PAUL AND NEWMAN

Paul and Newman

Christian Joy

God’s praises rang out from Paul’s mouth amidst his pagan surroundings. Consider the seismic scene at Philippi. It was night. A prison. And in it were Paul and Silas. “About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them (Acts 16, 25). God’s praises were being sung in the dead of night in a malodorous cell in an idolatrous city, and for the first time. Singing God’s praises in the heart of the night in a prison cell? The fellow prisoners didn’t seem to mind; but weren’t the guards disturbed badly enough to thump the singing duo on the head? The greater wonder was that “suddenly there was an earthquake, so violent that the foundations of the prison were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone’s chains were unfastened (ibid. vs. 26). The primordial case of a duet bringing down the house!

The prison earthquake was but an echo of the original convulsion when the Son of God himself entered the earth in death and took possession of the heart of reality from within. Then the earth shook and the boulders were split and the tombs were unfastened to vomit their dead who walked abroad. Apart from being an echo, the Philippi convulsion signified the opening of a thousand prisons to release a million souls from bondage.

What a happy night! On the one hand, we see the old world of darkness and chaotic cacophony with its temples, altars and sacrificial repasts; and, on the other, in its very midst Paul drawing forth deep melodious (as against malodorous) tones from the harp of angels.

Blessed John Henry Newman always insisted that the Christian vocation was one of light and joy. “Gloom is no Christian temper; that repentance is not real which has no love in it; that self-chastisement is not acceptable which is not sweetened by faith and cheerfulness. We must live in sunshine, even when we sorrow; we must live in God’s presence; we must not shut ourselves up in our own hearts, even when we are reckoning up our past sins.” This last phrase recalls Newman’s other words: “We rise by self-abasement.” They indicate that his was no easy optimism, for Newman was alive to the bright and dark side of human nature. “Left to itself, human nature tends to death and utter apostasy from God, however plausible it may look externally.” These are sternly realistic words, and not those of a man who would glibly scatter words about light and joy as a child might fling tinsel for the excitement of the glitter.

From Blessed Newman and from St. Paul, both of whom had known the anguish of mind and heart, we learn to look upon Christian joy as the fruit of a harvest whose Spring has known the harrow of self-discipline. The basis of that joy is fear and reverence. Referring to Christ, Newman comments: “Christ says to all his servants, ‘Fear not’, when they fear, but till then, he says, on the contrary, very emphatically, ‘Fear’.” It is in juxtaposition with such a sentence that we must understand Newman’s words about “living in sunshine”, for the very life blood of Pauline optimism is reverent love and loving reverence.

Newman’s emphasis, be it noted, in the passages inspired by St. Paul, is predominantly the optimism born of Christianity, sourced and rooted in the Christian tradition that today’s Pope Benedict XVI insists on reminding the Western leaders of. They must resist the inroads of secularism, relativism and what Newman called the “bottomless liberalism of thought” that has reduced Christianity to a poor thing of dust and gloom. At its heart is a Noah’s ark of sadness, wherein we are all herded together, to press our faces against the window and view with passion the corruption, sometimes in the most unexpected of places. Blessed Newman would exclaim: “What a travesty is all this!” And how refreshing it is to turn to him and to hear from him again the echo of St. Paul: that there must be joy of reconcilement with God even in the tears shed for our sins. Despite “the encircling gloom, we can continue to sing “Lead kindly light” and look forward to “the morn (wherein) those angel faces smile, which I have loved long since, and lost while.”