Dignus est agnus: the Feast of Christ the King

Yesterday, our schola sang the Introit for the Feast of Christ the King (yes, it's October, we use an older calendar): "Dignus est agnus...". You might know the English text from the Handel setting: "Worthy is the Lamb that was slain...". Here is a source text for the Introit: Revelations 5:12:

...dignus est agnus qui occisus est accipere virtutem et divinitatem et sapientiam et fortitudinem et honorem et gloriam et benedictionem...

("Worthy is the lamb who was slain to accept power and divinity and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing..."). I was daydreaming during the long sermon and noticed a bit of word-painting in the Gregorian melody. Words referring to earthly power, such as "virtutem," tend to be lower in pitch (and with a Fa tonal center), whereas words referring to spiritual characteristics such as divinity or wisdom have a higher tonal center (either So with the hard hexachord, or La).

At that time, the priest then started addressing the Gospel reading in his sermon, which was from Pilate's interrogation of Jesus in John 18. It's worth repeating part of the interrogation here (John 18:33-38 NAB):

So Pilate went back into the praetorium and summoned Jesus and said to him, "Are you the King of the Jews?" Jesus answered, "Do you say this on your own or have others told you about me?" Pilate answered, "I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests handed you over to me. What have you done?" Jesus answered, "My kingdom does not belong to this world. If my kingdom did belong to this world, my attendants (would) be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not here." So Pilate said to him, "Then you are a king?" Jesus answered, "You say I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice." Pilate said to him, "What is truth?" When he had said this, he again went out to the Jews and said to them, "I find no guilt in him.

Jesus never gives a straight answer to Pilate's question, "Are you a king?" The most interesting response to me is, "You say I am a king." To me, this suggests that Pilate didn't understand what Jesus meant by "My kingdom does not belong to this world..." Pilate understands "king" in particular as the potential leader of a revolt against Roman rule in Palestine, but more generally as a secular ruler: someone who deals in worldly power. Jesus understands "king" entirely differently: "You say I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth." His dominion is voluntarily accepted by his subjects: "Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice."

The word painting in the Gregorian introit melody hints at the story of Revelations, which is the Son of God assuming his authority over the world. He accepts both power over the "lower" earth, and the divinity which is rightfully his from the beginning. I've suggested to Gregorian scholae that they keep in mind the Throne Room March in Star Wars while singing this introit. Both pieces have a heroic minor mode, and both tell the story of victory and authority over evil obtained through suffering and sacrifice. The hero comes before the throne to receive the power and grace that was his by birth, which he relinquished for a greater cause and now receives once again with even greater honor. In that sense, one can read Jesus' saying, "You say I am a king," as a willing relinquishment of his rightful title. He could have claimed it and the honor and power that were his due, but he chose to lay it down instead.

Act and Intention

Last week, we were idly watching a television program called "Ghost Adventures." In each episode, a crew of three is locked inside a place purported to be haunted, and they attempt to document visual and auditory supernatural phenomena. In the program we watched, the three visited a nightclub widely considered the residence of demons, and taunted them in order to evoke a manifestation (with apparent success). (The episode wisely included some footage of an Old Catholic exorcist bishop in Kentucky chastising the show's host for his foolhardiness, and explaining that the real threat posed by demons is not physical but spiritual.)

What I'm writing about is not whether or not taunting demons is a bad idea (you can judge for yourself!), but something that the host briefly said during the crew's "lockdown" in the haunted basement. They were in a room purported to have housed satanic rituals. The host lit some candles, and arranged them in a circle, asking a crew member to sit there and watch for possible phenomena. However, the host was careful to state as he placed the candles that the circle was randomly arranged and was not meant as "a satanic ritual or anything like that."

The host's phrase irritated me at first, because the practice of casting a circle occurs commonly in many forms of ritual magic and has nothing necessarily to do with "devil worship." (Presumably the connection has to do with figures like Aleister Crowley, along with the usual misunderstandings about non-Christian religious practices.) However, the Gospel reading this Sunday (23th Sunday after Pentecost) put the host's saying in perspective. The reading was Matthew 9:18-26, in particular the cure of the woman suffering hemorrhages. I was reminded of Mark's account of the same episode:

There was a woman afflicted with hemorrhages for twelve years. She had suffered greatly at the hands of many doctors and had spent all that she had. Yet she was not helped but only grew worse. She had heard about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak. She said, "If I but touch his clothes, I shall be cured." Immediately her flow of blood dried up. She felt in her body that she was healed of her affliction. Jesus, aware at once that power had gone out from him, turned around in the crowd and asked, "Who has touched my clothes?" But his disciples said to him, "You see how the crowd is pressing upon you, and yet you ask, 'Who touched me?'" And he looked around to see who had done it. The woman, realizing what had happened to her, approached in fear and trembling. She fell down before Jesus and told him the whole truth. He said to her, "Daughter, your faith has saved you. Go in peace and be cured of your affliction."

