Mary Magdalene-The Scarlet Woman

Most blessed lady, I who am the most evil and sinful of men do not recall thy sins as a reproach, but call upon the boundless mercy by which they were blotted out. 
(St Anselm, Prayer to Saint Mary Magdalene and Our Lord)

From the early Middle Ages the Latin Church began to associate a number of different Gospel stories, the nameless woman who was a great sinner (Luke 7:36-48) and Mary of Bethany, with the figure of Mary Magdalene who had been first witness to the Resurrection of Jesus. Feminists, enemies of Christianity and liberal theologians always present this association as if it were a misogynist scheme by the old white men (now dead) of the Catholic Church to slut-shame a feisty independent woman disciple of Christ. As a plot it failed miserably since the Magdalene became, after our Lady, far and away the most popular female saint of the Middle Ages. This was not despite but because she was seen as a reformed sinner. Most Catholics then as now could empathise with one who had succumbed to temptation, especially sexual temptation, and saw in her redemption and closeness to Jesus a significant source of hope for themselves.

I, however, have an alternative theory. One of the things which the Gospel tells us about our saint is this- "Mary who is called Magdalen, out of whom seven devils were gone forth" (Luke 8;2.) This is immediately after the story of the unnamed woman so linkage is plausible but more importantly it features the number seven. To the modern mind this conveys nothing but in the ancient and medieval world it was charged with significance. The world was created in seven days, the seven seals of the Apocalypse will be a prelude to the end of days, the Israelites had to drive seven tribes out of Canaan, seven Apostles witnessed the risen Jesus by the shores of Lake Tiberias and so on and so forth. Therefore whenever this number appears in Scripture we are invited to ponder on what significance it may have. Often it is taken to imply fullness so when St Peter asked (Matthew 18;21-22) if he should forgive someone up to seven times a day he simply meant "as often as it is likely to happen."

Pope St Gregory the Great when he reflected upon it came to the conclusion that in the case of the Magdalene it referred to the seven mortal sins. That being so she became a perfect fit with the unnamed woman in Luke because of two things which the Gospel tells us explicitly about St Mary. Firstly, that she had been possessed but that Jesus had liberated her from that. Secondly, that she loved our Lord very greatly. This last was shown by her standing at the foot of the Cross during His Crucifixion. Indeed, the Magdalene is often depicted as wearing red and/or as having red hair. This is not, as some suppose, because of an association with prostitution, but rather because of her association with the Lord's Passion and death. More poignantly after His entombment her love is depicted in this passage by St John the Evangelist-
Mary stood at the sepulchre without, weeping. Now as she was weeping, she stooped down, and looked into the sepulchre, And she saw two angels in white....They say to her: Woman, why weepest thou? She saith to them: Because they have taken away my Lord; and I know not where they have laid him.  When she had thus said, she turned herself back, and saw Jesus standing; and she knew not that it was Jesus. Jesus saith to her: Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She, thinking it was the gardener, saith to him: Sir, if thou hast taken him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away. Jesus saith to her: Mary. She turning, saith to him: Rabboni (which is to say, Master) 
(John 20:11-16)

So moving is this passage that it has resulted in many reflections upon it by saints, artists, poets and writers. St Anselm for instance wrote-
..And, more than all this, what can I say, how can I find words to tell, about the burning love with which thou didst seek Him, weeping at the sepulchre, and wept for Him in thy seeking? ...So, near to death and hating her own life, she repeats in broken tones the words of life which she had heard from the living. And now, besides all this, even the Body which she was glad, in a way, to have kept, she believes to have gone. 
And can Thou asketh her, 'Woman, why art thou weeping?' 
Had she not reason to weep? 
...I think, or rather I am sure, that she responded to the gentle tone with which He was accustomed to call, 'Mary'. What joy filled that voice, so gentle and full of love....
..At once the tears are changed; I do not believe that they stopped at once, but where once they were wrung from a heart broken and self-tormenting they flow now from a heart exulting..

Jesus said of the nameless woman "Many sins are forgiven her, because she hath loved much" I think it likely that Pope St Gregory connected the idea of this woman's great love with Mary Magdalene's great love and her sins with the Magdalenes seven devils. Critics who focus on the sin forget the love but the Church never did. The idea that these two persons are one might or might not be right but the idea that they were linked in order to denigrate the great and much beloved St Mary Magdalene is most certainly wrong.
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The paintings are Mary Magdalene by El Greco and Magdalene Mourning by Colijn de Coter.

The Gate & the Way

An Evangelical Christian preacher very often, if not always, preaches on the need for conversion. She will invite her hearers to accept Christ into their hearts and be born again. Catholics and other Christians are prone to finding this repetitive and tedious. They have, they think, already made that fundamental choice and are more interested in finding out the best way to translate it into their daily, hourly, lives. By contrast, Evangelicals often find Catholic preaching tepid and uninspiring. Moreover since it often focuses on outward behaviour it can lead an unconverted person to pursue an hypocritical life where they publicly conform with their bodies to Catholic usages but inwardly do not accept them and practice vices in private.

