Month: February 2021

KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 11 February

If I have not love, I am nothing.

Love is in the air and snow is on the ground. It is hard to know of which there is more – love or snow? Paul’s great hymn to love in 1st Corinthians 13 has been the traditional scripture passage for the week of winter carnival and the attendant Valentine’s Day celebrations at King’s-Edgehill School. It is one of the great literary classics and perhaps one of the more familiar passages of Scripture even in our spiritual-lite and religious adverse age.

What is love? It is the question of Plato’s Symposium and belongs to a serious reflection upon the understanding of our humanity in its desires and drives that concern our relation with one another. Love is a big little word. Paul uses the word ‘love’ explicitly ten times and refers to it another seven times. In other words, love is emphatically front and center in 1st Corinthians seventeen times in seventeen verses. What does he mean by love?

As with Plato, love means more than simply the romantic and the sensual even as it shapes and informs those aspects of our humanity. As with Plato, Paul is not arguing for the idea of love as an object, a thing, even love as the beloved, but as an activity of the soul. There are a great number of words for love that the ancient Greeks have bequeathed to us and which have carried over into a variety of Latin terms as well. Ordinarily in English we have to make do with the big little word love to cover a whole range of meanings.

In Greek, there is eros, for instance, from which we get the idea of the erotic and the sensual; there is philos, or friendship love, we might say, and which extends to a whole host of words like philosophy, the love of wisdom, or philanthropy, the love of our humanity associated with generosity; there is storge, the love of family or nation or community; and there is agape, the social and communal love which extends to matters spiritual. That is the word which Paul uses but which is translated as caritas in the Latin with its connotations about grace, and rendered rather beautifully in the King James version as charity. But it would be a mistake to place these different terms for love in tight little boxes, sequestered and isolated from one another. Plato deliberately, it seems to me, uses the word eros with all of its sensual connotations to embark upon the journey of love which is spiritual and intellectual but as such embraces all the forms of love, from the lowest to the highest.

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Prayers and liturgy

Caedmon, Poet

The collect for a Doctor of the Church, Poet, or Scholar, in commemoration of Saint Caedmon (d. 680), Monk of Whitby, first English poet, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD, who by thy Holy Spirit hast given unto one man a word of wisdom, and to another a word of knowledge, and to another the gift of tongues: We praise thy Name for the gifts of grace manifested in thy servant Caedmon, and we pray that thy Church may never be destitute of the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Daniel 2:17-24
The Gospel: St Matthew 13:9-17

geograph-263793-by-RichTeaSaint Caedmon is the first English poet whose name is known. Saint Bede the Venerable tells Caedmon’s story in Book IV, Chapter 24, of The Ecclesiastical History of the English People.

Bede records that Caedmon was a herdsman who at an advanced age suddenly received the gift of poetry and song. Someone appeared to Caedmon in a dream one night and asked him to sing. In response, he spontaneously sang verses in praise of the God the Creator. When he awoke, he remembered the words of his song and added more lines.

He went to speak with Hilda, Abbess of Whitby. She and several learned men examined Caedmon and affirmed that his gift was from God.

Caedmon became a monk at Whitby and composed a large body of poetry and song on many Christian subjects, including the Creation story, the Exodus, the birth, passion, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the teaching of the apostles.

Unfortunately, almost none of Caedmon’s work survives. Only his Hymn, recorded by Bede in Latin and Old English, is known to us. Here is a modern English translation:

Praise we the Fashioner now of Heaven’s fabric,
The majesty of his might and his mind’s wisdom,
Work of the world-warden, worker of all wonders,
How he the Lord of Glory everlasting,
Wrought first for the race of men Heaven as a rooftree,
Then made he Middle Earth to be their mansion.

Source: Bede, A History of the English Church and People, translated by Leo Sherley-Price, rev. ed. 1968, Penguin, p. 251.

A humble and holy monk, Caedmon died in perfect charity with his fellow servants of God.

Photograph: Memorial to Caedmon, St Mary’s Churchyard, Whitby, North Yorkshire, Great Britain. The inscription reads, “To the glory of God and in memory of Caedmon the father of English Sacred Song. Fell asleep hard by, 680”. © Copyright RichTea and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

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Prayers and liturgy

Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Sexagesima Sunday

Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Sunday called Sexagesima.

