What's in a Word?

Most days I go to visit my sister, these days, who is in extremis, as is her husband.  They give me good lessons in mortality and its implications. Since my wife and I are their only family living hereabouts, it is hard to go away at present, though I had hoped to be sailing the Anna M home by now. Anyway it is an important time of the year in the garden, and besides money is scarce, a common complaint these days, since it doesn't go nearly as far as it did ten years ago. However, later this year I will be eighty, I feel that my own time is short, and I am still hoping to be able to sail Anna M home this summer. 

Will we be there again?

    Whatever transpires, I shall keep up the monthly blog about the Gannetsway. I have plenty of memories to work from, and it should be an old man's joy and privilege to have the time to attend to them. I may remind you that the Gannetsway is my name for the geographic stage on which I have lived my life, conjoining the British, Irish and continental Atlantic coastal regions as the ground for a context, indeed an identity, that I hope you readers may find interesting. 

    Growing up, I used to spend the summer holidays fumbling around mainly its English, Breton and Irish parts, before the days of electronic aids to navigation,- we didn't even have a vhf radio. My father said that he did not want that buzzing racket in the boat. I think he also did not want what today we may call 'the Machine' aboard, though he would not have put it like that. This made for plenty of excitement denied to us lucky people who have GPS navigators and know exactly where we are, and it brought us closer to ancient heroes of my imagination like Saints Brendan, Patrick and Columba. Surely they are the very men to teach us to sail in the uncharted waters that we face today!

    It was part of the fun that wherever we were, we tried to get to Mass on Sunday,- it was another dimension to the joy of cruising, particularly in France. That was mainly on account of my mother, but my father, a lapsed Anglican agnostic, also did have a certain penchant for it, and even had the grace to say to me, 'if you're going to be a Christian, you may as well do it properly'! He had, after all, studied history and law at Cambridge; he rather wished he could bring himself to believe, but never quite made it; since he was happy to talk about this, it made for some interesting conversations in the cabin of a little sailing boat, usually in Rye Harbour, with a Channel crossing behind us, maybe with the sound of wind and rain outside, and the ebb-tide lapping on the planks. In those years quite soon 'after the war', submerged memories of it sometimes surfaced, which generally had little airing. I discovered that with a bit of help from  dutyfree booze and a congenial atmosphere, religion could be perhaps the most fascinating subject of conversation!

    I don't recall when I was introduced to the saying 'Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi' (the Law of Praying is the Law of Believing), but I started learning Latin and Ancient Greek around the age of eleven, and from my earliest years I was interested in the Liturgy. I loved serving at Mass, at the crack of dawn, answering some monk's Mass in Latin at Worth. However Latin was being withdrawn from the liturgy by the time I was a teenager, and at Downside I had a grandstand view of a great monastery tearing itself apart over such matters. 

    Since I have had over sixty years to ponder the matter, and while I am still by the grace of God compos mentis, I may as well set down my conclusions here and now. I have pretty firm ideas about it, and happily I think that I am more or less in tune with Pope Leo. In boyhood, I used to find it difficult to follow what was being said in church, at one remove through the missal, let alone to fully participate in it, and did not think it right that most people generally did not seem to bother,- many devout people were quite happy to say the rosary while the priest mumbled on incomprehensibly. I therefore became quite an enthusiast for the Novus Ordo, the New Rite, though I observed the distress it caused to some people whom I respected, including a cousin of my mother's who would drive for miles for a Latin Mass. Her sister just lapsed and didn't go to Mass at all. There was evidently a lot of work to be done!

    I brought my own family to live in the West of Ireland partly in order to live in a traditional Catholic community and to live out the drama here as old Ireland was dragged into modernity. How would a modern English-born Catholic fit in? Did the Catholic faith really constitute a viable basis for life together and how would it weather the coming storm? I am reminded of a sophisticated Pakistani emigré's account of visiting his Muslim grandparents in a traditional rural village. There was gulf of difference that could not be transcended. Fiona and I feel no such alienation, but curiously, there is nowadays a strange reversal,-  we find ourselves in a place more consistent with the older generation, as modern Ireland has lumbered into the desert of materialism. In church, we hear a lot about care for the marginalised and Nature, as all the Great and Good preach. When it comes down to the nitty-gritty of our own back-yard, such as the Aughinish alumina smelter here on the Shannon Estuary, money apparently rules over such considerations.

    Fiona, who has been a Presbyterian and an Anglican in her time, says it's getting difficult to see the difference in our Catholic church. This where the Lex orandi comes in. We can't claim to have done a great job bringing up our own family in the Faith. Is a part of the trouble in the way we attempt to express and celebrate it? The one daughter out of five who is a regular mass-goer drives her gang for miles to find a meaningful faith community. Every priest has to try to bring his community with him, and it's not my intention to try to lay down the law, but here is what I think about it,- hanging on to the exclusive use of Latin in the liturgy, partly in reaction to Protestantism, eventually led to a reaction that went too far in the opposite direction, and now is the time to restore balance.

