Rough Ideas

by Stephen Hough

  As the future of concerts becomes ever more uncertain, there is a new, pressing need to make a connection with the community as we seek to develop new audiences for the next generation. Promoters now often organise pre- or post-concert talks and orchestras have extensive outreach and education programmes, but all music-lovers need to become evangelists, convincing people that live concerts are a more thrilling experience than sitting alone, ears blocked with headphones.

  The individualism that flowed from the Reformation colours every aspect of modern life, but it has its limits. No musician is an island and G. K. Chesterton’s description of tradition as the ‘democracy of the dead’ is apt when we seek to bring to life works from the great canon of masterpieces. The individual or the community? Well, after we’ve tuned our instruments and the audience has settled in their seats we realise, with joy, that it is both.

  Crack!

  The Second Vatican Council called the Mass ‘the summit towards which the activity of the Church is directed; at the same time it is the font from which all her power flows’ (Sacrosanctum Concilium 1:10). For Catholics it is there around every corner of their lives: fifty punctuating rest-stops through the year’s Sundays, as well as baptisms, confirmations, funerals, marriages … and, for many people, that casual midweek Mass caught hastily between a business meeting and a half a sandwich. Libraries of volumes have been written about every aspect of its practice (its liturgy, its theology, its history, its music) over many centuries. It was one of the most hotly disputed topics for debate (and, it has to be said, torture and killing) during the Reformation period – and not just between Catholics and Protestants. Reformers fought bitterly among themselves regarding this issue.

  In the course of the centuries, every word, particularly of the ‘moment’ of consecration has been dissected within a jot and tittle of its life. ‘This is my Body’: yes, but at which exact point does the wafer of wheat and water become a spiritual nuclear bomb? If the priest died before saying the word ‘body’ (or said just the ‘b’ of that word), would the elemental change have taken place? Such points seem arcane in the extreme, unless you really do believe what the catechism tells you. Then they could be the most important words of Life heard during your brief life on earth.

  There is one detail among all the details – one grain of sand on the beach – that I’ve never seen discussed, except in passing (although I include it in my novel The Final Retreat, mused on by the fictional priest, Father Joseph); and it’s a point that seems to me of greater significance than a grain of sand – indeed, more like a cornerstone of the whole devotional building. I’ve been to thousands of Masses in my life so far, and something bothers me every time. At the absolute central point of importance, the moment of consecration, the priest tells us that Christ did something … but then we don’t do it.

  Here are all the versions of the moment in question in the Bible:

  While they were eating, Jesus took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to the disciples, and said, ‘Take, eat; this is my body.’ (Matthew 26:26)

  While they were eating, he took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to them, and said, ‘Take, eat; this is my body.’ (Mark 14:22)

  Then he took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ (Luke 22:19)

  For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ (1 Corinthians 11:23–4)

  Here is the same moment in the Tridentine Rite:

  Qui pridie quam pateretur, accepit panem in sanctas ac venerabiles manus suas, et elevatis oculis in cælum ad te Deum Patrem suum omnipotentem, tibi gratias agens, benedixit, fregit, deditque discipulis suis, dicens: Accipite, et manducate ex hoc omnes: Hoc est enim Corpus Meum. (Who, the day before he suffered, took bread into His Holy and venerable hands, and having lifted up His eyes to heaven, to Thee, God, His Almighty Father, giving thanks to Thee, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to His disciples, saying: Take and eat ye all of this: For this is my body.)

  He ‘broke the bread’, but we don’t – at least not at the same moment. In fact, the priest waits until the Agnus Dei to break the consecrated wafer, which is quite a while after the Consecration. Indeed it is after the Eucharistic Prayer, after the Lord’s Prayer, after the Sign of Peace – just before Communion. Yet it is quite clear from all the sources, scriptural and liturgical, that the piece of bread at the Last Supper was broken before the words were said.

  Does this matter? Let us go in imagination to the upper room and watch Christ as he performs this action. It is the Feast of Unleavened Bread in the Jewish calendar, the Passover. He is not holding a wafer and speaking words over it, into it: no, it is much more dramatic than that. In fact, it’s pure, brilliant, utterly compelling theatre. ‘This’ (breaking the unleavened, crisp bread) ‘is my body.’ It’s the action of breaking the bread, not the bread itself to which his words seem to apply. This is what will happen to my body: crack! He is acting out his self-giving sacrifice in a sort of mime.

  And it doesn’t end there. ‘This’ (pouring the red wine into the cup) ‘is my blood.’ This is what will happen to my blood. It will pour out from my hands and my feet, and especially from my side. I don’t think it is the fermented grape juice sitting at the bottom of the chalice that is so much the object of his ‘this’, but rather the action of pouring out blood-like wine, capable of staining Christ’s garments at supper as it will stain them when the lance pierces his side the following afternoon.

