Advent prepares us for the celebration of the great mystery of Christ’s holy birth in the humble and lowly scene of Bethlehem. It prepares us for the great gift, the greatest gift of all, the mystery of Emmanuel, God with us in the special intimacy of Jesus Christ.

It is the gift through which all gifts are given. God’s great generosity, the outpouring of the divine life in Jesus Christ, contrasts with the fearful but too easy narrowness of our own lives. I know, there are no end of anxieties and worries, especially for those on fixed incomes, for those whose retirement years are based on diminished returns from investments, for those who are scrambling with several jobs to make ends meet, and for those who juggle jobs and family. And let us not forget the unemployed.

Generosity is not simply about who has how much and how much more or how much less. It is about giving out of the spirit of giving and without counting the cost. It is about giving out of love for God in the free and wonderful outpouring of God’s love for us in Jesus Christ, the Word of God become man for us and for our salvation. The Crucified Christ challenges us all with the power and the poignancy of his suffering and death which brings such wonder and grace to our lives. His gift gives us a way to face all manner of hardships.

We have done remarkably well in this year under the circumstances of changing demographics, a dismal economy and constant yet necessary repairs. Our challenge is to see if we can’t continue to be sustainable as well as to contribute to the life of the Church beyond ourselves; in short, to end the year strongly and as well, if not better, than last year.

The roofing projects, mostly completed, are of the greatest significance for the long term viability of the Parish. In the short term, though, we need your generosity of spirit. We would like not to have to tap into capital. We would like to be able to make some sort of contribution to the work and life of the wider Church.

We have had to undertake more in the way of roofing this year than anticipated. Like everyone else we face mounting costs and expenditures. Because Christmas falls on a Sunday, so does the Octave Day of Christmas. That means that the Sunday after Christmas is New Years’, the beginning of another year. Our effort is to end the year strongly and for that we need your help. It will all come down to the Christmas offerings before January 1st.

I appeal to your generosity. Every little bit counts. Our hope is to end the year with a little bit more so as to give more.

With every blessing in the joy of Christ’s Holy Birth,

(Rev’d) David Curry

Among the many treatises of Augustine, one of the most charming and instructive devotionally is his Enarrations or Expositions on the Book of Psalms. For the English reader, it was only translated in the 19^th century as part of the project of recovering the Patristic heritage of the Church, an interest both in England and on the continent. E.B. Pusey, one of the outstanding figures of the Oxford Movement, provided in December of 1857 an advertisement for the translation into English of Augustine’s work on the Psalms. As he remarks,

St. Augustin was so impressed with the sense of the depth of Holy Scripture, that when it seems to him, on the surface, plainest, then he is the more assured of its hidden depth. True to this belief, St. Augustin pressed out word by word of Holy Scripture, and that, always in dependence on the inward teaching of God the Holy Ghost who wrote it, until he had extracted some fullness of meaning from it. More also, perhaps, than any other work of St. Augustin, this commentary abounds in those condensed statements of doctrinal and practical truth which are so instructive, because at once so comprehensive and so accurate.

This doctrinal and practical sensibility about the Psalms means, of course, that they are read in the light of a certain theology of Revelation. They are not read as a mine of historical information and they are not read ‘critically’ as that term has become to be used by the schools of biblical and historical criticism, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They are read with a certain insight into the nature of Scriptural Revelation. In Augustine’s case, they are read entirely from a Christian perspective as bearing constant testimony to Jesus as the fulfilling of the Law.

What this means is a necessary emphasis on a multi-layered approach to the reading of the Psalms: allegorical, moral, and mystical. It means a way of reading the Psalms that identifies different voices: the voice of Christ, the voice of the human soul, the voice of the Church. As Augustine remarks on Psalm 139: “Our Lord Jesus Christ speaketh in the Prophets, sometimes in His own Name, sometimes in ours, because He maketh himself one with us.” The Psalms are seen, in other words, through the lenses of the doctrine of the Incarnation and with constant reference to the doctrine of the Trinity and to various aspects of the doctrine of Redemption, particularly, the passion and resurrection of Christ.

The Christian Church inherited the psalms and their use in prayer and praise from the Jewish synagogue but saw in them the figure of Christ as the fulfillment of the Jewish hopes and expectations and sensibilities about the Law, the Torah. As such the use of the Psalms in the early Church is really part and parcel of the development of Christian doctrine.

