Pentecostal Usury
"Olivet, Olivet! Where heaven robbed us
And stole our Christ, and sailed Him to the sky!"
His cloudy chariots snatched Him from us in a whirlwind of glory, and the Apostles were left, like Elisha, bereft—yet, like Elisha, they were to receive a mantle, and a double portion of glory.
As Christ "suspended" His glory during His lifetime, and suspended His "place of glory" before the Ascension, so, too, the glory of the Apostles is suspended. It is the shortest suspension of these: a mere ten days, compared to the forty days of the Ascension, the thirty-three years of Christ's life, or the many decades of Mary Magdalene's. Yet it is a suspension, and painful one, nonetheless, that wait until they would "receive power, the Holy Spirit coming upon" them (Acts 1:8).
In those ten days, when they were "packed and shuttered...in utter beggary, / Behind the thin doors of the Cenacle," perhaps, once again, with the "doors locked for fear of the Jews" (Jn 20:19), they were suspended. So many unbelievable things had occurred to them: could they really doubt a "coming of the Holy Spirit"? Surely the Master's word was true? Yet doubt finds a crack in even the most solid wall. They busied themselves with the Matthias' lot; perhaps they found other tasks to busy themselves with, as they waited for days unknown. (For Jesus gave them no date.)
But for each day of uncertainty, of struggle against doubt, of suspension, we might say that the glory due to them increased. By His promise, Jesus put Himself in debt to the Apostles, with the Holy Spirit being the awaited payment. Perhaps we could say that this debt accrued interest; if so, then the Apostles could well pray:
"Oh drown us in the compound fortunes of these ten days' usury,
Reproach our lamentation with these fiery tongues:
Pay all our ransoms with a flock of notes
New-minted in Your golden furnaces."
Can God really be said to owe us? Certainly, we can owe Him: so St. Anselm bases an argument for the Incarnation and Redemption upon our inability to pay Him our "debt of glory," and to make up any arrears1 And God sometimes wills to bind Himself in covenants, which He must fulfill, not because a greater power forces Him to, but because of His faithfulness and trustworthiness in what He Himself has freely promised. (The only bond that binds God is His own.) So perhaps we could see Jesus' statement as a binding promise, as a debt He must pay: if so, then perhaps we can permit the poet his image of divine usury.
Certainly we know God does not always pay tit-for-tat. The one who gives a single glass of cold water receives Heaven with its endless fountains; the one who gives a cloak receives the wedding garment, white far beyond fullers. And this disproportion works both ways: if a bite brought damnation for all, then a Fiat brought salvation to all. "A Fiat gave beginning to the world; this Fiat gives beginning to the author of the world."2
If God can make bind Himself by His promise, and God is wont to repay beyond measure, then maybe the Apostles could rightly claim a "ten days' usury" of glory—and claim, not as their due, but as what God had given. For could all the glory He gave, the Spirit Who is "all the prudence and the power / That change our dust and nothing into fields and fruits," be simply the payment of that simple promise? Surely God overpaid His due: surely He paid His debt with interest?
Yet, if He paid with interest, we do not always respond in kind.
"Forgive us, always, if our clumsy wills,
Reeling with the possession of so pure a pleasure,
Stumble and break the bottles of our Pentecost."
So we must take up new bottles and try again, try and try again; we must seek to make meet use of those talents, gain interest of our own, repay His Pentecostal usury with our own. (Though, in truth, can we ever even pay back our principal, let alone interest?) And so, to gain the Spirit's aid in using the Spirit aright, we can pray, in some final, very Beatnik, words of our accompanying poet:
"Make us believe You better in the crazy desert,
And seek You better in the skipping heat,
Follow Your messages until we beat our heads
Against the jazz of the horizon.
We'll find You there as much as int he caves of shade,
The grass and springs of the oasis:
But only wring us always, at the center of our inward earth,
Artesian secrets for the roots of love."
1 See the summary of Anselm's argument in Pierre de Bérulle, Life of Jesus, tr. Brandon P. Otto (Independently published, 2024), 250, n. 107↩
2 Pierre de Bérulle, Life of Jesus XVI, in Pierre de Bérulle, Life of Jesus, tr. Brandon P. Otto (Independently published, 2024), 174.↩
Source: All the uncited lines of poetry come from Thomas Merton, "A Whitsun Canticle," from his 1946 collection A Man in the Divided Sea, found in The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions, 1977), 118-121. Note that, in the original, the poem is entirely left-aligned, with no indentations; the center-aligned quotations here are for the aesthetic purposes of this blog only.
Nota Bene: I chose the particular icon of the Ascension found at the top of this post because the leaves of the olive trees hanging over the heads of Mary and the Apostles resemble, to my eyes, the shape of flames, thus being a prophecy of the Pentecost to come.
Text ©2024 Brandon P. Otto. Licensed via CC BY-NC. Feel free to redistribute non-commercially, as long as credit is given to the author.
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