The late nineteenth century Quaker Hannah Whitall Smith reflected on a useful distinction which can be made here. There are Christians primarily concerned with foundation truths and those who mostly deal with superstructure truths-
"Foundation truths deal with the beginnings of things, superstructure truths deal with their development. The first show the entrance to the divine life, the last teach how to live and walk after we are in that life. Without the superstructure truths, the foundations remain bare and crude; without the foundation truths, the superstructure will be tottering and unsafe."
(The Unselfishness of God: Chapter 29)
Growing up she was exposed to much teaching about how she should live but not about why she should make such choices which were radically at odds with the world at large. When she encountered the Revivalist movement she, or at least her faith, went from being dead to being alive. This led her to direct her attention to the exhilarating task of making converts. But that was not the end of the story for her-
"As years have passed on and the foundations of our Christian life have been, as we believe, securely laid we have become more and more interested in the superstructure and now to some of us the old preaching which once we did not understand has become marrow and fatness to our souls. This is not so much because the preaching has changed as because we have changed."
(Quaker Writings: An Anthology)

The obvious thing to say at this point is that the Church needs balance and must find a way to combine both things. How it is to do this is a question above my pay grade to answer. To paraphrase Mr Spock, however, I will say that the needs of the many are often the same as the needs of the few or of the one. That is, each one of us who call ourselves Christian cannot afford to neglect either our own foundation or our superstructure. Specifically we cannot take our calling as an unexamined first assumption. We must continually revisit Christ, Christ Himself, and be born again in Him from out of the death of sin and forgetfulness which we constantly plunge ourselves into.

For Catholic and Orthodox Christians the sacrament of penance (confession) can play an important part in this process of renewal, unless it becomes a routine outward practice with no inward feeling attached to it. It could be said though that if we have many eggs the Lord has provided us with many baskets to put them into. That is, we have multiple ways open to us to return to our Divine source and seek refreshment. As we are each different then we may each find different methods more helpful to us. Prayer is one, daily examination of conscience is another, listening to charismatic preachers is a further option and so it goes on.

For my part I find nothing, outside of the sacraments, more powerful than the Gospel. When I approach it with a thirst for Jesus it always satisfies me. How you read the Gospel and why you read it will powerfully affect the impact it will have on you. When you pick it up longing with all your heart to encounter the Beloved then He will not hide Himself from you. In His divinity and in His humanity He is there, waiting for you, longing for you as you long for Him. Although I read from the Scriptures every day I do not always do so with the same attitude, few of us do. We must consciously call to mind the need to shore up our foundations and then open ourselves to what the Holy Spirit will do through the pages of that wonderful text to bring us to a rebirth in Christ.

Nor must we neglect our superstructures. The Church has produced many saints and their lives and examples can inspire us, teach us and guide us in our journey towards God. And we should recall that not all the saints are in heaven, some are among us still, some perhaps are our neighbours, our priests or teachers. Some, it maybe, do not yet embrace all the fullness of our faith but yet can still show us the effects of grace in the human heart. The Christian life is not only about doing but also about being. Sometimes the fastest way to travel is to stand still and the most deep reaching sound is silence. We can build up our faith lives and strengthen ourselves to help others by occasionally or frequently doing nothing but communing with our Father who is in heaven, His stillness to our stillness, His silence to our silence, His love to our love.

Although it is convenient to think about foundation and superstructure it is only an analogy. There are threads that weave their way through all of our aspects of life in Christ. There is, I think, no part or stage of the Christian life where we cannot offer up this heartfelt prayer which St Catherine of Siena has given to the Church-
"Lord, unmake me, and break the hardness of my heart, that I be not a tool which spoils Thy works"
May each one of us join ourselves to this petition and may the Good God in His mercy answer us.
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The painting is Pilger ins Heilige Land by Alois Niederstätter

St Edmund Campion: Priest & Martyr

The most high profile of England’s martyr priests to be executed during the time of Elizabeth Tudor was certainly St Edmund Campion who died 1 December 1581. During the year or so of his mission he preached the Word and administered the sacraments to recusants while being hunted for his life by pursuivants (the Elizabethans had a wonderful way with words.) St Edmund’s fame, or notoriety, arose because of two documents which he wrote while on the run. First a short letter, called by his opponents Campions Brag, which contained a challenge to debate the issues between Catholics and Anglicans at his old university of Oxford. Secondly, after what became known as the Uxbridge Conference with fellow recusants, he wrote, in Latin, Ten Reasons which outlined the arguments he would have made had such a disputation been permitted.

These were angry and passionate times and St Edmund’s writing style was combative, that of his opponents if anything was even more so. There is little that modern readers might find edifying in the polemics of that time. The Brag however ends on this note-

“I have no more to say but to recommend your case and mine to Almighty God, the Searcher of Hearts, who send us his grace, and see us at accord before the day of payment, to the end we may at last be friends in heaven, when all injuries shall be forgotten.”