    There aren't many of us left who grew up with the old Latin Mass, and what's more I had to study Ancient Greek and Latin from the age of about eleven. It was the last gasp of the old genuinely liberal idea of education, which involved getting a grip of the fundamentals of our civilisation, giving us the tools to tackle any problem in a rational and disinterested manner. Surely it is no coincidence that the idea of sticking to principles of truth and justice went out of the window along with the study of Latin, and no wonder that savvy people tend to think that in fact self-interest and power rule, though one likes to dress them up with one grand idea or another! 

    Does the Mass really point to an alternative? Perhaps, without trying to merely go back pre Vatican II, it may be helpful to recover some Latin for the landmark bits that are repeated with every Mass, which everyone can get to understand. We begin by confessing our sins, though now the very idea of guilt and sin is eschewed. You should not be made to feel guilty, says modernity. Cut out that waffle and try saying the Confitior Deo.... Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. You will even feel better in the end!

    Then I like the bit of Greek to remind us of the other ancient language in our heritage,- Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison. I retain the notion that ancient Greece was the power house where the basic questions of life were first posed and our most fundamental concepts emerged. Then the Romans came along, listened, and eventually knocked a practical and universally applicable response into shape, for which they had to draft in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The result was the Roman Catholic Church, with the primacy of Latin.

    If it is lost entirely, an awful lot more will go with it. To my mind Gloria in Excelsis Deo sounds a whole lot more glorious than the English version, especially when it is sung in Gregorian chant, and how sadly lacking in Glory modern life tends to be! Much the same goes for Credo in unum Deum.... 'I believe' in English generally translates as 'I'm not altogether sure, but I do rather think....' Credo is much stronger. The very idea of seriously believing anything was pretty much outlawed by the time I was at Cambridge. The 'Unum' nowadays is conveniently dropped from our English version. One God presumably entails one Church,-  maybe it is dropped out of deference to all the folks who see fit to go off and found their own 'church'. Anyway it sounds horribly exclusive to contemporary ears. In our church we are lucky if the priest says the Creed at all, even on Sunday when Canon Law demands it. It was carefully figured out long ago, and is the intellectual framework of the Faith. No wonder so many Catholics have such hazy ideas about what they believe, and King Charles likes to call himself 'Defender of faith' rather than 'Defender of the Faith'. What a  difference one little word makes!

    Holy Moses, does the English word 'holy' really carry the same punch as Sanctus? Dominus vobiscum, the priest was always saying, and we replied Et cum spiritum tuum. In the New Rite we just say 'And with you.' Really, even if we may well be addressing nothing but a bundle of vanities? Sorry, it's only for the real, essential, dare I say, the supernatural you, your spirit, that I invoke God's blessing. Is this distinction between the natural and the supernatural dualism? No, we believe in one God, one Truth, one consistent Reality, but the glory which is waiting for us remains as yet unrevealed, in the words of St Paul, and meanwhile creation can but retain the hope of being freed, like us, from its slavery to decadence. The supernatural is what it says it is,- not the unnatural! Is that what we have lost, the sense of the Supernatural- the mysterium fidei, which our old Celtic forebears had in abundance?

    The climax of it all is the Consecration. One can have a better shot at the mystery with the Latin version of Jesus' words,- 'Hoc est enim corpus meum', rather than 'this is my body'. 'My body' is generally construed in English to be the merely physical machine that supports our life, a lump of flesh and bone. It may include the brain, but the mind? Can a surgeon looking at our brain see that? The Latin corpus is more capacious. "He is not the God of the dead but of the living," said Jesus, trying to explain what we are in His eyes. What is the essential me? A vibe, a pattern or field of energy? Real, modern science seems to have things to say about this. Our bodies are certainly a lot more than the mere matter, the atoms of our bodies, which are here today and gone tomorrow! We do not start merely from some blob of cells, as individuals or collectively. We are called by name.

    'In principio erat Verbum', we used to be reminded at the Last Gospel. It was but a gloss, yet it was a good one. Who now remembers these most profound words at the beginning of St John's Gospel? We start from an Idea in the mind of God. C.S.Lewis in his Narnia stories implies that God sings creation into being, and it may be helpful to think of God's Ideas as musical notes. The note of a bell at the consecration is another big miss. That Word/Note, sent into our hearts and out into the world with the Eucharist at every Mass, gives us the base note, to get our lives in tune with God. 

    Whatever, He comes to us across the water to rescue us in our fragile little boats, to where we may be freed from decadence, storms and disasters, once and for all, to be chatting and singing jollily with our friends, remembering old times with its struggles and its triumphs,- and not just remembering, but reliving! What more could an old man ask for?

Ite, missa est!