Times of transition signal occasions for renewal. We come to the ending of the Church Year and so to the beginning of yet another. The times of endings return us to our beginnings. Advent marks a new beginning. But what does it mean, these endings which bring us back to our beginnings? What does it mean to begin again? Is the cycle of the Church Year another dreary round of the same old things in the same old places with the same old faces? Or is it the dance of God’s grace and glory in human lives? “To make an end is to make a beginning,” T.S. Eliot observes for “the end is where we start from.” It is about the principle of our lives.
We come to the end of a year of grace and take stock of our lives in the light of God’s grace. It marks a kind of harvest-time for our souls, as it were, a gathering up of the fruits of the past year’s grace in our lives. But it means too, that we are returned to our beginning, to Him who is the foundation and meaning of our lives. The grace is God’s Word revealed and all because “Jesus turned.” The turnings of the year and our turnings turn upon God’s turning to us.
In the barren emptiness of nature’s year, “when yellow leaves or none or few do hang/ upon those boughs which shake against the cold,/ bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang” (Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73), Christ strides across the barren fields of humanity to gather us into the barn of his righteousness and truth. We are returned to him who is “the Lord our Righteousness,” our Judge and King, the Shepherd and the Healer of all mankind, the Alpha and the Omega of all creation. Our endings and our beginnings all meet in him. Basil the Great suggests what this means.
As all the fruits of the season come to us in their proper time,
flowers in spring, corn in summer and apples in autumn,
so the fruit for winter is talk.
Talk, you may protest, thank you very much, but we have had quite enough talk, too much talk, especially preachers’ talk. But talk about what, you might ask? What is the talk in the times of endings, the fruit for winter’s evening, the talk which marks the occasions for renewed beginnings? Surely, it is God’s talk, God’s Word and no other, God’s Word making his talk in us. For apart from God’s talk, our talk is vain and destructive. “The tongue,” as St. James notes, “is a fire. The tongue is an unrighteous member…With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who are made in the likeness of God.” Such are our contradictions. “From the same mouth come blessing and cursing.” As he says, “My brethren, this ought not to be so.” But sadly it is, for “no human being can tame the tongue.”
What then can be said either by us or about us? Not much. Yet what is wanted is that we and our words, our souls and our very being, should be brought under the wisdom and the Word of God, “for both we and our words are in his hand,” as The Wisdom of Solomon puts it. What is wanted is that his Word should take shape in us. “Who is wise and understanding among you? By his good life let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom.”
In the meekness of wisdom, in mansuetudine sapientiae, the gentleness of wisdom, really. It is a wonderful phrase which captures beautifully the point of Wisdom’s prayer: “May God grant that I speak with judgment and have thoughts worthy of what I have received.”
The gentleness of wisdom requires a certain disposition of soul, an attitude of mind. It requires an openness to that constant coming of God’s Word to us, “to that which we have received.” It challenges the arrogant assertions of our own petty ‘wisdoms’ and the follies of our complacencies. It brings us under the tutelage of God’s word and wisdom. Only then may we say that “both we and our words are in his hand.” Such is the gentleness of wisdom.
We come to an ending only to find that we have come to the beginning, to him who is the foundation of our lives, the Alpha and the Omega. We find all our endings and all our beginnings in the Father’s Son and Word. We come simply to Christ. And surely, that is the truth of our Christian life. By his Word we have gained the threshold of heaven upon which we may sing and dance, upon which we may sit and talk. What more can we ever say than that? What can our talk be except his Word in us? Then we shall find that we “have thoughts worthy of what [we] have received.” The fruit of our lives must be our talk of Christ, “for both we and our words are in his hand.” That we can begin again is “the gentleness of wisdom.” Begin again so that we might come to him who comes to us in the gentleness of wisdom hinted at in Charles G.D. Roberts’ poem.
When Mary the Mother kissed the Child
And night on the wintry hills grew mild,
And the strange star swung from the courts of air
To serve at a manger with kings in prayer,
Then did the day of the simple kin
And the unregarded folk begin.
When Mary the Mother forgot the pain,
In the stable of rock began love’s reign.
When that new light on their grave eyes broke
The oxen were glad and forgot their yoke;
And the huddled sheep in the far hill fold
Stirred in their sleep and felt no cold.
When Mary the Mother gave of her breast
To the poor inn’s latest and lowliest guest, –
The God born out of the woman’s side, –
The Babe of Heaven by Earth denied, –
Then did the hurt ones cease to moan,
And the long supplanted came to their own.
When Mary the Mother felt faint hands
Beat at her bosom with life’s demands,
And nought to her were the kneeling kings,
The serving star and the half-seen wings,
Then there was the little of earth made great,
And the man came back to the God’s estate.
Charles G.D. Roberts
From the Book of Roses, 1923
Fr. David Curry (revised 2019)