Love is that liquor sweet

Scholars make a link between the garden of Gethsemane and the first garden, Eden, but where Eden means something like “delight,” Gethsemane means “olive press”: the place where olives are picked and crushed to make oil.  The image of the press is apt, not only for the scenes that follow this one, but for the psychological trauma that happens here. Sometimes overlooked, the garden scene is one of the most intense and intimate of the whole saga. Before and after it, Jesus is calm and quiet, and seems to face his own death with sangfroid. Here, we see his mortal fear, sorrow, anguished prayer, and sweat like blood. This glimpse in the dark garden, half hidden from its only witnesses by trees and sleep, is something rare and wonderful. A dimension of the incarnation we would do well to remember, and a scene which our theologies of suffering must not forget. My favourite poem on the subject is, of course, Herbert's. Here are the second two stanzas of “The Agonie,” which mingles the imagery of the olive press with the wine press, and the scene in the garden with the supper in which blood becomes wine.

Who would know Sinne, let him repair
Unto mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
His skinne, his garments bloudie be.
Sinne is that presse and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruell food through ev’ry vein.

Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the crosse a pike
Did set again abroach; then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine.

The last hymn

Two of the four gospels record that at the conclusion of the last supper, Jesus and the disciples sang a hymn. I once heard a preacher say that, given the festival they were celebrating, the hymn was most likely Psalm 118. Reading it, I am always struck by its echoes. I'm sure Jesus would have been too, even if his followers knew not what they sang. Here's most of it:

⁵From my distress I called upon the LORD;
The LORD answered me and set me in a large place.
⁶The LORD is for me; I will not fear;
What can man do to me?

¹¹They surrounded me, yes, they surrounded me;
In the name of the LORD I will surely cut them off.
¹²They surrounded me like bees;
They were extinguished as a fire of thorns;
In the name of the LORD I will surely cut them off.
¹³You pushed me violently so that I was falling,
But the LORD helped me.
¹⁴The LORD is my strength and song,
And He has become my salvation.

¹⁷I will not die, but live,
And tell of the works of the LORD.
¹⁸The LORD has disciplined me severely,
But He has not given me over to death.

²⁰This is the gate of the LORD;
The righteous will enter through it.
²¹I shall give thanks to You, for You have answered me,
And You have become my salvation.
²²The stone which the builders rejected
Has become the chief corner stone.
²³This is the LORD'S doing;
It is marvelous in our eyes.
²⁴This is the day which the LORD has made;
Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

²⁷Bind the festival sacrifice with cords to the horns of the altar.

²⁹Give thanks to the LORD, for He is good;
For His lovingkindness is everlasting.

Mandatum novum do vobis

Today is “Maundy” Thursday. Maundy is a fifteenth-century English word that (probably) comes, via Old French, from the Latin “Mandatum” - commandment. Mandatum novum: a new commandment.  While celebrating the passover, Jesus gave his twelve followers what he called “a new commandment”: “Love one another. By this all men will know that you are my followers.”

Later that night, one of them betrayed him to the authorities that wanted him dead; all but one fled from him when the army turned up, and before the next dawn that one had three times denied that he ever knew him. With his new commandment, Jesus instituted a new order, a new way of being, and of being known. Within twenty-four hours he was dead, his followers scattered. Instead of love, lies, fear, and betrayal.  

But it was not the only new commandment he gave. Another, and much more contested, was that spoken over the unleavened passover bread he was tearing up to share with them: “Hoc est corpus meum.” This is my body. With this simple metaphor he writes himself into sacred history, past and future. He accepts the death that follows hard upon this feast, and founds with these frail men a new order in which love and death are one.

I have not been as others were

A gloomy Friday afternoon is drawing to a close, and somehow that rack of clouds mounting in the northwest made me think of Poe. I'm not that familiar with anything other than “The Raven” with its croaking refrain of “nevermore,” but I thought this poem “Alone,” with its diabolic cloud, was suitably dour and askew. It touches on the threads of this week's conversation, and touches a chord with anyone who never quite felt they fitted in.

From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were – I have not seen
As others saw – I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I lov’d, I loved alone.
Then – in my childhood – in the dawn
Of a most stormy life – was drawn
From ev’ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that ’round me roll’d
In its autumn tint of gold –
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass’d me flying by –
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.

Accidental poetry

Amid the usual trash and guff, this headline caught my eye today:

Slain father kind, brave.

The journalist's truncation here becomes poetry.  An epic note is sounded and an almost Sophoclean cadence falls. These four words are each rich; together they hold volumes. All the vowels are long, and the comma slows the pace still further to make the last word toll in a little silence. There is quasi-rhyme between the second and fourth words, and still stronger rhyme between the first and the fourth, giving the phrase a circular quality, a solemn echo, the sacredness of verse. The beginning and the end share a cognitive rhyme too: his bravery connects to his slaying in a way his kindness doesn't.  His kindness is an aspect of his fatherhood, as much in its suggestion of gentleness, as in its link to “kin,” and both are encircled by the more dramatic assertions of his courage and death. The absence of verbs makes the phrase more like direct speech, an address to a “bleeding piece of earth...ruins of the noblest man that ever lived in the tide of times.” Yet there is a narrative here. That he was kind makes his slaying the more tragic, makes him the weaker victim. That he was brave gives nobility, dignity to his death, redeems it from the anguish of simple loss and makes us think “here cracks a noble heart.” It's a headline, not an epitaph, but it has an unintended beauty. It both demands and creates a moment. It's a window in the quotidian through which light breaks.