blog
de profundis II
Tuesday 9th February 2016 @ 5:29 pm
I was talking with a friend, only last week, about how twenty years ago I was chastised for using an Oscar Wilde story in a service of Christian worship … a parishioner had complained about the young things leading the service, and chief among the complaint, the ‘pièce de résistance,’ was that I had used a story by ‘a practicing homosexual’ as the sermon.
I accepted most of the complaints. But that one I threw back.
The following excerpt from De Profundis, is not what I read at that service years ago … but I will surely be reading it at services in the future.
Enjoy Oscar at his prison low / most humbled / authentic / honest and most beautiful best.
Read it a few times … there is depth here.
“Yet the whole life of Christ — so entirely may sorrow and beauty be made one in their meaning and manifestation — is really an idyll, though it ends with the veil of the temple being rent, and the darkness coming over the face of the earth, and the stone rolled to the door of the sepulchre.
One always thinks of him as a young bridegroom with his companions, as indeed he somewhere describes himself; as a shepherd straying through a valley with his sheep in search of green meadow or cool stream; as a singer trying to build out of the music the walls of the City of God; or as a lover for whose love the whole world was too small. His miracles seem to me to be as exquisite as the coming of spring, and quite as natural. I see no difficulty at all in believing that such was the charm of his personality that his mere presence could bring peace to souls in anguish, and that those who touched his garments or his hands forgot their pain; or that as he passed by on the highway of life people who had seen nothing of life’s mystery, saw it clearly, and others who had been deaf to every voice but that of pleasure heard for the first time the voice of love and found it as ‘musical as Apollo’s lute’; or that evil passions fled at his approach, and men whose dull unimaginative lives had been but a mode of death rose as it were from the grave when he called them; or that when he taught on the hillside the multitude forgot their hunger and thirst and the cares of this world, and that to his friends who listened to him as he sat at meat the coarse food seemed delicate, and the water had the taste of good wine, and the whole house became full of the odour and sweetness of nard.
Renan in his Vie de Jesus … says somewhere that Christ’s great achievement was that he made himself as much loved after his death as he had been during his lifetime. And certainly, if his place is among the poets, he is the leader of all the lovers. He saw that love was the first secret of the world for which the wise men had been looking, and that it was only through love that one could approach either the heart of the leper or the feet of God.”
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