Year: 2014

“The wedding is ready, but they who were bidden were not worthy”

“I had not thought,” says Dante to Virgil, “that death had undone so many.” A passage and a scene from Dante’s great work, The Divine Comedy, he has pictured himself as contemplating the hordes of lost souls in the Vestibule of Hell as they run to and fro following this or that fad or fancy, souls who willed and then unwilled their will unable to commit to anything; unworthy even of Hell, it seems. It serves, perhaps, as a kind of metaphor for the age of distraction.

T.S. Eliot quotes that same line in his great poem about the ambiguities of modernity, The Wasteland. “I had not thought death had undone so many”, it is said, but in the context of contemplating “a crowd flow[ing] over London Bridge.” His comment is about the living as dead, the walking dead, as it were, in the “unreal city” of the modern world.

There is something wrong and not quite right with us. Yet precisely in the gloom and grey of November, we are awakened to the end of our humanity in the glorious vision of the Communion of Saints, “a multitude that no man could number.” Such is the meaning of All Saints. We have an end with God and with one another, as a community united in and through the diversities of human personality, a community united in prayer and praise of God. But when we neglect that vision, we find ourselves very much in the company of the walking dead, “cast into outer darkness,” as our Gospel puts it so frighteningly this morning, where “there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth” and all because of our indifference and our hostility and our unreadiness; in short, our lack of commitment.

The contrasts between the communion of saints and grim realities of outer darkness could not be greater.

(more…)

Print this entry

“And the wall of the city had twelve foundations,
and in them the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb”

The feast of St. Simon and St. Jude completes the annual parade of Apostolic Saints and brings us to the festival of All Saints, the celebration of the Apostolic city and fellowship in the Communion of All Saints.

All that really can be said about St. Simon and St. Jude has to do with their apostleship. They simply belong to the company of “twelve poor men, by Christ anointed,” as a hymn puts it. What more needs to be said than that?

They have, to be sure, lent their names to certain features of human life as patron saints, symbols, we might say, of some aspect or other of the virtues of Christ individually considered. St. Simon is the patron saint of zealots; St. Jude, more curiously, is the patron saint of lost causes, something with which I have more than a passing acquaintance. The zealous passion for a perfect political and social and spiritual righteousness often complements the despair at lost causes that often accompanies such worthy and necessary aspirations. Ultimately, such zeal brings us to the true righteousness of Christ, realized in the city of heavenly Jerusalem. What we have here is only “the unreal city” as T.S. Eliot memorably puts it, a lost cause.

“Zeal for thine house hath even consumed me,” the psalmist says. Yet through the myriad of lost causes, the deeper yearning for peace and righteousness is glimpsed, the deeper yearning which belongs to a peace, “not as the world giveth,” but as Christ gives.

The readings concentrate our attention on the Apostolic Foundation of the Church and the end of our humanity. Apostolic Foundation and Apostolic Fellowship are two realities which we are badly in need of recovering and reclaiming. Without them our parishes, our communities, our institutions either become the mental ghettoes of passive nihilism, empty, angry and in despair, or the activist sects and cells of active nihilism trumpeting one of a myriad of the social and political agendas of the day at the expense of the spiritual vision of redeemed humanity which is ours to proclaim. We are too much with ourselves because we are not with God.

(more…)

Print this entry