The Land of Unlikeness

Janet recently requested more writing on blessed Theresa of Calcutta, hopefully soon to be sainted, and it was a topic that came up last night in Bible Study as well, in the context of the healing stories in Luke. The question came up that if Jesus did so much healing when he walked the earth, what kind of bodily healing should we expect our prayers to effect? Should healing be part of our walk? You might think this a strange topic for an Anglo-Catholic crew to be discussing, but it caused me to see an important distinction in what Jesus does when he’s alive and the legacy he gives us in his death. What is this legacy but death? This is our starting point. What Jesus gives us is perhaps a healing, but one that comes to us from the far side of death, from the wound that opens out to us from a resurrected body, from a spiritual body that is incorruptible. Our entrance to this wound, our celestial gate, is death in the form of baptism. It is a drowning of the blind kitten of sin. Jesus first comes to us as grim reaper, which is consistent with the opening of the New Testament, Matthew’s sermon on the mount, which is no walk in the park, but the imposition of a law more stringent than that of Moses. It should not be a shock, then, when we learn that Theresa’s life was dominated by the absence of God, an absence which she felt as pain to her very bones. Notwithstanding that this absence is also communicated in her published writings which have been available for years, this epiphany should serve to deepen the mystery of her life. Why? Because out of this absence she acts. She acts out the commandment given on the mount as well as in John, to love because you have been loved. That is it, quite simply. We are not guaranteed physical well-being, or spiritual comfort, but we are told that because we have been drowned in the blood of Christ’s love, we will have the gift to perservere in loving actions.

The Russian Orthodox thinker Sergius Bulgakov is interesting to me for a couple reasons. First he articulates a vision of Sophia that challenges the quaternity of Jung which I am currently dissertating about. Second, Bulgakov was very active in promoting dialogue between the Russian Orthodox and Anglican churches, and so it is fitting for me to introduce Bulgakov by looking at George Herbert’s poem, Prayer I, which I reproduce here:

PRAYER the Churches banquet, Angels age,
Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth ;

Engine against th’ Almightie, sinner’s towre,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six daies world-transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear ;

Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,

Church-bels beyond the stars heard, the souls bloud,
The land of spices, something understood.

So many of Herbert’s themes are here in such a compact, concise form. One of the first things I notice with this poem is that prayer has its dark and light sides. We start by characterizing it quite positively as God’s breath but then it immediately becomes sinner’s tower. This tendency for a good thing to be ruined by a bad man is a theme of Herbert’s, the way a priest abuses the priesthood in Affliction I or the way the poet perverts his own gift in Jordan II, but it is even more stunning here because what the sinner is perverting is God himself as Breath (I am reminded here of Barth’s trinity in which the Father speaks, the Son is spoken, and the Spirit is the response within us). Such a sin must be punished in Herbert’s world. Such a sin demands suffering and agonizing, and we know that Herbert does not lack the knack to express this. Yet that is what is so conspicuously missing in Prayer I, for the dark turns to light again with no explanation or expiation: “softness, and peace. . . . . ” but how? What of Christ’s blood? What of the sinner’s stubborness? There is a strong sense in this poem that it is God who is writing, God who is praying, and even man’s best effort to pervert the work of that God, even his “Christ-side-piercing spear” comes out to no more than “a kind of tune which all things hear and fear.” A mere tune? What is this tune? What is it if not the idea of creation itself, the heavenly archetype which informs all made things and which demands to cleave to its author and God? But Bulgakov, in describing (divine) Sophia, wants to go beyond a simply conceptual relationship between God and the world and so Sophia becomes, in Bulgakov’s The Bride of the Lamb, a kenosis of the “Trinity in unity.” In another place he says that Sophia is the “nature” of the Holy Trinity (without it being a separate hypostasis; in fact the hypostasis of Sophia comes from the human personality) (I have to admit that I am not always completely sure where Bulgakov is conceptually, so if I seem to be off the mark, please don’t hesitate to correct!) What I’m getting from this is that the divine Sophia (to which the earthly Sophia corresponds and strives) is part of the dynamism of the Trinity itself (Bulgakov denies the position that God might not have created, even though he affirms God’s satisfaction apart from creation). This would explain Bulgakov’s position of universal salvation, or something very close to it: “Evil loses the very foundation of being after the separation of good and evil. Evil is not eternalized as a result of this separation but, on the contrary, is ontologically annulled in the parousia,” and “Heaven does not exist in its fullness as long as and insofar as hell exists.”

This sense of man’s destiny for God and of unstoppable divine love is perhaps consistent with Orthodox thought, and I would question my readers whether it is not also evident in the Anglican tradition. And although I don’t think one sees it always in Herbert, in Prayer I we definitely get very close to it. Are not the atomic images somewhat like archeytpes in the mind of God, in their lack of syntax in the midst of precise order? Is not the turn from man’s sin to God’s “softness,” in that there is no explanation given, redolent of God’s illogical love of sinners? Is not the final phrase, of “something understood,” redolent of Wisdom herself? And is there not a confidence here in human Wisdom (erring as it is), such that Sophia is not a divine hypostasis but finds her hypostasis in us, in humanity, in the pinnacle of Creation? And what is this hypo-stasis, or this sub-stance, except something thats stands under?