicates where she thinks Balthasar goes too far in his poetical theology. In particular, her critique concentrates itself on his theology of the Descent into Hell, and the implications it has for our understanding of God as Trinity.

Balthasar understands the Descent as the Son’s being forsaken by the Father and thus sharing the destiny of sinners, rather than the glorious proclamation of the Gospel and the liberation of the holy dead. This interpretation (which is at least questionable) seems to be rather central to his theology and introduces divergences everywhere. Pitstick is strict in her evaluation, but probably not unjust.

One of Balthasar’s contentions is that the Persons of the Trinity continue to surprise each other for eternity. Given that the divine life is active and desirable beyond all things, and that one of the most beautiful human experiences is the discovery of a new aspect in a friend’s character or history, this is prima facie plausible. Pitstick, however, offers this razor-sharp and somewhat sarcastic critique:

A real distinction between the divine Persons and the divine nature seems latent when he says they are “identical at every point ‘except where the distinct relationships [between the Persons] require otherwise.’” The distinction of Persons actually requires quite a large area in which they would not be identical, since “the divine hypostases know and interpenetrate each other to the very same degree that each of them opens up to the other in absolute freedom.” Given the unpredictability of what one will reveal to the other, and given that such surprise continues for all eternity, the realm in which the Persons do not “interpenetrate” each other must be quite large.

I look forward to reading the third and last part.

Blessed Easter!

The People of the Earth

I missed last week, and have nothing but a short post to make up for it today.

Currently I am reading Holy War in Ancient Israel by the German scholar Gerhard von Rad. It is an incredibly stimulating book that makes me want to go and write a novel. (That, or form a parish group dedicated to the planning and execution of holy war. Just kidding, of course!)

Von Rad argues that the phenomenon of holy war was at the core of ancient Israelite society, but that the original idea had faded by the time in which the Bible was written. Holy wars were not religious wars; they were defensive wars to protect the tribes of Israel. Israel was not a kingdom yet, but functioned as an alliance which only cooperated when they were called up for war by a charismatic leader. Von Rad refers to it as an ‘amphictyony’ (definition). This old militia is later increasingly supplanted by professional soldiers.

One of the key elements of holy war is the exhortation ‘Be not afraid’ – a command which will be taken up in Isaiah (who is, according to Von Rad, the prophet most inspired by holy war traditions) and in the New Testament.

There was one phrase which caught my attention in particular. Von Rad discusses how Judah’s professional soldiers have all been assimilated into the Assyrian army after the incursion of Sennacherib in 701 BC. Still, Judah is able to field a new army in a surprisingly short time. According to Erhard Junge, this can only be because the old militia is called up again under King Josiah. In fact, they were the ones who had brought him to the throne.

What could be more natural than that together with the renewal of the militia to its old military dignity the old conception of the real essence and meaning of the wars of Israel could also arise again. The agricultural circles from which the militia was recruited were, of course, still much more bound to patriarchal faith and patriarchal customs than the circles around the court, the officials, and the professional officers in the capital, who previously made all the political and military decisions.

And this ‘free rural population’ is called the ‘am hā’āretz, the ‘people of the earth’!

This reminded me immediately of a poem for which I have a particular predilection, Chesterton’s Ballad of the White Horse (in fact the title of this blog is derived from the poem). In Book VII, after King Alfred’s army has been routed by the heathen Danes and the only survivors are the peasant slaves of Mark the Roman, Alfred rallies them again by saying:

Though dead are all the paladins

Whom glory had in ken,

Though all your thunder-sworded thanes

With proud hearts died among the Danes,

While a man remains, great war remains:

Now is a war of men.

The men that tear the furrows,

The men that fell the trees,

When all their lords be lost and dead

The bondsmen of the earth shall tread

The tyrants of the seas.

The ‘bondsmen of the earth’ – one wonders if Chesterton knew anything about ancient Israel’s wars!

It is an epic scene, but to appreciate it fully, you need to read the whole poem.

Well, what are you waiting for?

The King Rests

Last week I gave a small talk to potential confirmands (11/12-year-olds) and their parents. One of the kids read the passage where King David is anointed with oil. I told them that they could also receive this sign that has existed for at least three thousand years, and asked them if they knew what a king did. One of the kids ventured, ‘Not much.’

That happens to be a quite correct and Biblical answer. In I Samuel 8, when the people of Israel come to the prophet-judge and demand a king to rule over them, Samuel warns them that the king will take their sons and daughters into his service and will demand their finest possessions and products. The word yiqqāh ‘He will take’ is repeated at least five times in the short description of the king that the people crave. And yet the people demand a king, ‘that we also may be like all the nations’ – an obvious red flag, because Israel’s vocation is to be different from the nations.