The task of defining and working out the nature of Christian doctrine was the great achievement of the Patristic Period. Augustine is a seminal figure with respect to that accomplishment. His treatment of the Psalms is a kind of summing up of much of the Patristic development, particularly in its western and Latin expressions.

His Enarrations or Expositions of the Psalms is not an academic exercise. But then again, hardly anything he wrote ever was. Almost everything he wrote was occasional and not principally academic, by which I mean he wrote for particular circumstances and to address contemporary questions. Paradoxically, the only work which was not so written is his Confessions.

The treatment of the Psalms belongs to Augustine’s life and work as a preacher and pastor, to his teaching ministry, as it were. Contained in his reflections on the Psalms is a form of doctrine in devotion. And, as Pusey has suggested, “the condensed statements of doctrinal and practical truth” that his commentary presents is “so instructive, because at once so comprehensive and so accurate,” accurate that is to say within the interpretative framework of creedal doctrine. Almost all of the Enarrations were sermons and they have that sense of immediacy and topicality. In Augustine’s view, they all speak of God and Christ, of Christ and the Soul and of Christ and the Church.

Among the Psalms that are used liturgically in the Church during the season of Advent is Psalm 80. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only Psalm that Augustine explicitly calls a Song of the Advent. “The song here is of the Advent of the Lord and of our Saviour Jesus Christ, and of His vineyard,” an image of the Church. A few selections from his commentary on this psalm may give you a sense for his voice and for the flavor of his argument about praying the Psalms.

Augustine used, for the most part, the Old Latin version of the Psalter which had been translated from the Septuagint. At the same time, Jerome was translating from the Hebrew as well. Jerome’s translations of the Psalms from the Greek Septuagint and the Hebrew would both remain in use in the Latin West. A feature of the version Augustine used were interpretative titles to the Psalms to which Augustine often referred in his exegesis. Psalm 80 in his version is titled: “For the end in behalf of them that shall be changed,” to which Augustine adds, “for the better.” For, as he says, “Christ, the end of the Law, hath come on purpose that He should change men for the better.” This Psalm “confess[es] both Christ and the vineyard; that is, Head and Body, King and people, Shepherd and flock, and the entire mystery of all Scriptures, Christ and the Church.”

Commenting on the first verse, “Thou that feedest Israel, hearken, Thou that conducteth [leadeth] Joseph like sheep,” and “thou that sittest upon the Cherubin,” he remarks on the name Joseph which as he says “signifieth increase” and on the Cherubin as “the seat of the glory of God and is interpreted as the fullness of knowledge.”

There God sitteth in the fullness of knowledge. Though we understand the Cherubin to be the exalted powers and virtues of the heavens: yet, if thou wilt, thou wilt be Cherubin. For if Cherubin is the seat of God, hear what saith the Scripture: “The soul of a just man is the seat of wisdom.” How, thou sayest, shall I be the fullness of knowledge? Who shall fulfill this? Thou hast the means of fulfilling it: “The fullness of the Law is love.” Do not run after many things, and strain thyself. The amplitude of the branches doth terrify thee: hold by the root, and of the greatness of the tree think not. Be there in thee love, and the fullness of knowledge must follow. For what does he not know that knoweth love? Inasmuch as it hath been said, “God is love.”

He speaks about those twin qualities of love and knowledge as belonging to what the Advent of Christ brings to our humanity, namely, the perfection of those divine qualities in us. “O God, convert us,” as Augustine’s psalter puts it. In the Latin, that turning is, of course, conversion, our being turned to God in whom we find the fullness of knowledge and love. As he observes, “For averse we have been from Thee, and except Thou convert us, we shall not be converted.” By God’s turning to us and looking upon us, we shall be turned and made whole. Advent is about our turning to God because God has turned to us in Jesus Christ. Augustine’s commentary shows us something of the dynamic of prayer as doctrine in devotion by way of the stirring of hearts and the enlightening of minds.

Fr. David Curry
Tuesday, December 6^th
Commemoration of St. Nicolas
Christ Church, Windsor, NS

Andrew is the Advent saint. Sometimes his feast day anticipates Advent and at other times, it falls within the first week of Advent, as it does this year. In either case, he begins the cycle of the Church’s commemoration of the Saints throughout the course of the year. And, as always, there is something rich and significant about beginnings.

