Nearly Beloved,


91 Questions About the Nature of Questions.

Last night at St Clement's Church the choir sang a diversity of music including, Poulenc's Four Motets entitled Tenebrae factae sunt – which might be loosely translated as “There was darkness”. These are difficult, modern, meditative pieces but they were beautifully and movingly sung by St Clement's Choir conducted and trained by Karol Jaworski.


The source of the Tenebrae is to be found in Mark 15:33 which describes Christ's crucifixion:

“And when the sixth hour was come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour.”

This service, its hymns, motets and varied readings, raised the most demanding questions of Christian belief. Is any question more demanding of our understanding than that posed in the second of the motets, Christ's cry from the cross:


“My God, why hast though forsaken me?'


Altogether the varied texts on the service sheet contained twelve questions ( I counted them). Karl had composed a setting of a “Traditional spiritual” which contained five of these questions, including “Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Were you there when the sun refused to shine? Were you there when they laid him in to tomb?


Surely a question is always a more powerful manifestation of an attempt to understand than an answer often is? An answer is just that, and it is often incomplete, possibly replete with misunderstanding and may be misunderstood by the listener. On the other hand any question has a great many answers. “Were you there...?” Physically? Emotionally? Imaginatively? In thought? Compassionately? At a distance? And if you were not there where were you and why not?


Questions are quite modern in many ways. In that series of nested, folk stories A Thousand Nights and One Night better known as the Arabian Nights written down in the 9th/14th centuries CE, a woman is celebrated as being especially knowledgeable, and indeed wise. This is proved by her answers to questions, but the questions and answers are all a matter of social consensus. The underlying idea is that there is only one correct answer to any one question.


When I showed this letter to my wife Josephine, she pointed out that I omitted mention of Abelard's Sic et Non (Yes and No.) written between 1115 to 1117 C.E. Abelard asked 158 questions about theological, biblical, ambiguities and said “The master key of knowledge is, indeed, a persistent and frequent questioning” Abelard set us off on the quest so that nowadays we ask questions about the answers and, even more important, questions about the questions, about the meaning of questions and how they influence the answers not to mention the further questions that flow from them.


The twelfth and last question which I identified on the Tenebrae service sheet is perhaps the most pertinent for us and it is the question of Christ to Martha (John 11:21-27).


“I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”


Peace, 


 Paul

Original written 11 April 2022.

Photo: Paul Munton.

The Prior's Door, Ely Cathedral.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
  Rosa Celeste :  Gustave Doré 's illustration for  Paradiso  Canto 31, where Dante and Beatrice gaze upon the highest Heaven, The Empyrean Introductory Notes for the Discussion Group for St Clement's at Andrew Day's residence on 23 rd February 2024 on the subject of AJ Ayer's statement that: “ If a mystic admits that the object of his vision is something which cannot be described, then he must also admit that he is bound to talk nonsense when he describes it. “ Contemplative Experience. I will use “contemplative” rather than “mystic” in honour of “Mystic Meg” a News of the World sub editor and later astrologer associated with predicting things about National Lottery winners (which I am told, were rarely accurate!) I am going to start with describing some tiny portions of the experiences of contemplatives and will then go on to deal with AJ Ayer's objections. I shall leave a few seconds before I identify each quotation to allow people to think a
Read more
Image
24. On War. Dearly Beloved, It is difficult for us to cope with a war in Europe so close to home, especially because it is a war within Christendom between Christian communities. Apart from the civil war in Herzegovina, there has been peace in Europe for 77 years. My father was 28 years old and my mother 22 when war broke out in 1939. My father was already in the Royal Navy and my mother joined the Auxillary Territoral Service. “The War” in my family continued in talk and discussion long after the fighting had actually stopped. It was the background to my childhood and was made more prominent when my mother organised her family to fly us out to Malta in 1953 where my father's ship lay in Sliema Creek. We lodged close by whilst he finished an extra year of service obligated by the Korean War. One my earliest memories is of looking down from a prop driven Vickers Viscount aircraft at the ships on the Mediterranean sea shining in the sun far below. That was the same Mediterrane
Read more