Читать книгу Writing the Icon of the Heart - Maggie Ross - Страница 12

In the bleak mid-winter

Frosty wind made moan.

Earth stood hard as iron,

Water like a stone.

Snow had fallen, snow on snow,

Snow on snow,

In the bleak mid-winter

Long ago.

A few years ago, the Bodleian Library published a Christmas card that showed the annunciation to the shepherds—or, rather, to one shepherd, standing on a hillside shielding his eyes from the glory of the herald angel. Beside him, his cheeky dog was doing what good sheepdogs do: barking at the strange intruder. It is not hard to imagine the poor shepherd, in dread and awe of this staggering vision, trying to get the dog tο shut up long enough for him to hear what the angelic messenger is saying.

I often wonder if all the fretful, frenetic activity in our lives isn’t a human way of barking at angels, of driving away the signs everywhere around us: signs calling us to stop, tο wake up, tο receive a new and larger perspective, to pay attention tο what is most important in life, to behold the face of God in every ordinary moment. These signs press on us most insistently at the turning of the year, when earthly light drains from our lives and we are left wondering in the dark.

The church, from ancient times, recognized the spiritual value of this winter span of darkness and created in its liturgy what we might think of as a three­-months-long Night Office, beginning with the Feast of All Saints on the first of November, and ending with Candlemas on the second of February. This season is a vast parabola of prophecy and vision, a liturgical arcing of eternity through the world’s midnight.

The readings—especially those from Isaiah and Revelation—do their best to subvert our perceptions of time and space in order to plunge us into the great stillness at the heart of things, the stillness necessary to make space for what is “ever ancient and ever new”5 to break through the clamor of our minds, tο open our hearts to the Beloved, to annunciation, and to fruition. Eternity is our dwelling place even in time, if only we have the eyes to see, the ears to hear, the heart to welcome. “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts,” cry the seraphs, their voices shaking the foundations even as their ineffable wings fold us into the stillness of God (Isa 6:3).

Only in this stillness can we know eyes are being opened and ears unstopped; the lame are leaping like deer and those once silenced singing for joy; water is springing in the parched wilderness of our pain. Only as we are plunged into the depths of this obscure stillness can we know the wonderful and terrible openings of the seals and the book; the rain of the Just One; the heavens rent by angels ascending and descending; the opening of graves and gifts, of hell and the side of Christ.

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Our God, heav’n cannot hold Him,

Nor earth sustain;

Heav’n and earth shall flee away

When he comes to reign.

In the bleak mid-winter

A stable-place sufficed

The Lord God Almighty,

Jesus Christ.

By contrast, it is a curiously contemporary phenomenon that the public rhetoric of religion employs words such as freedom and liberty even while it is taking away our sense of wonder, crowding our minds with insistent demands, and obviating the possibility of any space for contemplation. Thus, we are invited to think about ourselves and our discontents, especially our fear, which locks us in time instead of gesturing toward eternity.

By associating God with fear, political and religious institutions encourage us to calibrate certainty by establishing rigid conceptual grids. We then try to force ourselves and our world to conform to these templates, an exercise that ends in an illusory sense of control. This tragic search for security in exterior validation makes us hostage to what other people think, especially the opinions of those who seek tο define the boundaries and content of our lives. Our anxiety is so great that even the fickle wind of chance cannot break our death-grip on the wildly vacillating weathervane of others’ opinions. This desperate clinging to convention can extend to being afraid to talk about God—or even to pray—outside carefully scripted parameters, in spite of the fact that such denatured language can twist the thoughts, words, and intentions of our hearts.

True Christianity stands in opposition to such closed systems. Its essential message is this: to “free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death” (Heb 2:15). The fear of death can take many forms, most of which have little to do with what might happen after our bodies die. Rather, fear of death is a matter of the mind. It has everything to do with how we perceive and interpret our experience. Our self-consciousness generates anxieties that make us vulnerable to manipulation and coercion in every sphere of our lives, from the most trivial preoccupation with fashion to the fate of our planet. It conspires with the exploita­tion of fear and uncertainty that makes us complicit in inflicting physical or spiritual death on ourselves or others. Our fretful search for certainty becomes a search for numb complacency.

But faith challenges this complacency. Faith is not about sus­pending critique, but about exercising it as it issues from a silent space of love, a reality yet unseen (Heb 11:1). Faith is about finding security in insecurity, the realization that unless we work hard to maintain a hole in the heavens6 by which the closed universe of anxiety is breached, the fate of everything in our created world will be determined by the human fear of “death.”

The Christian antidote to the fear of death is summed up in Philippians 2:5–11, often known as the kenotic hymn. Paul’s preface is succinct: our problems originate in our anxieties. Their resolution, says Paul, is to “let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus . . .” (v. 5, my emphasis).

Christ takes on the burden of our human self-consciousness but is never trapped by its anxieties. He never loses the clarity of his gaze on the Father, the secret exchange of love in faith. Both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament gather this gaze and all that it implies into the single word behold. Sadly, this word has vanished from modern translations of the Bible and the liturgy, and with it has vanished the most important message that Christianity or any other religion has to offer.

Behold is the marker word throughout the Bible. It signals shifting perspective, the holding together or even the conflating of radically different points of view. It indicates the moment when the language of belief is silenced by the exaltation of faith as these paradoxical perspectives are brought together and generate, as it were, an explosion of silence and light. This silence holds us in thrall, in complete self-forgetfulness. Our settled accounting of ordinary matters is shattered and falls into nothing as light breaks upon us. Beholding is not confined to monastic cells: it is the wellspring of ordinary life transfigured.

