Meditation for the Eve of Ember Friday in the Autumn
As ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.
There is something spiritually compelling and instructive about the tradition of the Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday Ember Days in the Ember Seasons scattered throughout the year. At once a kind of Christian sanctification of the ancient patterns of the nature’s year and of agricultural life, the Embertides are also times of prayer and times for the ordination of Christian ministers. They connect our natural lives with the supernatural or spiritual by grounding the former in the latter.
They have become set around significant seasons and events of the year naturally and spiritually. The Advent Ember days fall after the Third Sunday in Advent, thus invariably close to the Winter Solstice. The Lenten Ember days are shortly after the beginning of Lent, which is always a movable season, commencing either early or late depending on the date of Easter, the Sunday after the first Full Moon following the Spring Equinox. Again, you get the sense of connection to the patterns of nature’s year. Yet the fons et origo of the Ember Days is in relation to Pentecost. The Pentecostal Ember Day propers are appointed to be read on the Wednesdays of each of the Ember Seasons, thus grounding all of them in the Descent of the Holy Spirit to give birth to the Church and its ministry. And finally, there are the Autumn Ember Days which follow shortly after Holy Cross Day, and, invariably, close to the Fall Equinox.
There is in all of this a kind of balancing of emphasis and focus, a dance of nature and spirit, as it were. But the Ember Days argue for the deeper integration of our everyday lives in the things of the Spirit. The Autumn Ember days have as their special theme, ‘Labour and Industry,’ but the propers speak eloquently about our labour as being really a labour of love; in short, the love of God and the love of neighbour, as it were, which we saw on Trinity XIII, Sunday just past, in the Parable of the Good Samaritan. The Autumn Embertide Gospel from Luke’s Sermon on the Plain extends that love to the love of your enemies, and to “be merciful even as your father is merciful.” The Gospel begins with the important insight that the love of God and neighbour implies the love of self, hence the concept of the golden rule articulated by Jesus. “As ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.”
This signals the importance of the self and self-knowing including the need to be self-critical without which we cannot begin to learn to love one another or God. The ordained ministry exists to remind us of the true labour and industry of our lives as labours of love, a love which only as grounded in the divine love can love others and ourselves as God loves us, even when we are the enemies of his love which Holy Cross day reminds us by way of the readings for Passion Sunday. We labour in the love of God shown to us in Christ, a love which challenges us in every way about our loves, our love of self, of others, and of God. There is our learning to love and to persevere in love, always seeking to do well and better, but only as rooted and grounded in the love of Christ. In him we learn how to “go and do likewise” as in the Parable of the Good Samaritan.
As ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.
Fr. David Curry
Eve of Ember Friday
September 19th, 2019
Almighty God, who didst call thy servant Theodore of Tarsus from Rome to the see of Canterbury, and didst give him gifts of grace and wisdom to establish unity where there had been division, and order where there had been chaos: Create in thy Church, we pray thee, by the operation of the Holy Spirit, such godly union and concord that it may proclaim, both by word and example, the Gospel of the Prince of Peace; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.