Perhaps unconsciously Dr Rowan Williams, when he held the title of Archbishop of Canterbury, echoed this idea as, in 2010, he commemorated the Carthusian martyrs to Henry VIII-

”If Henry VIII is saved (an open question perhaps) it will be at the prayers of John Houghton.  If any persecutor is saved it is at the prayers of their victim. If humanity is saved, it is by the grace of the cross of Jesus Christ and all those martyrs who have followed in his path.”

Although many great and terrible wrongs can be laid at the feet of those who call themselves Christian there remains at the heart of the faith an irreducible core which can be ignored but cannot be denied. There is an obligation to forgive, to love and pray for those who hate us and to acknowledge that every child conceived in the womb is a person for whom Jesus died on the Cross. Christians cannot despise any of their fellow humans. The recusants who were involved in activities like the Gunpowder Plot and Anglican Elizabeth’s chief torturer Topcliffe (like the Queen herself) may have forgotten this but fortunately for the reputation of Christianity St Edmund and many like him did not.

It is relatively easy to preach high sounding sentiments but the challenge is to live them out in the little details of life. Evelyn Waugh, author of Brideshead Revisited, wrote a masterly biography of Campion which recounts many such instances. Perhaps the most outstanding is the case of George Eliot, not the author but a spy whose treachery and perjury brought St Edmund to the scaffold. Visiting the martyr in gaol Eliot asked for forgiveness not because he feared for his immortal soul but rather for his mortal body since he had grounds to think that certain less saintly Catholics than Edmund were likely to seek vengeance for his treachery. Although still in agony from the rack and other tortures which Eliot had delivered him up to Campion’s reply is a classic of its kind-

“You are much deceived if you think the Catholics push their detestation and wrath as far as revenge; yet to make you quite safe, I will, if you please, recommend you to a Catholic duke in Germany, where you may live in perfect security.”

There can be few more Christlike images than that of a man who, bearing the marks of suffering upon his body, takes anxious thought for the well-being of the person who holds chief responsibility for those marks. As it happened Eliot did not take advantage of the offer and returned to his trade of spying but St Edmund’s gaoler, Delahays, who heard the conversation was so moved by it that he converted to Catholicism. We can hope that in this country never again will we be visited by such an evil as religious persecution but perhaps more than that we can also hope that in every evil that does visit us we will never lack for Christians filled like St Edmund with the spirit of forgiveness and generous love. By the grace of God may we ourselves be such Christians.

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Seeing God, Making God Visible.

The saints are the true interpreters of holy Scripture The meaning of a given passage of the Bible becomes most intelligible in those human beings who have been totally transfixed by it and have lived it out.
Pope Benedict XVI

The organ for seeing God is the heart. The intellect alone is not enough. In order for man to become capable of perceiving God, the energies of his existence have to work in harmony.
Pope Benedict XVI

The Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI can accurately be described as an intellectual or, at any rate, an academic. Anyone who reads his books (and you really should) can have no doubt that he has a formidable mind which he feeds by wide reading and nourishes by deep reflection upon what he has read. He is then better placed than most of us to know that by the intellect alone we cannot see God. His life and work also stands as an eloquent and elegant refutation of the lie that Christians must abandon their intelligence in order to embrace their faith. Our discursive, cogitative, enquiring mind forms part of our God given personal apparatus as it were and so must play its part in our search for and encounter with Him but the part must not be substituted for the whole.

What does that mean exactly? To be a human is to be more than a pure intelligence. To be fully engaged in human life is to involve our whole selves, our 'energies of existence.' If we do not love or feel compassion or understand things with our heart then we are not using every part of ourselves, we are attenuating ourselves. It is unwise to believe or feel or do anything which our intellect cannot give consent to but the mind alone does not provide us with a powerful enough motivating force to actually do or to dare very much in life. It is an inadequate definition to say that a Christian is a person who believes in the divinity of Jesus Christ, Son of God and Son of Mary. It needs to be added that a Christian is a person who has a loving relationship with God through Jesus (and if they are wise a loving relationship with Mary also.) So what Father Benedict is saying is that to see God with all the fullness possible to us we must use all the humanness that has been granted to us, that is mind and body, emotions and feelings, soul and spirit, everything. The more we look the more we see and that looking is more than just thinking.

When we engage our whole selves in the relationship with God then all that we are becomes capable of being transformed by Him through that relationship. Each of us recognises from personal experience that simply knowing something to be true with our minds is not sufficient to decisively affect our conduct. Indeed whole industries are built on the fact that our desire for chocolates or shoes has more power over us than our knowledge that we need to buy considerably fewer of these things than we actually do. St Paul put it like this 'With my mind I am a slave to the law of God, but with my flesh I am a slave to the law of sin.' (Romans 7:25)  To see God is to immerse ourselves in Him through prayer, the sacraments, reading the Scriptures, living in communion with the Church community and in love with all our neighbours. He is both within all these things and more and transcendent to every created thing so that no true perception of Him can be anything other than multidimensional and experienced through all of our faculties.

