A Journey through Covid with William Blake and Job

A Journey through Covid with William Blake and Job

Plate 13: Then the Lord answered Job out of the Whirlwind

 

 

 

Welcome back to the next instalment of our journey through the Book of Job with William Blake, genius illustrator, as our guide. We are now more than half-way through the plates when God finally makes an appearance. God had been in the earliest plates in the court of heaven but as yet has not manifested to Job himself – although as we saw earlier Lucifer certainly has by means of plague, pestilence etc.

It is worth spending some time pondering this first appearance which is why I include the close up of the central plate as well as the whole surrounding image. The relevant passage in the Book of Job (Chapter 38) is as follows:

 

          Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:

          ‘Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?...

          Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?

          Tell me, if you have understanding.

 

Who has not felt a whirlwind of emotions these past few weeks? Have we not gone from denial to anger to frustration to loneliness to helplessness to depression? Yet out of this whirlwind something new, and yet very old, emerges. It is the ground-beat of creation. Throughout our cities, towns and villages nature has reasserted itself. Here in the Northern Latitudes the inevitable return of spring has brightened our dark covid days and each evening, over London anyway, Venus and the great spring stars of Regulus and Spica have shone through unusually clear skies. Nature has returned, and with it the renewing force of creation.

Blake depicts the Creator with a compassionate gaze as he blesses Job and his wife. Using medieval iconography which he was very aware of, Job and his wife are put on God’s right hand, the traditional side of the blessed – Those ‘accusers’ who used all sorts of sophistry to bend the truth go on the left-hand side with the unrighteous. They are even closer to blindness and not seeing – let’s hope they too will eventually see something of God’s wisdom and compassion. Job’s rough woollen ‘comfort blanket’ slips away to reveal his nakedness beneath – ‘naked I came from my mother’s womb, naked I return, Blessed be the name of the Lord’. The Lord’s whirlwind has a placental shape and he points away to the distance. This is the moment of renewal and new directions – Job is being prepared for the next phase of his life. All masks have fallen now, we are faced with the truth – Satya in Sanskrit – a word that combines the notions of ‘truth’ and ‘being’.

          If nothing else the covid crisis has returned us to the fundamentals of life – what and who really matters. As much as Job we have had an encounter with the foundations of being, nature and creation. It is up to us now to grow wise from this encounter so that from now on we cease uttering ‘words without knowledge’.

 

Love

Peter

 

 

 

 

 

 

'Let Him Easter in us!'

 

 

 

Some thoughts for Holy Week in a time of covid:

 

‘Let Him Easter in Us!’

Easter 2020 will go down in history as the year the churches closed. In the 2,000 years of Christianity there have, of course, been other times when churches were closed in cases of war, famine and civil rebellion. Yet there must be few people living in Western Democratic countries today who have experienced this in their lifetimes. I certainly haven’t.

So how do we react to this? What do we do?

Well I suppose we can go online and watch services and liturgies enacted by solitary clergy in cavernous empty churches. I’m afraid this is a little too voyeuristic for me, and besides, I have a sneaking feeling that this is not where we are being called to now. Rather, in the words of The Wreck of the Deutschland by the great English Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins S.J., I believe we are being called towards the ‘granite of being’. Or, as he addresses it in the opening lines of the poem:

Thou mastering me

                   God! giver of breath and bread;

World’s strand, sway of the sea;

                   Lord of living and dead;

The poem is about the terrible sea-wreck and death of the passengers of the German steamboat, The Deutschland, off the Kent coast in December 1875. Amongst the passengers were five Franciscan tertiaries, driven from Germany by the Falk laws, all of whom drowned: Mothers Barbara Hultenschmidt, Norberta Reinkober, Aurea Badziura, Brigitta Damhorst and Henrica Fassbaender. One of the them, ‘the tall nun’, was heard to cry before she perished: ‘Mein Gott! Mach es schnell mit uns!’ (Philip Martin 1976). Poignantly, for Hopkins, they were finally laid to rest near his childhood home at St Patrick’s Cemetery, Leytonstone. Whilst discussing the incident with his rector Fr Jones at the Jesuit house of St Beuno’s, North Wales, where he was resident at the time, the priest opined that he ‘wished someone would write a poem on the subject’. This was all Hopkins needed to rekindle his writing career and within a few weeks he had produced the great ode of 35 verses.

