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.
Charles G.D. Roberts, a Canadian poet who taught at the University of King’s College when it was here in Windsor, in his sonnet, The Winter Fields, written in 1890, evokes a feeling for the harsh realities of winter, “the iron fields”, the fields and farmlands of the Windsor area, which yet hide “the germ of ecstasy – the sum of life”, looking to spring and April.
Winds here, and sleet, and frost that bites like steel
The low bleak hill rounds under the low sky.
Naked of flock and fold the fallows lie,
Thin streaked with meager drift. The gusts reveal
By fits the dim grey snakes of fence, that steal
Through the white dusk. The hill-foot poplars sigh,
While storm and death with winter trample by,
And the iron fields ring sharp, and blind lights reel.
Yet in the lonely ridges, wrenched with pain,
Harsh solitary hillocks, bound and dumb,
Grave glebes close-lipped beneath the scourge and chain,
Lurks hid the germ of ecstasy – the sum
Of life that waits on summer, till the rain
Whisper in April and the crocus come.
He recognized that a Canadian literature must be about Canada and, specifically, the Canadian landscape, at the same time as drawing upon the larger traditions of literature. Aware of the dangers of “the possible peril of falling into a narrow provincialism, both of subject and treatment”, he nonetheless wanted to encourage a literature born out of an appreciation for the land. He notes that:
In our landscape, earth and sea and sky conspire to make an imaginative people. These stern coasts, now thundered against by Atlantic storms, now wrapped in noiseless fogs, these overwhelming tides, these vast channels emptied of their streams, these weird reaches of flat and marsh and dyke, should create a habit of openness to nature, and by contrast put a reproach upon the commonplace and the gross. Our climate with its swift extremes is eager and waking, and we should expect a sort of dry sparkle in our page, with a transparent and tonic quality in our thought. If environment is anything, our work can hardly prove tame.
That “openness to nature” does not hide the grim and dangerous realities of storm and sea as every winter tragedy reminds us, such as the sinking of the scallop dragger and the loss of life in the Bay of Fundy this winter. (In what is almost a sense of tragic irony, the captain’s name was Charles Roberts). “Storm and death with winter trample by”. In these events, we confront something of ourselves, both our fears and our loves, in and through our relation to the land and to the world, even in the world of pandemic.
Roberts called the poetry of nature, following Keats “the poetry of the earth”, and argued that it took two forms: one that deals “with pure description”; the other “that which treats of nature in some one of its many relations with humanity”. Though somewhat restrained with respect to what Ruskin called the “pathetic fallacy”, the attribution to nature of human emotions, so often overblown by the romantic poets, Charles G.D, Roberts argues that what we find in nature is really something of ourselves.
Man, looking upon external nature, projects himself into her workings. His own wrath he apprehends in the violence of the storm; his own joy in the loveliness of opening blossoms, his own mirth in the light waves running in the sun; his own gloom in the heaviness of rain and wind. In all nature he finds but phenomena of himself.
And so it is here in these readings for today. We find something of ourselves, about our expectations, about our sense of justice. The point of the Gospel is that it challenges our all- too-limited views of what we think is right, overlooking the justitia dei, the justice of God which is the ground of all forms of social and political justice. Divine justice seeks our ultimate good which cannot simply be reduced to the metrics of human labour. The point is not just that those who work less and for a shorter time get the same recompense as those who have worked more and longer but that all should work. Work belongs to the pageant of redemption, to the Lenten pilgrimage, to our engagement with the will of God in creation whether late or soon. In other words, the Gospel challenges a limited and partial view of justice which is not the whole picture. God’s justice is infinitely more and seeks more than the interest of the few; it seeks the good of all. “Go ye also into the vineyard”. The repeated word, “also”, includes us all in the labour.
In complement with the Epistle, the Gospel seeks to transform our labour into works of love and compassion; in short, into prayer. Prayer is our labour. As Richard Hooker says, “prayer signif[ies] even all the service that ever we do unto God.” For such is what is right. To see our labours as oriented to God belongs to the transformation of the classical virtues of temperance, courage, prudence, and justice into the forms of love. Such is the itinerary of our souls to God in and through the various aspects of our lives in the world. The virtues are reordered to an eternal end, to an end in God, and while that may seem to contradict and confound the narrow sensibilities of our worldly interests, it really seeks to open us out to that which is perfect and absolute. As such it changes our attitudes and our minds, opening us out to God as the source and principle of all life.
On the last day of January, and in its bitter cold, we are bidden to see the world as the vineyard of the Lord in which we find the true meaning of our labour, our labours of love for God and for one another, finding ourselves in such labours and in our relation to the land and the events of our world and day. Il faut cultiver notre jardin, Candide famously says in Voltaire’s novel, Candide. We must cultivate our garden. It means to do the best you can in the circumstances in which you are placed, in a world of human injustices and human suffering. The deeper lesson of these ‘gesima’ Sundays is that our doings are ordered to God and engage us with the redemptive love of God for all. Such is justice writ most large, our good, our end, and our joy.
“Go ye also into the vineyard.”
Fr. David Curry
Septuagesima, January 31st, 2021