Lenten Programme 4: The Comfortable Words and the Literature of Consolation IV
`“Rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of the sufferings of Christ” (1 Peter 2.13)
Tonight we meet not only in the week of The Fifth Sunday in Lent, in other words, in Passiontide, but in the conjunction of the commemorations of Benedict, the founding father of Benedictine monasticism which shaped so much of what would become Europe and the intellectual culture of the Latin or Western Church, and Thomas Cranmer, who built upon that legacy as the architect of The Book(s) of Common Prayer that envisioned a Christian nation as a community of prayer. Both can be regarded as “doctors” – teachers – of the Church. But Cranmer was the Archbishop of Canterbury and, as well, a martyr.
It seems fitting and in keeping with our Lenten series on The Comfortable Words and The Literature of Consolation that we give emphasis to the aspect of martyrdom, to the idea of comfort found even in suffering, captured in the text from 1 Peter and reflected in the Gospel reading from Matthew 16 about “deny[ing ourselves] and tak[ing] up [the] cross, and foll[owing Jesus]”.
“Draw near with faith, and take this holy Sacrament to your comfort.” These words belong to the Invitation to Confession in the Eucharistic liturgy of the Prayer Book, words which perhaps we hear as familiar and dear but don’t really think about and yet they connect two things, comfort with Confession, and comfort with the Sacrament of the Altar. In both those senses they suggest something of the significance of the Comfortable Words in the Prayer Book Communion liturgy. In a way, the Comfortable Words pick up from that succinct and rich phrase in precisely those two ways: at once in relation to the comfort of confession and to the comfort of the sacrament to which the confession of sins leads us.
They echo, too, perhaps, the words of St. Paul at the outset of his Second Letter to the Corinthians, words of blessing in the midst of struggles and sufferings. “Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort; Who comforteth us in all our tribulations, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God.” That is consolation writ large! Two nouns and three verbal forms, yet all about comfort extended and received, but, most importantly, grounded in God. The Greek word for comfort is translated in the Latin as consolatio. It is, perhaps, not by accident then that Meister Eckhart, an astute and original thinker on every aspect of the Christian Faith philosophically and here pastorally considered, should entitle his two early fourteenth century treatises on Consolation with Paul’s opening word, “Benedictus.” The first treatise, “The Book of Divine Consolation” begins with these words from Paul, words which not only begin but underlie the argument of both treatises which together present in a concentrated way almost the whole of the tradition of consolation before him.