Month: December 2014

“Behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a Son,
and shalt call his name JESUS”

Mary in Advent is Mary in Holy Waiting. She carries the hope of the world in her womb and never more poignantly and more expectantly than at this time. She is heavy with the weight of divinity, we might say.

And yet, how providentially marvelous and theologically appropriate, a kind of condignity of the Spirit, that in the Advent season we are reminded of her Annunciation (not to mention her conception, immaculate or otherwise) as preparation for the meaning of Christ’s nativity. And even more so, on the Advent Ember days. The Ember seasons remind us of the office of the ministry of the Church which shapes and informs all our ministries, lay and cleric alike. Each Ember season, though roughly analogous to the seasons of nature’s year, have an additional spiritual quality, a point of emphasis, if you will. That emphasis in the Advent Ember days is on the theme of Peace in the World and the readings are to be understood in that context.

How amazing. The readings from the prophet Micah and the Annunciation Gospel from Luke are given an interpretative framework. They are to be seen in terms of the theme of Peace in the World. This should give us pause, both generally and particularly. More generally, because it should alert us to how the Eucharistic readings are to be read and understood according to a thematic theme and purpose, an interpretative matrix, as it were. The important question, the only question, really, is about the themes. And however much it has been overlooked, denied and ignored, the inescapable reality of the Eucharistic lectionary is that it is ordered according to the principles of creedal doctrine and reinforces, especially, though not uniquely for Anglicans, the close connection between Scripture and Creed. It is a catholic principle, universal in its scope and as belonging undeniably and inescapably to both the traditions of Roman Catholicism and, at the very least, the churches of the magisterial Reformation.

More particularly, it locates the Annunciation within the season of Advent in terms of the radical message of the preparation for the Lord’s coming among us both as the Babe of Bethlehem and as the Judge of all creation. In each case, the challenge for us is to be Marian, open to the Divine Word and yielding intelligently the whole of our being to God.

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This is the second of a two-part Advent Programme. The first part, presented on 2 December, is posted here.  Both parts have been combined into a single pdf document which can be downloaded here.

Advent Programme at Christ Church – 2014
The Themes of Nativity and Resurrection in P.D.James’ The Children of Men
Part 2

“Wisdom reacheth from one end to another mightily:
and sweetly doth she order all things”

II.

O Sapientia. O Wisdom. This is the first of the Advent Antiphons, a series of Scriptural statements and prayers that belong to the heightened expectancy of the Advent Season. Suaviter and fortiter, sweetly and strongly, Wisdom rules and moves through all things. Wisdom is an important feature of the Advent season and often as not it is found in and through the experience of human limitation, not to mention human folly and wickedness. Our Advent preparations focus on such follies and wickednesses depicted in Dame P.D. James’ extraordinary novel, The Children of Men, a dystopian novel which examines the spiritual barrenness of our world and day.

That world is viewed through the eyes of Theodore Faron. In him the gentle skepticism and questioning agnosticism of her detective hero, Adam Dalgleish, emerge as a kind of detached atheism. The poetry of Adam Dalgleish, too, finds its complement in the diary of Theo Faron.

The diary serves as a vehicle for describing himself and his world. “If there is nothing to record, I shall record the nothingness”. The diary is not written for the sake of posterity, for there is no prospect of succeeding generations. It represents instead, as perhaps diaries generally do, the hold of memory in the meaning of human personality. It is part of his identity which must, it seems, vanish with himself. “If and when I reach old age – as most of us can expect to, we have become experts at prolonging life – I shall open one of my tins of hoarded matches and light my small personal bonfire of vanities”.

Dr. Theodore Faron is an academic, an historian of the nineteenth century with “an interest in the Victorian Church, old liturgies, defunct forms of worship”. For him “that age…seems like a world seen through the telescope at once so close and yet infinitely remote, fascinating in its energy, its moral seriousness, its brilliance and squalor”. The past of the nineteenth century is woven into the fabric of the twentieth and lies, like a pall, upon the dead lives of the twenty-first century. And yet the memory holds life, ambiguously and tenaciously. The liturgical memory of Theo Faron becomes the conduit of redemptive grace, but only through the learning of love.

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