Electric Prayer

The Greek island of Mykonos is the home of opulent hedonism. If God made the elements (the island says) then it was so that we should enjoy them. And people do. On the other hand, if you join the passeggiata of beautiful people wandering through the town at 1a.m, you will notice an interesting thing: along with the bars and expensive shops there are many chapels open at the side of the streets, and people drop in to them and light candles.

Greece is, of course, Greek Orthodox. But on the way back from the beach one Sunday evening I passed a small building near the harbour. It was a Catholic church. Mass was in just over half an hour – too long a time to wait, too short a time to get back to the hotel and come out again. So I carried on walking.

On the other side of the harbour I changed my mind and came back.

The tiny church was packed and I was squeezed somewhere into the porch. The Mass was in a mixture of Greek and Italian. I can understand the liturgy in Italian but I can’t make the responses in it, and my Greek is pitiful, so I compromised by using Latin fairly quietly, adding to the overall volume of sound without confusing or irritating my neighbours.

(At the end of the Mass one of my neighbours congratulated me in Italian on choosing to make the responses in Latin. We switched to English, and he turned out to be a Bavarian with a suspiciously detailed knowledge of central London parishes. All very confusing to the geographical sense.)

As we shuffled down the already sardine-packed church to receive Communion and then shuffled back again to approximately our original places, I was reminded how insistent Christianity is about giving value and significance to matter.

The Pope, when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, speculated wistfully (I can’t at the moment track down the reference) about how much easier things would have been if Christianity had been a refined, spiritual religion on the Eastern model. Matter, though not evil in itself, would have been seen as an imperfection to be regretted and eventually transcended. We would have replaced all those undignified rituals – washing people’s feet, pushing through crowds to have a piece of bread stuck in our mouths – with more elevated symbolic representations. More elevated and less prone to embarrassing accidents, when one of the people whose feet are being washed can’t get his shoe back on or when the priest sprinkles the entire congregation with holy water and has to go through the rest of the Mass in sodden vestments.

But Christianity obstinately does not spiritualize. God made matter deliberately. It was not an accident or a mistake. God took on flesh and became embodied in matter. That was not a mistake either. When we are resurrected we will be resurrected not as disembodied spirits but as complete beings with real bodies. Bread, wine, salt, water, oil and ashes form indispensable parts of our spiritual lives.

And this is as it should be. It seems superficially attractive to “become more spiritual” as an antidote to the sins of the flesh – but only if you forget that the sins of the flesh are inherently self-limiting whereas the sins of the spirit are invisible and can grow without limit. Spiritualize still further and you end up with the dualistic world-view of the Manichees and the Cathars, who believed matter to be evil and the creation of an evil god and were led to perverse practices as a result.

So when a Mass that has being going at a reasonable pace grinds to a halt as too many people try to crowd into too small a space in order to receive Communion, don’t start wondering why we can’t have a single member of the congregation, up front, symbolically receiving the Host as a proxy for us all. Matter and its positioning in time and space is an essential part of the ritual, even when it is inconvenient, because matter is an essential part of our lives, even when it is inconvenient. It is not a mistake; it is not evil; it is not an illusion. It is good, and holy, and part of us; and it must always be respected, because God chose to make it.

This is cheating, in a way, since the Carmelite Church in Kensington Church Street is my parish church. My excuse is that it isn’t the parish church of most of my readers; and that it exemplifies yet another aspect of the theme of the Sign of Peace.

I was in the church one Sunday as Mass was just beginning, and I happened to be praying hard for someone I’d met once or twice there before. I hadn’t seen him for some time and so it was one of those rather complicated for-him-or-the-repose-of-his-soul prayers. Then I looked up and saw, walking up the aisle, a little stiffly, but walking all the way to his usual place in the front, the man himself.

I went up to the front row to keep him company. It was only when I got there that I became aware of the details of his appearance: long grizzled stubble, purple hair, and a short black pleated skirt over black tights.

This is a very good test of a congregation!

They passed the test brilliantly. No-one stared, and at the Sign of Peace they all shook his hand in the usual way (even the woman behind us who was wearing her Hermès scarf with the label showing: I still regret not telling her). He received Communion and was driven home again by his nephew. It was the last time that I saw him.

He used to worry that Our Lady would be angry with him if he forgot to bring her statue whenever he went into hospital but I’m sure she didn’t really mind. He wasted his life and he died mad. Pray for him.

Chiapas is the southernmost state of Mexico and the poorest. In the lowlands it is intolerably hot and humid, but at an altitude of 2000m, San Cristóbal de las Casas is cool and refreshing, wrapped (in September) in an almost perpetual mist. Many of the plants in the forest don’t even bother with putting roots into the earth: they simply stick themselves onto a convenient tree and absorb the mist and the dew.

Compared to Oaxaca the city looks poor and run-down. The buildings are lower, the streets narrower, and the beggars are persistent and importunate, lacking the dignity of their Zapotec counterparts. In nearby villages the churches have been taken over by strange syncretisms combining Maya beliefs (apparently without the blood-letting), Christian personalities and elements of African divinities. The ex-churches are full of greenery and the chapels of the Apostles are turned into shrines, with each saint’s statue converted into an idol before which offerings are placed. It demonstrates the indiscriminate self-abasement before the numinous that must have covered the whole of Europe before Christianity arrived to liberate us; and incidentally provides good business to the guides who lead tourists round the villages and devote some of the proceeds to alleviating the squalid conditions of the inhabitants.

At Sunday evening Mass in the cathedral, the floor was strewn with pine fronds. I don’t know whether this was to make people feel more at home if they were used to the green pagan temples of the villages, or simply a practical local substitute for a carpet.

I have commented on the Sign of Peace before. Here is a counter-example to what happened in Paris. Next to me, but crowded as far away from the central aisle as possible, were an Indian family. They were very shy and reserved. I looked at them; they looked diffidently at me. I moved over and gently offered my hand to the nearest one.

All the shyness disappeared and they all wanted to shake hands with me. Every one of them, in that row, and the next row, and the row after that. I had to shake them all, young and old, two rows forward and two rows back. There was such joy in their faces.

The Hôtel des Invalides is one of the great achievements of the age of Louis XIV, both as a building as an institution. Housing old soldiers and an army museum, it is an expression in stone of the glory of French national pride, impartially embracing kings, republics, empires – for all are French and therefore worthy of honour.

My sister (a military historian) wanted to see the museum; my mother and I wanted to go to Mass; and I had a suit. Accordingly we turned up at the Invalides on Sunday morning: we might be civilians and we might not be French but we were, after all, Catholics.

The back three rows of the church were a solid mass of scarlet uniforms of straight-backed officer cadets. We went further forward, where it was pretty empty. The Mass began: it was unmemorable until the sign of peace.

When the sign of peace first came in I waged a long campaign against it – I was 16 and willing to fight any trendiness my elders sought to impose. I called it “the most divisive innovation ever made” (or some such resounding phrase). This is true to some extent, since you never know, if you’re a stranger, what the local community expects you to do and who you are expected to do it with… but naturally one mellows with age, and so when the sign of peace came at the Invalides I turned round and offered my hand to the lady in the row behind me.

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