I like Mark's version better both because it's more touching (you hear more of the woman's story) and because it's more "raw" than Matthew's account. Mark tells an interesting detail about Jesus' reaction to the woman's touch: he asks, "Who touched me?", even though he is in the middle of a crowd pressing on him from all sides. Imagine asking "who touched me?" in the middle of Times Square at rush hour! However, in a crowd, the act of touching is generally intentionless, or rather a byproduct of unrelated intention: I want to get close enough to have a good look at this Jesus guy, or I'm trying to push through this annoying crowd to buy some groceries from the market, or I'm just caught in the middle and trying to figure out what's going on. In contrast, the suffering woman touches Jesus with fully deliberate intent: "If I but touch his clothes, I shall be cured." Jesus in turn responds not to the act of touching, but to the intentional act, the act combined with deliberate intent.

This helped me understand why the host of "Ghost Adventures" might have said what he did. He was in a room where he thought satanic rituals might have been held (a "ritually and supernaturally charged space"), and doing something that he considered charged with spiritual significance (putting candles in a circle around someone). Therefore, he thought it necessary to announce his intent: the arrangement was "random" and "not a satanic ritual." The phenomenon resembles something that a Catholic priest once mentioned regarding the Consecration: at times, it would be necessary to consecrate bread and wine not on the physical altar in front of him, so he would consecrate with the intention to include a particular physical space. He didn't use these terms, but one could say that Eucharistic consecration normally includes an "implicit intention" (i.e., "the bread and wine on the altar in front of me"), but may also include an "explicit intention" which covers unusual circumstances. (Say the priest has to say Mass in a bread factory on a table made of stacked-up full wine bottles: the priest might want to make an explicit intention only to consecrate the elements meant for the sacrifice, and not the surrounding bread or wine.)

Jesus' sensitivity to human intention meant that he could tell the difference between accidental touch and meaningful touch. What's most interesting, however, is that Jesus doesn't even seem to know who touched him, until the woman identifies herself. It's as if her faith alone effects the cure: "Daughter, your faith has saved you." This shows the power of intention in the supernatural world. One could say that the only effects there are willed effects: there is no accident.

Asking questions

A couple days ago, I was flipping through Thomas Merton's little pamphlet on how to approach Scripture. He pointed out an example of the typical master-disciple exchange in Zen Buddhism: the disciple asks, "Who is the Buddha?", and the master replies, "Who are you?" The surface interpretation of this dialog is that you are the Buddha and I am the Buddha and everybody is the Buddha so let's all be happy hippies all together now. Merton explains it in a different way: the disciple goes to the master looking for facts, for doctrine to fill in the blanks in her spiritual worksheet. In reply, the master offers a question instead of an answer. Knowledge of the Buddha is not doctrine but experience, and therefore it requires a process of internal reflection and self-discovery ("Who are you?").

Interpreted a different way, this is what good advisors do with their students. If the answer to a question is known, it can be found in some journal paper or textbook. Instead, good advisors offer questions, because the process of scientific insight and discovery cannot begin without a good question. Long experience in a field develops the ability to ask the right questions, rather than the ability to accumulate knowledge. (Perhaps this is why among professors, good lecturers are much harder to find than good researchers!)

Bio of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin: following Beatrice?

Last weekend, while traveling, I read a biography of Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin by Mary Lukas and Ellen Lukas. It reads much like one would expect from a biography written by journalists in 1977: a lot of chronology, some of it not particularly interesting, and some sympathy. I've been dipping into "The Human Phenomenon" (formerly known as "The Phenomenon of Man") in a new translation, and finding it very insightful. Unfortunately, that kind of book is impossible to read in short bursts (for me at least!), so I have trouble making progress.

I learned two surprising things about the good Father from the biography. The first is his apparent failure to learn anything from China about humanity, after having spent so many years there. He observed the lack of interest in spiritual matters of ordinary Chinese people, and found it alien and disconcerting. The almost self-annihilating spiritual drive of many Hindus in India, in contrast, gave him a reference point against which he could argue: it said (according to him) that "matter is bad," whereas he said "matter is good." It didn't seem to occur to Teilhard to try to account for a cultural disinterest in "spiritualization" in his views on human development.

The second thing I learned was that Teilhard also had something to say about noncorporeal "sex magick," a topic which I've discussed on this blog before. The biographers considered Teilhard's work "The Evolution of Chastity" as mainly a reflection on his personal situation with Lucile Swan -- a woman with whom he carried on a long-term platonic relationship. What's interesting about the work is that he comes to many of the same conclusions as did Charles Williams and other male authors: from the male perspective, heterosexual expression should or will evolve away from the physical and towards the spiritual.