Andrew is recognized as the patron saint of Scotland and, therefore, of New Scotland, Nova Scotia, as well. Scotland, not to mention Nova Scotia, is a long ways from the land of the New Testament, a long ways from the setting of the story of the calling of the brothers Simon Peter and Andrew, and the brothers Zebedee, James and John, a long ways from the sea of Galilee. It reminds us of the missionary impulse of the Christian faith. Which is not to say that Andrew ever laid eyes on either!

Yet, the spiritual point is clear. Those who follow Jesus become the ones who proclaim Jesus and make him known even “unto the ends of the world.” For much of the first millennium or more, Scotland must often to have seemed to be the very end of the world. Perhaps, too, the same might be said of Nova Scotia. And yet, the word has gone forth on the wings of the saints and carried forward by their witness to Jesus Christ. Critical to that witness, as the readings on this feast day reminds us, is the Scripture. The Feast of Andrew belongs to that pageant of Word and Song which is part and parcel of the Advent of Christ.

The epistle reading from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans is a kind of mini-treatise on ‘the theology of revelation’. It focuses on the significance of the Scriptures and upon preaching. What is meant primarily by preaching is simply the proclamation of the Scriptures. Those that follow become those that are sent and those who are sent preach the good news of our salvation in Jesus Christ. There is an important emphasis upon the hearing of the Word of God through the preaching, meaning the proclamation of God’s word.

Something of the majesty and the wonder of God is set before us. The word proclaimed is heard and faith comes to birth in the hearers. In a way, we encounter the mystery of God coming towards us, his Advent, in and through the lives and witness of the Saints who are simply those who have gone before us with the mind of Christ. Andrew shows us the story of one, who having heard, immediately followed, “readily obeying the calling of thy Son Jesus Christ, and following him without delay” as the Collect so simply puts it. It is almost as if Andrew knows that “the night is far spent” and that “the day is at hand” as we heard on Sunday. There is a kind of directness and immediacy to his response to the Word of Christ.

Sometimes we like to think that we can control and manipulate people’s faith. We can’t. Faith can only come by the hearing of the Word and by that Word taking root, quickly or slowly, in our hearts. It can only happen, though, if the Word is proclaimed. And for that there needs always to be those who called to preach. If only in the hopes that others will hear and proclaim, each in their own way, not least by the quality of their lives, the truth and power of the God who is Lord of all and who seeks our salvation.

We give thanks tonight for the witness of St. Andrew who belongs in the company of those whose “sound went out into all the earth,/and their words unto the end of the world.” May we be ready and willing to follow.

“Their sound went out into all the earth,
and their words unto the end of the world.”

Fr. David Curry
Eve of the Feast of St. Andrew
November 29^th, 2011
Christ Church

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.

Somehow angels are very much with us. They are very much a part of the biblical and spiritual landscape of the great religions of the world. They are found in the Jewish Scriptures, in the Christian New Testament, and in the Koran. They are present from creation to redemption, as it were. There is even in our contemporary secular culture a yearning for a spiritual company and a sense that we are somehow more than cosmic orphans cast adrift in wholly material universe.

But perhaps you still protest and reasonably so. “Are not angels simply the product of our imaginations, the creatures of our minds, as it were?” Creatures of the mind? Better to say creatures who are mind, wholly mind. The angels are pure intellectual beings of immaterial substance. They are the ordered and distinct thoughts of God in creation, the moving principles of his goodness and truth, the invisible reasons for the visible things of the world. And since the intellect transcends the sense, angels cannot be seen except by the mind in thought. The angels are creatures who are mind that only minds can think. Angels belong at the very least to an intellectual tradition that connects with Plato’s Forms and Aristotle’s Spheres; in short, to an intellectual understanding of the universe.

Angels, let us allow, are thinkable, but what does it mean to think with them? After all, there are endless numbers of things which are “able to be thought”. The ancient Collect for Michaelmas speaks of God as having “ordained and constituted the services of Angels and men in a wonderful order”. The services of angels are instituted of God and joined with the services of men in a wonderful order. Somehow thinking God means thinking with the angels who are God’s thoughts in creation. We are part of a spiritual community that is far larger than we realize.