Which brings us to 'totally transfixed.' What the Holy Father is referring to are those saints who respond to an insight which they have had of God, found in the Scriptures, and reflect it in the way they live their lives. That is, having seen God themselves they seek to make Him visible to others through the things they do and say. The 'energies of their existence' have worked in harmony to bring about clarity of vision but this is not a purely self centred thing because the energies of their existence continue working in order to share that vision with the world. The two commandments cited by Jesus; 'Love God and love your neighbour' are simply different faces of the one commandment 'be transformed by God.' When with all the energies of our existence we see Him then these same energies can be put at His disposal to do His work in Creation and that work is always a labour of love and service, above all to the weakest and most vulnerable.

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Praying to Saints?

                                                            Venerable Margaret Sinclair

When the centurion heard about Jesus, he sent to him elders of the Jews, asking him to come and heal his servant
Luke 7:3

Enemies of Catholicism suppose (or affect to suppose) that Catholics pray to Saints instead of praying to God. Those who are merely uninformed think that Catholics pray to Saints as well as praying to God. So what is the situation? The idea, briefly, is that Christians on earth ask Christians in heaven to join with them in praying for this or that petition. The two challenges to that proposition which I have encountered most frequently are-

• Why not just pray directly yourself since Jesus is the sole mediator between Man and God?
• How do we know that Saints can hear our prayers?

As far as the first point goes there are several possible answers. One Christian asking another Christian to pray for them has been standard practice since New Testament times. The Apostle St Paul wrote You also must help us by prayer (2 Corinthians 1:11) We know that the Apostle prayed directly to Jesus so clearly he did not see intercession by others as detracting from that but rather strengthening it. As he put it to the Philippians  for I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my deliverance (Philippians 1:19) Why this kind of intercession might be helpful is something that St James addresses The effective prayer of a righteous person has great power (James 5:16) Which, by the way, raises the suggestion that in the eyes of God some people appear more righteous than others something which more hardline Protestants would deny absolutely. But I digress, the point is that asking others to pray for you is not a sign of your lack of faith in Jesus it is a frank recognition of your own failings. Because I suspect most of us reading this and myself writing it are very far from being righteous it is more than helpful to us to invoke the aid of those whom we know or suspect of being nearer to virtue than we ourselves are.

Does it somehow offend Jesus if we thus ask others to present our petitions to Him? The episode of the Centurion's Servant (or slave) in Luke (Chapter 7:1-10) indicates that far from being offended He is absolutely delighted. The story is that a Centurion has a servant (or slave) whom he loves and who is gravely ill. It is worth noting that as a Roman the Centurion is not only not Jewish but is actively involved in perpetuating the hated occupation of Palestine by a foreign power. So he sends Jewish leaders to Jesus to act as his advocates. They commend his petition for these reasons He is worthy to have you do this for him,  for he loves our nation, and he is the one who built us our synagogue  (vv4-5) That is both his charity and his works are presented to Jesus as being sufficiently meritorious to earn our Lord's goodwill. The argument seems persuasive enough insofar as our Lord and his entourage then set off to the Centurion's house. However the Roman then sends out a further bunch of advocates, his friends, who say to Jesus Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof. (v6) And he makes the point that our Lord can simply command that the servant (or slave) be healed and that would suffice to make it happen, which of course it did. Did Jesus get het up because the Centurion chose to appeal to Him in this fashion? What He said was turning to the crowd that followed him,[He] said, “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.” (v9) 

I think that much of the confusion surrounding this issue stems from a misunderstanding that equates the role of mediator with that of advocate. Jesus is the sole mediator between Man and God in the sense that all reconciliation proceeds through Him and only through Him. Yet although this reconciliation is freely available to all not all will finally avail themselves of it. Some are estranged from God through lack of explicit or implicit faith in the Saviour. Others are estranged through sin which presents a barrier to grace though they may formally acknowledge the importance of Christ. Seeking to overcome these barriers through the assistance provided by the prayers of those who are in a state of grace is not replacing the mediatorship of Christ with that of the Saints it is a seeking by those with an imperfect faith to enter fully into the inheritance promised to those with perfect faith. That is, they certainly place their hopes in Christ, which is wise, but not in their own merits, which is also wise, thus they ask those whose merits are known to Christ to add to the sum of their own prayers and as it were tip the balance from justice to mercy a kind of accountancy that Jesus always smiles upon.