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Statements and other writings

Rector’s Annual Report, 2020

Click here to download the full Rector’s Annual Report for 2020 (in pdf format).

The Rector’s Annual Reports for 2003 through 2019 can be accessed via this page.

Rector’s Annual Report for 2020
“But that on the good ground are they which in an honest and good heart, having
heard the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience.”
February 7th, 2021

Patience. In many ways, it has been a year that has required great patience and perseverance, a year of trials, in part, because of the COVID-19 pandemic. I say ‘in part’ because struggles and trials, difficulties and tribulations are a constant feature of human experience. The question really is about how such things are faced. That has been the question for Christ Church as a Parish and for the wider Church and culture as well.

Timothy Findley’s novel, “The Wars”, written in 1977, offers an important insight into how difficult and catastrophic things are faced which complements, I think, the Sexagesima Gospel. The point is not to take refuge in tragedy but “to clarify who you are through your response to when you lived”. This is wisdom, it seems to me. It points to the activity of our souls, to what is alive in us. As a Parish, we have weathered the sturm und drang, the storm and stress of the current concerns with COVID-19 quite well. Thanks to the hard work and leadership of the Parish Council, we have taken the courage to do two things: first, to spell out some of the potential scenarios for the future of the Parish; and, secondly, to articulate a Parish protocol in accord with the requirements of the Department of Public Health that have allowed us to be able to continue with “in-person worship”, to use the phrase du jour, responsibly, creatively, and with reasonable flexibility.

In the early days of the pandemic, we were closed but maintained contact with the Parish and with many ‘Friends of Christ Church’ via the Christ Church Connections. That has continued and developed even after we were able to be open again starting on Trinity Sunday in June. We were one of the few churches in the Diocese and in the Province that found ways to be open safely, with a reasonable set of protocols in place, and with a minimum of fuss. I am most grateful for the response of the Parish as a whole to these protocols, and for the trust and confidence that you have shown in the face of these troubling and uncertain times. The point is about carrying on faithfully in what belongs to our mission and life as a Parish in worship and teaching, in care and compassion. The mantra has been “be not fearful but careful”. We have been fortunate that the situation in this part of Canada and the Province has allowed us to continue.

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Sermons

Sermon for Sexagesima

“If I must needs glory, I will glory of the things which concern mine infirmities”

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.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 8 – 14 February

Sunday, February 14th, Quinquagesima
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Event:

Tuesday, February 16th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club: Christ Unabridged: Knowing and Loving the Son of Man: Essays (2020) and J.I. Packer’s A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life (1990)

Services to be held in the Parish Hall, January through March.

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Prayers and liturgy

Sexagesima

The collect for today, Sexagesima (or the Second Sunday Before Lent) from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O LORD God, who seest that we put not our trust in any thing that we do: Mercifully grant that by thy power we may be defended against all adversity; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 2 Corinthians 11:21b-31
The Gospel: St Luke 8:4-15

Vincent van Gogh, The Sower (Zurich)Artwork: Vincent van Gogh, The Sower, 1888. Oil on canvas, E.G. Bührle Foundation, Zürich.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 4 February

For now we see through a glass darkly

But we see, however dimly, and that is the important insight. It belongs to the awareness of the limitations of our knowing that counters human presumption and arrogance. It is good to be reminded of this in the bleak midwinter.

A winter storm with snow and wind has given place to the not altogether unusual midwinter thaw. There is an almost spring-like feel to things in the return to School after the late January break. That spring-like feel is warranted from the perspective of the turn towards spring signaled by Candelmas observed on February 2nd. It marks the transition from light to life, from Christmas to Easter in the Christian understanding. Literally forty days after Christmas, it points us to Jerusalem, to the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection at Easter, which follows immediately upon the spring equinox.