Among the great cathedrals of Europe, the great Gothic Cathedral of Rheims in France stands as a kind of miracle. It does something more than just stand. It flies on Angel’s wings. A host of Angels, with wings outstretched, stand tabernacled upon the piers of the flying buttresses of Rheims. They raise that whole complexity of stone to heaven on the light wings of their simple prayer. In a way, the winged angels on the flying buttresses of Rheims provide a compelling image of their service and ours in the upward motion of lifting all things to God. Those wings signify the pure spiritual motions of reason and love and signify something about the purpose and the vocation of our humanity. The angels recall us to the truth of ourselves in the service of God as spiritual creatures who belong to a moral and spiritual universe.

September’s air, it seems to me, is angelic air, clear and direct and full of purpose. Yet September, too, is a very busy and almost frantic month, as so many of you know. Michaelmas is the term given for the feast of St. Michael and All Angels on September 29^th.  In the Jewish Calendar, too, it is close to Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Both festivities intentionally recall the themes of creation and the fall, of good and evil.

Michaelmas is also the name given to the first term of schools and colleges which derive their traditions from the medieval universities of Paris and of Oxford and Cambridge. At a time in our culture when we confront our contemporary uncertainties and unease about the institutions of our lives, the service of angels may provide a kind of antidote; the antidote, in fact, to our contemporary woes, our cynicism and despair, our resentments and envyings, our lustings and revellings, our ennui and lethargy; in short, the despisings of our minds to what belongs to mind.

Perhaps you have been already much preoccupied in a multitude of things and are already fretting and worrying about the doing of things that are not done and the doing of things which ought not to be done at all! Perhaps the angels can recall you to the things which matter most of all and without which nothing else is worth doing at all.

In the Purgatorio of Dante’s spiritual classic, The Divine Comedy, there is a special place for those who are preoccupied with the sheer busyness of life. They rest in the Valley of the Kings to watch a spectacle, a symbolic enactment of the Fall and our Redemption, such as is signified in the reading from John’s Revelation. The serpent of our disobedience is banished by the angels. The night of grace descends that we may rise in the day. In a way, that is what our liturgy is about. We are bidden to rest and contemplate these great and grand themes. They are the counter to the intensity of our self-preoccupations.

That drama of angelic instruction echoes the ancient expulsion from the Garden of Eden and John’s vision of “war in heaven”. Our wills in rebellion have their spiritual counterpart in the disobedience of the angels, especially in Lucifer, the Prince of Light who darkens himself, we might say, by the denial of his creatureliness, a denial which, of course, cannot undo the truth of his being. Yet, what are our despisings of the mind except our refusings of the good in things both great and small? This “war in heaven” is equally the war in our hearts. It means more than a conflict of partial goods. It means the far greater denial of the good that is somehow known, a denial of God and an antagonism towards him and his will in creation, “men choosing darkness rather than light”.

But we are not simply left with the fact of this opposition of our own choosing. There was war in heaven. It has been overcome. Scripture shows us heavenly and earthly discord, but shows us, even more, the divine will for reconciliation. “Michael and his Angels fought against the dragon… and they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb”. The angelic victory is the victory of “the light which shineth in the darkness and the darkness overcame it not”. The power of the good is greater than all evil. To think that is to think with the angels; it is to discover the truth and dignity of ourselves as spiritual beings, beings who think and love.

“There was war in heaven”

Fr. David Curry
Michaelmas 2011

All is decked in purple hue, the cross is veiled. There is an unmistakable seriousness about Passiontide, even a somber mood. This is, perhaps, difficult and challenging for our culture and age. There are so many fearful things that we confront in the culture and the community, in the global world and in our souls. Why add to that? Well, we aren’t.

Passiontide provides us with strong ways of thinking about the hardest things. Suffering and death, sin and evil, are the deeper concepts that lurk in the corridors of our hearts of fear. Passiontide recognizes how much is hidden from the understanding of ourselves and the hardships or trials or struggles that we all endure, whether self-inflicted or put upon us by the thoughts and actions of others. One of the more poignant aspects of that form of unknowing is captured in the Gospel for Passion Sunday. Jesus says that we do not know for what we are asking. It is a powerful statement about the nature of sinfulness, about our ignorance and our arrogance.

