Christ Church

Lift up your hearts

“We ascend,” St. Augustine says,“in the ascension of our hearts”. It is an essential feature of our liturgy. We might even suggest that the Prayer Book liturgy is all “sursum corda,” all about the lifting up our hearts unto the Lord. Such motions are the motions of grace in us, the motions of Christ’s Ascension moving in us.

The Ascension marks the culmination of the Resurrection and belongs to its essential logic. In a way, it is all about our being and dwelling with God who in Christ has dwelt among us, literally “tented among us,” itself a suggestive image, but only in order to bring us to the true homeland of the Spirit. “We should understand the sacrament, not carnally, but spiritually,” Cranmer argues “being like eagles in this life, we should fly up into heaven in our hearts, where that Lamb is resident at the right hand of his Father.” It is such a powerful and suggestive image: being like eagles “fly[ing] up to heaven in our hearts where that Lamb is resident at the right hand of his Father.” It speaks to our hearts and minds.

Homer’s great epic poem, The Odyssey, is all about homecoming. It chronicles the struggles of Odysseus in his ten year quest to achieve his homeland of Ithaca after the Trojan War. That struggle is about knowing who you are which means overcoming all of the forms of our forgetting and the unknowing of ourselves. Home is a powerful image of the sense of place as belonging to identity. It is at once local and particular but also cosmic and universal. To know yourself is to know your place in a cosmic order. It is to know your relation to others and to God.

Christ’s Ascension is altogether about who he truly is, the eternal Son of the Father who always sits at the right hand of the Father, which is to say, that “there was not when he was not;” in other words,  that he is always God. His Ascension signals the gathering up of our humanity to its end and truth in God. His homecoming is “the exaltation of our humanity,” as the Fathers of the early Church argue, the lifting up of us to God in whom we truly live and move and have our being. “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

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The collect for today, The Ascension Day, being the fortieth day after Easter, sometimes called Holy Thursday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

GRANT, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that like as we do believe thy only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens; so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continuously dwell, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 1:1-11
The Gospel: St. Mark 16:14-20

Artwork: This same Jesus which is taken up from you into Heaven shall so come in like manner, All Saints Margaret Street, London. Photograph taken by admin, 25 September 2015.

She reacheth from one end to the other mightily and sweetly ordereth all things

Strongly and sweetly. Fortiter et sauviter. Who is this ‘she’? In Chapel this week we read from the eighth chapter of the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon. It is a most famous passage. It is what I like to call a connector passage, writings which connect to many other  cultures and patterns of thinking. Students and faculty, for the most part, have perhaps never heard this passage but that doesn’t make it any less famous. The ‘she’ here is wisdom; sophia in Greek, sapientia in Latin. The passage is a wonderful paean of praise to wisdom and as such speaks to the educational project of the School in terms of understanding and cultural literacy. Wisdom, not knowledge simply, and certainly not mere information is what is looked for and sought. Wisdom is about maturity of character, about a way of understanding that shapes a way of living ethically and responsibly.

Written in Greek probably in the first century BC, Wisdom connects directly to the forms of discourse and thinking that belong to Greek or Hellenistic philosophy. The created wisdom of God shows us that wisdom is to be sought above all other things. “If riches are a desirable possession in life, what is richer than wisdom who effects all things?” Wisdom teaches temperance, prudence, justice and courage, the four classical virtues of Greek and Latin antiquity which in turn contribute to the moral and ethical discourse of Christianity and Islam. Wisdom here is about an understanding of the created world and thus about ourselves. The influence of this text is altogether remarkable. It continues to speak to us even in the arrogance of our unwisdom.

Some seven centuries after the Book of Wisdom was written, Boethius wrote a most influential treatise known as the Consolation of Philosophy. Sometimes called the last of the Romans, Boethius was actually a Christian philosopher whose life ambition, largely unfulfilled, was to translate the works of Plato and Aristotle into Latin. The only explicit Scriptural reference in the Consolatio is this passage about wisdom strongly and sweetly ordering and moving all things. “O qui perpetua mundum ratione gubernas” – O thou who dost rule the world with everlasting reason, Boethius says. Wisdom is what is looked for in our lives.

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“In the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer,
I have overcome the world.”

Rogation Sunday reminds us that the Resurrection is cosmic in scope. It recalls us to the land in which we are placed and to our vocation where we are. That is altogether about prayer and praise. “Prayer,” as Richard Hooker so clearly states, “signals all the service that we ever do unto God” and so it is praise too. That Godward orientation of our lives belongs to a sacramental understanding whereby the things of the world become the instruments of grace and salvation. It is about seeing the world in God and God in the world. This challenges completely many of our contemporary assumptions.

