Year: 2020

There was war in heaven

In a world of wars and division, it may be too much to contemplate the idea of war in heaven. The Feast of St. Michael and All Angels reminds us of the spiritual warfare between good and evil. But it doesn’t simply leave us with opposition and division, with war and enmity. In a way, we are saved by grammar. “There was war in heaven, “ not there is! But on earth? In human hearts? That is, I am afraid, another matter. This remarkable feast reminds us of the struggle for the good in human hearts and human lives. The struggle, as Revelation suggests, is cosmic, a struggle against spiritual forces, as Paul indicates, against principalities and powers.

Angels belong to the created order. They are, we might say, God’s thoughts in creation. The Gospel reading touches upon an important intellectual consideration: “angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven,” Jesus says. The Gospel reading recalls us to the biblical witness to angels as spiritual beings that are with us in some sense. They are, as the long philosophical tradition of reflection teaches, pure spiritual beings, sempiternal, defined by their will and attention to God. But Revelation reminds us of the fallen angels, of sin and evil as the principle of the denial of God and of their own creation. It is expressed in a series of terms: “the great dragon”, “that old serpent, called the devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world.”  Such images take us back to Genesis and to the conditions of creation in the commandment not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and to the subsequent story of the Fall with the wiles of the serpent whose questions insinuate doubt and denial of what is called emphatically “good”, indeed “very good.”

The questions of the serpent to Adam and Eve deceive by suggesting an alternative explanation at the expense of what God has actually said. Thus, the Genesis story sees sin and evil as rooted in disobedience. The further ramification of such disobedience is seen in the angelic revolt of that great dragon, that old serpent (recalling Genesis), called the devil and Satan. Another term is Lucifer, meaning the light-bearer who becomes the prince of darkness because he literally turns his back on God and on the vocation and truth of his own being. Such is the radical nature of evil, a denial of the Good upon which our being and knowing utterly depend. It is absolutely self-contradictory; it depends upon that which it rejects. Such is the folly of sin and evil. It means to live in contradiction to the principle of the Good which is by definition greater and prior. The passage from Revelation shows us the victory of St. Michael and All Angels over all that opposes the truth and goodness of God. The victory is through the blood of the Lamb, a reference to Christ and his passion and sacrifice for us, a victory which is cosmic in its extent and force.

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Link to the Audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 16

To know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge

Paul in Ephesians lays out wonderfully the principle that will underlie the itinerary of the soul in what becomes the Trinity season in the liturgy of the Church. It is about our being “rooted and grounded” in love. We journey in love and bylove to love in the growing awareness of God and of ourselves, mysteries which by definition we can never fully exhaust. The journey of the soul is something inward albeit conveyed by our reflection upon things outward in creation and even through suffering and tribulation, our own tribulations as well as others. The love of God is learned through things positive and negative; both lift us up into the mystery of God which is always greater than ourselves and the world.

Love is learned, not just felt. The passage from Ephesians, like Paul’s great hymn to love in 1st Corinthians, belongs to the intellectual traditions of amor which in turn draw upon the Platonic eros, the passionate desire to know, so profoundly explored and explicated in the Symposium. Love leads us to the Good, to the knowledge of a principle of beauty and goodness upon which every part of the journey, from the very lowest to the very highest depends. It is what Paul speaks of here as “the breadth, and length, and depth, and height” of love, the love of God running through all things. In the Christian understanding, it means “to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge;” in short, to know what is beyond our knowing.

Such a way of thinking challenges our contemporary assumptions about an instrumental, mechanical, and technocratic reason which reduces us all to objects, to things. That is really a kind of anti-love, a betrayal of the love of God which is the ground of our very being and knowing. It is very much the dilemma and problem of our age. Yet “wisdom taught me,” the Wisdom of Solomon says, but are we teachable? Are we able to learn about the unum necessarium, the one thing necessary which has to do with our life in God and God in us, the very things which the Scriptures, the liturgy, and the Faith would teach us? And how will we learn the lessons of love?

In today’s Gospel, we have a story which teaches the meaning of our being “rooted and grounded” in love, the love that passeth human knowing at the same time as it is the truth of human knowing. What we are presented with is a healing miracle of restoration to life motivated by compassion, a very rich and powerful concept, however much it is misunderstood. The theme of compassion is rooted, even grounded, in something intellectual. “When Jesus saw her, he had compassion on her.” It is a recurring expression – seeing followed by compassion followed by love in action.

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Link to the Audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 15

I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus

Such marks in the body are like large letters. They tell a story. What is written in our lives? In the Gospel, Jesus tells us three times not to be anxious. Yet we live in a most anxious time. Tyndale’s translation, which shaped the King James version which came to be used in the Prayer Book in 1662, has Jesus bid us “be not careful.” This may seem strange until we realize that we are only too often full of cares, overburdened with fears and worries, “distracted with much busyness,” like Martha, literally unable to attend to the “one thing necessary.” In modern times, the older concept of carefulness has been replaced with a more loaded and psychological word, anxiety, the Englishing of the German angst.

That has, I think, a different kind of intensity. It belongs to a more modern preoccupation with ourselves and with a kind of dread, at least as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche see it, a fear about ourselves in having to commit, to think and to act in an alien and meaningless world. The anxiety is in us, in the negativity of our modern subjectivity and self-consciousness; incurvatus in se, as turned in upon ourselves we are in dread of ourselves, uncertain about how to act or how to be. The title of W.H. Auden’s 1947 prose poem, ‘The Age of Anxiety,’ has come to define our culture as the culture of anxiety, at once wanting to connect and be with one another in a kind of sympathy and yet altogether uncertain about how that can be accomplished. We are, perhaps, no longer “assured of certain certainties,” in Eliot’s phrase but sense the need to be taught as he puts it, “to care and not to care,” to learn to care in the right way. The current culture of outrage only adds to our anxieties and divides us from one another in endless antagonisms. Anxious about being anxious only adds to our anxieties.

In our obsessions and busyness, our fears and worries, we lose something of ourselves. The paradox of being too caught up in ourselves is a loss of ourselves, a forgetting of who we are in the sight of God and his providence.

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