by CCW | 7 February 2021 08:00
Temperance is the virtue that concerns the mastery of our appetites, of our bodily desires. It is about self-mastery, but to what end?, we might ask, which is why it was coupled with parable of the labourers in the vineyard last Sunday about what is right; in short, justice. Courage, highlighted wonderfully and to the point of deliberate exaggeration, is set before us in today’s Epistle from 2nd Corinthians. It is complemented by Luke’s parable of the sower and the seed which considers the virtue of prudence; necessary, we might say, in relation to courage.
Courage speaks to our hearts. Cor is Latin for the heart. The cardinal or classical virtues belong to a way of thinking about the constituent elements of our humanity, about what it means to be human in terms of the activities of the soul. Thus temperance pertains to the body; courage to the heart; prudence to the mind; and justice to the proper relation of each of them without which, as Augustine suggests, the virtues become splenditia vitiae, splendid vices. Paul suggests something of this in his litany of courage, noting that he is speaking foolishly, even recklessly, even with a kind of madness. He is alluding to the problem of courage. Courage can be reckless folly if it is not tempered by prudence and justice. You can be brave but foolish.
Yet even that is not enough. The virtues undergo a kind of “sea-change into something rich and strange” (Shakespeare, The Tempest, I. ii) in these ‘gesima’ Sundays and in ways that belong to the itinerarium of our souls in the pilgrimage of Lent, itself the concentration of the journey of our souls to God within the span of forty days. In other words, these readings speak profoundly to the entirety of our lives in relation to God and one another. They reveal the deep struggles of the soul in the awareness of the limitations of its own activities. In that lies the awareness of the principle of the Good upon which all our doings depend and to which all our doings are ordered. As the Collect trenchantly puts it, “we put not our trust in any thing that we do.” This opens us out to the power of God and to the movement of God’s grace in us. Such is the transformation of the virtues into the forms of love. Divine love seeks the perfection of our human loves in and through the reordering of the virtues to their end in God.
Courage is about our thinking and our doing in the face of adversities. This year has been a year of adversities, to be sure, both for our churches, our culture and our world. How do we face difficult, challenging and threatening things? We have had the spectacles of folly and arrogance alongside the so-called abundance of caution. We cannot ignore how the COVID-19 pandemic, however much we are in this together, plays out very differently and with glaring inequalities throughout our world and in our communities. That requires a certain forbearance and patience in the recognition of the limitations and short-comings of human affairs however well-intentioned. At best, we can say that we – not they – are doing the best we can perhaps. To think this way is to be always open to the possibilities of doing better. That is where the lessons of the ‘gesima’ Sundays enter in. They counter two things, the arrogance of human knowing, on the one hand, and its cynical despair, on the other hand. The counter lies precisely in the awareness of the limits and folly of our humanity. It means being open, not closed to the grandeur and the power of God, to put it bluntly.
Paul offers a corrective to the limitations of courage by orienting it not to oneself, to self-glorification, to a kind of braggadocio, as it were, but to the glory of God. Courage is not simply for a human end. It is not, as Paul is really saying here over and over again, ‘look at me, look at me’. Instead he is insisting on the necessity of acting in the face of dangers. He is countering all and every form of a kind of fatalism and passivity of the soul in the face of difficult and challenging times. Courage is required of us as the counter to the paralyzing fears that turn into hatred and moralizing judgmentalism of others and which belong to a deeper despair about creation and about our humanity, to a kind of gnostic dualism which denies the radical goodness of God and creation. What we face in each and every challenge is really ourselves. The evil is not out there. It is not in the other. The problem is always, always with ourselves. Paul is encouraging us, literally calling us to the activity of courage in us.
It has taken courage on the part of many of you to come to Church throughout these times but that courage has been, I hope, rightly tempered with a sense of prudence and good sense. We have found together creative and responsible ways to continue, to be and to do what we are called to be. I am only too well aware of the fears and the accusations of recklessness that are out there in the community and in our churches and to the anti-religious attitudes and biases of our culture. Such things belong to the debilitating aspects of our maritime communities in their fatalism and fearfulness about others. It belongs to our mission and vocation, I think, to “be strong, and let thy heart take courage, and wait upon the Lord,” as the Psalmist says (Ps. 27.16). The gradual psalm reminds us in a beautiful image of who we are in the sight of God. “Keep me as the apple of an eye; /hide me under the shadow of thy wings” (Ps.17.8). It belongs to the activity of putting our trust not in ourselves but in God. But this trust, this coming in “under the shadow of thy wings” is neither something passive nor blind. It is not reckless folly. It is courage and prudence.
Thus the Gospel complements the Epistle reminding us precisely of what is being asked of us, namely, to be “the good ground” upon which the Word of God is being sown, Sunday after Sunday, I pray. To be the good ground is about “an honest and good heart, [which] having heard the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience.” That takes courage but tempered with prudence out of a sensibility about the radical truth of our humanity as found in God. Such is grace and glory, here and now and always.
Fr. David Curry
Sexagesima Sunday, 2021
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