Be of good cheer
Really? Is this some kind of cruel joke? Be happy in the midst of the uncertainties and fears of the current Covid-19 crisis? In the face of the fears of contagion and death, especially with respect to the elderly and to others who are vulnerable? And yet, what is signaled in the Gospel for the last Sunday of Eastertide (in its traditional reckoning), a Sunday commonly known as Rogation Sunday, speaks directly to the general question about how we face dark and difficult things. The Eastertide readings belong to a long and profound tradition of philosophical and ethical reflection about suffering and sorrow, about life and death. Tribulations ‘r us but they always have been. ‘All God’s children got problems’, as the old Gospel song says. At issue is how we face tribulations of whatever sort. This goes to the question of what it means to be human.
Far from being a cruel joke, what Jesus says here is deep wisdom. He bids us to be cheerful, not in flight from the world and its tribulations, but in the face of the things which confront us. It has entirely to do with how we see and think about things. That is why it is so significant that Jesus begins with what is really a kind of commonplace; “in the world ye have tribulation.” To be sure. How can he then say, “be of good cheer”? Because “I have overcome the world.”
This is the key point. Yet the very language of victory, of overcoming, suggests opposition and division, a ‘them versus us’ mentality, a conflict narrative. Is that what Jesus means? He means rather, I think, that he has overcome the separation of our humanity from the world and from one another because of our separation from God. Such are the radical teachings that belong to the idea of creation and the story of the Fall. The overcoming is human redemption accomplished by God in Christ through the humanity which he has assumed.
Nowhere is the deeper meaning of this shown than in the wonderful phrase which captures the whole logic of God’s engagement with our humanity and our world. Jesus says, “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.” “Because I go to the Father” is the great mantra of Eastertide. It signals nothing less than our being gathered into the love of God through Christ’s death and resurrection. Rogation Sunday shows us that this is cosmic. The whole world is gathered into God and returned to its truth in God. Rogation refers to the fundamental sense of prayer as asking, to what we desire which is the good which we seek for ourselves and for the world in the truth and goodness of God himself. The Easter mantra connects to the Our Father. As Origen, Augustine, Aquinas and a host of others remind us, nowhere in the Hebrew Scriptures is God prayed to as Father. Here everything is gathered into the divine intimacy revealed through the words of the Son.
Rogation Sunday reminds us of a different relation to the world than what technocratic society offers. It is, perhaps, one of the great lessons of the current crisis to realize that there is something radically amiss in our global techno-digitalised world, something fundamentally unlivable and inhuman. We have become disconnected from the natural world and from one another. But that disconnect is not something external. It is what we have done. In thinking like machines we become machines. The paradox is not new: we make the machines which unmake us, quite literally, like the guillotine in Camus’ The Outsider. Technology is not the solution; it is part of the problem, especially in terms of how we so easily default to a machine-like reasoning which serves our instrumental ends but at the expense of what it means to be human. The real question is how we think technology.
The overcoming of the world is not about conquest in the narrow sense. What is overcome is the opposition between God and the world, between man and God, which belongs to the long, sad tale of human sin and evil. Christ’s overcoming of the world proclaims the greater goodness of God that alone overcomes evil and alone makes something good out of evil. We are returned to who we are in God.
This Sunday highlights the vocation of our humanity in relation to the world. We are not called to dominate and destroy the natural world. It is emphatically God’s world, and never more so than in Rogationtide, a subset of Eastertide. We are recalled to creation. Its end and purpose is found in God. Creation exists for God.
There are three modern paradigms about our relation to the natural world that are in tension and conflict with one another and which contribute greatly to our current distresses. What is needed is a way to re-integrate these and see them in their proper relation. These three ‘paradigms’ in their interrelation belong to the wisdom of the past which we have largely overlooked and forgotten. What are they? In the modernity of the last five hundred years or so, there has been, first, the idea that nature is just dead stuff which is there for us to manipulate and use to human ends. This asserts the complete separation of our humanity from the natural world, from creation. The partial truth is that we cannot not leave a mark on the world. The question is: ‘what kind of mark?’ This view has now shown itself to be utterly destructive of the world and threatens our humanity. But it is only a partial view.