  He adds, ‘Do this in memory of me.’ Do what? Break, crack the bread. This is truly symbolism of a sacrifice more than of a meal. When we do this, says St Paul, we ‘proclaim his death’ (1 Corinthians 11:26). Ah, indeed. By cracking the wafer we literally show forth (act out) his death in the mime he left us, and thus we renew his sacrifice. Furthermore, when St Paul complains of the Corinthians indulging in a meal without ‘discerning the body’ (1 Corinthians 11:29), maybe he meant it literally. They were concentrating on the supper – on the eating of bread and drinking of wine – rather than on the breaking of bread and pouring out of wine. They had sidelined the significance of the dramatic re-enactment left to us by Christ – in his broken body, in his shed blood.

  I think this is not just a matter of semantics: it changes completely and significantly our approach to the Mass. First, it needn’t and shouldn’t affect our belief that something happens to the substance of bread and wine, but perhaps it makes such a transformation less of a magical act and more an integrated part of the liturgical experience. It makes tactile sense of the physical properties of the elements chosen by Christ for his unique act of remembrance. It also has an ecumenical dimension. It explores a profound symbolism, which would have intrigued Luther, Cranmer and Calvin. It moves away from specifying too absolutely when the change takes place, which might appeal to the Orthodox Churches who find Rome’s legalism a stumbling block. For Catholics, it renews the understanding of the Mass as a sacrifice, as well giving us an example of the supreme liturgist in action … Jesus Christ.

  There is one moment in Scripture I haven’t yet mentioned – the account of the journey to Emmaus after the Resurrection, related in chapter 24 of St Luke’s Gospel. It is a fitting note on which to finish because Christ’s conversation left the disciples in the dark, even though ‘their hearts burned within them’, and it wasn’t through eating or drinking that their eyes were opened. No, before the risen Christ disappeared from their sight, we are told that ‘they came to recognise him in the breaking of the bread’.

  The ghastly story of Lazarus

  During Lent we hear read at Mass the story of the raising of Lazarus from the dead by Christ. No need to relate it here; it’s easily accessible in chapter 11 of
St John’s Gospel.

  Thousands of books and articles and theses have been written on the four Gospels, their differences in style, of authorship, and of the ‘voice’ of Christ, which distinguishes the three Synoptics (seeing together) from St John (a different view). Not even a thousand words here, but two specific problems I have with the Lazarus story: first, I don’t think it could have happened; and, second, the way it’s told reveals a side of Jesus’s character that is deeply unpleasant and therefore, for me, unlikely to be authentic.

  Let’s take the second point first. Jesus is shown displaying private grief in public in the shortest verse (John 11:35) in the Bible: ‘Jesus wept.’ No problem with that. To see the human side of Jesus is something to be treasured. But looking more closely, it strikes a false and duplicitous chord. He weeps over his dead friend and then (knowing he will do it only moments later) he raises him to life again. The weeping has to be a pretence.

  He’s already played games with his disciples earlier in the chapter by suggesting that Lazarus is only asleep not dead and that he will go to wake him up. But then he snaps back to reality: ‘Lazarus is dead, and for your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe.’ This is strange; moody, petulant, theatrical. He lets him die so he can bring him to life, ‘so you may believe’. Then he pretends he’s mourning his dear friend, and then calls him out of the tomb. The whole episode shows a manipulative person playing cat and mouse with those who trust him implicitly – lying even, if not in words then in actions.

  Beyond this, the question remains: did Jesus raise a man from the dead called Lazarus? Internal evidence apart (and St John likes to show how careful he’s being with the ‘facts’ – we’re told that Bethany is less than two miles from Jerusalem, and given the detail of the stink of decay after four dead days in the tomb), this is the most prominent, public miracle recorded in the New Testament. It was witnessed by a large crowd and, according to the author, its effect was so powerful that it became one of the reasons the chief priests wanted to arrest Jesus. People were following Christ because they’d seen the spectacle of his raising Lazarus to new life. If this were true, it is completely inconceivable that the episode would not even be hinted at, never mind described, in the rest of the New Testament. Beyond all occurrences related from Christ’s birth to his death this miracle proved power and divinity. But it’s simply not mentioned elsewhere, only in this one place.

  The Gospels are fascinating documents creating a new literary form. They are not straight biographies. They do not attempt to give a chronological or exhaustive string of facts and details. They aim to convey a life-affirming message that excited their authors and is meant to excite us. And they were intended to be evidential documents proving points of supreme significance. If Lazarus were truly raised from the dead, Matthew, Mark and Luke (and Paul, whose epistles predate the Gospels) would have known about it and nothing on earth would have been able to stop them telling us about it.

  Assumptions about the Assumption

  One day on tour, with groans, stiff joints, and a sour stomach, I hauled myself out of bed to go to an early Mass, despite having a morning dress rehearsal followed by an afternoon concert. It was the Feast of the Assumption and my lethargic, bad mood was intensified by the priest who turned out to be one of those clerics immersed in the sort of Catholicism unquestioned until the 1960s. He spent a lot of the sermon quoting Pope Pius XII who, in 1950, defined the doctrine the Feast was commemorating. The Pontiff’s ominous declaration that those who wilfully refused to believe it were no longer in a state of grace (and thus on the way to Hell) did not lift my spirits, despite the early-morning sun streaming through the stained-glass windows.

