Bel and Yahweh

Given that the Office works on a three-year lectionary cycle, I must surely have read the Book of Bel & the Dragon publicly at Morning Prayer before, but I really can’t remember doing so. In fact I am so shamefully unfamiliar with it I couldn’t even recall what happens. You can see why it’s confined to the Apocrypha: having already been vindicated in his worship of the God of Israel, the prophet Daniel, in Babylon along with the other Jewish exiles, is rather illogically tested again by being called on to do obeisance first to a brazen image and then a hideous beast. At least the text attaches this story, or two stories, to a different Babylonian king, Cyrus rather than Artaxerxes, but it has Daniel being cast into the lions’ den for a second time. This time, not only does the Lord shut the lions’ mouths, but rather charmingly the prophet Habbakuk is magically transported to Babylon with a bowl of stew so Daniel won’t go hungry. Angela Carter once defined a fairy story as ‘one in which a king can call on another king and ask to borrow a cup of sugar’, and Bel & the Dragon clearly falls into the same category, dare I say it.

It's the brazen image which interested me. Every day twelve bushels of flour, forty sheep and fifty gallons of wine are sacrificed to this thing, Bel, and King Cyrus adduces its daily disappearance as evidence that Bel is indeed a god. Daniel naturally scoffs, and persuades Cyrus to test the divinity of Bel by scattering ash around his sanctuary and sealing his temple after the daily sacrifice. Lo and behold, when the door is reopened, the offerings have vanished, but there in the ash are the tell-tale footprints of the priests of Bel and their families who have sneaked in through a secret trapdoor to snaffle the lot. Enraged, Cyrus has them all slaughtered and the temple pulled down forthwith.

Enraged; and one might imagine humiliated, as Cyrus the Mede would have had to have been prenaturally unobservant not to realise this was happening at the Temple of Bel given something similar took place at every other temple in the ancient world, even at the Temple in Jerusalem where it was quite explicit that, apart from the portion of offerings that were burned to a crisp ‘as an odour pleasing to the Lord’, the priests ate the sacrifices. It was standard practice. In this story the great conqueror of much of the ancient world is shown up as the equivalent of a grown-up who still thinks Santa consumes the brandy and mince pie left out on Christmas Eve. Yes, all across the ancient Levant gods were ‘woken up’ in the morning and put to sleep at night in the persons of their statues, but while everyone felt there was some sense in which the deity was connected with their cult image, nobody really thought it was them. Does this tale, then, show that the Jews really thought the pagans did?

My mind goes back to a parallel we talked about some years ago – the non-existent scandal of the mechanical statues of medieval cults mocked and vilified by the 16^th-century Reformers who had never actually seen them move or knew how they had functioned in their contexts. They felt comfortable ridiculing the credulous believers of the past precisely because they were far enough in the past to do so. The writers of these Biblical texts were also sufficiently distant from the worship patterns they described to be able to tell such mocking stories. Nobody was going to say them nay.

But there was some point to it all. The other night I led a discussion about the Exodus story for a group of folk from other parishes on a diocesan course, and we touched on the ways in which the worship of the God of Israel differed from that of pagan deities, and what it meant for the Hebrews to be in relationship with him. I decided not to stray into the hazardous area that had occurred to me when I was preparing that in some ways the whole narrative reads uncomfortably. You can caricature the Lord’s declaration to Israel as ‘You are in a relationship with me; you have entered voluntarily into this relationship; and if you try to leave it, I will hurt you’. Once upon a time this kind of thing might not have raised any concern at all but nowadays we know what to call it. It occurs to me that the Church has to do some work to say why this image of God as an abusive partner is not in fact accurate.

The nature of the pagan gods is I think part of the answer. After all, they are not real. When the ancient Hebrews neglect YHWH and put up images of Baal and Ashtoreth they are not really exchanging like for like, one partner for another, even if that’s the language the scriptures couch it in. The pagan gods are the manufactures of human beings: they are projections of our longings, fears, and failings onto the world around us. A temple of Dagon is a shrine essentially to ourselves. Hence the urgency of God’s objections – when his people wander faithlessly away, they are going somewhere they will find nothing that will help them or improve them. They will find themselves bargaining with aspects of their own natures without knowing, and there is every likelihood that they will spiral downwards into the worst elements of who they are.

Paganism now is different. The pagans I know personally almost invariably regard their worship as a form of meditation and self-improvement, not dealing with deities who are actual personalities. But I wonder whether the danger is not still there. Bel is no more true now than he was when that text was written.

Steering Clear of the Rocks

The horrid oesophagal spasm which occasionally hits me very rarely starts up in the middle of the day, but that’s what happened as I was setting up for the midweek mass on the feast of blessed St Thomas Aquinas. The only way of stopping it is to swallow something. Water didn’t make any difference, so, avoiding Slimming World who were occupying the church hall, I shot into the kitchen and grabbed a tin of biscuits from the cupboard: eating one breached (my own interpretation of) the eucharistic fast, but the biscuit was horrible, so at least I suffered for it. The spasm was stilled and I was able to carry on.