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Enough for him, whom cherubim

Worship night and day.

A breastful of milk,

And a mangerful of hay:

Enough for Him whom Angels

Fall down before,

The ox and ass and camel

Which adore.

Julian of Norwich understands the importance of the word behold. Her Revelation of Divine Love is an explication of this single word. Behold is profoundly theological. It describes a reciprocal holding in being, the humility of God sharing the divine nature with what it creates. God, the creator of all, God who is beyond being, in humility allows us, created beings, to hold God in being in space and time, even as God is sustaining us in existence and holding us in eternity.

Behold. Behold the God who is infinitely more humble than those who pray to him, more stripped, more emptied, more self-outpouring—and we need to remember that humility and humiliation are mutually exclusive. Humility knows only love, and God is love. The scandal of the incarnation is not that we are naked before Emmanuel, God with us, but God is naked before us, and, in utter silence, given over into our hands and hearts. And it is in the depths of this beholding, in the silence of the loving heart of God, that the divine exchange takes place most fully, where each of us in our uniqueness and strangeness is transfigured into the divine life. And it is for this that God comes tο us, the Word made flesh, stable-born and crucified.

There is something else, too, in this beholding: the great com­mandment tells us this seamless love applies as much to our neighbor as to God. Beholding makes it possible to live out the great commandment. It invites us to abandon our very limited perspectives and ideas, so that many aspects of life in community become not so much less difficult as irrelevant, to the point of not being noticed.

This living beneath the level of personality unfolds without denying or wasting any of the richness of the human person; it brings us, in our entirety, warts and all, to fullness. To behold God in everything is the antidote tο frenetic activity, to stress and busyness. It enables us to live from, continually return to, and dwell in the depth of silent communion with God. And as this is something God does in us: we have only to allow it, to cease our striving and behold.

It might be helpful to realize we are already in that stillness by virtue of the divine indwelling; it is thoughts and distractions that drag us away from it. This stillness is the very stillness of the heart of God, which resides in the realm of beholding in itself. We bring everything to it, and we draw everything from it. As we come to the manger, high and low, rich and poor, each brings a gift. Gospel accounts and legends tell us of a multitude of gifts, but there is one we share in common, without exception, which each of us bears to the radiant child, and that is suffering—the devastated suffering of those shattered by war; the sorrowful suffering of those who mourn; the anguished suffering of the abused; the hungry suffering of the poor; the hollow suffering of the rich; the interior suffering that is the simple longing that burns for God.

Behold! He is coming with the clouds and everyone shall see him. Behold! The Lamb of God. Behold! The hour comes. Behold! I bring you good tidings. Behold! The Lion of Judah. Behold! I am laying in Zion a foundation stone. Behold! I am sending a messenger. Behold! The bridegroom comes. Behold! I show you a mystery. Behold! The tabernacle of God is within you.

Behold! You shall conceive. It is in the beholding itself that Mary conceives, and we also. It is in this self-forgetful beholding, this eternity of love gazing on Love, of Love holding love in being, that all salvation history occurs. The words in the sentence that come after behold in the angel’s announcement are for those who do not behold, who are still chained by the imperious noise of those who wield power and control by means of the fear of death. The Word yearns with the promises of God, if only we will turn and behold and, in that beholding, be healed.

Behold: behold, and all the rest will be added unto you. “Behold!” says the angel. It is in the consent to behold, the fiat, that our fear is transmuted into love.

The beholdings that irrupt as annunciations are profoundly dislocating events, whether to the shepherds, to Mary, to Isaiah, or to us. They are sudden; they take us by surprise, often in the least likely circumstances. When we realize something beyond our knowing has happened, we may be at first incredulous, or even embarrassed. But when we finally realize we can no longer dismiss the evidence—the traces left from an encounter hidden even from ourselves—we are filled with awe.

Annunciations leave us with a sense of strangeness, for we cannot wrap our minds around what has happened. They cannot be circumscribed by concept or by the self-reflexive interpretation we call experience. They are too wonderful, they are beyond what we can ask or imagine, and in their wake life will never again be the same. Yet by welcoming this homely strangeness of God in beholding, we learn to welcome the strangeness of our neighbor, and, indeed, the strangeness of ourselves.

If we embrace these annunciations—and we ignore them at our peril—we come finally to dread, tο a forced choice: to remain in a state of alienation, to seek anesthesia, or tο plunge deeper into faith, into unknowing, relinquishing every preconception, every idea, image, and notion we have, including those about God and about ourselves, so that these annunciations may change and integrate us.

God, and the fathomless vision God longs to give, will never fail. It requires only the opening of our hearts for God to purify with the fire of love, God whose thoughts and ways are not ours. Christ’s peace is utterly simple, a simplicity that can never be comprehended, only received, and through it we are drawn into the mystery of God’s own self-outpouring, into speechless wonder and ineffable joy.

Therefore, in this world’s night, let us enter more deeply into stillness so we may behold the herald angels. Let us be undistracted even if the sheepdog continues to bark at our side. Let us so plunge into this beholding that its silence and light will radiate even through our own darkness to illumine all the darkness and pain of this world, to announce tidings of great joy for this day and all the days to come.

What can I give Him,

Poor as Ι am?

If I were a shepherd,

I would bring a Lamb.

If I were a wise man,

I would do my part.

Yet what I can I give him,

Give my heart.