Christ Church

Dust and ashes

Ash Wednesday reminds us with words that we are dust while ashes are placed on our foreheads. The dust recalls us to our creation as the dust into which God has breathed his life-giving spirit. The ashes are the ashes of repentance because of our having turned away from God in sin. They turn us to redemption.

The ashes are made from burning last years’ palm crosses. Fire ends in ashes. But these ashes mark a new beginning, a renewal in love. Lent is the pilgrimage of love. That love is the perfecting grace of Christ, the divine love incarnate who goes the way of our imperfect loves to make perfect our loves. There must be in us the continual purgation and purification of our loves. They are purged and purified in the passion of Christ, in the pilgrimage of his perfect love for us. That is the intent of Lent and the significance of beginning in ashes.

We are called to repentance. This requires an awareness of our imperfect loves. The ashes mark a beginning with a twofold emphasis. There is conversion from sin and there is contrition for sin. Fire ends in ashes but God’s love is the greater fire which makes something out of the ashes of our lives. We are to arise from the ashes in the renewal of faith, hope and love.

It is the joy of renewing love. There is the joy of knowing that we have a gracious God to whom we may return, yet again. Repentance is the gracious stirring of his love in us recalling us to the truth of ourselves as found in him.

The ashes placed on our foreheads signify at once the rational faculty by which we are made in God’s image and the misuse of that divine image in us by our willful disobedience. The ashes are placed on our foreheads with the words that recall the dust of our origins but also our end, namely, dust dignified with divinity.

Lent is the season of renewal in love. The fire of Christ’s love is “that most burning love for the crucified” (St. Bonaventure). It does not end in ashes.

Fr. David Curry

Epiphany ends and pre-lent begins. It makes, I hope, the winter seem shorter! Purely psychological, of course, but the pre-lenten Sundays with their impossible Latin polysyllabic names point us towards Spring and Easter. They help, in Loreena McKennit’s words “to drive the cold winter away,” at least notionally.

What curious names they are! Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quinquagesima. A kind of esoteric knowledge at its best, it might seem, and yet these are the terms which have been in common use for centuries upon centuries. More recently, they have been given up in favour of more prosaic terms but with more complex demands of computation and order, namely, the parade of Sundays in Ordinary Time. There is, I think, such a wealth of colour and feel to these more intriguing and exotic terms. What exactly do they mean? And what do they signify?

Septuagesima refers to the week of the seventieth day before Easter; Sexagesima to the week of the sixtieth day; Quinquagesima, to the week of the fiftieth day and stands on the brink of Lent itself, just a few days before Ash Wednesday. What do they signify? Historically they recall a time when the Quadragesima, the forty days of Lent, were computed differently, with fasting and repentance scheduled for certain but not all days of the week, hence seventy, sixty and fifty day periods in which the biblically based forty days of Lent were accomplished. But beyond that historical note, these Sundays have developed a special character of their own, spiritually and theologically. They are very much about the transformation of the older classical virtues of prudence, courage, temperance and justice into the forms of love through the power of the theological virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity.

In short, they inculcate a more inward consideration of the journey of the soul in Lent.  Unusual, even curious names but which are well worth the trouble in giving them your fullest and prayerful attention.

Fr. David Curry

“They saw…they came…they worshipped”

It may be, as someone recently remarked to me, that had the wise men been women, they would have gotten there on time and presented more practical gifts! Yet the gifts of the Magi have another purpose. They are profoundly symbolic: “sacred gifts of mystic meaning”, as one of our hymns puts it. In short, they are gifts that teach. Both the gifts of the Magi and the journey of the Magi wonderfully illustrate something of the nature of the Epiphany.

Epiphany marks at once the beginning and the end of Christmas. With the story of the coming of the wise men from the east who brought gifts to the child Christ, it seems, thereby breaking-in to Bethlehem, Christmas is omni populo, for all people – and so there is the beginning of Christmas for the whole world. But with the break-out from Bethlehem which Epiphany also signifies, there is a new and different focus. There is a journey, both a journeying to Bethlehem and a journeying from Bethlehem to Jerusalem. And yet, the deeper meaning and significance of God with us is the critical lesson in the journeying from Bethlehem. Something of Bethlehem continues with us.

The mystery of God with us is the mystery revealed, the mystery made manifest. Epiphany is more than a day and a season. It signals a doctrine – a teaching. Indeed, the teaching that it signals is the teaching of God – God making himself known to us through the conditions of our humanity; God teaching us something about what he wants and seeks for us. We are opened out to the mystery of God with us. We are taught something about what belongs to the truth of our humanity from within the conditions of our brokenness. We learn, it seems, even from the little ones.

