Coming in the Clouds

'Send not, send not, the rich empty away.'

Charles Williams, The Prayers of the Pope

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In his book The Eleventh Hour (2002) the Traditionalist scholar Martin Lings (1909-2005) claims that the nearer we get to the end of the Kali Yuga the more the light of the Golden Age to come will inevitably shine into the darkness of our times. It would be fruitful, I feel, to focus as much of our attention as we can on this aspect of eschatology - less, perhaps, on the Sturm und Drang of a dissolute world in collapse and more on the 'Eighth Day' and the holy light of the Heavenly Jerusalem, which is even now, here and there, starting to make itself manifest.

Here is a related thought. What if the return of Christ at the end of the age 'coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory' (Matt 24:30) is not something which happens all at once, as we commonly suppose, but bit by bit, a little like a light with a dimmer switch? The eschatological Christ, in this case, may already be here, but at the moment very few can see him. It is too dark. But the more people start to perceive him - those compelled into vision by the force of their longing - those rich in sorrow, loss, yearning, and the pain of living in a world shorn of Divinity - the brighter He becomes and the brighter we all become until every person, place and thing is transfigured in His light.

I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last ... He which testified these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Even so, come, Lord Jesus. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen. (Rev 22: 13, 19-21)

The Woman Clothed With The Sun

On this day in 1996, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception transferred from Sunday 8th December to Monday 9th, I attended Mass at the Oratorian church in Manchester - The Holy Name on Oxford Road as it then was.

The music was Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli and the priest giving the sermon was Fr. David Clemens. 'An ancient philosopher,' he said at one point, speaking of Our Lady's Heavenly beauty, 'once wrote that we become that which we contemplate.' Struck by the profundity of Fr. Clemens' thought, I popped down to Manchester Central Library the next day and found out that the philosopher was Plotinus.

It was an epiphany which I wasted in many ways, but I'll never forget it - the clear sense I had as he spoke of the continuity and relationship between classical thought and the Christian revelation. C.S. Lewis does something similar at the end of The Last Battle with Professor Kirke's references to Platonism.

What moved me most about the sermon was that it wasn't motivated by an abstraction but by beauty, by 'the woman clothed with the sun', who shines with the light of Heaven and whose love for us is at the same time deeply human and personal. Maternal, in a word.

'A terrible beauty is born,' wrote W.B. Yeats in Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen, and sometimes we can't handle that beauty and we hide from it and turn away from it. I certainly did. But that doesn't matter. What counts is that it exists. That it's there. That She's there. That He's there. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow.