A matter of heavenly routine

The seventh sequence, the first act, the twelfth play of Dorothy Sayers’ magnificent The Man Born to Be King:

We are at the tomb. The mothers have come and gone. The frightened soldiers are fumbling for words among the Sanhedrin, desperate to explain what they do not understand. John and Peter have arrived in a breathless, leg-pumping, helter-skelter mess, and Peter has gone in.

Now there is only Mary Magdalene, weeping in the garden, and the angels, still guarding the tomb.

RAPHAEL: Gabriel, messenger of the Most High, is our joyful errand done?
GABRIEL: Nearly done, Raphael, son of consolation.
RAPHAEL: Did those women understand us? They were very much afraid.
GABRIEL: They understood more than the soldiers. And in time, they will understand everything.
RAPHAEL: Those disciples did not see us at all.
GABRIEL: John son of Zebedee needs no angel. For his heart is close to the life of the Blessed—
RAPHAEL: To whom be glory—
GABRIEL: And dominion for ever—
RAPHAEL: Amen.
GABRIEL: And the eyes of Peter are darkened with sin and shame. But to whim the All-Beautiful will speak—
RAPHAEL: Whose delight is in mercy—
GABRIEL: Amen.1

In her customary notes before the play, designed to give actors and directors a better understanding of their characters, Sayers says this about the angels:

In their conversation together they execute a reverent little antiphon every time their Lord is mentioned, and hail his appearance with the murmuring of the Holy Name; all this should be quite quiet and done as, so to speak, a matter of heavenly routine.2 [emphasis added]

As an appreciator of poetry and an enthusiast of Arthurian tales since childhood, I was ecstatic about Malcolm Guite’s recently-released Galahad and the Grail.

Through a series of depressing circumstances, I’ve still not finished the epic poem. But after drenching my consciousness in the majority of the book, I do believe that smaller bits, well-noticed, are better than skimming through enormous chunks. Quality over quantity, folks.3

If you’ve not dipped into Galahad and the Grail, do yourself a favor and look for it. Even some of my friends who tend to gravitate away from Arthurian stories have enjoyed it.

For one, the sheer rhythm of the poetry flows like water. Guite encourages his readers to speak the poem aloud, and even the poetically untrained find themselves slipping into the cadence with ease. There’s a pulse to the poem; a wild, living spirit, alternatively solemn, mischievous, or triumphant.

Then too, Guite is wonderfully intentional in his word choices. I once read someone analyzing the prose of Tolkien and identifying monosyllabic adjectives that soak the narrative of The Lord of the Rings:

Fair, fell, grim, high, hard, clear, cold, clean, long, swift, dark, great, deep, tall, grey, keen—they’re used so often and generously that they form a kind of “underlying chromatic rhythm.”4 The repetition itself becomes a kind of faithful harmony to the rest of the story.

Galahad and the Grail has its own set of repeated words (strikingly monosyllabic, just like The Lord of the Rings): Green, fair, woods, vale, land, holy, quest. And like Tolkien, Guite leverages these core words until they lend cohesion to the telling.

Yet I expected all that. I’d read enough of Guite’s other poetry—“The Singing Bowl” is one of my favorite poems of all time—to be familiar with how he strung words together.

What surprised (and delighted me) about Galahad and the Grail was simply how gospel-oriented it was.

Guite has spoken about seeking to “reclaim Christian symbolism” in his Arthurian tales. The title itself appeals to a larger story—the “grail” is none other than the wine cup used in the Last Supper.

As the knights journey on their quest, they come across chapels and crosses. Strangers speak to them of God and his Son. Age-old symbols—lions, a white hart—flicker through the trees. It all calls out to a Christian world.

The knights, very much apart of that world (however little they may understand of it), recognize the symbols. They put names to them.

And thus, they tell the gospel.

It wasn’t shoehorned into a single stanza “just in case” somebody unfamiliar with it read the book. It saturates the narrative—nearly every time Christ is mentioned, so is the gospel.

The spear that pierced Christ’s side—yes, Christ who came and bled, at the hands of wicked men, that you and I should be free.

The cup offered up—yes, offered up by Christ, who sealed a new covenant and calls us all to light and life.

The tellings are quick and to the point—but they are there. The characters live the story. They are not slow to recall it.

Share A Seat by the Fire

I’m reading a lovely little book by C.S. Lewis right now, Reflections on the Psalms. In the ninth chapter, “A Word About Praising,” he says:

Except where intolerably adverse circumstances interfere, praise almost seems to be inner health made audible…. I had not noticed either that just as men spontaneously praise whatever they value, so they spontaneously urge us to join them in praising it: “Isn’t she lovely? Wasn’t it glorious? Don’t you think that magnificent?” The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about.

I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation…. It is along these lines that I find it easiest to understand the Christian doctrine that “Heaven” is a state in which angels now, and men hereafter, are perpetually employed in praising God… To see what the doctrine really means, we must suppose ourselves to be in perfect love with God—drunk with, drowned with, dissolved by, that delight which, far from remaining pent up within ourselves as incommunicable, hence hardly tolerable, bliss, flows out from us incessantly again in effortless and perfect expression, our joy no more separable from the praise in which it liberates and utters itself than the brightness a mirror receives is separable from the brightness it sheds.5 [emphases added]

As unclear as Revelation is,6 it seems plain that the gospel will be told and retold throughout eternity. Not out of obligation, as a dreary “Sunday morning” duty multiplied across every waking moment. Nor out of ignorance—as if any of us could forget!

We will tell it out of love—out of pure and shining joy. The love of God, the humility of Christ, the triumph of heaven—our souls, snatched from destruction and granted life beyond our wildest dreams!

Don’t you love this story?

And, as Lewis says, what you love, you will praise. You will be seized with an intolerable itch to speak of it, to point it out, to tell the gospel, again and again.

Do you love God? I know I do not, not nearly as much as I should. We who are “wearied by the changes and chances of this life” so often forget, or grow tired, or find ourselves distracted.

This praising, then, this “matter of heavenly routine,” is a kindness to each other on earth. What will be natural there is dastardly hard here.

So let us live, with the knights, aware of the world we live in—a world flickering, pulsing, “charged with the grandeur of God.”7 And let us live, forever and ever, with the angels, so delighted with our God that the mere mention of his name calls forth praise.

1. Community: I attended a writing conference in the beautiful mountains of North Carolina last week, and it was wonderful. The conversations were enriching, encouraging, and deeply entertaining. (And while I can’t say much about it, one of my novels received some positive attention from a reputable publisher, which was exciting.)

2. Tea: After a week of staying with family, I am shocked at how many kinds of Christmas tea there are. The best was a black tea called Gingerbread Joy. (Also, kindly weigh in: Can you say something alliterates if both words have the same sound but not the same letter? Inquiring mind wish to know.)

3. Nature: Foxgloves are actually much prettier than their name suggests. And the Atlantic Ocean was beautifully blue-gray and full of birds, with waves nudging the rocky shore almost politely.

   

4. History: The Adams family, particularly Abigail Adams. I have a new appreciation for her and I’m looking for a good biography to read. If you have any recommendations, do let me know.