The Word is Very Near You: Feasts and Festivals. John Pridmore
They too would exult over their oppressors, who would watch this mighty act of God in abject awe.
Simeon foresees an altogether different fate for Israel, not a sunlit highway but the valley of the shadow of death. The end may be glorious, but the path will be a via dolorosa. The doom of Israel is presaged in this baby, born to be a crucified king. Simeon speaks of light and glory, but also of the ‘falling’ as well as the ‘rising’ of ‘many in Israel’. It will be, as Eliot has it, ‘the time of cords and scourges and lamentation’. Simeon’s words anticipate what this child himself will one day say, ‘The Son of Man came to give his life as a ransom for many’ (Mark 10.45). For Mary herself, there is little comfort in Simeon’s words. The sword, thrust into her son’s side, will pierce her heart too.
Simeon turns out to be a much less reassuring figure than we have made him out to be, and ‘the Presentation in the Temple’ an altogether more disturbing event than we had supposed. A truer account of Simeon’s meeting with the child and his mother is given by the Venetian artist Giovanni Bellini. Venice Bellini wrestled with the significance of the story of Jesus as few artists have done other than Rembrandt himself. His study of the Presentation, now in Venice’s Querini Stampalia Gallery, is a great masterpiece. Looking at it, we see this scene as for the first time.
An unsmiling Simeon reaches out to take the infant Christ. We are unused to seeing babies swaddled and to us the bands, which bind him so tightly, seem like cerements. He appears to be already prepared for burial – which in a way he was. Mary seems abstracted, as if continuing to ‘ponder in her heart’ what had been told her concerning her child. Two women standing by are lost in their own thoughts. One of them is turning away. Is she unaware of what unfolds beside her? Or is the burden of it too much? Joseph – it must be Joseph – stares intently, almost angrily, at us from out of the picture. He seems to say, ‘Do not for one moment suppose that you understand what is happening here.’
Simeon sought consolation. But there is pain beyond consoling, as Mary found. Others, such as C. S. Lewis, have found that to be so.
Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand. (A Grief Observed, Faber, 1961)
The Annunciation of Our Lord to the Blessed Virgin Mary
25 MARCH
Isaiah 7.10–14; Hebrews 10.4–10; Luke 1.26–38
IT IS WHAT IT IS, SAYS LOVE
The Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth is an immense pile. It is also a remarkably ugly building. It was built in the 1960s – the decade when many daft things were done – to replace the more modest church which previously had stood on the site. Many pilgrims feel that such a brutalist structure altogether misrepresents the unassuming and gentle woman it purports to honour. The symbol of Mary is the lily. Fittingly, the vast dome that surmounts a building that gets it all wrong is in the form of an upside-down lily.
Several earlier buildings preceded the present church. Neither the sumptuous Byzantine basilica nor the splendid Crusader church that succeeded it could be described as faithful in spirit to the self-effacing Mary. By the time the Crusaders arrived the Byzantine building had collapsed. In 1187 there was a particularly nasty battle between the Crusaders and the Muslims. (‘Militant Muslims’, we would call them today, but they were no less militant than the bloodthirsty Crusaders.) After the battle, in which the Crusaders were defeated, the Christian inhabitants of Nazareth took refuge in the church. They were pursued into it and slaughtered. The Crusader church was sacked and razed to the ground by an emir of the Sultan of Egypt in the thirteenth century. Eventually what was left of it became a garbage tip.
The recent history of Nazareth has not testified any more clearly to the good news of the Prince of Peace. Today Nazareth’s Christians fear Moslem extremism. A dispute which dragged on for years, until quashed by the Israeli authorities, centred on a provocative proposal to build a mosque next to the Basilica of the Annunciation. Nazareth, like the rest of West Bank, is under harsh occupation. The modern Jewish settlement of Nazareth, Illit, overlooking ancient Nazareth, prospers at the expense of the old city. Nazareth’s Christians, looking for a future, look for it somewhere else. Some say that in a couple of generations there will be no Christians left in the city where Jesus grew up.
The story of Nazareth is a sad record of the ungodly mess we mortals have made of things. Beneath the Basilica of the Annunciation is a crypt and in the crypt is an altar and beneath the altar is an inscription. The inscription makes an absurd claim: Verbum caro hic factum est – ‘Here the Word became flesh’. Here of all places – here where this preposterous building now stands, here where across the centuries the sons and daughters of Abraham have butchered each other and where they’d gladly do so again, here where today bewildered and exhausted tourists emerge from their air-conditioned coaches – here ‘the Word became flesh’.
But there is no contradiction, no absurdity. All the holy places of the Holy Land are human places and so bear witness as much to what we do to each other as to what God has done for us. In a word, they partake of our flesh. Nazareth is as the rest. It is of the stuff which – because of Mary’s ‘Let it be’ – the Word became.
‘Let it be to me according to your word.’ Mary’s prayer differs from most of ours. Our prayers, at least those that well from within, rather that merely being mouthed, are more often prayers of protest rather than of acquiescence. I do not like how things are and so I post my objection. ‘Let it not be’, I plead – whether ‘it’ is the rain that threatens to spoil my plans for the day or the cancer that bids to take my life.
‘Let it be.’ Mary’s acceptance of her task is rooted in her recognition that beneath all that is contradictory is an all-encompassing purpose of love. Lines written by the Austrian poet Erich Fried come to mind. Fried escaped from Vienna to England with his mother only after his father had been murdered by the Gestapo. What he witnessed and suffered lends great weight to his words.
It is madness says reason. It is what it is says love.
It is unhappiness says calculation. It is nothing but pain says fear.
It has no future says insight.
It is what it is says love.
It is ridiculous says pride. It is foolish says caution.
It is impossible says experience.
It is what it is says love.
(‘What it is’, 100 Poems without a Country, Calder 1987)
Perhaps those other siren voices – as well as Gabriel’s – whispered in Mary’s ear, the voices of calculation, fear and insight, of pride, caution and experience. If she was indeed a virgin, those voices would have been highly persuasive. But Mary accepted that it is what it is and that it is love that says so.
Where love tells me that ‘it is what it is’ – whatever Gabriel is asking me to do or to suffer – my prayer must be the same as Mary’s ‘Let it be’. How I need her to help me say it!
Ash Wednesday
Joel 2.1–2, 12–17 or Isaiah 58.1–12; 2 Corinthians 5.20b—6.10; Matthew 6.1–6, 16–21 or John 8.1–11
SAVED BY FIRE
The school of St Andrews, Turi, is spectacularly located in the highlands of Kenya’s Rift Valley. From its foundation in 1931 the school was run by ‘Pa’ and ‘Ma’ Lavers, legends to this day among many old Africa hands. For years the school provided education for British ‘missionary kids’. Today the school, while still Christian in its ethos, is both international and multi-cultural.
On the 29th of February 1944 a fire destroyed St Andrews. The Lavers immediately set about rebuilding the school. The symbol of St Andrew’s school today is the phoenix, a mythical bird calling to mind both a brutal event and a blessed hope, both the fire that burned the school down and the faith that ashes are not the end.
After