I was hesitating whether to write something about what happened. I still am. Actually when faced with such events as the Saturday tragedy in the near Alphen aan den Rijn, I only say a simple prayer, whose words almost stick in my throat anyway: Kyrie Eleison, Here God ontferm u, Lord, have mercy, Herr, erbarme dich, Panie zmiłuj sie, Gospodi pomiluj. In all the languages I pray in, only that one plea comes to my mind, sometimes coupled with a – full of grudge and reproach – “Lord, if you had been here…” from last Sunday’s Gospel. “If you had been here…”, then what? My brothers and sisters wouldn’t have died? But (I myself quoted these words only a few months ago) He dwells where we let him in, doesn’t He?
Sometimes it is so that our mind relates the events everyone talks about to ones which almost no one mentions, but which for some reason were imprinted in our memory. A week ago I visited a friend with whom I haven’t talked for a long time. Among different stories we shared in response to the standard “How are you”, was also one about his wife’s friend. A young girl, PhD student at the Leiden University, having taken care of all things that needed taking care of, returned all books to the university library, drove out of the city one day, and… threw herself under a train. The reasons? Loneliness, lack of perspectives, winter… No, I don’t want to compare her to the boy who killed six people last Saturday in Alphen, but I can’t help it that in my mind they stand beside each other.
What is happening in the world around me makes me afraid. From Minsk we received news about 12 people being killed at a subway station; the damaged reactor in Fukushima is still polluting the environment; our government is planning new austerity means, whose victims will be the weakest, the defenseless; in the secularized Holland there are less and less positions for theologians. I am afraid… I am really afraid. But not only I and those whom we would categorize as the weakest and defenseless are. A friend I visited is not only one of the most intelligent and clever people I know, a philosophy graduate, extraordinarily astute and discerning observer of the world and the events going on in it. He is also a great translator, has his own firm and… is addicted to marijuana. Has been for years… He is afraid too. But I had known it, for a long time. I often think even that it is this fear we share that binds us more than any other thing, that lets us understand each other easily even after a period of long separation. Something else struck me, however. As a translator, he moves within circles of business people. Those “finest”: bankers, “captains of industry”. He was talking about them. With his eloquence and conciseness he was telling how they look like in his eyes: young, intelligent, educated, and… full of fear.
My God… I understand the girl who, after four years of assistantship at the oldest Dutch university, comes close to writing her doctoral thesis on a topic interesting mainly (if not only) for a small group of specialists, is alone, aware that she will soon go to an employment agency and hear, as I did a few years ago: “We can’t help you. You have no useful skills…”. I understand her, her fear, her sense of being lost, of having no future. But, if those “finest” gentlemen (there are not many women among them) feel a very similar fear, what, in God’s name, have we built this world on? On fear? Our own fear of the future, or of the lack of it? But it is absurd! We built hell: for ourselves, for each other. In it we are at the same time the damned and the guards. The victims and the perpetrators.
In the conversation I said that the thought to come back to my doctoral thesis is gradually ripening in my mind. No… Not to come back, actually. I won’t come back to studying the liberal theology of the past century. Not only doesn’t it give me answers to my questions, the problem arises a level deeper: it doesn’t even provide me with tools to pose them. Its optimistic faith in the human being makes it blind to the tragedy of human fate. I was trying to show that some of its representatives were aware of it themselves and tried to speak about it somehow, suggest some solutions, but staying within its paradigm. And they became living proofs of its bankruptcy. No, I won’t come back to the “Liberals” from the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Something else fascinates me. It is what Marek Woszczek writes about.
The Gnostic rejection is directly related to the state of that temporary sobering: it is in fact awakening in the disgusting slaughterhouse of nature, and then sensing the stench of aggression, pain and the never-ending death of everything, even of the rocks smelted and pressed somewhere in the depths of the earth, and saying to the tailor of that monstrous grotesque “no”. It is Manichaeism that presents the fresco of this world in a decisive and merciless manner, making it impossible to create the, quite pathetic in the long run, idolatrous fantasies about the aromatic wonderfulness and plush friendliness of cosmos. Such fantasies are for a Gnostic a clear proof of the sickness of mind, a complete blindness: for it means seeing the Light in a morgue, in the reeking cemetery of demons, which Mani talked about, divine abode given to the only a little insubordinate man. From the perspective of the Gnostic-Mysterious Christianity, in such theology the whole truth was horribly deformed, everything is precisely à rebours. The theology of paeans and incense for the material world is malformed theology of cowardice.
And, as someone who likes to confront extremely different visions and believes that it often leads to very interesting results, I would like to confront it somehow with the attitude of world affirmation typical for Anglicanism, which, in my opinion, derives from the Iro-Scottish tradition, a certain “natural Pelagianism”, which even the massive attack of Calvinism during the Reformation couldn’t suppress. I imagined that these visions could meet on the territory provided by the religious and artistic legacy of Jerzy Nowosielski. His “orthodoxy fed on heresy”. It was what I talked with my friend about. Two men held captive by the famous “Midlife crisis” were musing about the “Gnostic rejection” after a good supper, over a glass of wine. One was smoking aromatic cigarillos (they happened to be on sale), the other “joints”… And they even managed to reach some conclusions. What came to their mind was namely that you simply can’t consistently and to the end say “No” to that horrible world, that there always has to be some place left for hope of a metamorphosis, a transfiguration, a transformation… Nowosielski:
We can think of ourselves as the rational entities, spiritually designated in a way to redeem this world . The moment this world disappears as the empirical reality, our redeemed consciousness will carry elements of that world to the new earth and the new heaven.
