Christ Church

The following note was included in the bulletin for the service of Confirmation held this morning at Christ Church.

We welcome the Suffragan Bishop of the Diocese to Christ Church for this service of Confirmation. While Bishop Sue Moxley has been to the parish several times over the past years, this is the first official visit of Bishop Ron Cutler to the Parish. Welcome!

I have sometimes been asked: what do we need Bishops for? The short answer is Confirmation. Ordination and Confirmation are the two specifically spiritual functions of bishops. The term “suffragan” is more about the administrative side of the episcopate. A suffragan bishop is an assistant bishop but without right of succession to being the Diocesan Bishop. So what is confirmation?

It is the laying on of hands with prayer upon those who are baptized and who have reached a certain level of maturity. The candidates for confirmation are old enough to be able to understand for themselves the basic principles of the Christian Faith and to take responsibility for themselves with respect to spiritual life. They are able, for instance, to appreciate what a Sacrament is and to know that it is not ordinary bread and wine. It is the body and blood of Christ.

The older pattern in our Parishes, in a less mobile age, was for children to be baptized as infants, confirmed as young ‘teenagers’, and admitted to Communion. Confirmation, however, is not a meal ticket to Communion. It is a service which has an integrity in itself. It is about these young people seeking God’s strengthening grace, conveyed through the Office of the Bishop, to walk with Christ in the journey of faith.

In God’s good Providence, there are some additional special features to today’s event. Lorry Anne Kelley, the mother of the three Kelley boys, was prepared for confirmation by Bishop Ron Cutler when he was a parish priest in Lower Sackville! Hey! It’s the Maritimes! Go figure!

All those who are baptized in the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost and are of an age and are desirous of receiving the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ are most cordially invited to do so.

“They have no wine”, Mary says in today’s Gospel story, the story of the wedding feast at Cana of Galilee. As Father Robert Crouse observed, her statement captures the human predicament. We lack the means of joy in ourselves. We lack what he has called “the wine of divinity”.

Many of us may feel that we are at a loss, too, with the death of The Rev’d Dr. Robert Darwin Crouse. A great teacher and scholar of international standing and repute, he was a friend and a mentor to a great number of priests and scholars around the world. Many of us owe our love and what knowledge we have of such outstanding theological and poetic figures as Augustine and Dante, for instance, to Robert. Through his teaching in hundreds and hundreds of sermons over many years, many people, both clergy and lay, have learned a love of God and an understanding of Christian doctrine, particularly as expressed in the liturgy of The Book of Common Prayer. Acknowledged as “the conscience of the Canadian Church” by another theologian, Canon Eugene Rathbone Fairweather, Robert’s voice was the calm still voice of wisdom and understanding, a theological voice which has not always been heeded by the Anglican Church, but which lives on through his writings and teachings and, perhaps, in some small way through his many, many students.

He was, perhaps, the most outstanding scholar that King’s Collegiate School in Windsor, (now King’s-Edgehill) and the University of King’s College in Halifax ever produced. The School contributed to his love of nature, his love of music and his love of learning. They are the loves which stayed with him throughout his life: in the horticultural paradise of his gardens in Crousetown; in playing the organ at little St. Mary’s, Crousetown, the home of the famous Baroque concerts; in teaching at King’s and Dalhousie and in Rome. An outstanding teacher of patristic and medieval philosophy and literature, he was the embodiment of the ideal of the scholarly priest.

While a student at the School, he often came down to Christ Church to play the organ: it was his way, he told me, of getting out of rugby! He has left his mark, quite literally, on the inside wall of the organ chamber where his signature in chalk can still be seen. The smell of the wood and fabric of Christ Church, he once told me, has always stayed with him as evocating the very image and idea of the essential being of the Church.

Robert’s teaching was always, in some sense, sacramental. From Robert we learn something of what it means to have “no wine” in ourselves and, even more, to discover “the wine of divinity” in which we may find those joys celestial which have no ending. May he rest in peace and may his example inspire us all.

Fr. David Curry
Chaplain & Teacher, King’s-Edgehill School
Rector of Christ Church, Windsor
January 16^th, 2011

Many of Fr. Crouse’s sermons and writings can be accessed via this link at St. Peter Publications.

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Denys (d. c. 258), Bishop of Paris, Patron Saint of France, Martyr (source):

O GOD, who as on this day didst endow thy blessed Martyr and Bishop Saint Denys with strength to suffer stedfastly for thy sake, and didst join unto him Rusticus and Eleutherius for the preaching of thy glory to the Gentiles: grant us, we beseech thee, so to follow their good example; that for the love of thee we may despise all worldly prosperity, and be afraid of no manner of worldly adversity. Through Jesus Christ our Lord.

The Lesson: Acts 17:22-34
The Gospel: St Luke 12:1-9

Artwork: Henri Bellechose, Martyrdom of St Denis, 1416. Panel transferred onto canvas, Louvre, Paris.

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