That was physical pain; I took some emotional turbulence into the service as well. In the midst of my distractions, I reflected how wonderful it is to be carrying out this act that connects us to the eternal worship of the angels, and also that, whoever I may be estranged from in this earthly realm, those broken relationships will (in so far as they can, consonant with the eternal justice of God) be made whole. That’s all very well: it blunts the upset, or puts it into a wider context. At the very least, the words of redemption and praise take you to a different place if only temporarily. But the liturgy and the prayer it is part of doesn’t make the damage go away.

My Spiritual Director was told, as a young priest, ‘You will never get anywhere in the Church if you insist on being so personal in your sermons’. I talk about my own experiences and those of people I know all the time, so I disagree (not that I have ever wanted to ‘get anywhere’ in the Church); but a pastor’s congregation, I think, are caught in contradictory feelings about this. They want their minister to ‘seem human’, to have some sense that they too are subject to frailties and disappointments, but they don’t necessarily want to know in any detail what they are. Equally, the pastor may want to bring personal experience to bear to inject some reality into what they talk about, but it's a tactic fraught with hazard. Oversharing might not only head into areas that most people would rightly be reluctant to talk about, but might also be burdensome. You can think of circumstances (of illness or another misfortune) when a minister might need to be ‘held up’ by their people, but you don’t want them to become reluctant to share difficulties with you themselves out of concern for your own welfare.

The Feast of the Angelic Doctor afforded me limited opportunity to discuss my own difficulties anyway, and in the end I tend to veer away from deep emotional waters unless I have navigated them many times before and know how to talk about them in a way others may find helpful. Because ultimately the pastor's job is to serve, and only relieve your own burdens when it will definitely benefit your listeners to do so.

The Hidden Paths

When I moved into Swanvale Halt, I realised on exploring my surroundings that the footpath that ran up the hill between the fields and woods at the back of the Rectory and a 1990s estate was originally a road. Even today it has traces of the white lines down the middle. That has fascinated me ever since, even more so since realising that there are paths between the blocks of new houses, connecting the old road with the new; it's like a hidden landscape secreted inside the obvious, external one. Before the new streets were built, there were big houses here, some of them accommodation for the public school that used to own the area, and even tennis courts. I thought it might be a fun location for a Forest Church excursion, following the paths and reflecting on the way communities change, including the various people we used to know who lived in these cul-de-sacs and roads. Doing my recces I found a lone sequoia tree, and a curious double-trunked oak amid the yews and beeches. If God is to be found in the contemplation of landscape, the way landscapes, habits and memories alter affects our interaction with him as well. 

Today the wind blew and the rain fell, and only three of us braved the venture. I think I'll use this walk for a Forest Church later in the year, but I find myself reflecting that I often put material together that ends up not being used, and have to trust that in some way - divine providence, perhaps - it doesn't go to waste. It also struck me that that desire that the great lumber-box of things we have done and had to relinquish, whether creative efforts, loves and relationships, joys and sorrows, shouldn't go to waste either, has been perhaps more of a driving force in impelling me to investigate faith than I've realised. 

I joke that the great thing about the movies of The Lord of the Rings is that nobody has to read the books again, but I do like the walking rhyme Frodo sings near the end. I thought of it again as we traversed the secret paths on the hilltop.

Still round the corner there may wait
a new road or a secret gate
and though I oft have passed them by
the time will come at last when I 
shall take the hidden paths that run
west of the Moon, east of the Sun.

Offering

Fr Donald sat with me saying Evening Prayer. At the moment, the Common Worship Office book gives us the option of reciting words from the Epiphanytide hymn, 'O Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness'. It was written by John Monsell, the Tractarian priest who died after a fall while checking the building works at St Nicolas's church in Guildford, where he was incumbent, in 1875. At first he seemed to have suffered nothing more serious than a broken arm - no joke at 64, but not fatal - but it became clear that he'd undergone internal injuries which did end up carrying him out of this world. 'Fight the good fight' is another of his lyrics, a bit more foursquare Victorian than the Epiphany one; 'Truth in its beauty, and love in its tenderness/These are the offerings to lay at his shrine', the latter goes.

I find myself pondering the nature and worth of love, the core and heart of human life but sometimes so evanescent. Mr Monsell's hymn shows how it's useful to have some buttressing, some additional apparatus, to the Scriptures, to aid us as we navigate the sometimes cold waters of life, and the wisdom of Our Holy Mother the Church in putting the words of a Tractarian worthy into its daily meditations. A particular expression of love might last just a little time. But if it's real and sincere it's not wasted. What is the infant Christ going to do with the Magi's gifts, after all? It can be an offering, which God holds to his everlasting heart, and works with in ways we never know. We can hope.