It is perhaps worth mentioning that the equivalent episode in the Gospel According to St Matthew (8:5-13) presents the story as if the Centurion and our Lord had actually met and engaged in a dialogue. I think that this can be explained by the different purposes underlying each Evangelists narrative. St Matthew was writing in the first instance for a primarily Jewish audience, his priorities were to emphasise that Jesus was a fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies and that these transformed the religious mission of the Jews from a national project to an international one with the renewed Israel becoming a beacon to the world-

“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
    to raise up the tribes of Jacob
    and to bring back the preserved of Israel;
I will make you as a light for the nations,
    that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

(Isaiah 49:6)

St Matthew then, as it were, bigs up the encounter between the heir of King David and the gentile in order to emphatically put Jesus' imprimatur on the mission to the gentiles which is why he includes this passage which is absent from St Luke's account

" I tell you, many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

(vv11-12)

St Luke had different purposes and his account of our Lord's mission is often called "the Gospel of Prayer" (don't believe me? Google it.) Therefore he describes the episode with the Centurion in the way that he does precisely because it bigs up the prayer aspect, that is to say, the intercessory prayer aspect. One can easily reconcile the two accounts by considering that the words spoken by the advocates really were the words first spoken by the Centurion which is precisely what you would expect when Saints intercede for you with the addition, as St Luke notes, of extra material highlighting whatever merits you may possess.

                                                            St Margaret of Scotland

Granting that asking people to pray for you is not displaying a lack of faith in Christ but is actually being obedient to the plain sense of the Scriptures people still doubt whether it is legitimate to add Christians in heaven to our list of people that we ask. The question is do they hear our prayers. One school of thought is that when people die they enter into a 'soul sleep' which is to say that they literally snooze their way from death to the final judgement without any sort of awareness of their surroundings. The basis for this idea is the frequent references to people who die 'falling asleep.' But this, I think, only refers to the physical half of the equation, a dead person resembles a sleeping person when we look at them. There are, by contrast, numerous scriptural references to post-mortality people being very much alive to the eyes of God. Here are some-

• And he said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” (Luke 23:43) Said to the 'good thief' on the Cross.
• "Have you not read what was said to you by God: ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living.” (Matthew 22:31-32) 
• The Parable of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16:19-31 which portrays Abraham, Lazarus and the rich man as all being spiritually alive and aware after their mortal death. It might be argued 'its just a parable' but it would be an extraordinarily misleading one for Jesus to use if there is no spiritual life and awareness among those who have passed on.
• The Transfiguration (Mark 9:2-8) which includes- there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, and they were talking with Jesus. (v4) Now, Elijah had been assumed into heaven but Moses had unequivocally died and been buried. If Moses could hold a conversation with Jesus clearly he was both spiritually alive and aware of what was going on. I have heard it argued that 'it was just a vision' and not the real Moses but, again, it seems an extraordinarily misleading one if the scriptures want us to believe in 'soul sleep.'

So granting that intercessory prayer is scriptural and A Good Thing and granting that Christians after death are spiritually alive to God and aware what warrant do we have for assuming that they can hear our requests? Sacred Scripture offers no explicit guidance on this subject, asking Saints to add their prayers to ours is certainly not contrary to Scripture but neither is it affirmed by it. What we can say is that it is an ancient practice of the Church. It began with invoking the aid of martyrs whom the faithful have excellent grounds for believing to be in heaven. Protestant critics of Catholicism offer various competing dates for the time when the Church supposedly fell into apostasy. What we can say about praying to Saints is that it predates all of them. The Church which defined the Nicene Creed was a Church that prayed to Saints. Therefore anyone who accepts the one has no logical grounds not to accept the other and practically every Christian denomination does accept the Creed. It cannot surely be the case that the Holy Spirit guided the Church to be so profoundly right in these central matters of the faith but was entirely laissez faire about the prayer life of Christians. The practice then is not contrary to Scripture and is entirely consonant with the beliefs and practices of the Church from practically the get go. Individual Christians may not feel the need to invoke Saints, thats up to them, but they have no grounds to criticise others for doing so nor to suggest that it is somehow non-Christian or displaying a lack of faith in Christ our Lord and Saviour.

Finally, as with faith itself, the greatest proof is experimental. If you ask the Saints to join their prayers to yours then you will yourself discover the wonderful benefits which flow from the practice. Above all invoke the aid of Mary, Mother of Jesus, Mother of Christians, Mother of the Church and you will find that where, perhaps, grace once abounded now it will abound all the more. Going to Jesus through Mary shows no lack of faith in Jesus but at once is an affirmation of your own littleness and of that indescribably huge reservoir of love that flows between Jesus and His mother. There is nothing that He will refuse her and there is nothing containing virtue, charity or hope that she is not bold enough to ask from Him.