We go into the Passion of Christ so that we may suffer with the one whom we will see suffer on the Cross. Passion is about suffering. Passiontide is about the sufferings of Christ for us and our desire to suffer with him. The suffering and the death are about our sinfulness and evil. It is what Passiontide will ultimately unveil and what Christ will overcome.

“A Lenten Pilgrimage: Meditations on Bonaventure’s Journey of the Soul into God”
(sponsored by the Prayer Book Society of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island)

9:00am Mattins – Hensley Memorial Chapel
9:20am-9:40am – Registration & Refreshments in Convocation Hall
9:45am First Address – Convocation Hall
Silence

11:15am Holy Communion – Hensley Memorial Chapel
St. Joseph (BCP – p. 319 & p. 113)

12:00 Lunch – Stanfield Hall (School Dining Room)

1:30pm Second Address – Convocation Hall
Silence

3:00pm Third Address – Convocation Hall
Silence

4:15pm Evensong – Hensley Memorial Chapel
4:30-4:45 Departure

A Quiet Day is a time for prayer and study and reflection, a part of the Lenten discipline, a part of the spiritual journey of Christian Faith.

The cost for the day is $ 10.00 which includes lunch. Payment can be made on the day itself. If you are interested in attending, all or some of the day, please contact Fr. David Curry.

There is no greater challenge to the cultural celebration of Christmas than the Feast of the Holy Innocents. We like to think that Christmas is for children and for the child in all of us. We might want to think again. God “madest infants to glorify [him] by their deaths.” Now, there is a show-stopper! A real shocker. Try marketing that!

And yet, this is inescapably part of the Christmas story, albeit a part of the story we easily overlook. It recalls us to the inescapable political occasion for the nativity of Christ in Bethlehem – a census for taxation purposes – and then ups the ante in terms of the real-politique of power and domination. Herod embarks upon a policy of infanticide, killing all the little children in Bethlehem. Why? Out of fear for a rival king, the child King of Bethlehem, as he has heard from the Magi. He embarks upon a human scorched earth policy to destroy a potential rival to his power.

His policy, of course, echoes a similar policy by Pharoah in ancient Egypt who wanted to control the population of his gastarbeiter – guest-workers, also known as slaves, namely, the People of the Hebrews. That policy was the occasion for the remarkable birth of Moses, literally, the one who is drawn out of the reeds. Moses, of course, will be the leader of the Hebrews in the quest for freedom, leading them out of Egypt by way of the Passover and the crossing of the Red Sea, and leading them into the Covenant with God in the form of the Ten Commandments. “Out of Egypt have I called my Son.” In the context of the prophetic vision of the Old Testament, this refers to Israel, coming to be the people of God by being called out of Egypt.

Now, in the Christmas story, it takes on a whole new meaning, a deeper and profounder meaning. Herod’s policy of infanticide is the occasion for the Holy Family’s fleeing Bethlehem and going into Egypt from which then they will return to Nazareth. “Out of Egypt have I called my Son” now has an extended reference, the concentration of the story of Israel into the story of Jesus.

It concentrates our understanding of the Christmas story wonderfully. It reminds us of the reason for the Incarnation; it is, at once, revelation and redemption. There is blood in Bethlehem. Herod slew all the little children in Bethlehem. At least one of the carols of the season, a 15^th century carol sung to a 16^th century melody, is explicit about this reality of the Christmas story. Puer Nobis Nascitur – Unto Us a Child is Born.

Herod then with fear was filled:
‘A prince’, he said, ‘in Jewry!’
All the little boys he killed
At Bethlem in his fury.

It ought to disturb us, I think. The question is in what ways. I have known clergy who have been quick to denounce the very concept signalled so directly in the Collect, God making infants to glorify him by their deaths.

And yet, the idea of the slaughter of the Holy Innocents – innocent, theologically speaking, because they lack the power to harm (in nocens); infants, because they are literally without speech (in fans) – speaks to the radical nature of redemption and to the power of the idea of redemptive suffering. The lives of the countless little ones of the world matter; their deaths are not without purpose. They are understood within the greater embrace of God in his care for our sin-wracked humanity, regardless of what kind of political policy or project of social engineering happens to be underway, driven, as always, by the fear and the lust for power.

