Day: January 31, 2021

Go ye also into the vineyard”

It is a suggestive and powerful image that belongs to the essential qualities of the itinerarium or spiritual journey of the soul upon which we embark this Sunday known as Septuagesima Sunday. Along with the other ‘gesima’ Sundays, it seems that we turn to the landscape of creation, literally to the vineyard, to the ground, and to the road near Jericho. Yet in all these ‘gesima’ Sundays, we are being turned to Jerusalem, to the image of the heavenly city, the city of God, in which the true yearnings of the soul are realized. What follows immediately from today’s Gospel, for instance, is Matthew’s account of what we have in the Gospel from Luke on Quinquagesima Sunday about “going up to Jerusalem” and which continues on to form the Gospel for Passion Sunday from Matthew.

In every way, these ‘gesima’ Sundays belong to the spiritual pilgrimage of Lent. As such they speak directly to the forms of spiritual discipline necessary to the quintessential itinerary of the soul to God. Something is required of us. The spiritual journey is an activity of the soul in relation to God imagined here in terms of our relation to nature, to the landscape of creation, presented as a vineyard in which we labour.

As the Epistle teaches, that labour requires self-mastery or temperance in terms of the ultimate goal which is not a perishable or “a corruptible crown” but “an incorruptible”. What we strive and labour for is not something transitory and passing but everlasting. Such is the true yearning of the soul. “For it has become clear,” as Boethius puts it in his itinerary of the soul, The Consolation of Philosophy, “that all perfect things are prior to the less perfect.” All our desires are but shadows of the human longing for what is absolute, the great all-good, as it were.

Thus the ‘gesima’ Sundays are more than mere prelude to the play of Lent and are really part of the Lenten pilgrimage but with a certain sensibility about the land; in short to our relation to the land. But vineyards? Hardly so, it might seem, in the cold of January, however much vineyards have become such a distinctive feature of Nova Scotia, particularly here in the Valley. But in looking to Jerusalem in the itinerary of these ‘gesima’ Lenten Sundays, we look to the spring of our souls even in the throes of winter.

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