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Bride of Heaven

A Love Song

Listen, daughter, consider, and turn your ear.
    Forget your own people, and also your father’s house.
11     So the king will desire your beauty
Psalm 45(44):10-11

Many of the psalms have Superscriptions or Headers at their beginning before getting into the actual psalm itself. Most of these are technical or musical notations referring to types of instruments or tunes. Some refer to particular episodes in biblical history to which the psalm supposedly relates; the most famous of these being Psalm 50(51)  A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet came unto him, after he had gone in to Bath-sheba which explains why David is so repentant in that song. Psalm 45 (confusingly numbered 44 in some Bibles) is unusual in that in addition to the technical part the superscription adds "a love song"  or as one version beguilingly puts it A canticle for the Beloved. It is also unusual in that most Christians agree that its literal meaning is of secondary importance to its spiritual one. Naturally, Christians being what they, there is a bit of a falling out as to what that meaning actually is but we shall come to that by and by.

On the face of it the psalmist seems to be primarily concerned with celebrating a Royal Wedding. Specifically the marriage in Jerusalem of one of the kings descended from David and Solomon to a foreign wife. Perhaps, indeed, that was all that the author consciously intended  to do. There is though a constant motif that runs all the way through the Old Testament in which the relationship between the Almighty and His People Israel is compared to that between husband and wife. It was natural enough then in light of that to incorporate this psalm into that motif. Christianity took that theme up and saw in the bridegroom the figure of Christ and in the bride an image of the Church. And as in the larger so in the lesser it could also be seen as a portrayal of the relationship between the individual believer as lover and Jesus as the Beloved. A further, more controversial, layer of meaning will be referred to later.

What is interesting in the verses I have highlighted here is that they contain a fairly detailed programme of action condensed into a very few words. Poetry has the ability to do this and the psalmist in this case was no mean poet. The Bride is advised to-

• Listen
• Consider
• Turn towards
• Forget i.e. turn away from.

When she has done this and as a result of having done this she will become beautiful (or more beautiful) in the eyes of the King and, therefore, He will desire her. In the context of a Jewish wedding what follows from that will have been in the minds of those who first heard the psalm Wherefore a man shall leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they shall be two in one flesh (Genesis2:24) Where the bride is a human and the groom is God incarnate then what we have here is a prescription for achieving Divine Union where the bride enters by participation into the very being of the Blessed Trinity.

A prescription is only of use if it is possible to fulfil its requirements. So, can we, could the bride, do what the psalmist proposed? The first injunction is 'Listen.' We live in an age where people walk around the streets or sit on public transport listening to personal stereos or mobile phones. When not doing this they listen to TV's, radios, DVD's, movies and even, occasionally, each other. When not listening they are usually talking. People even sleep with TV's turned on. The problem you might think is not that there is too much listening but that there is too little silence. In fact, from a spiritual point of view, there is too little listening because there is too little silence. God speaks to us it is true but in a still small voice (1 Kings 19:12) To hear Him we must listen attentively for Him alone, be still, and know that I am God as another psalm puts it. (Psalm 46:10) To listen to Him requires an effort on our part, a desire to hear Him.

Specifically there are several ways that Christian tradition recommends to us as methods through which we might hear the voice of the Bridegroom. Reading the Scriptures is one, or actually two at least since there is more than one way to read them. We can take a passage or a chapter or a book in the Bible, begin at the beginning and work our way right through to the end. Then we can think about what it means and, if we are wise, we can consult the opinion of others by reading commentaries on the text and see what better minds than ours have made of it. That is one method and the Gospels in particular are well suited to be used in this fashion. Another approach would be the practice known as lectio divina where after prayer we take a very short passage of Scripture read it slowly and/or repeatedly and then  let it slowly sink into us. Not so much thinking analytically about it as holding it in our minds and waiting to see what fruits will spring from the seed within us. As I have already hinted there is the practice of prayer to help our listening too. In this context it cannot consist of a list of demands that we want God to action but rather of an upward motion of our heart inviting a downward motion of His Spirit into us. In my series about Christian Meditation I outline a number of ways to do this.

God also acts at times through human agents. We can hear Him if we pay close attention to the lives of the Saints. The Christians of the Reformation traditions (often called Protestants) tend to restrict themselves to the examples given us by outstanding biblical characters, and indeed there is a rich treasury of such to be found within the pages of the Bible. Catholic and Orthodox Christians look additionally to the many examples of Christian living which the past two thousand years have given us. Throughout the world and throughout the ages Saints of widely varied characters in all sorts of settings have shone like good deeds in a naughty world (Merchant of Venice Act 5 Scene 1) Whatever our own personality type or circumstances might be we will be sure to find a Saint whose life, words or deeds will speak the voice of God to our own condition whether that be the wisdom of a St Therese, the gentle patience of a St Bernadette or the outspoken counsel and visionary insights of a St Catherine of Siena. Nor indeed need we confine ourselves to the past. It is well known in the West that the spiritual traditions of the East call for spiritual seekers to look for wisdom at the feet of gurus. What seems to be a well kept secret is that the West too has a long tradition of Spiritual Directors, male and female, who are steeped in the various contemplative and prayerful spiritualities of Christianity and have the wisdom and experience to guide others.

