Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord, if you be, claim me today.
Jesus, if you be, help me today.
Christ, if you be, put hope in me today.
Son of your Father, if you be, adopt me today.
Face of God, if you be, face me today.
Merciful one, if you be, forgive my fault and fracture today.
Sinner, though I be, come and eat with me today.
Amen
a-van-tard-ed (adj.) — avɒ˜ː(ŋ)ˈtɑːdɪd
The more or less giddy peddling of postmodern or fashionable ideas in a way that lacks real understanding, care or critique : Jack is completely avantarded.
ORIGIN early 21st cent.: portmanteau of French retarder, from Latin retardare, from re- ‘back’ + tardus ‘slow.’; avant-garde, late Middle English (denoting the vanguard of an army) from French, literally vanguard: a position at the forefront of new developments or ideas.
Another good conversation with James Butler the other day, about sacred or theological space and time, and especially sabbath. I promised him then the following slice of Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the creational rhythm of dailiness.
These words are drawn from Creation and Fall, a theological exegesis of the opening of Genesis, offered originally as lectures to students in Berlin (1932–33) and later published. For Bonhoeffer, the day is a sort of theological ‘quantity’ that we inhabit. I suppose it’s less like carpe diem and more like accipe diem: welcome/receive the day! Such an understanding provides a theological foundation stone for the idea of daily rhythms, as well as for the significance of a day’s sabbatical rest.
Genesis 1.4b–5: And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.
The day is the first finished work of God. In the beginning God created the day. The day bears all other things, and the world lives amid the changes of the day. The day possesses its own being, form and power. It is not the rotation of the earth around the sun – which can be understood physically – or the calculable change of light and darkness; the day is something exceeding all this, something determining the essence of our world and of our existence. If it were not such an unsuitable thing to say in this context, we might say that it is what is called a mythological quantity. The gods of day and night who, according to pagan belief, inspire and animate the world are here totally dethroned. Nevertheless the world remains God’s first creature, both wondrous and powerful in the hand of God.
For us the creatureliness and miraculousness of the day has completely disappeared. We have deprived the day of its power. We no longer allow ourselves to be determined by the day. We count and compute it, we do not allow the day to give to us. Thus we do not live it. Today less than ever – for technology is the campaign against the day. The Bible too speaks of the day in the same calculating way as we speak of it but the Bible knows too that the day is not this calculable day of the earth’s rotation – that it is the great rhythm, the natural dialectic of creation. In the morning the unformed becomes form and then by evening sinks back into formlessness. The bright polarity of light dissolves into unity with the darkness. Living sound grows silent in the stillness of the night. An expectant awakening in light follows sleep. There are times (which go far beyond the physical day) of awakening and slumbering in nature, in history, and in nations. All this is what the Bible means when it speaks of the creation of the day, of the day without man, which bears everything, including the lot of man. The rhythm – repose and movement in one – which gives and takes and gives again and takes again, which thus eternally points towards God’s giving and taking, to God’s freedom on the other side of repose and movement – that rhythm is the day. When the Bible speaks of six days of creation it may well have been thinking of the day of morning and evening, but in any case it does not mean this day in a computable sense; it thinks of it in terms of the power of the day which first makes the physical day what it really is, the natural dialectic of creation. The physical problem does not at all belong to the discussion in which the “day” is being considered. It does not disparage biblical thought, whether the creation occurred in rhythms of millions of years or single days, and we have no occasion to protest the latter or to doubt the former. But the question as such does not concern us. To the extent that his word is the word of man the biblical author was limited by his time and his knowledge, and we dispute this as little as the fact that through this word only God himself is speaking to us of his creation. The days God created are the rhythms in which creation rests.
—Creation and Fall; Temptation: Two Biblical Studies, Touchstone (New York), pp. 28–29
I chime in with Bonhoeffer’s intuition that in debates about whether to read Genesis 1–3 literally or poetically – and thus the seven days as literal periods or poetic stanzas (the latter being my own view, need I say?) – all sides easily miss the point and flirt with backdoor atheism with respect to creation if they try only to sort out how long a day is, rather than recognising the fundamental point: the theological nature of dailiness itself is that of a rhythm given to live in time with before God. As Bonhoeffer says, it is the ‘natural dialectic of creation’.
Many who worry about calculating the days should learn to number them instead.
I wanted to be like him. Which is why, three years later, I found myself sitting in his office and trying desperately to fill his shoes.
—Lew Sterrett, Life Lessons from a Horse Whisperer, 2009, p. 89
Ambition, envy and competition are strong emotional drives that can provoke the strangest of behaviours. Fight or flight? Imitate or defecate? Lew or loo?
