The gospel lesson for next Sunday (Matthew 10:24-39) seems
unpleasant and uncompromising to me, and I decided a week ago that I’m simply not
up to it… The more so, having just read
a newly published account of the life of Héloïse,[1]
who was briefly mentioned in our discussions last Friday. Héloïse of Argenteuil was the wife
of Peter Abélard. They lived in France in the high Middle
Ages. Both of them had brilliant minds
as philosophers and theologians. Abélard was a young and popular teacher
at the great cathedral school of Paris. Héloïse
was one of his many rapt students. She could
attend his lectures only by disguising herself as a man.
Predictably they fell in love. A love affair between teacher and student is
a fraught enough situation in our day… but in the medieval world ruled by a
church hierarchy of powerful men for whom the role of women was devout subordination
and submission, such a thing was perilous indeed. The glories of gothic architecture and the
plainsong liturgy, the great monasteries with their storehouses of learning,
all existed alongside a culture of poverty, brutality, disease and superstition,
seasoned with arrogant hypocrisy from those who possessed the wealth and the
power. There isn’t time to tell the
story of Héloïse
and Abélard,
except to say that it was a life of tragic enforced separation and much
suffering. Héloïse had a son, Astrolabe, who
was taken from her and whom she met again only in his adult life. She found some security and peace eventually
as abbess of a small community of nuns. Héloïse
and Abélard
died far apart from each other, separated by a church of terrifying authority
and cruelty – all deemed to be to the glory of God.
It is worth noting, I think, that the kind of prayer we are
pursuing – Christian Meditation, a form of contemplative life and prayer, in
which our only issues are simplicity, silence and stillness, waiting and
attending – has never been cordially encouraged, or for that matter understood,
by any church emphasizing order and conformity, and control of the ways people
believe and behave. So it is no accident
that it is in our day, when the fallibility of the church, its actual frailty
and sinfulness, become plain for the world to see, that there is a resurgence
of this ancient mode of prayer.
Yes, the lovers Héloïse and Abélard
were way out of order. Yet they
reflected God’s love and the compassion of Christ more surely than their
accusers ever managed. When she was
dying, Héloïse
wrote what she called her Confession of
Faith, and it says:
I, despite life’s trials, have found faith in a God who embodies Love;
a God who also aspires for us to love and to apply that love with truthfulness
and good intent…
That love is what forms and sustains our prayer, and for
many of us is the only way our hearts can believe and belong to God.
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