To my mind, this is powerful. And it belongs to a significant sea-change in the outlook of the ancient world. With the birth of Christ, there is actually a new valuation of human life, especially the life of children. Infanticide, after all, was a common pagan reality – the exposure of infants to the elements, for instance, if the child was thought to be deformed or unwanted or a threat in some way or other. Think of the story of Oedipus. He was exposed and left to die on the slopes of Mount Citheron because his parents feared the prophecy which said that their son would kill his father and marry his mother.

No. The feast of the Holy Innocents challenges the sentimentality of the Christmas celebration in our culture and it recalls us to the new and greater demands of charity and compassion, namely, our care for all the little ones. The Feast of the Holy Innocents teaches us that they matter; that their lives are not in vain. Their purity and innocency connects them and us to the purity and the innocency of Christ, our Redeemer.

In our culture, the little ones are again in danger throughout our world and day whether it is policies (or the lack of policies) about abortion, policies about reproductive technologies that are cavalier about the conception(s) of new life, policies about single-child policies by way of political fiat and so on. It is partly a feature of our technological culture which raises inescapably ethical concerns. Not everything that we can do is that which we should we do.

But even more, it seems to me, this feast speaks to the hard-rending forms of suffering encountered in the loss of children through accident or disease. It allows for a way of thinking about human life in terms of our divine destiny. We do not, I have to say, raise children for ourselves. In truth, we raise them for God. For they are a gift – of God – and not a right. This disturbing feast gives us the great comfort that allows us to place our children with God, come what may in the course of a wicked and weary world, where, once again, the politics of power in which we are all complicit, threaten the little ones.

It recalls us to the revolutionary power of God’s care for our humanity. Christ, after all, is “God’s great little one.” The Christmas story challenges all the forms of the hubris of our humanity; it offers human redemption and a way to face the hardest of hard things, even the deaths of the little ones.

“Then Herod … sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem”

Fr. David Curry
Meditation on the Feast of the Holy Innocents
Christmas, 2010

There can be no greater affirmation of the central mystery of the Christian Faith than this Epistle reading from The First Letter of St. John. It echoes, of course, the great Christmas Gospel proclaimed at the Mass of Christmas Night. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God … And the Word was made flesh.”

And that is precisely the point which John is driving home in his Epistle. He is arguing for the absolute and tangible reality of the Incarnation. This man Jesus Christ is “Very God of Very God.”

“That which was from the beginning – heard, seen, looked upon, and handled by our hands is the Word of life.” He bears witness to the divinum mysterium of Christmas. The Word and Son of the Father who is Light and Life is Incarnate; the God made Man is Jesus Christ.

And he is telling us that this is no passing knowledge – a matter for a moment, a mere factoid of idle information – but rather a truth that reveals “eternal life,” the truth upon which our lives ultimately depend for their truth and meaning.

That which he has heard and seen has been declared to others. That which he has heard and seen has been written down and handed on to us. And all for a purpose. The purpose is the meaning of human redemption itself, namely, “that your joy may be full.”

We often forget this simple but profound truth. Salvation is really about the deep joy of our humanity which is to be found in its truth with God. Without God, we may say, we have no real joy. Without God, there is really only our own darkness. Without God, there is really only death and empty despair.

Such is the character of the culture of nihilism. Without God, there is really only our nothingness – no real joy, no real knowledge – no light, and no real life. We are, in a famous phrase, merely “the walking dead.”

To our dark and dreary world, a world of death and despair, a world of folly and sin, comes the great Christian proclamation that changes everything. It is the good news of our redemption accomplished in God’s willingness to engage our humanity in the intimacy of Christ’s holy birth. John bears witness to the Incarnate reality of Christ; the divine mystery of the Word made flesh who dwelt among us. This is divine mystery that makes known to the love of God for our humanity. The divine mystery that is Word, Light and Life. The Divine Mystery that is about the Trinitarian fellowship of God with God in God, The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

His witness is a crucial part of the Christmas mystery. It is a kind of insight, the insight of theological wisdom that sees within, behind and beyond the veil of images to grasp the divine reality in its incarnate truth. What is seen and heard, touched and handled is declared and written down. It is manifested and made known.

There is, as well, a further insight and one which is hinted at in the Gospel reading for this feast day; once again, a reading from The Gospel of John. It is this. The Word of God incarnate means a far greater wisdom that what we can imagine and grasp; “not even the world itself could contain the books that should be written.”