So, we the Brides can, if we wish, listen to our Lord speaking to us through all these channels and others besides. Then what does the psalmist counsel? 'Consider.' This seems fairly straightforward. Reflect on what we have heard, consider it from various aspects, impact our options. Except that we are not considering a business transaction or a career change neither has our listening been of a conventional kind. With Jesus 'to listen' means 'to encounter.' He is our potential bridegroom, to have and to hold, in sickness and in health. It is not enough just to weigh up with our minds the pros and cons of His proposal to us, though we could certainly do that on the Pascal's Wager principal. We need to respond to Him with our whole selves, body, mind and spirit, because we will be living with Him with our whole selves both in time and in eternity if we accept His offer of marriage. If His call awakens something within us then we need to consider what it is we shall lose if we accept Him as well as what it is we shall have to gain. He may call upon us to sacrifice material things or established relationships upon which we have so far relied and depend instead entirely upon Him and upon Him alone.

Having considered we must turn to Him decisively. We turned aside from our way to listen to Him. We paused to consider what we had heard. Now He becomes our way, He is the route we travel and the destination at which we arrive. He nourishes us, He sustains us, He loves us and unites Himself to us and we allow ourselves to be united. The foreign bride of the psalm is urged to forget her own people, meaning her nation, and her fathers house, meaning I suppose both her family and her national religion. At a literal level this is a sacrifice which Jesus later put in these terms Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple (Luke 14:26) It is a radical gamble, to cast yourself into His arms and let everything else slip away from you. And indeed this forgetting of what lies behind is partly a conscious effort of casting aside all impediments. More than that though it is a becoming absorbed in new interests. Very often the close friends of a new bride expect their friendship to continues much as before, the bride herself may expect so too. But gradually as time passes, perhaps as children arrive, the things which concern her, which she cares about, which she is willing to sacrifice for become more and more different from those things which a single girl about town has on her mind. The forgetting then is less a casting of of the old and more a putting on of the new.        

There is a more than literal meaning though to this command to forget. God does not hate families or expect us to do so either. Except for those few people called to live out their Divine Matrimony in monasteries or hermitages most Christians will experience the companionship of the Bridegroom in the context of their own domestic setting, their earthly spouses, children, parents, siblings, friends, communities, Churches. There Jesus is to be an inseparable companion, His friendship and example enriching the way that we give of ourselves to those dear to us, the way that we love and are loved. The turning to Him, the forgetting of earthly chains becomes not a negation of these relationship but a raising up of them to a higher level, a spiritualisation of them. If the Saints have acted as agents of God to us then we must act as agents of God to our neighbours for if we are one flesh with Him how could we do otherwise? There is one important proviso in all that we do however, Every Christian must be a potential martyr. The commitment we have made is one that overrides all others. Given a choice between suffering or even death on the one hand or repudiating our faith, by word or deed, on the other then we must be willing to suffer and dies if needs be. Not because we desire a reward in heaven but because we are faithful spouses. At this point, given many events in recent world history, I feel the need to stress that for Christians the concept of martyrdom consists of a willingness to endure suffering but never, never, never a willingness to inflict it.

The Bride who has done these things, listened, considered and turned towards the Bridegroom, becomes in His eyes beautiful precisely because she has done those things. In the whole history of humankind it sometimes happens, rarely I'm sure but sometimes, that a bride becomes a little vain. She is proud of her beauty and congratulates herself if only within herself about it. In his letter to the Ephesians St Paul lets us into a secret about the bride of Christ.  Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, in order to make her holy by cleansing her with the washing of water by the word, so as to present the church to himself in splendour, without a spot or wrinkle or anything of the kind—yes, so that she may be holy and without blemish. (Ephesians 5:25-27) Any beauty we may have comes to us as pure gift from the Bridegroom. What Christians call Grace, the work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts, is the very thing that prompts us to listen, that helps us to consider wisely and which sustains that act of will by which we turn towards Him and keep turned towards Him. And it is the sacrifice of the Son on the Cross at Calvary that washes us clean from all the acts by which we have disfigured our beauty from the very moment that we first set our heart on anything other than Him. So if we are radiant brides He is our radiance, if we have a beautiful dress He has supplied it. Another motif which runs through the Old Testament is that of adultery, the sin by which Israel turns from the Almighty and runs after other husbands. If we too fall in that way then our Groom stands ready to make us anew if we once again turn back to Him. We have no cause for vanity or pride but many causes for gratefulness and, it maybe, for repentance too.

Not the least cause for our gratitude lies in the fact that He, Creator of all that is seen and unseen, desires us. He loves us. He died for us. We are not instruments to be used we are made by Him in His image and likeness. Despite all that we have done to mar that image, to distort that likeness He will patiently help us to reconfigure ourselves to our Divinely crafted original. He desires us, if we remember this continually then we will as continually strive to make ourselves worthy of that love by allowing His hands to mould us into that which we should always have been had not our blindness and folly led us astray down dark paths where He is not to be found.