Rogation is about prayer in this wider sense that connects us immediately and concretely to the land and to our cultivation of the land. This is not simply like, say, Sir Francis Bacon’s endeavour to interrogate nature and to force nature to disclose her secrets in order to make the natural world serve human interests. Though Bacon’s interest in nature was with respect to the betterment of the human condition, that impulse to interrogate nature forcefully and experimentally only too easily slides into the tendency to dominate. We know only too well how that leads to destruction, to a disregard and a disrespect of the created order. Canada shipping garbage to the Philippines? The mind boggles, the heart weeps.

Gerard Manley Hopkins’ 1879 poem, Binsey Poplars, reflects on this larger problem by way of an instance of a kind of clear-cutting along the banks of a country stream. “All felled, felled,” … “not one spared” …  “O if we but knew what we do/ When we delve or hew – hack or rack the growing green” … “where we mean/ To mend her we end her,/ When we hew or delve” … “Strokes of havoc unselve / The sweet especial scene,/ Rural scene, a rural scene, / Sweet especial rural scene.” There is more to that ending than just a kind of nostalgia for a romanticised rural idyll. His point is that we unselve ourselves in such acts of destruction.

Rogation recalls us to a kind of thoughtfulness about our engagement with the land where we are placed. We cannot not leave a mark; the question is what kind of mark? The cliches of our contemporary world in this respect are often misleading and dangerous. The mantra ‘think globally and act locally’ seems more and more only to serve the corporate interests of the global elites. To think and act locally might actually lead to a deeper appreciation and understanding of the world and of ourselves in it. Even better, just think!

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Tuesday, May 28th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place

Thursday, May 30th, Ascension Day
6:30-7:30pm Sparks – Parish Hall
7:00pm Holy Communion

Friday, May 31st
6:00-7:30pm Pathfinders & Rangers – Parish Hall

Sunday, June 2nd, The Sunday after Ascension Day
8:00am Holy Communion (followed by Men’s Club breakfast with Ladies invited)
10:30am Holy Communion

Seeing that we have a great high priest that is passed into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

Rogation

Rogationtide brings us to the Ascension as the culmination or end of the Easter Season. It reminds us of two important themes that are quite radical in their extent. Rogation means asking, from the Latin, rogo, rogare. It appears in English in the word, interrogation. Rogation days are days of prayer, a kind of asking; an active acknowledgment or recognition that all and every good comes from God to us. Prayer places us and keeps us in the presence of God. This is the astounding truth and power of the Resurrection. Prayer and praise place us with God. Nothing stands in the way except our own hearts and wills.

The other theme that Rogation presents to us is the idea that redemption is cosmic in scope. The world is God’s world and participates in the redemptive love of God for the whole of his creation, including the natural world and world of human labour and endeavour.

The days of Rogation embrace the world in prayer. They remind us that wherever we are is a kind of holy land. How? By being the places in which we praise and honour God and pray to God.

To think on these things is the counter to our utilitarian exploitation of the natural world for our own immediate ends and the counter to our despair and anxiety about suffering and hardship. “In the world,” Jesus says, “you shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” Wherever we are is to be a place of prayer and praise. Whatever we do is to be a work of prayer and praise.

Fr. David Curry

The collect for today, The Fifth Sunday After Easter, commonly called Rogation Sunday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O LORD, from whom all good things do come; Grant to us thy humble servants, that by thy holy inspiration we may think those things that be good, and by thy merciful guiding may perform the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: St. James 1:22-27
The Gospel: St. John 16:23-33

Artwork: Fritz von Uhde, The Last Supper, 1886. Oil on canvas, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.

The collect for a Bishop or Archbishop, on the Feast of Saint Aldhelm (c. 639-709), Abbot of Malmesbury, Bishop of Sherborne, Poet, Scholar, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD, our heavenly Father, who didst raise up thy faithful servant Aldhelmto be a Bishop in thy Church and to feed thy flock: We beseech thee to send down upon all thy Bishops, the Pastors of thy Church, the abundant gift of thy Holy Spirit, that they, being endued with power from on high, and ever walking in the footsteps of thy holy Apostles, may minister before thee in thy household as true servants of Christ and stewards of thy divine mysteries; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee in the unity of the same Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Timothy 6:11-16
The Gospel: St. Luke 12:37-43

Aldhelm became the first Bishop of Sherborne in AD 705. Before then he had been Abbot of Malmesbury for some thirty years. He was born in about AD 639 and died in 709 in Doulting, Somerset. St Aldhelm is buried at Malmesbury. His name translated from the old English means “Old Helmet”. For more information, click here.

