The Marian Antiphon of Francis Bernardone by Sr Ruth Agnes Evans, Tau Publishing, £14
First, what a wonderful title. This might be a novel, a collection of poems, a work of history or even musicology. In reality, The Marian Antiphon of Francis Bernardone is a meditation on a work of devotional literature composed by St Francis.
In the late 1980s, Sr Ruth Agnes Evans was a Poor Clare novice struggling to live out her loss of access to the world, while also trying to make personal connections with the founder and foundress of her order, St Francis and St Clare. More specifically, she was finding it hard to relate to Francesco Bernardone, the son of a rich merchant who abandoned his prospects of worldly success and embraced poverty so extreme that it shocked his contemporaries and damaged his health. He embraced “the experience of derision; of hunger, cold, rejection”. Sr Ruth “badly needed a way into the man’s mind”.
The way was opened when she came across The Office of the Passion, composed by St Francis by rearranging psalm phrases from the Latin Vulgate. In doing so, he created the “impression that we are hearing Jesus speak as he moves through the most critical events of his life”.
Sr Ruth found herself mesmerised by the Office, so “unassuming and slow to divulge its meaning”. Francis “repeated his own created psalms to himself over and over again in the course of his travels”.
Eventually, Sr Ruth’s mind turned more fully to the Marian antiphon that precedes and follows the psalms in Francis’s sequence: “Each passion psalm crosses a terrible distance, and at the beginning and end of each psalm, Mary is still there.” The antiphon reminds us that all that is happening to Christ is happening in front of his mother.
Or, looked at another way, the unchanging antiphon provides “a place of peace and stability” in the turmoil of the story evoked through the psalms. Sr Ruth picks her way through the prayer (51 words in the original Latin) to illustrate Mary’s role as “the one who leads us to her son through her closeness and likeness to him, interceding with him on our behalf”.
However, Sr Ruth has another motivation which lifts this book above the ordinary. She has long been preoccupied with the fate of death-row prisoners in the United States. Her intention with this book is to use Francis’s evocation of the bond between Mary and Jesus “to show what it means to hold a person in anticipation of his or her death and what this must mean for those who are bound to him or her in love”. What we do “to the least of our brothers and sisters reverberates far beyond the execution chambers in which they die”. Sr Ruth writes on behalf of each and all of the condemned prisoners of the United States. Each chapter (other than the final one about the Resurrection) concludes with a “Comment” on the plight of prisoners on death row.
This is a book suffused then, from all directions, in strong emotions; suffused in, but not overwhelmed by. To Sr Ruth’s enormous credit, she writes throughout with great care, clarity and poise.
Some death row prisoners, she recognises, have caused appalling suffering. Others have been executed even though innocent. Whatever the case, Christ, she notes, “chose to represent us all”.
“I am a worm and no man,” Jesus says in the course of Francis’s fourth psalm. Death row prisoners are dehumanised in the eyes of wider society to the point where the only meaning of their existence is “what we do to them”. Sr Ruth meditates continuously on this shared experience of condemnation and abandonment.
Sr Ruth also seems to believe that prisoners end up on death row for reasons of structural rather than personal sin – injustice, racial discrimination, poverty, inadequate defence at trial, or mental illness. Yet her descriptions of Jesus’s persecutors make their sins sound very personal. These men display “ignorance and hate”. They make “sinful choices”. They are “evil witnesses” to the agony they cause. I am haunted too by the robbers who left the man for dead on the road to Jericho before a certain Samaritan came by; and by the other criminal on the cross, the one who railed against Christ. What did Jesus think of them? What should we?
Inevitably, perhaps, given the relative paucity of what the Bible tells us about Mary during Jesus’s childhood and mission, Sr Ruth needs to speculate about the Blessed Virgin’s inner feelings – the text is peppered with ideas about what she “must have been” feeling. And, as the antiphon is quite conventionally worded, Sr Ruth also has to work hard at times to squeeze fresh meaning from it. But there is an upside to this too, retraining us to see the import and potency of familiar terms.
Every sentence, one feels, in this unusually thought-provoking book, is the fruit of deep reflection of a kind most of us will probably never manage.
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