17 July 2010

Home

I chose St Francis de Sales as my confirmation saint.  He was the Bishop of Geneva, and had won many Calvinists back to the "Old Faith" - so I thought it appropriate that I, a once-Calvinist, should ask for his patronage.

Bishops are busy men - and St Francis de Sales was no exception.  However, he found time to write.  And one book that he wrote has been enormously popular, amongst Protestants and Catholics alike.  It is called, in the usual English translation of the title, "Introduction to the Devout Life".  Unlike some books of spiritual reading, it is aimed at persons in all walks of life, not just those called to a religious vocation (monks, nuns, friars, and sisters).

I read it in the first year or two that I was a Catholic, but did not find it terribly helpful - too flowery, too ... well, too 'religious' perhaps :-)

Recently I decided to try it again and have had a very different experience.  Perhaps I have changed in the ten or fifteen years since then.

In particular, after the first introductory paragraphs, he leads the reader in ten meditations:
  1. ON OUR CREATION
  2. ON THE END FOR WHICH WE WERE CREATED
  3. ON THE BENEFITS OF GOD
  4. ON SIN
  5. ON DEATH
  6. ON JUDGMENT
  7. ON HELL
  8. ON HEAVEN
  9. BY WAY OF ELECTION AND CHOICE OF HEAVEN
  10. BY WAY OF ELECTION, AND CHOICE WHICH THE SOUL MAKES OF A DEVOUT LIFE
It may not be true to say that you get out of such helps what you put into them - nevertheless, reading alone will not do much for you.  You must meditate.

Yesterday I read, and meditated upon, number 8 - "On Heaven."  I confess that the thought of Heaven has never meant very much to me.  The presentations in de Sales's book, like so many attempts to talk about Heaven (including the ones in the Bible), are lovely enough - but, frankly, just not much more than the best of earth:
Consider a fair and clear night, and reflect how delightful it is to behold the sky bespangled with all that multitude and variety of stars; then join this beautiful sight with that of a fine day, so that the brightness of the sun may not prevent the clear view of the stars nor of the moon; and then say boldly that all this beauty put together is nothing when compared with the excellence of the great heavenly paradise.
That's from the book, and very lovely it is, and it is, no doubt, true that nothing earthly can compare with the "excellence of the great heavenly paradise."  Nothing, indeed, can compare - so the comparison, alas!, fails.

Home.

That is the word that came to me.  Home.

I'm afraid it falls flat as I write it.  At the time - and still when I think about it - I am moved with deep emotion.

The word 'home' has never seemed to mean a great deal to me.  No doubt I loved the home my parents made for me - but I do not recall any very serious homesickness when I left it, first for University, and then to get married.  I know that Susan's experience and feelings about home are very different from mine - she has told me so often.

And yet - the feeling of homesickness - the German word Sehnsucht for which, interestingly, Yapese has a word (taawreeng), but there is no adequate English translation - that feeling is what I think I am feeling.  It is surely what C. S. Lewis meant, misleadingly, I feel, by 'joy' in his spiritual autobiography "Surprised by Joy"  It is the inconsolable grief (I think I have the phrase from Lewis) of the lost child, longing to be home.

That will be Heaven - lost no longer.

2 comments:

Alice said...

Did you ever see a movie that tries to depict heaven? At best ridiculous and at worst depressing. ("You mean that's all?") But believe it or not, I saw a movie that found a way to do it successfully.

The movie is called "Queen of Hearts" and when the grandfather dies you see him walking up a hill and he's in his combat uniform from WW2 (men who have been in a war often see the experience as the center of their lives) and as he gets to the top he gets younger and younger, till he's a young boy--and there ahead of him is the home he grew up in, with his mother at the door holding open her arms to him. He begins to run to her...and that's all. Back to this world.

It worked because it used a powerful symbol and kept it simple and light.

John Thayer Jensen said...

One of the most wonderful treatments on the subject is Lewis's "The Great Divorce." There the images used are (1) the reality of everything in Heaven (by contrast with things of earth); (2) the love amongst all of them; and (3) with almost as powerful effect on me as that of 'home,' the idea of light