          The genius of Hopkins’ work, a true Paschal drama, is how he turns this disaster into a witness of Christ’s loving work in the world. This I have recently argued is what we can call the ‘symbolic’ aspect of the Christian message. I am influenced heavily here by the French Dominican Marie-Dominique Chenu O.P. who describes the symbolic element of Christian life as revealing: ‘the profound truth that lies hidden within the dense substance of things and is revealed by these means’ (Chenu 1957: 99). The Christian view is thus a way of seeing reality – a symbolic truth especially open to the discerning eyes and ears of poets, artists and creators.

          What then is the symbolic meaning of our present covid crisis? I have tried to explore this in other recent blogs using the symbolism of Blake’s Book of Job, and hopefully I will continue this in the coming weeks. However for today, this special Paschal day when we lay aside our everyday lives and enter for three days into the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Christ, I return to Hopkins and his exhortation at the end of the Deutschland: ‘Let Him Easter in us.’

For sure the next few weeks will see a great deal of suffering, tragedy and death, it has already begun. But as Christians I believe our role now is to see the ‘symbolic’ hand of God in this suffering as we are led down the Seven Steps into the Underworld of Holy Saturday.

The shorthand for this symbolic form is, of course, ‘the Cross’. The Cross, for the Christian, straddles the two realities of despair and fulfillment. The Christian, as Edith Stein suggested, thus becomes the symbol as they face the Cross in an act of faith, or as Chenu put it:

To join two realities within a single symbol was to put the mind into secret contact with transcendent reality… the result was a double resonance within the single grasp of a ‘dissimilar similitude’ (Chenu 1957: 131, c.f., Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchy: 2

Therefore, rather, than sitting at home waiting for the churches to reopen we are called today to find Christ in our hearts, our homes, our families, our everyday lives. ‘Christ plays in ten thousand places’ says Hopkins, and why not in your living room or garden? Also, during this difficult time we are asked, I believe, to find Christ in each other and to pay particular attention to small acts of love and consideration. J.R.R. Tolkein famously said at the completion of his epic Lord of the Rings cycle that the world will be saved by small acts of kindness. Accordingly, during this special Paschal time let us each see 2020 as an invitation to enter the symbolic reality of the moment in small acts of kindness to those around us and in a deepening sense of the presence of Christ in our lives through prayer. Let us take time each day to perform these acts, and especially to contemplate Christ’s message for us through them. The covid crisis will then become an invitation to let Christ 'Easter in us' so that ultimately He becomes for us, as Hopkins concludes his epic poem:

 

'A dayspring to the dimness of us, be

 a crimson-cresseted east...

Pride, rose, prince, hero of us, high-priest,

Our heart's charity's hearth's fire, our thoughts' chivalry's throng's

Lord.'

 

 

Happy Easter when it comes! Love Peter

Passover--Easter--Ramadan 2020 in a time of covid

 

This month three of the major world religious celebrations of 2020 occur one after another in quick succession: Passover, Easter and Ramadan. Like the annual renewal of Spring it is reassuring that these ancient ceremonies repeat with their familiar summons to repentance and soul-searching. Yet, this year all will be different. Communal gatherings will be banned - mosques, synagogues and churches will be closed. In terms of the covid crisis we have reached midnight. Deaths are predicted to peak this month around the world as families will be shaken by the illness and death of loved ones.

In reflecting upon this I have turned once again to the Blake prints I commented on earlier in the crisis. In the former blog we looked at the arrival of the angel of pestilence – Satan – with his poetic pose and his halo and we saw then that, like the Israelites of old, we were being summoned upon the journey of Exodus out of our familiar world of ‘onions, cucumbers and melons’ to the harsh landscape of the desert. Yet, as we discussed in the previous blog, in the desert we can see wonders happen and like the silent bird of the Upanisads we are being called to listen to the silent song within our hearts.