And so to the controversy. What I have said so far is I think common ground among most Christian traditions. Catholics see in the figure of the bride all that Protestants see. In addition, however, they discern Mary the Mother of Jesus. In part this is because, in a sense, Mary is the Church. For a time, certainly, the Church consisted of her alone, she was the first to hear of Jesus, the first to have faith in Him, the first to give Him to the world, the first to follow Him. In part also it is because she most assuredly is the spouse of the Holy Spirit for by His power it was that she became fruitful and contained within her womb Him whom the heavens could not contain, the Logos of God, her Son Jesus. But I think even if we lay aside all these claims for Mary which Protestants for reasons of their own baulk at we should all be able to agree that our Lady represents to a superlative degree all those qualities which the psalmist outlines.

Mary listened to the Archangel Gabriel attentively, she considered their meaning she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be (Luke 1:29) And not just once did she listen, not just once did she consider but repeatedly  Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.  (Luke 2:19) His mother treasured all these things in her heart.  (Luke 2:51)  And she turned towards Him and forgot all else at the beginning Then Mary said, ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.’ (Luke 1:38) and at what appeared to be the disastrous end Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister (John 19:25) And, quite literally she was given a new family When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home. (John 26-27)  A family which she was at the centre of and family ties which strengthened not weakened their mutual faithfulness to the Bridegroom  When they had entered the city, they went to the room upstairs where they were staying, Peter, and John, and James, and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James. All these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus  (Acts 1:13-14)      

And we for our part can do nothing better than to imitate Mary. As she chose so can we Those who look to Him are radiant with joy; their faces will never be ashamed. (Psalm 34:5)
  
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He annoys us- Holy Week reflections

                                                             Joseph thrown into a pit.

¹² Let us lay traps for the upright man, since he annoys us and opposes our way of life, reproaches us for our sins against the Law, and accuses us of sins against our upbringing.
Wisdom 2

²⁵ Anyone who loves his life loses it; anyone who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.

²⁶ Whoever serves me, must follow me

John 12

Humans, saints and sinners alike, can seldom honestly claim to commit any action for but one single motive. We bring the whole of our previous experience, our outlooks and our feelings, to bear upon each of our acts whether we are conscious of this or not. An artist when asked how long it took to make a particular sketch could honestly reply "five minutes and an entire lifetime." Those authorities of Church and State who conspired to bring about the trial and death of our Lord on the first Good Friday did so, they thought, to prevent Him fomenting a dangerous spirit of unrest which would bring down upon all Israel the avenging fury of Imperial Rome. In part that really was their motivation, and a very sensible one by worldly standards. The prophetic words from the Book of Wisdom, however, point us towards another reason, no less powerful but unacknowledged, which was at work in the conspiracy to kill Jesus.

Saintly people are intensely annoying. They irritate us. We think that we live good, moral, justifiable lives which could be a little bit better but not much. We are better than our neighbours, so we are within our rights to despise them, and not very far short of the best we could be. When we encounter (or hear about) those whose lives are massively more genuinely good than our own we are, as they say in Scotland, black affrontit. Their existence poses a fundamental challenge to how we understand ourselves and how we choose to live and move and have our being. They imply that we require a complete change of mind and heart if we are to be genuinely, absolutely, good and not just relatively so. Rather than doubting ourselves it is existentially much easier to doubt the saint. They are lying, they are hypocrites, they are bigots, they are dangerous. The fury against Jesus was not simply the result of an accurate political calculation. It was personal, truly, madly, deeply personal.

The implication of our Lord's words that His followers must hate this life is that those who love this life must necessarily hate them not for what they say but for what they are. His life no less than His words are a constant reproach to those who find themselves more or less comfortable with themselves and the case is the same with His followers. We do not like being reproached. Still less do we like it if we are in the positions of teacher, leader and exemplar. If we cannot ignore the challenge, as the High Priestly party and the Pharisees could not, then our choices are to accept it and change ourselves, repudiating all that we are and all that we have been, or to silence it by whatever means come to hand. Passiontide was a conjunction of political expediency with personal angst. The boil which was to be lanced, and lanced it truly was, Jesus, stood as a thorn in the flesh of those for whom flesh was all that they considered to be important.

Those Christians of today who retrospectively stand on the side of Jesus and in condemnation of His condemners will do well to recall these words of His Whoever serves me, must follow me   Being considered annoying is not in itself a sign that we are following in our Royal Masters footsteps. Neither is being persecuted although both these things should be notes of the Christian life amidst the masses of the worldly. What following Jesus means here is just this, live the Good Life unselfconsciously. Do what comes unnaturally to us as if it came naturally because it comes supernaturally. Complete and humble surrender to the work of Grace within us is the only basis upon which we can do this. We must provoke annoyance not by being provocative but by being pure peace.