Schroom

It’s been a while, I know. Lent, Easter, and the Ordination all conspired to keep me from posting; or perhaps it is my fault. In any case I was very glad to see how many people sacrificed time to come to the Ordination. I was particularly touched by the presence of some American friends; Youth Choir Faith, which sang a few hymns at the Mass; and one or two special friends.

Since then I have been on holiday, another mountain-hiking holiday in Austria. We stayed for two nights at a convent of the Canons Regular of the Holy Cross (O.R.C.) and then continued to a small hotel, more of a guesthouse really, between Ochsengarten and Kühtai. The guesthouse had its own chapel. It was beautiful.

Last night I was procrastinating. (Are there job offers for procrastination? If it were my job I would probably delay procrastinating until the last possible moment, and before that moment I would get so much useful things done!) I opened a magazine that was lying on the table and found an article by Kees Waaijman, a well-known Dutch Scripture scholar of the Carmelite order, about schroom – a typically Dutch word connoting a kind of fear that is more like a reverent hesitation.

The article contained the following quotation from John Cassian (my translation):

Schroom is filled with attentive affection, not afraid of blows nor of reproaches, but only of the slightest injury to love, and it is haunted by a passionate tenderness that saturates all its acting and speaking, out of concern that the other’s burning love towards it might cool, however little.

It reminded me of a favourite phrase of Pope Francis, la rivoluzione della tenerezza, the ‘revolution of tenderness’. Tenderness is a word that occurs multiple times in his inaugural homily; there it is associated with the attitude of St. Joseph. I sensed the revolution in this quote by the desert father.

I also sensed it in Austria – and here I was reminded of a quote from Charles Williams, somewhere in his mysterious Arthuriad cycle: a description of an island never set foot on, the land of the Trinity: ‘each in turn the Holder and the Held’.

This I remembered, and after a while it continues:

…in the land of the Trinity, the land of the perichoresis,

of separateness without separation, reality without rift,

where the Basis is in the Image, and the Image in the Gift…

I had to look for it, and lo and behold, it was from The Founding of the Company. On rereading I found that this poem is also the one that contains the exchange between the poet Taliessin and the court fool Dinadan. Dinadan calls Taliessin ‘lieutenant of God’s new grace’. Taliessin refuses a title that would make him master over others, but Dinadan lectures him:

                                          …any buyer of souls

is bought himself by his purchase; take the lieutenancy

for the sake of the shyness the excellent absurdity holds.

Shyness is perhaps not the worst translation of schroom.

The poem ends as follows:

The Company throve by love, by increase of peace,

by the shyness of saving and being saved in others –

the Christ-taunting and Christ-planting maxim

which throughout Logres the excellent absurdity held.