Writing My Own Magnificat
Many years ago when I was, or so I tell myself, someone else entirely; when I was withdrawing from heroin for the umpteenth time—one, two days into it; sleepless, itchy, empty—I had for the first time in my life genuine suicidal ideation. I had at various times previous, tapping into the strange logic of chronic depression, thought that life must be easier when you’re dead, but this was the first time death presented itself as a viable, perhaps even pressing, option. It wasn’t prompted by the pain of withdrawal. I had, as I’ve indicated, already felt that many times before. It wasn’t simply the feeling that I had effectively ruined my life. If anything, I still harbored a perverse romanticism about my addiction, and what could be more romantic than an emerging writer hurling himself out a window in Greenwich Village? No, what brought me to the window at three in the morning, looking down at the street, wondering whether five stories would be enough to do the trick, was that, despite all I had heard and long believed about the soul, I thought I had finally killed mine. The emptiness, the hollowness, was finally entire, and I think I thought about the window rather than simply overdosing because falling would prove I had some gravity, some substance left to me after all.
At the corner of my desk nearest the window was my Bible. For I was not only a romantic junkie, I was a religious one. After my first shot of the day, I would pray the morning office, my eyes moving slowly, heavily along the lines of the psalm and, as the dope kicked in, gradually regarding the letters as pure shapes, visually climbing them, sliding down, stumbling into puddles of sound, all syntax dissolved but never the feeling, never the ache. For what I loved about the psalms was that so many of them seemed to have been written by people in pain. And when it came to the intercessions before the Our Father, my intention was always the same: “Please help me. Please make me stop.” But that night I felt myself beyond prayer, beyond Scripture. By the grace of God, however, I was not beyond literature, and recalled George Eliot characters (Adam Bede’s Methodists, I believe), flipping the Bible open at random at moments of distress or decision, and taking direction from whatever passage or verse their eyes first lighted upon. The problem, of course, was that I no longer even knew if I thought the Bible was true, but if there’s any advantage to suicidal ideation it’s the sure knowledge that you have nothing to lose. So I flipped open my Bible.
“Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.”
This wasn’t exactly what I expected or, I thought for those first few moments, what I needed. Given the plethora of inspirational and redemptive passages even the most random flipping of the Bible might afford, I didn’t find the editorial introduction to a gospel particularly life-saving. Until I read it again: “…I too decided to write an orderly account…that you may know the certainty…” And then it hit. Hit me so strong a George Eliot Methodist would blush with envy: my eyes wide, my soul suffused with a joy so buoyant it felt foolhardy, I said out loud to the ceiling, to the sky, to the heavens, “They wrote it down! THEY WROTE IT DOWN!!!” My faith in God may have been weak, nearly dead, but I still recognized the faith at the heart of all good writing, real writing, the holy spirit that says, “I have to write this down because it’s true.” A relative handful of people in the 1st century realized that they had encountered the truth behind and beyond all truths, had indeed come face to face with that truth in the face of Jesus Christ, and two thousand years later that truth saved my life because they wrote it down.
More specifically in my case, Luke wrote it down. I’ve always had a great fondness for the Gospel of Luke, if only, like many people, for the mysteries recounted in his infancy narrative, Christmas of course chief among them. But as I’ve read them more soberly (in every sense), more deeply over the years, I’ve realized what a great disservice we do them by slathering them over with sentimentality. Though it’s an understandable defense mechanism: we tell ourselves the stories are cute so that we don’t have to acknowledge them as accounts of a prolonged metaphysical earthquake at the heart of human history. There’s a reason people in the Bible are always afraid when an angel appears: very rarely does the angel come to announce God’s pleasure with the status quo. And to indicate the abrupt change in direction the universe in general and reality in particular had taken, Luke’s infancy narrative is propelled by reversal and conundrum: the barren and virgin wax miraculously fruitful; the most important message of all time is delivered to illiterates; a man struck dumb for his lack of faith breaks his silence with prophecy; a man welcomes death because he’s seen salvation; temple elders are awed by a twelve-year-old. And most mysterious, most startling of all: the Old Covenant somersaults into the New.