It celebrates the intersection of what will become the Old and the New Testaments. It is at once a feast of Christ and of Mary. Its proper name for Eastern Orthodox Christians is hypapante, meaning meeting: the meeting of Old and New, of young and old, of men and women, of aged Simeon and old Anna, of the child with Mary and Joseph, of prophecy and fulfillment, of suffering and revelation. There is a wonderful complexity to the images of this feast, a blaze of light in the bleak midwinter signalling life and joy.

Yet the meeting of themes all happens in the temple in Jerusalem. “The Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple,” as Malachi prophesies. “They found him in the temple,” as we heard in the story of the child Christ. Here at the age of forty days is Christ’s first journey to the temple in Jerusalem and, like the childhood journey it, too, is in accord with the customs of the Law, the ritual practices of ancient Israel. These are not simply superseded but transmuted or transformed. In a way, Candlemas, like the Conversion of St. Paul, highlights the vocation of Israel in the universality of its mission. It is signaled here in Simeon’s words, quoting Isaiah, but with a startling emphasis upon the infant Christ as the embodiment of those words: “a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel,” words which become the Church’s evening canticle, the Nunc Dimittis.

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Prayers and liturgy

Anskar, Missionary and Bishop

Bendixen, Bishop AnsgarThe collect for today, the Feast of St. Anskar (801-865), Archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen, Missionary to Sweden and Denmark (source):

Almighty and gracious God,
who didst send thy servant Anskar
to spread the gospel among the Nordic people:
raise up in this our generation, we beseech thee,
messengers of thy good tidings
and heralds of thy kingdom,
that the world may come to know
the immeasurable riches of our Saviour Jesus Christ,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Lesson: Acts 1:1-9
The Gospel: St. Mark 6:7-13

Artwork: Siegfried Detlev Bendixen, Bishop Ansgar, 1823. Holy Trinity Church, Hamburg, Germany.

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Sermons

Sermon for Candlemas

“The Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple”

Candlemas is a wonderfully multi-layered feast of interrelated concepts and themes. It marks the transition from light to life, from Christmas to Easter. It celebrates the intersection of what will become the Old and the New Testaments. Thus it complements the truer meaning of last week’s feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, which belongs at the very least to the beginnings of the emergence of Christianity yet happens entirely within the context of Israel.

Even the title is a conjunction of themes: “The Presentation of Christ in the Temple commonly called The Purification of the Saint Mary the Virgin,” at once a feast of Christ and of Mary. Its proper name for Eastern Orthodox Christians is hypapante, meaning meeting: the meeting of Old and New, of young and old, of men and women, of aged Simeon and old Anna, of a child and a mother, of Joseph and his mother in wonder, of prophecy and fulfillment, of suffering and revelation. There is a wonderful complexity to the images of this feast. We should be glad of its contraction into the simplicity of Candlemas, a blaze of light in the bleak midwinter signalling life and joy.

Yet the meeting of themes all happens in one place, the temple in Jerusalem. The lesson from Malachi highlights the theme of the preparation of the way for the Lord who “shall suddenly come to his temple,” a coming which portends judgement and purification; in short, redemption. “They found him in the temple,” the Gospel for the First Sunday in Epiphany tells us in the story of the child Christ. Here at the age of forty days is his first journey to the temple in Jerusalem and like the childhood journey it, too, is in accord with the customs of the Law, the ritual practices of ancient Israel. These are not simply superseded but transmuted or transformed. In a way, Candlemas, like the Conversion of St. Paul, highlights the vocation of Israel in the universality of its mission. It is signaled here in Simeon’s words, quoting Isaiah, but with a startling emphasis upon the infant Christ as the embodiment of those words: “a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel,” words which become the Church’s evening canticle, the Nunc Dimittis.

The temple itself takes on a whole new meaning. It is at once the sacred space that encapsulates and intensifies the teachings of Israel but extends to the sacred space that is the womb of Mary, itself an habitaculum dei. She, too, is the temple even as Christ’s body is the temple, and our bodies, too, are to be the temples of the Holy Spirit. The temple carried the temple into the temple, as a preacher once put it. There is this wonderful sense of the necessity of the embodiment of ideas, a wonderful sense of the ways in which ideas are bodied forth, the ways in which we are gathered into the light and life of God through the forms of mediation.

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