Christ is God’s “great little one” to whom the great of the earth – kings in their power and the wise in their wisdom – “come and worship”. The mystery of Christmas cannot stay hidden in some remote corner of the world; it must needs break out from the confines of little Bethlehem. In the coming of the Magi from afar (they are the prototypical come-from-aways!) the whole world in its desiring to know is understood to have its place and its fulfillment in this story.

Read the rest of this entry »

“Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them …” These familiar words belong to the Collect which Archbishop Thomas Cranmer composed for The Second Sunday in Advent (BCP, p. 97). Taken from the Scriptures, in this case Paul’s Letter to the Romans, the prayer captures an entire pattern of theological understanding that is at once formative and foundational for Anglican doctrine and devotion. Diarmaid MacCulloch, commenting on Gerlach Flicke’s 1545 portrait of Cranmer, which depicts him holding The Epistles of Paul but also with Augustine’s book De Fide et Operibus (“Of Faith and Works”), suggests that this signals Cranmer’s theological enterprise, namely, the recovery of the Scriptures understood through the best of the Fathers, principally Augustine.

The creedal or doctrinal understanding of the Scriptures is a distinctive feature of the Anglican Common Prayer tradition. The rich interplay of Scripture and Creed(s), for example, shapes the worship and liturgy of the Church. The Articles of Religion and the ordination vows of the clergy testify to the centrality of the Scriptures for the teaching and praying life of the Church and express a remarkably sophisticated approach to the reading of the Scriptures in the life of the Church. We place ourselves under the authority of God’s Word Written. But that means that we have to think the Scriptures. “What do the Scriptures say?” (Romans 10.8). Or, as Christ asks, “how do you read?” (Lk.10.26). There is a necessary engagement between God and our humanity through the witness of the Scriptures. Revelation is mediation and requires the fullest engagement of our minds with what the Scriptures proclaim.

The reformed principle of sola scriptura, “scripture alone”, admits of a range of applications but its most basic sense for Anglicans is the primacy of Scripture in determining doctrine, devotion and discipline. “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proven thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith,” as Article VI puts it. The same idea is required of the teaching of the clergy stated in their ordination vows. What are the things “necessary to salvation”? Those things which belong to the articles of the Faith; in short, the Creeds, which are the distillation of the Scriptures, and which speak to the nature of our spiritual identity with God in his self-relation as Trinity and in his relation to us as Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier. Creedal and doctrinal principles exercise more than a merely formal role; they exercise a formative role in the life of the Church. They should have a definitive voice in the debates and issues of the day.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Great ‘O’ Antiphons of Advent

December 16: O Sapientia

O Wisdom, which comes out of the mouth of the Most High, and reaches from one end to the other, mightily and sweetly ordereing all things: Come and teach us the way of prudence.

December 17: O Adonai

O Adonai, and Leader of the house of Israel, who appeared in the bush to Moses in a flame of fire, and gave him the law in Sinai: Come and redeem us with an outstretched arm.

December 18: O Radix Jesse

O Root of Jesse, which stands for an ensign of the people, at whom the kings shall shut their mouths, unto whom the Gentiles shall seek: Come and deliver us, and tarry not.

December 19: O Clavis David

O Key of David, and Sceptre of the house of Israel; that opens and no man shuts, and shuts and no man opens: Come and bring the prisoners out of the prison-house, them that sit in darkness and the shadow of death.

December 20: O Oriens

O Dayspring, Brightness of the Light Everlasting, and Sun of Righteousness: Come and enlighten them that sit in darkness and the shadow of death.

December 21: O Rex Gentium

O King of Nations, and their Desire; the Cornerstone who makes both one: Came and save mankind, whom thou didst make of clay.

December 22: O Emmanuel

O Emmanuel, our King and Lawgiver, the Desire of all ‚nations and their salvation: Come and save us, O Lord our God.

December 23: O Virgo Virginum

O Virgin of virgins, how shall this be? For neither before thee was any seen like thee, nor shall there be after. Daughters of Jerusalem, why marvel ye at me? The thing which ye behold is divine.

Veni, Veni Emmanuel

O COME, O come, Emmanuel,
and ransom captive Israel,
that morns in lonely exile here
until the Son of God appear.
R: Rejoice! Rejoice! O Israel,
to thee shall come Emmanuel!

O come, Thou Wisdom, from on high, (O Sapientia)
and order all things far and nigh;
to us the path of knowledge show,
and teach us in her ways to go. R.

