Month: May 2017

“I came forth from the Father and am come into the world:
again, I leave the world, and go to the Father”

Today is known as Rogation Sunday. The days of rogation are days of asking, days of prayer, but with a particular emphasis upon the land. Rogation Sunday reminds us of the redemption of creation itself and our place in the landscape of creation redeemed. The resurrection is cosmic in scope. Prayer is an activity of redeemed humanity. We make our prayers in the land where we have been placed. Our places in the land are to be the places of grace. How? By prayer.

Rogationtide embraces the world in prayer. The world is comprehended in the relationship of the Father and the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit. What is overcome is sin, the world as turned away from God and as turned against God, the world as infected and stained by our sinfulness, by our forgetfulness of our place in the landscape of creation redeemed. The consequences are our disrespect for the land and the sea, for the world in which we have been placed. We make a mess of it. We forget the place of creation in the will of God; we forget about the redemption of creation.

There are, it seems to me, three competing and contrasting contemporary approaches to our thinking about nature; they are the broken fragments of a more philosophical understanding captured in the Scriptures. First, nature is viewed merely as dead stuff, simply there for human manipulation. This assumes the dominance of our humanity over nature and our complete separation from everything else in the created order. It is a distortion of the Biblical idea of human dominance which emphasizes instead God as the Lord, the Dominus, and thus our dominance only as in the image of the Creator with the strong sense of stewardship of the world which is emphatically God’s world. Secondly, there is the view that collapses our humanity into nature altogether, such as the Gaia hypothesis, but in this view we are simply natural and material forces therefore what we do is natural. This makes it utterly impossible to account for human actions that are so destructive of nature. While it rightly reminds us of our creatureliness and thus a relation to everything else in the created order, it denies the distinctive features of the human creation. The first and second account contradict each other: the one asserting the separation from nature, the other denying the distinctive qualities of our humanity in creation.

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“Receive with meekness the implanted word”

In the secular culture of North America, today is Mother’s Day but in the sacred culture of the Church today is The Fourth Sunday after Easter which presents to us yet again, the Easter mantra of Jesus, “because I go to my Father.” In the face of our contemporary confusions about gender and language, it seems almost a kind of miracle that we still have Mother’s Day and the Easter mantra. But there is a great wisdom and a compelling and substantial truth in these images.

The coming together of the secular and the sacred in this way is suggestive, I think, and illustrates the nature of their engagement. The Resurrection is a redire ad principia that changes how we view everything. It signals the way all things are gathered back to God. Sacred and secular are not simply opposed; the challenge is to understand something of their interrelation, something of the way in which the sacred engages the secular and gathers it to God; something of the way, too, in which the secular reflects the Divine.

The mystery of motherhood belongs, as paradoxical as it might seem, to the mystery of the Son’s going to the Father. In short, it, too, belongs to the mystery of the Resurrection in its essential meaning. The Resurrection is radical new birth and radical new life. The Resurrection goes to the root of all life itself. That root is the reciprocal love of the Son for the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. Having brought us to birth in this new life, the Risen Christ would also nurture us in this new life, like a mother nursing a child.

The point of the Eastertide Gospels is to teach us about that radical new life of the Spirit which has been inaugurated and established through Christ’s death and resurrection. We can only be nurtured in what we have received; in what has been given to us. We can only give as mothers give – sacrificially and selflessly – through what God has given us of himself in Jesus Christ – sacrificially and selflessly.

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