  Believe it – what? The problem with this doctrine is that it is so nebulous and vague that one might wonder what sort of denial would actually be the cause of such a loss of grace. Pius declined to declare whether or not Mary died before she was assumed body and soul into Heaven; and no theologian has fully been able to define what the body means in post-earthly, eternal terms. It left me thinking that the defining of this dogma in 1950 was all about power – the power of the Papacy in a difficult moment of world history (the spread of communism, nuclear bombs, rebellious youth), demanding obedience, even if we were not told what we were meant to be obeying. We were asked to affirm the messenger rather than his message.

  Too often the Catholic Church has taken fluid devotional ideas and customs and tried to bake them into dogmas or doctrines. Limbo was one of these and it was eventually cast aside as indigestible; one wonders if purgatory (another loose and undefined idea almost but not quite found in Scripture) might not be far behind? The Orthodox Churches speak of Mary’s ‘dormition’, her going to sleep, and they wisely refrain from further comment. But pigeonholes are beloved in the Vatican, and if the birds remain quiet they are well fed and looked after.

  The writer Anne Rice wrote about leaving Christianity behind while holding on to Christ. That is a complex topic (and my attendance at early Mass indicates that I don’t yet share her conclusions), but there do seem to me to be some who have left Christ behind while holding on to Christianity.

  The three greatest fears

  There are three fears that most humans have and that Christ faced during his Passion: suffering, disgrace and death. Almost everything in our lives that causes distress or terror can be traced back to one of these three roots. Whether you regard the story of Christ’s death as a legend or as a true event, as irrelevant or as central to existence, its meaning involves an innocent man grasping these three nettles in ways that might help everyman to grasp them too.

  Why do these three things make us so afraid? I think it’s because they threaten to negate three vital and instinctive desires: the desire for joy and flourishing (suffering), the desire to be loved and accepted (disgrace) and the fundamental desire to live (death).

  Physical suffering is something we all understand, even if its distribution among the human race seems grossly unfair most of the time. From a twinge in the dentist’s chair to the most excruciating pains of torture it sounds a strident chord we instinctively long to silence. Mental suffering, ranging from overtiredness to the horror of a severe nervous breakdown, is much harder to understand. It is an invisible nettle, consciously painful but often with no visible wounds.

  From the time we are born we learn by imitation, reward and punishment. Our youth is shaped at home and at school by these techniques of control as we are formed into members of a family, a community, and much of our adulthood is spent trying to undo the negative aspects of this. We habitually do things in order to please, to be praised, flattered, honoured, approved … and the fear of being ridiculed or despised is probably behind every neurosis.

  And then it all ends with death. We understand somewhat the death of others, the bereavement of family and friends, but our own death? Me about to become ‘un-Me’? We can’t really take it in. Whether we believe that the end of life is the simple snuffing out of a candle, or the lighting up of a new house containing many mansions, the very idea of it is ungraspable, like mercury sliding across our palm.

  Good Friday: Christ undergoing suffering – flogged, punched in the face, struck over the head with a pole, crowned with brambles.

  Good Friday: Christ undergoing disgrace – mocked as so-called ‘King of the Jews’ when his own religious leaders were calling for his death; someone who claimed power to raise the dead and now hung naked and helpless on a cross.

  Good Friday: Christ undergoing death – even facing doubt in the presence, if not the existence, of God.

  If God can suffer, if God can be disgraced, if God can have a problem believing in God then maybe all of us have a chance, especially those who no longer feel able even to ask the questions. And if Good Friday is not the end of the story …

  Is he musical?

  If I may use this quaint euphemism, whispered in the late- Victorian years when even homophobia dare not speak its name, I actually did know I w
as ‘musical’ before I knew I was musical. From the age of four onwards I was deeply, vitally aware that I was attracted emotionally and romantically to boys rather than girls. Of course the explicitly sexual dimension of such an attraction came later, but I knew, when it did come, that it was a branch sprouting from the same root that in turn had grown from a seed at the oldest, deepest part of my being.

  It is strange looking back at those childhood years where memories are muddled like crumpled papers at the back of musty drawers. I had no traumatic experiences – no dead spiders – but I did share with most homosexual children growing up at that time (the mid-1960s) a strange instinct for survival that meant hiding, denying, pretending, and hoping that somehow it could be different. The delicate awakening of tenderness, before ‘homosexual’ was a word known or pronounced, had to be crushed in the panic of recognition – waking into a nightmare rather than out of one. It really was like pulling the flower out of the ground as it bloomed, the torn roots remaining deep in the soil.

  One of my greatest fears in early life was that I would be discovered to be gay – by friends, neighbours, teachers or relatives. It was a fear that grew as I grew, and as I felt the sting of playground jokes and savoured the stale, sour comments of grown-ups. It was holding on to a terrible secret: an insect captured inside a jam jar where the lid could come off at any moment. The default setting in society at that time was that in revelation one faced rejection. It is still the case in many parts of the world today. Silence is death; but speech is worse. Where most parents plan and wait impatiently for their children’s wedding day, for the same parents the revelation that a son or daughter is gay can mean an end to communication, a banning from the home, an erasing from the family. The gay child can find that he or she has lost two families: the parental home and the chance to form a future relationship protected and nurtured by society.