Photograph: St. Aldhelm, Sherborne Abbey, Dorset, U.K.
© Copyright Sarah Smith and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

Found in translation

Lost in translation has become an all too familiar trope at once simplistic and naive. It contributes to the idea of translation as betrayal, literally a traducing of the text, the idea that what is expressed in one language simply cannot be expressed in another. This implies a kind of intellectual despair which runs counter to the ideals and principles of education. That there are difficulties and questions about translation is one thing; but that translation is impossible is an entirely different matter. And so perhaps, just perhaps, there is also the idea of things being found in translation.

Cultural literacy is a feature of Chapel, it seems to me, along with the effort to provide at least a limited kind of biblical literacy. In a School where there are more than two dozen different nationalities and a multitude of languages, cultures, and religious and non-religious identities, whatever that means, translation is not only a pressing concern on a day-to-day basis but is assumed as being in principle possible, indeed necessary. Translation is about more than language; it is also about the intersection of ideas in the cross-overs of culture. In short, translation is an essential quality of education. It requires a capacity to engage with one another respectfully and with a willingness to learn from one another. In this sense, translation counters the disquieting tendencies towards cultural arrogance or national superiority, to the tunnel-visions of narcissism, solipsism, or even racism.

The lesson from Ecclesiasticus read this week is partly about the question and problem of translation. One of the books of the Apocrypha, books written in the period between the setting down of the Hebrew Scriptures and the emergence of the Christian Scriptures, the New Testament, it belongs to a category of writing known as ‘wisdom literature’. It is the only apocryphal text whose author we know. Ecclesiasticus is the Latin term literally meaning ‘church book’ for what in Hebrew and Greek is The Wisdom of Jesus, The Son of Sirach, frequently abbreviated to Sirach. The work is in praise of sophia, wisdom, which already reflects something of the confluence of Greek and Hellenistic philosophy and Jewish thought; itself a kind of translation, we might say. Written in Hebrew in the early second century BC, it was translated into Greek some fifty years later by the grandson of the author as indicated in the Prologue which he added.

There we see explicitly the question of translation with respect to language. “For what was originally expressed in Hebrew does not have exactly the same sense when translated into another language.” But Sirach’s grandson also notes the desire on the part of his grandfather to communicate the wisdom of the Jewish world to others as part of an universal and ethical desire to live wisely. Thus there is a kind of congruence of cultures, a translation of ideas and principles through the love of learning that in turn governs our living.

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“Because I go to the Father”

There is a great fearfulness in our own age and culture. It is not just about the ceaseless spectacle of a world of wars constantly before us in such things as “international terrorism”, the Jihadis culture, or the continuing conflicts in Syria, or the humanitarian catastrophe that is the famine in Yemen, not to mention North Korea, let alone the mounting tensions between America and Iran, let alone the disturbing realities of the surveillance state of China which is Orwell’s 1984 at the same time as the so-called West largely reflects Huxley’s Brave New World. In the one, “Big Brother” is literally watching, measuring and controlling you. In the other, the problem of “making people love their servitude” under the illusion of happiness and distraction has been only too successful. Pick your dystopia. Pick your nightmare.

Our fearfulness is more about the emptiness within the soul of a culture when we can no longer identify the principles and the ideals that dignify our humanity. When we can no longer say what makes life worth living for, and mean something more than merely the pragmatic hedonism of a materialistic culture, then there is certainly nothing worth dying for either. There is nothing to live for. There is only the emptiness within, a darkness inside. Out of that emptiness can come such frightening and senseless acts of violence, death and self-destruction that have become a regular feature of our world. Such is the world of “cultural nihilism” in both its active and passive forms.

The essence of such acts is their meaninglessness. The philosopher Peter Kreeft notes that the fear for our culture is not the fear of death as it was for the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome, nor is it the fear of Hell as it was for the mediaeval cultures whether Christian, Jewish, or Islamic. No. It is the fear of meaninglessness itself. There is no truth to which we should endeavour to conform ourselves and hold ourselves accountable. Our fearfulness is our emptiness, our nihilism, which we confront.

In the Gospels. Jesus confronts our fearfulness. The Gospel of the Resurrection is especially about his overcoming of our fearfulness. The message of the angel to the women, coming early to the tomb and finding it empty, was “be not afraid”. Jesus comes into the midst of the disciples whether they are huddled behind closed doors in fear or on the road to Emmaus in fearful flight from Jerusalem. His presence is peace and joy.

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Tuesday, May 21st
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club: In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong, by Amin Maalouf, and From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt against the West and the Remaking of Asia, by Pankaj Mishra.

Thursday, May 23rd
3:15pm Service – Windsor Elms
6:30-7:30pm Sparks – Parish Hall

Friday, May 24th
11:00am Holy Communion – Dykeland Lodge
6:00-7:30pm Pathfinders & Rangers – Parish Hall

Sunday, May 26th, The Fifth Sunday after Easter/Rogation Sunday
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion