a lawless bloggle

If we may turn for a moment away from this awesome scene, or rather into it to comment on some items:

The wind blows where it wants, and it cannot be controlled by any human ingenuity. Not only are they wasting their time, those who would control the windy spirit, but they may find that this wind can also be dangerous. A storm of wind can wreak destruction; a tightly channeled wind can blow you away.

The flames separated. They did not reach a critical mass to generate destructive heat. They went, one to each person as sign of the anointing and the commissioning of each and every ONE.

The community of those who follow the Way of Jesus is not strong by force of numbers. It does not need to reach critical mass to influence ‘the world’. This flame catches only one-to-one.

What ‘comfort’. What is ‘comfort’? The Latin means not ‘warm cuddly comfort’ but super strengthening: con-fortare. Children have comforters; they are used like pacifiers - dummies. When Jesus said, “I will be with you”, and “I will send the Holy Spirit to comfort you” he did not mean he was lending his teddy bear. “To strengthen you, so that you will be my witnesses to the ends of the earth.” Carry the flame of the spirit in yourself and it will catch onto those you meet. Only, you have to be brave enough to give the witness, to think and act and speak out what you know of the way to live, the Jesus way. No good keeping your light under wraps.

Suspended as in a magnetic field between the fateful polarities of Gnosticism, Pelagianism and Jansenism...

I used to love the Sequence Veni Sancte Spiritus  in the mass of Pentecost. The Sequences are the poems that on a few occasions in the great liturgical celebrations are sung to accompany the  procession leading up to the proclamation of the gospel. The Veni Sancte Spiritus has been called the greatest of them. It is, of course, mediaeval and utterly gothic in its simplicity, in the rude abruptness of its form, and in the glowing beauty of its light. I thought I might try to give it a fresh translation, but should it be rendered in soft warm easy-flowing language, or with chiselled phrases in open-ended free verse? It depends on what you make of the Holy Spirit as the ‘comforter’.

Take this central stanza, for example:

The 17th century translation smells strongly  of Jansenism, and yet it seems to be true to the Latin words:

I was on the point of consigning the whole thing to the dusty mediaeval storeroom when this question came into my head: Through what coloured glass am I looking at these words?

Did the author (probably Stephen Langdon,  Archbishop of Canterbury, d. 1228) think in the pessimistic terms of that later Jansenistic translation or did he have a positive and optimistic faith? If the latter, why so bleak: ‘nihil est in homine, nihil est innoxium’ -‘there is nothing in man, nothing that is harmless’?  

‘Sine tuo numine’ - without your nod of approval - apart from your will.   Is this about the imprint of God on human nature in the Incarnation, as the translation would have it, or about the seal of approval given by the Spirit to our being what we are. Do we need to be approved by God for being as we are made?

What is this nod, this seal of approval? A seal of authenticity? A seal of official approbation? Is there a seal of love? I have CathyT to thank for reminding me of the wonderful verse in the 'Song of Songs':

At this point I thought to address this little verse to my loving and much loved wife: Darling, I declared (silently), you know, without the approval of your love there is nothing of any worth in me; everything is shonky - expression of my silly vanity or selfish ambition.

It doesn’t work so well on paper, but perhaps anyone who has a loving partner will recognise my thought: that all the value of every bit of my life comes from this relationship. Her love is the seal stamped on all my doings, and it gives worth even to the insignificant items, even to the attempts that fail, even to the quirky things, even - oddly - to the mistakes.

'Nihil est innoxium'. Nothing can harmless be. I wonder what the mystic had in mind. It is almost as if he imagined contamination spreading to anyone who touched a diseased person or a corpse. But in the language of love the phrase takes on a different tone: without the seal of your love every movement of desire in me is towards my self. We are not thinking of humanity blighted either by endemic disease or by the fundamental corruption of original sin. We are in the longing of the heart, the great motivator. With your love I can do anything; without your love I am nothing.

If this harsh verse could be a song of love, then perhaps the whole poem has this life in it, for it is a mystical song,  not a social welfare charter. In my translation I want to keep something of the abruptness of the gothic Latin and discover again the intimacy of the language of love. This is not so easy when we don’t find in the images the emotional, the personal, the softness that we are more used to. Leonard Cohen’s ‘Dance me to the end of love’ came to mind and remained a refrain throughout this exercise. It has been called the perfect love poem, and yet it too is gothic in its starkness and in the way it keeps an empty space inside.

I found the Sequence on this website: www.preces-latinae.org/thesaurus/Hymni/VSS-2.html, and I borrow their short presentation:

Veni, Sancte Spiritus, known as the Golden Sequence, is the sequence for the Mass for Pentecost. It is commonly regarded as one of the greatest masterpieces of sacred Latin poetry ever written. Its beauty and depth have been praised by many. The hymn has been attributed to three different authors, King Robert II the Pious of France (970-1031), Pope Innocent III (1161-1216), and Stephen Langton (d 1228), Archbishop of Canterbury, of which the last is most likely the author.