O come, o come, Thou Lord of might, (O Adonai)
who to thy tribes on Sinai’s height
in ancient times did give the law,
in cloud, and majesty, and awe. R.

O come, Thou Rod of Jesse’s stem, (O Jesse Virgula)
from ev’ry foe deliver them
that trust Thy mighty power to save,
and give them vict’ry o’er the grave. R.

O come, Thou Key of David, come, (O Clavis Davidica)
and open wide our heav’nly home,
make safe the way that leads on high,
that we no more have cause to sigh. R.

O come, Thou Dayspring from on high, (O Oriens)
and cheer us by thy drawing nigh;
disperse the gloomy clouds of night
and death’s dark shadow put to flight. R.

O come, Desire of the nations, bind (O Rex Gentium)
in one the hearts of all mankind;
bid every strife and quarrel cease
and fill the world with heaven’s peace. R.

The initial words of the antiphons in reverse of their original order form an acrostic: O Emmanuel, O Rex, O Oriens, O Clavis, O Radix (“virgula” in the hymn), O Adonai, O Sapientia. ERO CRAS can be loosely translated as “I will be there tomorrow”.

Advent Prose

Rorate Caeli

Drop down, ye heavens from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness.

Be not so very angry, O Lord, neither remember iniquity forever: thy holy cities are a wilderness, Sion is a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation: our holy and our beautiful house, wherein our fathers praised thee.

Drop down, ye heavens from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness.

We have sinned, and are as an unclean thing, and we all do fade away as a leaf: and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away; thou hast hid thy face from us: and hast consumed us, because of our iniquities.

Drop down, ye heavens from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness.

Ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord, and my servant whom I have chosen; that ye may know me and believe me: I, even I, am the Lord, and beside me there is no Saviour: and there is none that can deliver out of my hand.

Drop down, ye heavens from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness.

Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, my salvation shall not tarry: I have blotted out as a thick cloud thy transgressions: Fear not, for I will save thee: for I am the Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel, thy Redeemer.

Drop down, ye heavens from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness.

The Blessing of the Advent Wreath

Father: Our Help is in the Name of the Lord.
(or Head of Household)

Family: Who has made Heaven and Earth.

Father: Let us pray:

O God, by whose Word all things are sanctified, pour forth your blessing upon this wreath, and grant that we who use it may prepare our hearts for the coming of Christ and may receive from you the abundant graces of your mercy; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Family: Amen

Then follows the next prayer, which is also said throughout the first week before the evening meal, beginning with Sunday Evening.

The Week of the First Sunday in Advent

Father: Let us pray:

O Lord, stir up your power and come, that by the protection of your grace we may be rescued from the threatening dangers of our sins and be saved by your deliverance; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Family: Amen

One Candle is lit and left burning during the evening meal each night of this week.

Read the rest of this entry »

“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man
lay down his life for his friends”

The significance of this day should not be lost on any of us. To remember is to be aware about who we really are. That means, paradoxically, to pay attention to others. It is especially hard in the attention deficit culture. Memory is increasingly the lost and neglected faculty of our humanity.

Remembrance Day is a kind of secular All Souls’ Day. The intention of All Souls’ is to remember our common mortality, to commemorate all who have died and to do so within the greater context of All Saints’, the celebration of our common vocation to holiness. The intention of Remembrance Day in the secular aspect of our culture is to remember those who died for the sake of our political freedoms and civic life.

To say that Remembrance Day is a kind of secular All Souls’ Day is not to say that our remembrance is not religious. It is, and profoundly so. It reminds us of the spiritual and, specifically, Christian principles which underlie the modern national states even in their contemporary confusion and disarray. To remember the fallen is to honour what they fought and died for in far away places and in scenes of absolute horror far beyond our imaging, despite the efforts of the film industry and even the purple prose of preachers.

We remind ourselves of the hell of war and of the destruction and evil which we inflict upon one another. The dust of our common humanity is soaked in blood. But if, and ‘if’ is the big, little word here, if we can remember in a spirit of forgiveness, so much the better. For then our remembering will be joined all the more surely to God’s forgiving remembrance of all our follies, all our sufferings and all our griefs. We will be remembering them in the greater sacrifice of Christ for the whole world, a remembering that enters into all that we do at the Altar.