Enquiring

Some years ago we devised a series of short videos to be used as the base material for what everyone tells you a church needs, a course of some kind for people who are new to the Christian faith or who want to ask questions about it. We didn't want to sign up to the mighty brand that is Alpha or use any of the others available. When we first did it, Marion the curate and Lillian the lay reader and I, one person took us up. The next attempt had no one at all. But this time we've garnered a feasible handful of souls. So last night they met in the church hall, I did the catering and set the video up, and Giselle the lay reader led the discussion. One person didn't show and there's a couple who couldn't attend but will come in other weeks. It must have been all right because the group, small as it was, kept talking for about 45 minutes.

What this placid picture doesn't reveal is the chaos after I managed to burn a jacket potato in the microwave. I intended using the kitchen oven anyway, but realised too late that I'd only turned its fan on and not the heat. I am not used to microwaves, as events revealed. I only cooked that last one because one of the previous batch had shrivelled to nothing and I wanted to be prepared in case our last attender did attend. At least we know the new fire alarms do work.  

Angry Gods

How did I get on the Little Watchman mailing list? I have no more idea than I have of who Little Watchman is. He sends me occasional emails with his short online sermons. The last one, which came into my inbox at just the right time he says ironically, is entitled ‘Is God Angry With You?’ The answer is very emphatically Yes, God is incandescently angry, and rightly. He’s told us what he wants of us, and we don’t do it. So, rage. But it’s all right, because Jesus (who Little Watchman insists on calling Yeshua) is the offering that makes God calm down. This is just how the writer puts it. Now, Substitutionary Atonement is no more than a standard, though to my thinking only partial, explanation of how the sacrifice of Christ changes our relationship with God, and there is a lot in Christianity that doesn’t quite make sense no matter how you describe it. But boil Substitutionary Atonement down this brutally, and what you end up isn’t a statement that includes the odd logical lacuna, but something that reads as so sick and insane you can understand why people go nowhere near a religion that promotes it.

Leaving aside most of the many questions or issues one could ask, how much sense does it make to think of God as angry? This is slightly separate from the Biblical language of the wrath of God, which strikes me as a description of a status rather than an emotion God might have: the estrangement the whole Creation, and most especially human beings, exists in as a result of the Fall, however one might characterise that event. A status in which all things find themselves, or, indeed, an experience humans, who are conscious of it as the mute creation is not, might have; but not something God feels. But anger is certainly ascribed to God in the Scriptures. Is it really anything like ours?

Our primary icon of what God is like is Jesus. He clearly experiences anger, just as he does sorrow, grief, joy, and even scorn. But because he is human, he experiences them in the way we do, with the exception that for him there is no admixture of sin in them; he is limited by time and space, so he goes through these feelings in sequence and not concurrently. Like us, he doesn’t seem to feel different things at once, even when his feelings are conflicted (as they are in Gethsemane). This is only what we would expect. But in his divine nature, God is interacting with the whole of creation, all the time, not just in the contemporary moment but eternally. This is nothing like the emotions we experience: it is so far from the emotions we experience that we ought be cautious about how we describe or think of it. The emotional life of God is perhaps as mysterious to us as the mechanics of the Trinity.

You might question why I am so keen to defuse this bomb of God being angry. I think it is probably because I draw my image of anger from the human anger I have experienced (and I don’t mean I have always been on the receiving end of it, either): contorted faces, shouting, raised hands. The suspicion is that the emotion is almost always tied up with that individual’s view of themselves and the effect their desires should have, and the physical effects of anger come from deep within our evolutionary history: they are designed to intimidate, to try to get our own way. Angry though he may have been from time to time, I can’t imagine Jesus in any of those states.

We might contrast anger with love. The Biblical imagery of God’s love – aside from the life of Christ – includes similes such as the sun shining and the rain falling. There are very human images, too, the mother with the child at her breast, the parent giving good gifts, and so on, but it’s clear that God’s love relates to those images metaphorically: it isn’t a complete parallel. The imagery of God’s anger should be taken the same way. To imagine God as an angry human, snarling and screaming because his will isn’t obeyed (rather than ‘a righteous judge, provoked all the day’ as Psalm 7 puts it) – even if that will is perfectly just and right – doesn’t help anyone.  

I see little sense in continuing with my unaccountable subscription to Little Watchman.

St Catherine at the British Library

I learned a variety of things from the 'Medieval Women' exhibition at the British Library yesterday. Among them was that there is a patron saint of ice skating (Lidwina of Schiedam), and what Margery Kempe thought the Devil smelled like (rather nicer than one might presume, as it turns out); that the last ruler of a Crusader state was a woman (Countess Lucia of Tripoli), that Margaret of Anjou had a pet lion, and that about a third of medieval medical practitioners were women (not all of them midwives). There were also two images of St Catherine: a small woodcut made by the sisters of the Bridgettine convent of Marienwater, and the terrible, charismatic painting on the Battel Retable, with its face scratched out like its sister of Maidstone. But there is more: like the other saints depicted on the Retable, she is surrounded by astrological graffiti, charms against witchcraft, and geometrical patterns whose significance remains obscure. She is a saint not merely maimed, but neutered, and recruited to some other cause.