he gaf them londes
and charged hem neuer to doo outragyousyte nor mordre
and alweyes to flee treason
Also by no meane to be cruel
but to gyue mercy vnto hym that asketh mercy vpon payn of forfeture of their worship and lordship of kyng Arthur for euermore
and alweyes to doo ladyes
damoysels
and gentylwymmen socour vpon payne of dethe
Also that no man take noo batails in a wrongful quarel for noo lawe ne for noo worldes goodes
Vnto this were all the knyghtes sworne of the table round both old and yong
And euery yere were they sworne at the hyghe feest of Pentecost.
Pentecost. Veni, Sancti Spiritus.
The great feast at Westminster. The king wears his crown, and the King's peace is upon the realm. Walked up to the enormous crypto-Anglican edifice for Evensong after lunch. Music compelling, as always.
Listening to the interesting homily at St. Pat's that morning, I had an odd thought. The rector was talking about his fright and shaking when he had to serve the Mass as a seminarian, culminating in being drafted at the last minute to hold the microphone for the Pope at Yankee Stadium. As he was telling the story, he mentioned as an aside that the Pope blessed the servers beforehand, and then returned to the main plot, in which all went well, and he felt an odd peacefulness during the entire service, which he attributed to the Holy Spirit.
I began to wonder at that point about the dialectical nature of the spirit descending. I'm reading an interesting summary of Hans Urs Von Balthazar's Theo-Dramatic texts, and it increasingly seems to me that he's using theatre as a sort of dialectic of the image, following the old tripos of logic (aesthetics); dialectic (theatre); rhetoric (logic?). The (very) old scholarly discourse confronted thoughts in their linguistic form, but the modern correlative of this is the image, and the form. Perhaps. At any rate, the notion of a dialectical, or theatrical, experience of grace came to my mind. We do things that cause Grace because the Holy Spirit is acting through us.
Start at the beginning. Usually, we think of the infusion of grace as a passive act, with the active portion limited to assent, to the fiat voluntas tua. But the only way that we see spirit, or geist is by the changes, by the historicity. It's not a substance, but a sequence of actions. So, under the scheme of passive infusion, we would just say that after the grace is received, as it were, certain actions are marked by having received grace in the past, which seems to miss the point of the Spirit actually being active in the present world.
If, rather, the Spirit is active with the individual act, then things get a bit more complex and rewarding. I can act according to the way that I think I should act, and I can act in the way I think I would act if God were prompting my actions, but we're talking about something different from these two scenarios. I am acting in a way that comports with my notions of right, which constitutes my openness to the Spirit. My action is then my own will, hoping for the good. That hopefully looking forward to the event turns my attention to the future act, and I have willed it without knowing what it was.
The standard line is that we intend the natural and foreseeable consequences of our actions. This means we have to imagine a world that follows. Essentially, I'm suggesting that the world that we imagine is a different sort of world, one in which we don't foresee the mechanically logical consequences of action, but we anticipate something else changing the situation, which is a justifiable claim, since such things have happened before. And--this is the important bit--the change in the nature of the world doesn't change my ability to will the subsequent act.
So, as Benedict blessed his server at Yankee Stadium, he might have willed to impart to them the peacefulness of a great spiritual leader, and also been open to the work of the Holy Spirit. As the spirit is action, not substance, it can only occur in what he did next. If I will to cede my volition to grace, I must act. But I do not claim the authorship of the act, as I choose to imagine the world after the act as being a different sort of thing, which would make the usual sort of willing an act impossible.
This is a long-winded walk around the thought, but what I'm reaching for is that Grace requires us to do things, but with a different relationship to the things that we do. We don't make the world in advance in accordance with the usual assumptions. We imagine the different sort of world, and will something within it.
Perhaps.