The second modern view of our relation to nature arises as a reaction to the first. Rather than being completely separate from the natural world, our humanity is completely collapsed into the world. We are simply one with nature. The problem then is that whatever we do must be what is natural and so cannot be subject to any kind of moral scrutiny and judgement. Humans are just doing what comes naturally. That we are inescapably a part of the natural world is true, but what kind of part? Collapsing our humanity into nature ignores the distinctiveness of our humanity. Thus, this too is a partial view.
The third view, a so-called post-modernist view, sees nature and our humanity as nothing more than linguistic and social constructs. It is all language games, just talking to ourselves, though what it means to be a self is itself elusive and unclear. Yet, language reveals assumptions about our thinking. It either hinders or helps our thinking. It is an inescapable feature of our humanity and its relation to the natural world. Words matter but only if they convey meaning and not simply deny or defer the possibility of meaning (Derrida), or signal only power and domination (Foucault).
All three ‘paradigms’ are incomplete in themselves. The logic of creation and redemption in the Gospel readings of Eastertide suggest their complementarity rather than conflict and opposition. Nowhere more so than on Rogation Sunday. For it recalls us to the vocation of our creation as the secretaries of God’s praises, as the poet George Herbert puts it.
Of all the creatures both in sea and land
Onely to Man thou hast made known thy wayes.
And put the penne alone into his hand,
And made him Secretarie of thy praise. (Providence)
“Man”, he says, “is the worlds high Priest”. This reveals the interconnection of these three disconnected ways of understanding our relation to nature. Here we are emphatically one with the creatures “both in sea and land”, inescapably part of creation and yet a special part. “Onely to Man thou hast made known thy wayes”. Man, “adam”, our humanity, alone of all creation, is said to be made in the image of God. Our domination of nature cannot mean our lording it over everything; it has to mean acting in the image of God’s care and concern for the created order as an expression of his own goodness. Nature is not divine but bears witness to the goodness of God. “God saw and it was good”, we hear over and over again in the ordered litany of creation. God speaks the world into being. “In the beginning, God”, “In the beginning was the Word”. Word, logos, God, these are inescapably connected. “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.” In Greek, the word for making is poesis, poetry. Our vocation, Herbert, suggests has to do with how our words and our deeds give voice to the creation’s praise of the Creator. That is what it means for man to be the world’s high priest. Gardening is poetry in motion!
And it is prayer, too. We work in the garden of God’s creation only by being attuned to the order of creation itself. We participate in God’s creation. Gardening is prayer as “a kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear” (Herbert, Prayer 1), fear in the sense of holy awe at the beauty of creation.
Such a way of thinking unites at once what is distinctive about our humanity in relation to the natural world and connects us to it and highlights the proper power of words which is not about domination over the world or others nor a despair of reason. It is about truth and our humble service of God in our relations with the world. All this depends upon a prior principle, namely, the essential goodness of the created world.
The current crisis runs the great risk of our losing sight of the goodness of creation and of the true vocation of our humanity. Covid-19 notwithstanding, the natural world is not evil. And our evil does not lie simply in our being but in our misuse of the gifts of the Creator. Rogation Sunday recalls us to proper relation to the natural world, to that world as found in God. As another poet, Thomas Traherne, puts it: “you never love the world aright until you learn to love it in God”. Rogation Sunday reminds us that this is God’s world, that human redemption has a cosmic aspect for the simple reason that we are inescapably part of the world and cannot not think ourselves as independent of it. At the same time, it highlights the true vocation of our humanity in the activities of prayer and praise. “Gods breath in man returning to his birth” (Prayer 1), a return in prayer and praise, in service and sacrifice.
This is to see the wonder and the mystery of God in the world by seeing the world as redeemed, as returned to its principle; in short, to see the world in God. Such a way of looking at things indeed gives us “good cheer”. We learn to see the beauty, the truth, and the goodness of God in the world because the world is in God. The world and our humanity is gathered into the love of God through the comings and goings of the Son to the Father in the unity of the Spirit. That is our good cheer in the face of whatever hardships or tribulations we confront.
Be of good cheer
Fr. David Curry
Easter V, Rogation Sunday
Posted not preached owing to the Covid-19 outbreak