Through the witness of John (and “we know that is witness is true,” it is said), we are opened out to a mystery that is greater than that which we can conceive. It is the mystery of Christmas. It is the mystery of the Incarnation. It is the mystery of God being with us in the very substance of our humanity to bring us joy and salvation.

This is the mystery that has been revealed, not concealed. John is the emphatic and theological witness to the great and central mystery of the Christian Faith.

“That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you”

Fr. David Curry
Meditation for The Feast of St. John the Evangelist
(In the Week of Christmas)
December 27^th, 2010

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

“Until they are good Marians, they shall never be good Christians” avowed Anthony Stafford in 1637, words which apply to every age of Christianity. We meet to honour the female glory of Mary, Virgin and Mother, through whom “salvation to all that will is nigh,” as the poet John Donne puts it, Christ being that “immensity cloistered in thy dear womb,” his conception the immediate consequence of her Annunciation. Yet her annunciation stands upon the necessity of her conception. We meet on the eve of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the week of the Second Sunday in Advent.

There is a certain paradox in this commemoration. On the week which is governed by the pageant of God’s Word Written in the form of the Scriptures we find this minor Holy Day which commemorates a completely non-biblical event, namely Mary’s conception. Yet, this minor commemoration has been in The Book of Common Prayer since 1549 and connects with an older doctrinal and devotional tradition of reflection about the role and place of Mary in the understanding of human redemption.

On one level, we could say it is all rather prosaic. For Mary to exist she had to be conceived. But that only heightens the question. Why the conception? Whether with or without the equally perplexing adjective of immaculate, meaning pure or spotless? Is this not all a bit much and whole lot removed from the biblical perspective? Well, it is outside the Scriptures but it belongs to a form of theological reasoning upon the Scriptures which, after all, have to be thought upon. They are given for our learning. The Conception of Mary belongs to the theological reflection upon the meaning of Christ’s Incarnation. This feast is part of a wonderful Anglican tradition of Marian devotion, but one that is governed by a clearly defined theological understanding.

Let’s be clear. There is no direct Scriptural basis for this feast. There are, on the other hand, a great number of legends and stories that have entered into the mindscape of the Church, both East and West, legends which fill in the gaps in imaginative ways, as it were. Notable among those are the stories of the meeting between Joachim and Anna at the golden gate in Jerusalem, the setting for Mary’s immaculate conception, a story which was frequently depicted in Christian art. But it is entirely a non-biblical story. Nonetheless, it speaks to a certain interest in the person of Mary in relation to Christ.

Though Mary does not appear that often in the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, she is present at certain doctrinally important moments: Christ’s nativity, his crucifixion, and at Pentecost. Theologically, she is critical for the understanding of the full, perfect and complete humanity of Jesus.

In 1854, the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception was promulgated by the Roman Catholic Church as a necessity of saving faith. Anglicans, whether they are attracted to the concept or repulsed by it, cannot regard the Immaculate Conception of Mary as an essential of the Faith for the simple reason that it is not properly grounded in Scripture. Which is not to say that Mary does not have a special role and place in doctrine and devotion. She does and in a way which constantly stresses the interplay and interrelation between Mary and Jesus.

All the feasts of Mary are keyed to the festivals of Christ. There is a wonderful doctrinal sensibility in which Protestants and Roman Catholics actually meet in relation to Mary. Luther, the great Father of Protestantism, in his sermon on the Magnificat in 1521, makes the following point. Mary does not want us to come to her but through her to Jesus. It is exactly the same sentiment as Ignatius of Loyola and the Jesuits, captured in one of their mottoes, per Mariam ad Jesum, through Mary to Jesus.

“The Femall Glory” is, I think, a wonderful phrase and yet, it is, actually, the title of a book by a pious, devout and theologically astute 17^th century English layman, Anthony Stafford, who was the first, he thinks, to have “written in our vulgar tongue on this our Blessed Virgin.” Unique perhaps in its style, it was not unique in its ideas and thinking but belongs to the rich and lively tradition of Marian devotion in 17^th century Anglican divinity. It embodies the distinctive qualities of classical Anglican divinity with its strong orthodox and doctrinal sensibility and its devotional focus and emphasis on the purity of Mary. The Femall Glory is an outstanding work of holy imagination but one which understands the subordination of the affective language of devotion and prayer to the language of essential doctrine and creedal affirmation.