By Domenico Ghirlandaio - Web Gallery of Art: Image Info about artwork, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10615293
It’s also a narrative propelled by song. Anticipating the operetta by about 1,800 years, Luke heightens and punctuates key moments in the account—epiphanies: moments when someone suddenly realizes the ultimate fullness that has just broken into history—by having them break from the story line to deliver a song, a canticle of praise: Zechariah’s Benedictus, Simeon’s Nunc Dimittis, Mary’s Magnificat. The Magnificat most strongly encapsulates the theme of reversal (“He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly”), but it just as strongly intones a theme that runs through all three canticles and indeed throughout Luke’s gospel: mercy. Luke’s is the only gospel that has the parables of mercy, chief among them The Parable of the Lost Son; the only one that records Jesus healing the severed ear of the man among His arresters; forgiving the men who crucified Him; showing mercy to the Good Thief moments before His death. Though perhaps this isn’t a separate theme at all. Perhaps what Luke is emphasizing—and responding to personally as he writes his “orderly account”—is the revelation that mercy is the most extraordinary reversal of all.
Luke is the only evangelist to have converted to Christianity from paganism, and I wonder whether his sensitivity to the dynamic of merciful reversal isn’t perhaps a glimmer of his own experience both reflecting and shaping the deeper light of his gospel. A Greek native of Antioch, a major city of the eastern Roman Empire with a strong Jewish presence, his first conversion (as St. Jerome speculates) may have been as a proselyte to Judaism. Whether St. Jerome is right about this or not, it’s clear that Luke was conversant with the Septuagint, and what seems to have captured his spiritual imagination about Judaism was the idea of a God who chooses a people for a specific if mysterious historic destiny, guides them, forms them, makes covenants with them and saves them—from enemies and from themselves—again and again prompted by an unfathomable love consistently expressed as mercy.
"Temple of Zeus" by D-Stanley is licensed under CC BY 2.0
This is a far cry from the Greek gods. One has only to consider Zeus’s reaction to human foibles in the myths of Sisyphus and Prometheus to see that mercy was not a cardinal virtue on Olympus. Mercy—Eleos—was indeed a god, but a primordial one, a daughter of Nyx (Night) and Erebus (Darkness), among whose numerous siblings were Fate, Old Age, Sleep, and Misery. More personified concepts than gods, the primordials had no statues, no temples, no cults, though Eleos had an altar in Athens where, by touching it, one could claim sanctuary. There was also a grove near Antioch that had once been a site of sanctuary, but by Luke’s time had been converted to the Gardens of Daphne, the site of a sex cult so depraved that even the Romans were disgusted by it and that gave Antioch an empire-wide reputation for the scandalous nature of its pagan worship.
Antioch, then, was ripe for the mercy of conversion, and it arrived in the mid-30s when the city experienced its first wave of Christians, escapees from the persecution that broke out in Jerusalem shortly after the martyrdom of St. Stephen. How Luke must have thrilled to hear of Stephen’s discourse before the Sanhedrin; thrilled to hear that the Jewish God’s mysterious plan, working its way through history and prophecy, had fulfilled them both in the person of this man Jesus, the Christ; had blossomed into something extraordinary called the Kingdom of God. Antioch had a vigorous response to the new religion, and Luke’s own response, of course, was well beyond vigorous. (Acts, written many years after his conversion, still has the energy and ardor of an RCIA candidate at Easter Vigil.) It’s impossible to know when exactly he converted, but it’s safe to say he was already a Christian by the time St. Paul visited Antioch for the first time in the mid-40s. And it was through St. Paul that God showed Luke the part he himself was to play in salvation history, the part he was to witness himself—and write down. It’s thought that he may have written his gospel during the two years Paul was held captive at Caesarea, and that he may have written Acts during the time—another two years—Paul was in prison at Rome. He was a great writer and a greater friend. It was from Rome that Paul, awaiting death and largely abandoned by his companions, wrote to St. Timothy, “The only one still here with me is Luke.”
I know exactly how he felt. That night long ago when I flipped open my Bible, the only one with me was Luke. And I backed away from the window that night, backed away from the death I had built into my life because Luke told me he had considered all these things carefully and written them down, and if I could consider them with even a dram of faith, a modicum of hope, I could be converted, could know the joyful mystery of reversal. I could see death turned to life, and I might, ultimately, write my own parable of mercy, my own Magnificat.
