FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - STAKES AND GALLOWS

Rant Number 354 9 July 2009

Hearing a vicar say that he wants to see the heads of the thieves who have robbed his church on stakes outside is unusual. Yet, the Metro newspaper quoted a Kent priest, the Revd Jim Field, as declaring that much. After 20.000 pounds worth of lead was nicked from the church roof.

‘I know as a man of the cloth I should not be saying this, but that is what I think’, he allegedly averred. I admire him for his sincerity. Here is a brother cleric who is no hypocrite. Rara Avis indeed.

To be fair, that kind of bloodthirsty sentiment is not new. The German poet Heinrich Heine once expatiated on what would have made him happy. He did not wish for much. Waxing lyrical about it, he spoke of a little cottage in the country. With cows providing fresh milk. Bread. A pretty garden with flowers outside. That sort of thing. Lovely, modest and frugal. However, Heine added: ‘To make my happiness complete, really perfect, I would also like to see a few of my enemies hanging from gallows outside my window. I would never ask for more.’

Before expressing dismay at such views, I would beg you to pause and reflect. Do a little examination of your feelings. Introspect. Above all, be honest with yourself. Don’t say what you think you should be saying, what other people expect you to say. Instead, say what you really feel. As for myself. I seem to hear a little voice inside me: ‘Fr Frank, would you really mind seeing the bishops of London and Truro, plus a few other priests and the occasional layman, swinging gently from gallows outside your little hut? More than that, would you not actually enjoy the sight? Come on, be honest with yourself. Tell the truth!’

I also hear another wee voice: ‘Fr Frank, not only you would enjoy that, confess it. You might also like to be the hangman yourself. And to tighten the noose around your enemies’ necks so that the agony last a little longer...’

Enough! Lucifer’s voice is getting unduly garrulous. (Mind you, it would take me more than just a cottage to make me happy.) A Christian has to square any feelings of revenge with the Gospel. Here is Christ’s voice: do not requite evil for evil, love your enemy, turn the other cheek, forgive 70 times 7, and so on. Are Revd Jim, Revd Frank and all the clerical rabble deaf? The stock Catholic answer that the Lord’s words in the Sermon on the Mount are not commands but counsels will not wash. Nor will the sharper point that they refer not to grave physical injury but to personal insults. First, clergymen, ordained to the ministry of the altar, have a special obligation to be Christ-like. Second, personal insults are exactly what is harder to forgive. The whole history of duelling testifies to that. So, Christ’s burning words cannot be so easily evaded.

For centuries the Church drew a distinction between soul and body. ‘Do not fear those who destroy the body. Fear rather he who can destroy both body and soul in hell’, says the Lord. Thus, it was all right to consign heretics and criminals to the secular arm, the State authorities, for execution. God was going to look after the sinner’s soul, anyway. Nothing wrong with having the thieves’ heads on stakes, then – their souls might still make it into Heaven, Deo Volente. For the believer, the next world is what matters most, surely.

A respectable argument. That it has lost credibility in the contemporary world’s eyes constitutes our stupid world’s indictment. But Christ’s words apply to both this world and the next. Hence the dominical challenge will not go away.

It could get worse. ‘The good I want to do I fail to do. I do instead the evil I do not want to do’, St Paul writes in a letter to the Christians at Rome( Romans: 7,19.) Note how the Apostle does not speak of mere feelings. That is important. How a man you be responsible for his feelings? They come upon you often unbidden and unwanted. The sin lies in giving way, or assenting to them, when they are illicit. But St Paul talks of actions. A much tougher paradox. One familiar to another poet, the Latin Ovid. Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor. ‘I see the better ways, and I approve of them, but I follow the worse’. The plight of the person who knows what is right and assents to it, yet finds himself doing the opposite. A fatal weakness of the will. Well-known to old Aristotle. But the pagan Greek could offer no remedy, while St Paul, that great Jew, joyfully discovered, after much agonising, that the answer lies in mystical union with Christ. Trouble is, what if you are not a mystic?

In spiritual matters neat, pat solutions will not do. Forgiveness, real forgiveness, will always be a tremendous gauntlet. And not only for Christians. A Muslim friend once told to me how awed he was by Muhammad’s famous Taif episode, when the Prophet forgave his persecutors. ‘I doubt I’ll ever be able to live up to that’ he confessed. Maybe ‘forgive your enemies’ works like a Zen koan, a riddle. But not like an intellectual or mathematical one, like finding the solution to an equation. A Zen riddle has no logical, rational answer. It must be lived through, sweated through, suffered through. The solution can only be arrived at after months, years of the most arduous physical and spiritual training. Sometimes perhaps suddenly, in a fulgurating flash of intuition bestowed from on high. Then the answer will not be bookish. It will be a felt, lived one. It will become part of you. And it will endure.

What about those who cannot or will not forgive? I am thinking of a clergywoman whose relative was killed in the 7/7 London terrorist bombings four years ago. She resigned her post, because she found she was unable to forgive. Harrowing. But how could I condemn her? There, but for the grace of God, go I.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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