Audio File of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 8
We are children of God
O sacred Providence, who from end to end
strongly and sweetly movest! shall I write,
And not of thee, through whom my fingers bend
To hold my quill? shall they not do thee right?
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.
George Herbert’s poem, Providence, begins with a scriptural text upon which the whole poem hangs, a text from the Wisdom of Solomon: “Wisdom reacheth from one end to another mightily and sweetly doth she order all things”, fortiter et suaviter, strongly and sweetly (Wisdom 9.1). It is also the only scriptural reference in Boethius’ great classic, The Consolation of Philosophy, written in 529 AD while in prison, falsely accused and awaiting his death; the work itself is a treatise on Providence for that is our great consolation regardless of the times and circumstances.
Herbert writes of Providence with the awareness that this is itself a providence. Providence bids him write and that bidding extends to all humanity. It belongs to us to write of Providence. It is our vocation as “children of God”. It is about who we are in the sight of God. Writing here is a metaphor for living out what we believe and know.
Yet the question is not at first how well do we write but what and how do we read. After all, Solomon, Boethius, Herbert, and a host of other thinkers and writers have all read and learned something of God’s Providence whether in Scripture, history, philosophy, or people’s lives. Only so can they then write of it as what moves so strongly and sweetly. Only then can we read so that we, too, might be the “secretaries of thy praise”. But what and how do we read?
To contemplate the Providence of God is to discover the will that wields the world and beyond. It is what we acknowledge in the Collect: “O God, whose never-failing providence ordereth all things both in heaven and earth”. But what does it mean to contemplate the Providence of God?
In our own lives and in the lives of others, and in the confusions of our world, we may see but a tattered quilt of circumstances and a tangled net of accidents. There is just such a jumble of things which might have been otherwise. There is so much that seems inexplicably arbitrary. And yet patterns weave and dance out of the seemingly arbitrary decisions and actions made by others so long ago and, no doubt, too, by ourselves. They tell a story.
The sense of a story marks the beginning of an awareness of Providence. We take our part in the weave and dance of God’s story. There is no story apart from him, the great poet/maker of all stories and things. Providence is about God in all things and all things in God. “Thou art in small things great, not small in any…/Thou art in all things one, in each thing many:/For thou art infinite in one and all” as Herbert puts it philosophically and poetically and in ways that echo the teachings of Plotinus and Boethius.
It means looking at things from God’s perspective rather than subjecting and reducing God to our human viewpoint. What we see and know in limited and discursive ways, first, one thing and, then, another, are but partial truths that belong to the unitive vision of God, who sees “what is, what has been, and what is to come, /In one swift mental stab,” as Boethius says (Consolatio V, II). It is our perversity to split up what is really one and simple in its nature (Consolatio III, IX).
The Providence of God does not simply mean foreseeing or foreknowing since that would imply a temporal perspective, like gazing into a crystal ball in an attempt to predict the future. Thus God’s foreknowledge is his eternal knowledge of all things at once preserving and providing the ground of human freedom and agency whether by “thy command or thy permission,” as Herbert puts it. The Providence of God is about how all things are known eternally in God such that time is gathered into eternity, becoming into what truly is, our knowing into the divine mind that we might know even as we are known. This is our consolation and freedom. “O qui perpetua mundum ratione gubernas” – “O thou who dost rule the world with everlasting reason”(Consolatio III, IX). Our reasoning is partial and limited but has its ground and truth in the divine knowing. Such is the religious and philosophical understanding that “the good is the end of all things” (Consolatio III, X). It is all about the direction of our thinking, thinking upward rather than downward, as it were, lifting our minds to contemplate the divine mind.
To contemplate God’s Providence counters the twin dangers of chance and chaos which negate human freedom and action and deny the relation between the outward and the inward, between saying and doing. To contemplate God’s Providence is to pray that God’s will be done in the confidence of the goodness of God which is greater than all and every evil, a goodness which alone brings good out of evil. To bring forth good fruit is to will God’s will in our lives. It is about our being in God and with God and about God being in us and with us. It means to learn to see “the good in everything” as Shakespeare puts it. We are being recalled to the goodness of God.
Sometimes we only see one thing by itself and don’t see it as part of the whole story. Sometimes we are so much a part of the story that we fail to know it as such. The fact of God’s will ruling in and through all things both “in heaven and earth” only becomes clearer afterwards, even if only much later afterwards.
Yet we begin to learn the providence of God through story, especially the stories of the Bible, stories that unveil the greater story of God’s Providence within which we, too, take our part. Jesus Christ is the visible mind of Providence himself, the will that wields the world even in the face of evil. Austin Farrer highlights this point.
What would seem less providential than Judas’ betrayal, or Peter’s denial? Yet the first was the occasion of Christ’s passion by which we are all redeemed; and the second brought it about that the Church, founded on Peter, was founded on penitence, not heroism; and so, though we are not heroes, there is hope for us all, for we can all repent.
In all of this, there is no manipulation of events, no outward form of coercion, but rather the simple working of God’s Word and Will running in and through all things. We are shown how we are redeemed. The mind of Christ, unveiling the story of endless and eternal love, is extended to us. Our story is drawn into his story. He is the one who tells us God’s story by writing it in our lives, even as he has lived it in our flesh. The mind of Providence is made visible to us in Christ.
To read the mind of Providence is to begin to write, to be in our lives texts which tell of God’s Providence, stories which celebrate the Providence of God, songs which sing the praises of Providence in and through the sufferings of the world and our sufferings too. For in the Providence of God we are reminded of who we are, the “children of God”. Such is Providence.
We are children of God
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 8, 2020