And perhaps the Rev. Dr. Paprocki is right to point at the connections between Nowosielski and the tradition of the Syriac Christianity, in hope to free him in that way from the context of Manichaeism?
Only a week later and only 15 km. away from the place we were discussing our reflections, one Tristan van der Vlis, 24 years old, made up his mind to reject the world radically. He made the decision – not only for himself, as my friend’s acquaintance in December of last year, but also for six other people… Right now I’m looking at his photograph. Judging by his looks, a nice boy: not ugly, smiling widely. I zoom in the picture, trying to look in his eyes. Do I look for something there? What? Sadness? Fear? Cruelty? Emptiness? Something, which would foreshadow what he will soon do?
It is not just to place him in the same category as the girl. And also as the Gnostics. For his “rejection” is completely different from theirs. Tristan says “No”, at the same time not saying “No” at all. He tries to reject the world, and at the same time he realizes the worst, most horrifying rules by which this world functions. He becomes one of the “slaughterers” in the “slaughterhouse”.
Lord, if you had been here… If we had let you in… If we were able to let you in… If we hadn’t thrown you out of this world, pronouncing it to be “ours” and only OURS, hadn’t driven you onto the Mount of the Scull, hadn’t nailed you to the cross… If we hadn’t, out of fear of what you have to say to us, and above all of who you are, decided to silence you for good, get rid of you. (“We” all? No, not all, fortunately… Someone stayed with you, someone still does…) But… In less than two weeks we will sing: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death”… A few days ago on the website of Episcopal Café I found these words of Teilhard de Chardin:
In itself, death is an incurable weakness of corporeal beings. . . . Now the great victory of the Creator and Redeemer, in the Christian vision, is to have transformed what is in itself a universal power of diminishment and extinction into an essentially life-giving factor. God must, in some way or other, make room for himself, hollowing us out and emptying us, if he is finally to penetrate into us. And in order to assimilate us in him, he must break the molecules of our being so as to re-cast and re-model us. The function of death is to provide the necessary entrance into our inmost selves. It will make us undergo the required dissociation. It will put us into the state organically needed if the divine fire is to descend upon us. And in that way its fatal power to decompose and dissolve will be harnessed to the most sublime operations of life. What was by nature empty and void, a return to bits and pieces, can, in any human existence, become fullness and unity in God.
Yesterday our friend from Oklahoma, deacon Helen Waddle, sent us her sermon from last Sunday.
Regardless of the miracles we might be denied, there is one thing that I view as a miracle and it is a constant in our lives. It’s one of the greatest joys of being a Christian. That miracle to me is having a God who is not just out there somewhere in the heavens, but a God who is right here with us loving us intimately, yearning to spend time with us, to talk with us, to walk with us, and to provide us with the things we truly need.
But it’s our choice to have a relationship with Jesus or not. To choose to have a relationship with Jesus then requires time and effort to build it up through worship, the sacraments, fellowship with one another, and alone time with our God in which scripture and prayer are essential.
But please know that it doesn’t have to be a complicated undertaking. As Episcopalians we’re blessed to have the most beautiful collection of prayers in our Book of Common Prayer. There are prayers for every occasion and we’re right to use them – but not exclusively. Unfortunately with this heritage we tend to think that all prayer must be as eloquent as those we’ve learned – but prayer is really quite simple. Being in relationship with Jesus is being you. Keep your prayer simple, honest, authentic…
There’s a short story that provides what I think is the best illustration of prayer I know. In the story a woman calls her pastor and says, “Pastor, I just moved my father here from out of state. He’s in the nursing home in town. I see him daily but he has no other visitors and he’s lonely. Would you visit him? He’s never gone to church so please just go as a friend.”
Of course, the pastor says yes and goes to visit the woman’s father. After brief introductions the man asks, “Pastor, how do I pray? I never learned how to pray.”
The pastor, in his wisdom, doesn’t immediately instruct but rather asks, “What do you think about prayer?”
“Well,” the man replies, “do you see that chair here by my bed? I pretend Jesus is sitting in that chair and I just talk with Him. But please don’t tell my daughter. She’ll think I’m crazy!”
The pastor responds, “That is the best definition of prayer I have ever heard. I think you’re doing just fine.”
Some weeks later the daughter calls her pastor. “Pastor,” she says, “I want to let you know that my father passed away last night. But it was odd. The nurse told me that when she found my father he seemed to have been hugging the back of a chair. Do you have any idea why he would have done that?”
If you need a visual aid in prayer, set a chair beside you, have an extra place at the table, imagine Jesus sitting in the passenger seat of your car or walking along side you wherever you go – and just talk with Him.
I’m reading these words of Helen and I’m thinking about that dying man and that chair. One thought comes to my mind: You can’t embrace Jesus, not embracing… the chair. The chair which symbolizes for me… the world. This very world. Empirical, horrible, infernal. Our world – the same world that rejected him, that rejected hope. Chose fear out of fear.
At the moment I truly believe that a complete rejection is impossible – such “No” which wouldn’t contain any “Yes”. Or to put it differently: I hope it is not possible. That you can’t say “No” to that odd, hopeless Messiah. And not telling him “No”, we can’t reject the world either. In spite of everything…
Dear Helen, thank you! Father Henryk, I’m waiting impatiently for your article on Nowosielski. Mr. Woszczek, I have the impression that I’m slowly getting ready to react to your text somehow…