The life lesson is surely this: better not to leave footwear in the office, just incase.
In London of an evening, a month or two ago, my friend Endre Kormos from Budapest asked a table-ful of people an excellent but open-ended question. After three days in England’s capital, he wanted to hear our thoughts: ‘How do you meet God in the city?’ A few weeks later, I was in Guildford talking to James Butler, and he was asking a question along similar lines, ‘Where do you start with an urban spirituality?’ These two friends occasion the following. My dull brain has been slowly waking to this pertinent poser – by which I mean of course the question, not James Butler.
Hans urs von Balthasar, one of the most creative voices in Catholic theology in the twentieth century, wrote in The God Question and Modern Man of the pain of the struggle to pray in the city:
Before the dawn of the technical age it was easier to create genuine culture from genuine recollection. Life was more peaceful, man’s surroundings expressed eternal values more directly . . . How immediately can a landscape absent of men unite us to God, for example high mountains, a large forest, or a freely flowing river! . . . In the cities, however, only man’s handwriting is everywhere visible . . . Concrete and glass do not speak of God; they only point to man who is practically glorified in them. The cities do not transcend man; hence they do not guide to transcendence. Quickly and greedily they devour the surrounding countryside and turn it into a dirty, defiled forecourt of cities. For some years now the Roman Campagna has ceased to exist, the Swiss landscape likewise. The Rhine has long ‘had it’. Overnight, ‘nature’ will be turned into a reservation, a ‘national park’ within the civilized world; and besides, in national parks – mostly crowded – it is not very easy to pray either.
The guantlet having been thus laid down, where might we find a way forward? Personally, I have been encouraged by Rowan Williams. In Silence and Honeycakes: The wisdom of the desert, Williams hints that a spirituality for modern urban life could be found, oddly, in drawing upon the spirituality that was once hammered out in the desert, by some of the first monastic communities. He writes:
The desert looks shapeless – the sandy desert of Egypt especially, where the sand shifts and landscapes dissolve. It looks like nowhere in particular; yet you go into it so as to become more particular than ever. In the modern context, you could compare it with the other sort of non-place we are familiar with – places stripped of any local identity, featureless and totally unsurprising – the airport lounge, the fast-food outlet, places designed entirely for individuals looking for repeatable experiences. No doubt fourth-century Alexandria had its equivalents: our job, as particular people trying to live something of a calling to contemplation, as a church looking for renewal and integrity, is to seek out the non-places where we can become personally faithful. We need to identify those bits of our immediate environment that can serve as sites for recovering a covenant with the self and the body.
So, what to make of it all? And who do we look to as our teachers of urban prayer?
When asked the question, ‘Who are the equivalents of the desert monks today?’, Williams mentioned, among others, Charles de Foucauld and the Little Brothers of Jesus, ‘exploring their Christian calling in a literal and physical desert and in the desert of the anonymous urban environment’.
What you are doing when you are listening as a Christian is putting your hand quietly in the other man’s life and feeling gently along the rim of his soul until you come to a crack, some frustration, some problem or anguish you sense that he may or may not be totally conscious of.
—Keith Miller, The Taste of New Wine, 1970, p. 100
To be sure, this image has aged rather less well than wine.
Quotidian exquisite,
award winning
wound every morning,
heaven ticking in ordinaire time
as vows pay.
Flies, all the time. Flies,
and so the time flies.
It rides in the incense of saints,
circumnavigates
scent and heat and death—
sweet breath—
heat and scent,
death and heat and scent.
Vulture-ringing upendedness, ebbs
idling, innocuous, tactile but slippery,
upon shaky souls, upon a smouldering field of battle
still not won. Beelzebub.
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
I had to read this twice this morning, because it genuinely seemed to me like it must have been a typo. Surely Darwin, writing in his The Descent of Man (1871), meant just the opposite: that the ignorant were those who thought science would answer all of life’s big questions. Surely he meant to say that what those who know much know is just how little they know!
But no, he is quoted correctly. I am not anti-Darwin. But his words go to show how differently things look from the far side of modernity.
There’s been a great reversal. Whereas back then some fearful cloister walkers denied out of their ignorance that science could answer any of our questions, today some arrogant lab rats claim that science will answer them all. And yet, as all scientists worth the name admit, it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that all the world’s problems have been – or will be – solved by science.
Darwin is not mistaken, things are just different now, and yet the first part certainly still seems true: ‘Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.’
About
I'm Mark Knight, and I live in Guildford, UK. I pilfered Garth Marenghi's self-description in a tongue-in-cheek way, hoping to be not merely reflector, nor rhetor, but actor.
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