Even King David falls. He sins by committing adultery with Bathsheba, but even more by his complicity in the death of her husband, who is one of his most loyal soldiers. The story of David and Bathsheba (and Uriah) is well-known. But its introduction is usually left out; a priest recently alerted me to it. After the author has narrated one of David’s many military exploits against the Ammonites, in defence of the honour of his servants, this is the opening paragraph of II Samuel 11:

In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle (hint, hint), David sent Joab, and his servants with him, and all Israel. And they ravaged the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah. But David remained at Jerusalem.

Well, perhaps a king cannot be in the forefront of the battle all the time. Leading a band of warriors is one thing, but ruling a nation demands administrative work, diplomacy, thought. Right? Yeah, right:

It happened, late one afternoon, when David arose from his couch and was walking on the roof of the king’s house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing …

He wasn’t keeping himself too busy!

Then comes the whole Bathsheba shebang, Nathan’s parable, the child’s death, Solomon’s birth – and then we go back to the beginning. Because while all these intensely personal matters are going on, General Joab is still at the walls of Rabbah. When the job is done and the gate is breached, he sends word to the king to preside over the concluding military ceremony.

Gather the rest of the people together and encamp against the city and take it, lest I take the city and it be called by my name.

After all, Davidopolis has a better ring to it than Joabtown.

Then David arrives at Rabbah, which his faithful soldiers (minus Uriah and a few unnamed others who have become collateral damage) have conquered for him. And what does he do?

He took the crown of their king from his head. The weight of it was a talent of gold, and in it was a precious stone, and it was placed on David’s head. … And he brought out the people who were in it and set them to labor with saws and iron picks and iron axes and made them toil at the brick kilns.

The King of Israel wears an Ammonite crown and acts like an Egyptian pharaoh.

So much for ‘that we also may be like all the nations’.

Being and Goodness

Lately I have been reading Meditations on the Tarot. It is a book that comes with a recommendation of several Christian abbots and an epilogue by Hans Urs von Balthasar, so I figured it was safe enough. It is written by an anonymous author who pursued esotericism and Hermetic philosophy for quite a while, but eventually converted to Catholic Christianity. So at some point during a discussion of one of the twenty-two Tarot cards, he remarks that his frequent devotional visits to the relic of the Holy Blood in Bruges were instrumental in his realization of the importance of blood as a life-force. (I am paraphrasing from memory here.)

In any case, I was particularly struck by a passage which occurs in his discussion of the second card, the High Priestess. (The book was originally written in French, and the English translation also gives the French names of the cards; this one is la Papesse, the female Pope.) The author talks about his discomfort with renaming the Holy Trinity as ‘Being, Consciousness, Beatitude’. For, he argues, goodness has primacy over being.

This sparked my interest, as St. Thomas defends the primacy of being (ST Ia Q5 A2), and the first adagium of the Thomist theologian is ‘when St. Thomas is not clearly wrong, he is obviously right’. So I read on with a sort of defensive intellectual posture, looking for flaws in the reasoning. The kernel of the argument was a reference to Calvary, in which God sacrificed his existence on earth for love’s sake. But what about the Resurrection, you say? The author argues this confirms his argument, showing ‘that love is not only superior to being but also that it engenders it and restores it’.

So the revelation to St. John, that God is Love, surpasses the revelation to Moses, that God is He who is.

The author further refers to the moral neutrality of being (as a concept); one could get an idea of ‘being’ from looking at plants or minerals, but ‘goodness’ presupposes an acquaintance with psychic and spiritual life.

I was still in defensive mode, trying to recall St. Thomas’s argument, when the author dived below the surface. He said:

The consequence of choosing between these two – I will not say “points of view”, but rather “attitudes of soul” – lies above all in the intrinsic nature of the experience of practical mysticism which consequently derives from this choice. He who chooses being will aspire to true being and he who chooses love will aspire to love. For one only finds that for which one seeks. The seeker for true being will arrive at the experience of repose in being …

So far, so good. True being, yes, that does sound like my cup of tea. And repose in being, certainly, against the horizon of ST Ia Q12 A1.

… and, as there cannot be two true beings … the centre of “false being” will be suppressed …

I felt a bit uneasy about this part, but before I had quite worked it out, I read on.

The characteristic of this mystical way is that one loses the capacity to cry.

Ouch!

That hurt!

