“Why are ye so fearful?”
“From lightning and tempest; from earthquake, fire and flood; from plaque, pestilence, and famine; from battle and murder, and from sudden death, Good Lord, deliver us”. Thus prays the ancient Litany in The Book of Common Prayer. It offers a wonderful and ordered way of praying all the things that belong to prayer and that belong to our creedal identity in Christ. But do we pray it? Such petitions teach a doctrine that, I fear, we have forgotten.
In our technocratic exuberance, we sometimes think that we can control the elements. We forget that we are creatures, too, and are often subject to the brute forces of nature; we forget that nature does not simply exist for us, for our pleasures and interests. We forget that nature is affected by our disorder; in other words we find ourselves in a world of earthquake, tempest and fire, a world of woes and suffering, a world where nature, if not always “red in tooth and claw”, can be pretty foreboding and pretty threatening.
This used to be a staple of our Canadian identity, namely, the recognition of the awesome and ominous power of nature. Our literary stories are most often the stories of survival and not of conquest. The point is nicely captured in a poem by Alden Nowlan, a celebrated Canadian poet from Stanley, NS, entitled Canadian January Night, written in 1971. He was, by the way, the son of Grace Reese, a parishioner here who passed away last winter and whom I buried in Stanley.
… I, walking backwards in obedience
to the wind, am possessed
of the fearful knowledge
my compatriots share
but almost never utter:
this is a country
where a man can die
simply from being
caught outside.
We have had some nights and days this January that might have reminded us of such realities. But I fear that we have forgotten this “fearful knowledge” in our illusions of control. We have forgotten the deeper and more theological teaching.
We have forgotten that nature, too, is subject to a higher authority, that there is an order and a purpose to nature, as Aristotle puts it, “at least for the most part”. We forget that aspect. What that means, in Christian terms, is that nature, too, is implicated in the Fall, that nature is no paradise; there are, I’m afraid, always blackflies and black ice! We live in a fallen world.
We forget these things and it takes an epiphany to awaken us to the Lord God of all creation and, especially, the Lord God of the human heart.
The Litany makes a wonderful point in these petitions for deliverance. Not only are there natural catastrophes but there are the storms and tempests of the human heart that wreak havoc among us as well. Battle and murder are seen in the same light as the destructive forces of nature, as storms arising from disorders within us which complement the disorders without. Likewise, too, with our anxieties and worries and our dark preoccupations with ourselves.
St. Mark tells the story of a storm at sea where Jesus rebukes the wind and calms the sea and in so doing awakens our awe and wonder. “Who is this that even the wind and sea obey him?” The Gospel story makes an important point. God is not only above the storm; he also enters into the storm and proclaims peace and calm from within the chaos of the storm, from the midst of the chaos of nature and, even more, from within the chaos of the human heart. We are more but not less than our natural selves.
Christ reveals himself as the Lord and master of the storm. From the midst of the tempest, Christ makes manifest “a sea-change” for each of us “into something rich and strange”, as Shakespeare puts it in his play, The Tempest (Act I, Sc. 2, ll. 400-401). Christ demonstrates both the power of his divinity and the depth of his compassion. In a way, the sea-change effected in the disciples and in us arises from the care of Christ for us made manifest while he is with us. When we forget this, then we are most fearful.
Our identity in Christ defines us, individually and corporately. Without that we are at the mercy of the storms both literally and metaphorically, for the simple reason that we acquiesce in a cynical and despairing view of life, a view which is a kind of throw-back to the despairing wisdom of the ancients who had “lost the good of intellect” because they had “no hope for anything more”, as Dante so astutely remarks. Such is the tragic vision of antiquity: the truth that can be glimpsed and seen but never fully enjoyed.
We are constituted for thought and even the sensual cannot escape the intellectual. “Eternity has been put in our minds”, as the wise old philosopher-preacher Ecclesiastes puts it. Our culture has done its very best to ignore or deny that understanding; confining us to the illusions of sensual experience and despairing of reflective knowledge. As another wise theologian and priest, Fr. Crouse, has remarked: “the children of experience will have to learn from the emptiness of experience”, if ever we will learn.
The miracle stories of the Epiphany teach us the essential divinity of Christ and they manifest the divine will and purpose for our humanity. There can be no greater lessons than these. The miracles all point to what theologians, like St. Augustine, knew was the greater miracle, the miracle of creation itself. For theology, the created world exists for a purpose; it is not the random occasion of the chance meeting of material forces. After all, from where did they come?
There can be no greater affirmation of the doctrine of creation than the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. Why? Because God wills to enter his creation. To what end? To effect redemption which is the even greater miracle of our being returned to the one who is the author of all being and truth. The miracle stories, far from being a violation of nature and nature’s laws, open us out to the principle of the very being of the universe and to the idea of ourselves as thinking creatures within it. That they do so through the mechanics of poetry, through the language of image and metaphor, is the stuff of theology.
To explain how something works, [after all] doesn’t explain why it exists or how it is knowable. That is a philosophical and theological question and one which goes to the quest for meaning. To say, as [Richard] Dawkins claims Darwin does for biology and as [Stephen] Hawking does for physics, that existence is random is as dogmatic and hypothetical a statement as anything that religion postulates. And is it not passing strange that the intelligible universe should have its origins in what is, in principle, unintelligible?[1]
There can be no science, as we use that word, without an intelligible universe.
Here in this Gospel story, Christ is with us in the storm-tossed boat. And that makes all the difference. We are recalled to the authority of God who overrides the storms of nature and the tempests of the human heart. We are fearful when we think ourselves to be all alone and at the mercy of the things around us. Our greatest enemy is ourselves in the things which we do to deceive ourselves. We forget that all authority is of God, the God who cares for us in the midst of the storm. When we are forgetful, then we shall ever be fearful.
“Why are ye so fearful?”
Fr. David Curry
Epiphany IV,
January 30th, 2011
[1] David Curry, Post-Secularism: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, http://www.anglicanplanet.net/edible-thoughts/2010/11/4/post-secularism-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly.html