In the cycle of Blake prints we also reach midnight. Job, like our modern technocratic world, lies prone at the bottom of the picture. All is seemingly paralysed, he can neither move forward nor back. However, in the central panel he has now adopted a different attitude to the one we saw in the last plate. He is attentive, humble even. He realises that he has nowhere else to go. Even the three ‘accusers’ are silent, his wife sits next to him with her head held in despair. Yet in contrast to these five pitiful figures Blake introduces a new figure – Elihu, the young man who will lead Job out of this mess. He begins his speech:

‘I am Young and ye are very Old wherefore I was afraid to declare my opinion before you.’ The scriptures tell us he ‘was angry at Job because he justified himself rather than God, he was also angry at Job’s three friends because they had found no answer though they had declared Job to be in the wrong.’ After the denial and depression, as Kübler-Ross tells us, anger is the next stage in our mourning for what has been lost and in these few weeks as people lose their livelihood, cannot find health services or even simple foodstuff there has been a rising anger. But Elihu’s anger is different, this is what used to be called in the old days ‘righteous anger’. It is the anger of youth that has ‘waited for words, listened for wise sayings’ and found none. Blake makes him a prophetic figure full of vitality and vigour in contrast to the five ‘oldies’ in front of him – this is the Parrhesia that authors as diverse as Michel Foucault and Hans Urs von Balthasar talk about – ‘speaking truth to power’ as we would call it nowadays, the traditional role of the prophet. Blake makes him a prophetic figure full of vitality and vigour in contrast to the five ‘oldies’ in front of him. He stands proud and upright pointing to the heavens while his other hand is a rebuke and a blessing at the same time. The five listeners look suitably impressed and hear him out. In contrast to Job and his crew he is half clothed in shade and he occupies the same space as the twelve stars that Blake has thoughtfully wrapped around him. It is clear that this is no ordinary young man.

In psychological terms we talk about two aspects of the psyche/soul; the senex or ‘old man’ and the puer or ‘youngster’. Elihu is clearly a representative of the puer – to my eyes Blake also seems to make him sexually ambivalent, he is neither male nor female with his long hair and his gentle step. This is a figure from the part of the psyche that has not been operative up to now. Again, as in the previous plate, Blake gives us more clues as to what is going on in the surrounding to the panel. Yes, the old figure asleep at the bottom seems unconscious but look what streams from him: a series of naked free-flowing figures, again sexually ambiguous, leading us up to the declaration at the top of the plate: ‘In a Dream, In a Vision of the Night, in deep Slumberings upon the bed. Then he openeth the ears of Men and sealeth their instruction...’ The unconscious is now speaking via the puer-figure of Elihu and Job and his tribe are both entranced and terrified. They know that however unpalatable the message this is what they must hear...

Which brings us back to Passover, Easter and Ramadan.

The Passover celebrations will begin this week with the Seder meal, normally held at home with the family. Towards the beginning of the meal the youngest child asks the famous question: ‘How is this night different from all other nights?’ Like Elihu, wisdom will come from the youngest as all look to them to start the ceremony. Likewise, in the Christian version of the Seder, Christ’s Last Supper in Jerusalem, also celebrated this week on Maundy Thursday, at a crucial moment in the meal Jesus ‘got up from the table, took off his outer robe and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that around him’ (John 13: 4 – 5). The disciples were shocked and scandalised, Peter even refusing to have his Master suffer this indignity to which Jesus replies ‘unless I wash you , you can have no share with me...’

All this, starting with Elihu, points the way out of our present crisis – like Job in this picture we have to accept with humility what is happening to us and our societies and realise that the Master must now become the Servant. Senex must give way to Puer if we are to allow the human spirit to emerge from this crisis. One world is dying and a new one is arising. As in Blake’s print it may seem that we are at midnight, but this is where the seeds for renewal lie – in our societies, in our homes and in our hearts. Let us continue to pray for all the human family at this difficult time – especially that we may all experience the renewing humility depicted by Blake, whatever our race, creed or religion. That we may listen again to the young and those on the margins of society. For the dawn will surely come again and let us be ready for it when it does.

To close I leave a link to the astonishingly beautiful depiction of this scene in Ralph Vaughan-Williams’ ‘Job: A Masque for Dancing’. I hope you enjoy it.

 

Love

 

Peter

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJ2X0ab8kiU