FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - The Secret of the Name

Rant Number 396 13 May 2010

‘What’s the secret, Father? I want to know! I must know!’ So spoke the little girl. A cutie called Daisy. A parishioner’s daughter. ‘The secret’ belonged to a story I had just told her. About the hidden, sacred name of ancient Rome. A secret known only to the high priest of the Roman religion. On pain of death, he could not reveal it, or the Eternal City would have fallen to her enemies.

To date, the secret of the name is still unknown. But there are theories. It is a name of power, as Rome was powerful. Paradoxically, that power has been known all along. It consists in a universal, beautiful truth. Like the best secrets, the stupendous, powerful Name is concealed under our very noses. In fact, we all know it. We see it, alive and kicking, in our daily lives. And it always works wonders. On Press TV, the other week, I had positive proof.

We were discussing family values on ‘The Link’ programme. Three panels, in Tehran, Beirut and London. A variety of voices. Emancipated, Westernised feminists side by side with traditional, hijab-wearing girls. A secularist guy behind me scoffed at religious norms. Geoff Dench, author of ‘What Women Want’, argued that it is time for public policy to put more emphasis on public life. A feisty lady disagreed. Marriage, she claimed, can be a trap for women. I ploughed my own, lonely furrow, appealing to commonsense, as well as Scripture – what else do you expect a poor priest to do, eh?

Tempers were getting a bit hot. A note of bitterness, even anger, was in the air. The family still turns people on, that was clear, but it also turns many off – it is a fact. ‘This debate is getting nowhere’ I mused. But then I thought of Rome’s secret name. I mean, its meaning just popped into my mind. ‘That’s it!’ ‘Eureka!’ The penny dropped.

It is like this. When I was a parish priest, it was my privilege to prepare couples for marriage. Very different sets of people. Kensington’s St Mary Abbots (David Cameron’s own parish church!) does not draw only the posh. And not all were young – I once married a couple in their 80’s. But, despite the variations in class, wealth, status, age and so on, all of them had something in common. Something you could see shining on their faces, like sunlight. It was there. It was palpable. It was real. And it made you feel good to see it.

Yes, it was Rome’s secret name, working its never-ending magic. That sacred, winged thing in action. Dig it? Be ready for the shock: here it goes.

In Latin, Rome’s name is spelt ROMA. Now spell it backwards. It becomes...AMOR. The Latin word for LOVE. That was, supposedly, Rome’s secret, mysterious, magic name. The secret of its power. And that was what I saw shining on the bright eyes, the tremulous lips, the faces of the couples who came to me to be married. It was LOVE!

So, towards the end of the programme, as people squabbled and disagreed, inspiration flooded over me. To mention that simple, special, all-powerful word - love. OK, maybe it is my imagination but... it did the trick. It was the magic word. And, as ever, love worked its magic all right. ‘Yes, yes it is love!’ a young woman in Beirut enthused. Other voices echoed her. Love, it is all about love, they twittered away. An orgy of consensus broke out. ‘It’s all about love’ the show host concluded. Where there was discord, there was now unity. Love had done it. The love which of course does not work only in traditional families but also in the lives of countless other people. Like single mums struggling heroically to bring up their children, stuck in a tower block or some ghastly estate. It is love. Like people who lay down their lives for their sick, the poor and the oppressed. Yep. It is love. Even in its distorted, irregular forms. Love. ‘The power that moves the sun and the other stars’, as Dante puts it at the end of the Paradiso.

The poet got it right. Love as the supreme cosmic force. Love as the glue that binds and connects together the mighty frame of the universe. Love as the emanation and manifestation of the power of God.

Why did God create the world? Asks the Sheikh al Akbar, Ibn Arabi, ‘the greatest sheikh’, the supreme Islamic mystic from Al-Andalus. He answers, somewhat arrogantly, in the person of the Deity: ‘I wanted to be known, therefore I created a world’. God desired to be known and therefore created humanity, Ibn Arabi is saying. I, who am of course much greater than Ibn Arabi, wish to go one better. ‘I desired to be loved, therefore I created human beings.’ A mystical utterance, to be sure. Not one rationalist theologians would approve of. Isn’t God self-sufficient? He lacks nothing and needs nothing. How can he want love? But that theology is too desiccated. The God of the philosophers and the God of humanity are different things. ‘God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob – not God of the philosophers’ Pascal said.

The New Testament pushes that mind-boggling paradox of divine love to the extreme. ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life’, St John says (3:16). The doctrine of the Incarnation conjoins the divine and the human in Jesus of Nazareth, a man of flesh and blood who walked the earth 2000 years ago, but whose life and power are not spent yet.

I know, the Incarnation is unacceptable, even offensive, to my Muslim friends. Sad but...here I stand, I can say no other.

The secret of the name. AMOR. Did I mislead Daisy? ‘It can’t be as easy as that’, some feel. Too simple. Perhaps. There are other hypotheses. Strictly speaking, the secret remains just that, a secret. Pliny says that Valerius Soranus, the Roman who dared disclose it to the uninitiated, was put to death. But maybe...maybe the secret is that the greatest, truest secret is also the simplest. One democratically shared into by all members of humanity. What we all need. What we all yearn for. That’s it! It’s got to be that. It must be LOVE.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli