Year: 2011

“I beheld, and lo, a great multitude, which no man could number”

It is “that time of year… when yellow leaves or none or few/ do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold/ bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.” In the culture of scattered souls and in the season of scattered leaves, we are gathered together. There is something more than our just being scattered, it seems. Like leaves scattered on the wind in all their colourful autumnal array, but then gathered into heaps of burnished gold, so we are gathered to celebrate the gathering into glory of the scattered fragments of our humanity. Such is the meaning of the Feast of All Saints’.

Are we simply like leaves collected into bags tossed upon some compost heap? Yes and no. The image of the story of human lives as scattered leaves goes back to the Sibylline Oracles of Roman Antiquity as conveyed most wonderfully by Vergil and then used by Dante even more wondrously to capture our being gathered together into the Communion of Saints. The whole human story belongs to one book, divinely written, to be sure, but scattered about on the wind; the leaves of the pages, like the leaves of the trees, are scattered and blown about. But by God’s grace the scattered leaves are gathered together into one volume; the leaves of the autumn likened to the pages – the leaves – of a book.

It is a powerful image and one where the ancient culture speaks profoundly to our contemporary world. We are the culture of the scattered, the disconnected and the distracted – never mind the claims of connectivity. Has it never struck any one as passing strange that in the age of almost endless connectivity we have as well the culture of almost total distraction, indeed, the attention-deficit culture, par excellence? We are the culture of the connect to the disconnect.

Perhaps, just perhaps, the counter to these contemporary experiential realities is the Communion of Saints, the gathering together of the scattered leaves of the human story. Nothing speaks more profoundly to the loneliness and the despair, the desperation and fears of our contemporary world than the idea of the Communion of Saints. We are reminded in the strongest way possible that we are part of something larger than ourselves, that we are not alone but belong to a company beyond number, a spiritual company.

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“Be ye kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another,
even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.”

It is, I think, a most compelling and touching scene, at once a story of friendship and forgiveness and of healing and restoration. In so many ways, it illustrates what St. Paul is telling us in the Epistle. Do we not see here in this Gospel scene the kindness of friends towards one another? Do we not hear in this Gospel Christ’s words of forgiveness to the man sick of the palsy? Is it not the tender-heartedness of Jesus that we see displayed here in all of its wonder and power?

Well, to be sure and wonderfully so. And yet there is something more, something of a more sombre and disturbing nature. There is as well in this Gospel scene the vanity of minds, the darkening of the understanding, the hardness of hearts, the corruption of souls; in short, all the other things that the Epistle mentions. There is an evil in the heart which resents and opposes the good that might be done to others.

The soul is the battlefield between good and evil. And we all stand convicted or better yet, in the imagery of the Gospel, we all lie paralysed, unable to move, our palsied limbs reflecting a deeper paralysis of the soul which we see in the resistance and opposition of the scribes to Christ’s words of forgiveness to the one who was paralysed. They say nothing, but “Jesus, knowing their thoughts, said, Wherefore think ye evil in your hearts?”

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“And one turned back… giving him thanks”

God is extravagant with his mercies; we are miserly with our thanks. October is the month of thanksgiving, especially harvest thanksgiving. But thanksgiving is something more and greater than our thanks for the great bounty of God’s creation and the fruit of human labours. This Gospel story opens us out to the deeper meaning of thanksgiving and its importance with respect to the understanding of our humanity as spiritual creatures. Just note.

There were ten “that lifted up their voices, and said, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us”. But only one turned back “and he was a Samaritan”. In short, there are many who cry out for mercy but few who return to give thanks.

To give thanks is more than good manners; it is to acknowledge the mercy freely given and received and to esteem the giver of the mercy freely and supremely. No doubt we have good reason to cry out for mercy like the ten lepers and yet God’s mercy is not given simply for us to take and run away with it. In returning and giving thanks we are more than healed; we are saved or made whole for then we enter into the motions of God’s own love: the going forth and return of the Son to the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. We enter precisely into the thanksgiving of the Son to the Father. That is the greater mercy and point of all God’s mercies towards us.

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