Pope Francis

I was going to point out an interesting inconsistency (?) in the encyclical Laudato Si. But this past weekend, I was confronted with major headlines about something else Pope Francis has said. It started with a Dutch news site, which was shared in a WhatsApp group:

Pope: contraception is allowed against Zika

Going to the Internet to find out the truth of the matter, there were many more such headlines from international news sources:

BBC: Zika virus: Pope hints at relaxation of contraception ban…

CNN: Pope suggests contraception OK to slow Zika

Wall Street Journal: Pope Francis Says Contraception Can Be Acceptable in…

New York Times: Francis Says Contraception Can Be Used to Slow Zika

Los Angeles Times: Pope opens the door to contraception in averting harmful…

Washington Post: Pope Francis suggests contraception could be permissible…

The Guardian / USAToday / ABCNews: Pope suggests contraception can be condoned in Zika crisis

Fighting my own little guerrilla war on misinformation, I posted a link to the actual interview. It was conceded that the Pope had not quite said it in those words.

There was a brave attempt by an alumna of the University of Nebraska to explain that ‘avoiding pregnancy’ does not necessarily mean using contraceptives. This is true, but while writing this blogpost, I heard that Fr. Lombardi has confirmed that the Pope was indeed speaking about contraceptives. Which makes a statement like the following difficult to harmonize with Church teaching:

On the other hand, avoiding pregnancy is not an absolute evil. In certain cases, as in this one, or in the one I mentioned of Blessed Paul VI, it was clear.

So not only does the Pope suggest that contraception is permissible to counteract the Zika virus, but he suggests that it is clearly permitted.

Of course, questions now arise why this should be the case for Zika but not for AIDS.

I think I will wait for the dust to settle.

So, what is the inconsistency in Laudato Si? This concerns the addressees of the encyclical. In 1963, Pope John XXIII made a significant change in addressing his encyclical on world peace (Pacem in Terris) not only to his fellow-bishops and the other faithful, but to all people of good will. This precedent has been followed in some other encyclicals, such as Caritas in Veritate (but, oddly enough, not Fides et Ratio).

In Laudato Si, the circle seems to be drawn even wider. In one of the first paragraphs, Pope Francis writes,

Pope Saint John XXIII … addressed his message Pacem in Terris to the entire “Catholic world” and indeed “to all men and women of good will”. Now, faced as we are with global environmental deterioration, I wish to address every person living on this planet.

A good will is not required; if you are a person, then Pope Francis is speaking to you, whether you are benevolent or hostile. However, further on in the document, this open address seems to be narrowed down again, in the first sentence of Chapter 2 about the Gospel of creation:

Why should this document, addressed to all people of good will, include a chapter dealing with the convictions of believers?

What happened to the villains inhabiting this planet? Do they not exist or are they no longer in view? Perhaps it is supposed that they do not read encyclicals? That would be a wrong assumption, because I have in fact read Laudato Si.

Questions, questions. Well, let me end with an assertion, again from Pope Francis, from the airplane interview that has so quickly become (in)famous. This is a good bit, in response to a question about the friendship between Pope John Paul II and Dr. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, that threatens to get overlooked:

A man who does not know how to have a relationship of friendship with a woman – I'm not talking about misogynists, who are sick – well, he's a man who is missing something. …

I also like to hear the opinion of a woman because they have such wealth. They look at things in a different way. I like to say that women are those who form life in their wombs – and this is a comparison I make – they have this charism of giving you things you can build with.

Patience

I have been absent for a while. Meanwhile, my friend Christy has not. She has set herself the task of writing a blogpost each day, for reasons outlined in the link. I don’t think I can do the same, but I’d like to try writing a snippet every Monday about a text that crosses my path, any text, a book or a sentence, it does not matter.

So let’s start here and now, with the story of King Saul which I have been reading. It’s a story I have been familiar with for a long time: the tall man chosen and anointed to be the first king of Israel. He seems rather reluctant at first, but comes to accept and even to love his position. When David threatens to outshine him, he hunts him (unsuccessfully) up and down through the land. Eventually he meets his fate in battle, dying together with his heirs.

Actually Saul’s downfall is announced before the name of David is even mentioned. A Philistine army is coming for him while Saul waits for the prophet Samuel, the one who has anointed him, to offer sacrifices. But because Samuel is late and the soldiers are starting to fidget and desert, Saul takes it upon himself to begin the ceremony. This is problematic because an Israelite king, unlike his colleagues in the Ancient Middle East (who are seen as divine beings), typically has no religious functions. So when Samuel arrives, he gets angry and tells Saul that his kingship is coming to an end.

There is one detail in the story that I never noticed before. It happens when Saul goes to Samuel for the first time, not with the goal of being anointed king, but because he is on a family errand and needs some help. Saul enters the city where Samuel lives and asks if the prophet is around. The young women answer him,

He is; behold, he is just ahead of you. Hurry. He has come just now to the city, because the people have a sacrifice today on the high place. As soon as you enter the city you will find him, before he goes up to the high place to eat. For the people will not eat till he comes, since he must bless the sacrifice; afterward those who are invited will eat.

The good example that Saul should have followed is right at the beginning of the story!