Our salvation is Jesus Christ, true God and true man. Mary is the pure source of Christ’s true humanity and as such is the bearer of his divinity into the world. At the heart of Anglican Marian devotion is the strong orthodoxy of the Council of Chalcedon in 451AD which gave theological coherence to the scriptural images of Mary in the economy of salvation by calling her Theotokos, the Mother of God. She is the Mother of God, not because she is the source of Christ’s divinity, which as creature she cannot be, but because she is the chosen vessel, pure and prepared by the grace of God, by which Christ becomes man without ceasing to be God, distinguishing, as Stafford puts it, “betweene the Mother of God and the Mother of the Godhead; the first of which she truly is, the latt’r she is not.

There is a kind of parallelism with respect to Christ and Mary. His conception, her conception; her nativity, his nativity; his Resurrection; her assumption; his presentation, her purification and so on. The feasts of Mary are all the feasts of Christ. This is an important feature of the Anglican witness to Mary.

It is all about the mystery of the Incarnation, “that the Union of both natures, God and Man, being in Christ, she must, by strong consequence, bring forth both God and Man.” The measure of Chalcedon governs the devotional discourse of Anglican divinity.

The Anglican Divines of the 17^th century celebrate the purity of Mary because of the purity of Christ. Only as pure can he freely bear the impurities of our sins which make us less than ourselves, less than fully human. Only as pure can he restore us to the truth of ourselves in God. Only as pure can he show us the Father and show us to the Father. It is the point that is made in the proper preface for Christmas and for the Annunciation in The Book of Common Prayer in which Christ, it is prayed, “was made very man of the substance of the Virgin Mary his mother; and that without spot of sin, to make us clean from all sin.” Any compromising of the terms of this discourse of doctrinal prayer would be a loss of orthodoxy.

Christ is the eternal son of God, “that pure one,” as Irenaeus puts it, “opening purely that pure womb which regenerates men unto God and which he himself made pure.” “Behold,” says Mary, “the handmaid of the Lord”. What do we behold in her? We behold the female glory.

But what is that female glory? The female glory, as Stafford makes clear, is the glory of our humanity. We behold the truth of our humanity in her who is the source of Christ’s true humanity. Stafford’s treatise contains An Epistle to the Feminine Reader that “here you may learn to transforme your ugly vices, into as amiable Vertues”; and An Epistle to the Masculine Reader, “requiring your Imitation, whose meanest Perfection farre excels all your so long vaunted masculine merits”. Such is the universality of its orthodoxy.

Her pure openness to the will of God is not a matter of passivity but signals true humanity’s active engagement with God. Mary, after all, asks the question, “how shall this be seeing as I know not a man?”, lest there be any ambiguity about the uniqueness and the mystery of the Incarnation. Lancelot Andrewes is especially clear, too, that for Mary “to conceive is more than to receive. It is so to receive as we yield somewhat of our own also. A vessel is not said to conceive the liquor that is put into it. Why? Because it yieldeth nothing from itself. The Blessed Virgin … [gave] of her own substance.”

It means being defined by the Word of God and not simply by the discourse of our world and day. It means being defined by the grace of God and not simply by the circumstances and experiences of our lives. It means being defined by the theological Word which must engage the discourse of our own world and day without simply being collapsed into it. Otherwise it is not the Word. Such are the challenges for contemporary Christianity. Corporately and individually, through her “whom no man can honour too much that makes her not God,” as John Donne puts it, we may discover again the essential Marian qualities of the Church, namely, our being with Christ through our active attentiveness to his Word proclaimed and his Sacraments celebrated.

For then, we, too, shall be highly favoured, and never “at any time more fully than in the blessed Sacrament to which we are now a-going”, as Mark Frank so eloquently puts it.

There he is strangely with us, highly favours us, exceedingly blesses us; there we are all made blessed Marys, and become mothers, sisters, and brothers of our Lord, whilst we hear his word, and conceive it in us; whilst we believe him who is the Word, and receive him too into us.

But only if we will be good Marians who say what Mary says:

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

Fr. David Curry
Eve of the Feast of the Conception of the BVM
December 7^th, 2010