As I read this passage in the biography, it occurred to me that Teilhard, along with other male authors who had expressed these views, was making an implicit assumption of causality. We observe this: Men often experience "the feminine" as diffuse, rather than strongly individuated. These authors seem to associate diffuseness with abstraction, and like Plato, abstraction with moral elevation. By abstracting one's relationships, they seem to say, one can reach upwards towards "das Ewig-Weibliche," or "Yin," or whatever one chooses to call the Platonic form of Womanhood. They seem to neglect another explanation of the above observation: men could experience the feminine as diffuse, simply because the human male tends towards polygamy or polyamory. Men -- perhaps some more than others -- must consciously choose to make their experience of Womanhood concrete and singular.

It's interesting that men like Charles Williams and Teilhard felt how they did for women who were outside lawful monogamous bounds: CW, for one not his wife (Phyllis Jones), and Teilhard, despite his vow of celibacy, for an arguably spoiled dilettante artist with a childish fascination for the mysterious French Jesuit. Were CW and Teilhard projecting their diffuse desires onto their metaphysics? I shouldn't speculate into their motives, and I should also point out that both relationships were resolved with moral uprightness. Fr. Teilhard also was close friends with Lucile Swan at times when he had little support and needed a lot of friendship and love. Rather than judging these men harshly, we should look into the phenomenon itself and try to understand why they saw the direction of causality pointing one way instead of another.

Don't send me an MS Word form to fill out...

(here comes a rant, watch out)

...because I can't read it. Not because I don't own a copy of Windows and haven't run it for over five years. Not because I'm a "geeky Microsoft hater." It's because MS Word files aren't even compatible with past or future versions of MS Word on Windows itself, let alone on Mac. It's because there's no free .docx to .doc conversion service anywhere on the web, even though the 'softies bribed the ISO committee to get OOXML (hahahaha, OBJECT-ORIENTED XML?!?!? that's like "MS Visual Object-Oriented COBOL") accepted as a standard. It's because the lovely ad-hoc tables that you hacked up in MS Word between visits to Cute Overload collapse into an overlapping jumble of typography unless the margins are set to the exact same number of millifurlongs as yours, even though the margin setting doesn't happen to be a part of your document. It's because you e-mail me a form, then expect me to print it out, fill it out by hand, and FAX it (remember that lovely '80s all-caps trademark? oh wait, you were just a twinkle in your father's eye then!), complete with my credit card number all in plain-text, to some random phone number in another state.

You could send... ASCII? Unicode? a web form? a PDF even, which I could print out, fill out by hand, scan in, and send to you via encrypted e-mail (because you've put your public keys on the website, right?)? Alternately, if you happen to reject post-1950's technology, you could send a physical piece of paper via traditional physical mail, which I could fill out by hand and put in a paper envelope with a money order and send back to you?

Submission to rubrics is submission to God

Recently, on an e-mail list, someone asked for advice on how to help make an Office liturgy over which (s)he was presiding more prayerful. I've heard other people ask this question too -- someone in our schola, who is new to the 1962 Roman Missal liturgy, was asking how to make it more about prayer and less about frantically flipping through various books and guessing at the right tones for responses. It's easy to understand how a quiet, prayerful person might find it very stressful to fiddle with books and worry about what to do next during the sacred liturgy. Maybe I'm just hardened to it as someone who has been through a lot of different liturgies in the choir loft! I'm convinced, though, that the busyness required to provide music for the liturgy can be an act of prayer in itself. Something that helps me is to remember that liturgy is about submission to structure leading to submission to God. When one is bound to the rubrics, one is not free to say or do whatever comes to mind. This in itself already exercises one's humility and is a prayerful act. (Not that spontaneity doesn't have its place, but the liturgy is mostly about following and not about creating.)

When I cantor in our local schola, I am bound to blend in with the voice of the other cantor, and to help the other schola members come in at the right time. We am bound to follow the director, who is bound to follow the actions of the priest and to help the congregation do their part. The priest is bound to celebrate the liturgy in a fitting way, and the congregation is bound to offer fitting worship. All of us are willingly bound together to worship God, and the Christ whom we worship is also willingly bound. All of this binding is sweet, like the swaddling clothes with which Mary wrapped the baby Jesus (see this Office hymn), or the priest's vestments at Mass. It's tight sometimes (imagine you're a new monk, it's 4am in the dead of winter, and you have to find out on the spot whether it's a Greater Double of the First Class or the Second Class), but it's there to help us out.

In a way, any mistake a presider makes or confusion that the congregation has is an act of worship -- it confesses the desire of presider and congregation to follow. The fact that one can "make a mistake" says that one isn't just making things up as one goes along. The more complicated the rules, the more one has to submit oneself to them.

Cabbage heads

Wer Buergerblaetter liest wird blind und taub...