What we are remembering are the sacrifices for the rational freedoms of our political and social life, to be sure. But what underlies that remembrance is something profoundly spiritual. It is, perhaps, best captured in the scriptural phrase which adorns a thousand cenotaph in a thousand villages throughout the world. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

Read the rest of this entry »

“Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord,
and may light perpetual shine upon them”

The Feast of All Saints embraces The Solemnity of All Souls. The one envisions the end and perfection of our humanity in the glory of heaven. Such is the Communion of Saints. The other recalls our sins and imperfections in the darkness of death and the stark reality of our mortality, common to us all. Such is the Solemnity of All Souls. Christ embraces both the glory and the grave.

In the year 998, as part of the Cluniac reform of Benedictine monasticism in Europe, Odilo of Cluny established the Commemoration of All Souls. It may seem morbid and dreary, negative and depressing, not to mention just plain, cold and miserable. After all, this is November! But why trouble our heads with what we would rather not think, let alone face and shiver? Ours is the culture of death through the distancing of death from our lives; death is even contracted out. But to the contrary, there is something wonderfully healthy and true about the Solemnity of All Souls. It signals nothing less than a mature and profound understanding of the Christian Faith.

The Christian Religion does not hide from view the realities of sin and death. Quite the opposite, it sets those things before us with an uncomfortable if not an unbearable clarity. It gives us a way to think about such hard and difficult things. Such is the way of charity. The death and resurrection of Christ is always front and centre to the Christian outlook, to the pattern of Christian life itself. There is the Communion of Saints which is not about “pie-in-the-sky/ by-and-by,” as if heaven were a vain hope and religion merely “the opiate of the masses,” as someone who was once famous once famously said. No. It signals, instead, the real meaning of our fellowship and communion, the real meaning of lives lived together in a community of faith, a community of faith that is far greater than what we can imagine, let alone see.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dancing with Angels

Have you ever thought about the title of a book that you might like to write? You know, where you say, “I’d like to write a book with this title?” Sometimes certain phrases and ideas catch us that way and you say, “that would be a good title for a book.” Well, for me, one title of one book that strikes me that way would be “Dancing with Angels.”

Dancing with angels is, I think, a way of speaking about what we do every day in our spiritual and intellectual lives whether as students or teachers, priests or parishioners. Angels are very much about the principles of the understanding, the intellectual and spiritual principles that belong to our understanding of the human and the natural world. They remind us that there is more to reality than what meets the eye. They speak, in a kind of way, to that common feature of our humanity, our loneliness, or what Alistair MacLeod calls our “inarticulate loneliness” out of which comes the struggle to articulate and communicate. The angels remind us that we have dance partners in the pursuit of understanding and in the struggle to act rightly and to be good.

In the year 1257, perhaps even what has come to be known as Michaelmas term, at the University of Paris, Thomas Aquinas, affectionately known as Doctor Angelicus, the angelic doctor, undertook in the Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, “Disputed Questions on Truth,” the question “Can a man be taught by an Angel?”(Q. 11, art.iii). Angels can teach us, he says, not by supplanting what is given by the light of nature or the light of grace, the human and the divine respectively, but as he says, by “moving the imagination and strengthening the light of understanding.”

Angels help us to understand the terrible, hard and harsh events of our own world and day. After all, will we really even begin to comprehend the terror of terrorism, for example, merely through the lenses of social and economic determinism? Don’t we need the spiritual wisdom which talks about the struggles between the good and evil which we are afraid to name, the spiritual struggles which the religions of the world in their truth and integrity contemplate and know?

Read the rest of this entry »

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”

The Cross is the meeting place of lovers. That “strange and uncouth thing”, as the poet George Herbert calls it, reveals the incompleteness of our human loves and the all-sufficiency of divine love. It signals what might be called the erotic liturgy of The Book of Common Prayer, a liturgy which is shaped and governed by the Cross, the liturgy of eros redeemed, the liturgy of the redemption of desire. But what does it mean?

I have often been struck with the coincidence of the early beginning of Fall with the Feast of the Holy Cross (September 14^th) and especially with one of its early and associated titles, namely, the Invention of the Holy Cross. It speaks so profoundly and yet so paradoxically to the nature of the intellectual enterprise. Inventio crucis.

Invention? Yes, but not in the sense of something fabricated out of our fevered imaginations. The feast derives from the celebrated visit of Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine, to Jerusalem and her so-called discovery of the Holy Cross in the early fourth century as well as the exposition or “Exaltation” of the supposed true cross in the seventh century. Inventio does not suggest fabrication and invention so much as discovery and disclosure.

In the Christian understanding of things, humility and sacrifice are de rigueur in the passionate search for understanding, the eros of intellectual life. The cross is the meeting place of such lovers, too.

Read the rest of this entry »