Last week I was in a thunderstorm in Medina del Campo when I read about Pope Benedict’s offer to accommodate some Anglican practices of those who wanted to join the Roman Catholic Church. I don’t want now to go on about the substance of the affair. What still intrigues me is the cultural incomprehension I found.
One must remember that the Spanish language is not one in which a person takes responsibility for what happens. If I were to drop a plate and it broke, I would say, “I dropped it.” The Spaniard would say, “Se me calló,” which may be translated, “It fell from me.”
I think Cranmer also took the idea of Cardinal Quiñones’ breviary reform, cutting the eight offices to two and going through the whole psalter in numerical order, to write Morning and Evening Prayer.
The website of [url=http://www.anglicanos.org/]the Spanish Reformed Episcopal Church (Anglican)[/url] seems to show that at least in some parts of Spain there are anglophile Spaniards (which is why they’re Anglicans or the other way round?). As there are iberophile non-Iberians and hispanophile non-Hispanics, why not?
But those seem the exceptions that prove the rule.
This essay is absolutely bizarre and without purpose.
francis, it was copy which was apparently due on a deadline and so it does serve a purpose – filler. Beyond that it is bizarre and purposeless.
young fogey: there are lots of Anglophile Spaniards, especially amongst the aristocracy. The Duquesa d’Alba, for example, has a famous British pedigree, as does the King, a descendant of Queen Victoria.
Christopher Howse’s article probably reads better in an English context; many of the references are cultural. I thought it was interesting, and I learnt something about St John of the Cross and what happens when we draw close to God which has got me thinking. Maybe I haven’t got that close yet to experience that ‘aridity’.
Okay, Pageantmaster, you got me. I actually read it to the end, with its lame non-sequitur final paragraph.
What drew me in was the reference to St. John of the Cross. I have both The Collected Works in English and PoesÃa in Spanish, and have attempted to plow through them with little luck. I understand the aridity that St. John experienced, but I can’t make heads or tails out of what he says we should do about it. Have you read much of it?
None at all Brer – I haven’t read Dark Night of the Soul, it is probably somewhere on the internet. And yes it would be interesting to know what he is talking about by ‘aridity’ in Howse’s
[blockquote]how a Christian drawing close to God may experience an aridity and evaporation of all the consolations of the senses and the imagination. Nothing – nada – is what remains, apart from God’s gift of faith.[/blockquote]
I wonder if we are meant to do anything about it or whether it is just one of those things that just ‘is’. It does concern me slightly as sounding a bit like that state of disconnectedness from all outside sensation that Buddhists talk about.
We have plenty of learned people on this blog. Maybe one of them will step in?
St. John of the Cross’s experience sounds exactly like that of Mother Theresa of Calcutta, as emerged after her death.
The Dark Night of the Soul, or, in Spanish simply Noche Oscura, is a rather short prologue and poem, rather mysterious and quite multivalent: [blockquote] Songs of the soul that rejoices in having reached the high state of perfection, which is union with God, by the path of spiritual negation.
1. One dark night,
fired with love’s urgent longings
– ah, the sheer grace! –
I went out unseen,
my house being now all stilled.
2. In darkness, and secure,
by the secret ladder, disguised,
– ah, the sheer grace! –
in darkness and concealment,
my house being now all stilled.
3. On that glad night,
in secret, for no one saw me,
nor did I look at anything,
with no other light or guide
than the one that burned in my heart.
4. This guided me
more surely than the light of noon
to where he was awaiting me
– him I knew so well –
there in a place where no one appeared.
5. O guiding night!
O night more lovely than the dawn!
O night that has united
the Lover with his beloved,
transforming the beloved in her Lover.
6. Upon my flowering breast
which I kept wholly for him alone,
there he lay sleeping,
and I caressing him
there in a breeze from the fanning cedars.
7. When the breeze blew from the turret,
as I parted his hair,
it wounded my neck
with its gentle hand,
suspending all my senses.
8. I abandoned and forgot myself,
laying my face on my Beloved;
all things ceased; I went out from myself,
leaving my cares
forgotten among the lilies. [/blockquote] What is more of note than the poem itself is Fray John’s extensive essay explaining the poem as an allegory for spiritual growth. I have read the first 60 pages of John’s dense essay, which covers only the first line of the first verse, to wit, “One dark night,”…
I relate what he writes partly to my own experience, coming off the heights of a prolonged experience of feeling the very presence of God, to the depths of feeling a stark absence. Mother Theresa may have had such an experience, which lasted most of her life after her initial experiences as a nun.
Fray John tries to assign categories to these phases of spiritual growth, as guidance for those coming along behind them in religious orders. One of these days I’ll dig back into it and see if I can reap anything of benefit.
Thank you Brer, how very interesting if very wierd, and I see there is a lot on the internet, including the text of the treatise. Much of this seems to be about purgatory.
Wierd, yes… It’s as if Christianity has its own Kabbalah.