by CCW | 30 January 2022 08:00
Click here to listen to an audio file of the Service of Matins & Ante-Communion for the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany[1].
It is the question for our times. That it comes in response to another question put to Jesus by those in the midst of the storm reveals an even deeper problem. “Master, carest thou not that we perish?” they ask. He arises, rebukes the wind and calms the sea, and then asks, “why are ye so fearful?” and answers with a rhetorical question, a question which provides the answer. “How is it that ye have no faith?”
Care but what kind of care and in what way? Our fear about what exactly? Our lack of faith in whom or what? These are the serious questions of the Gospel that challenge each of us and our contemporary world. My hope is that you would have been here today had there been no winter storm because you care about the care of Christ and his Church, that you would have been here not out of fear but out of faith, the faith that is grounded in love not fear, the faith that knows the deep care of God for our humanity and our world so magnificently signaled in this epiphany story.
Storms and tempests are nothing new, especially for a maritime culture. The storms and tempests of nature are an integral part of an older Canadian sensibility about finding ways to survive and not least how to survive the bleak, mid-winter! Our literature has been more about survival than conquest and more often than not that survival depends upon the reciprocity between those who govern and those who are governed. The juxtaposition of this Gospel story with the passage from Romans reminds us of a profound spiritual teaching. We are to “render to all their dues”, to all who are in power but only in the wisdom of knowing that all power belongs to God and that those who wield power do so only in a delegated sense. They are not omnipotent. The exercise of power by those in authority over us must be grounded in respect and toleration. It must be just and not vengeful. It must be aware of the uncertainties of the finite world and the limits of human justice and human reason. When those things are ignored or forgotten then authority overreaches itself and paradoxically undermines itself. Its claims to care reveal more about themselves and the systems of power with which they surround themselves. It is dominance rather than governance.
A problem about care is shown in this Gospel story. Those caught in a tempest at sea awaken Jesus asleep in the boat, not out of any sense that anything can be done, but to enroll him in their own fatalism and fear of death. He is awakened to be yet another fearful one. Not to be part of the culture of fear is to be an outsider and a threat to the dominating spirit of fear. But such is the culture of death; we are but the walking dead.
Peter Kreeft, in a lovely little book about Ecclesiastes, makes the interesting observation that the fear of death is the dominant fear for the ancient world, the fear of Hell for the medieval world, and the fear of meaninglessness for the modern world. There is much to ponder in that observation. Yet the fear of death goes along with the fear of uncertainty and the fear of meaninglessness in our contemporary world. It strikes me that we are not that much different from the Sumerian culture some five thousand years ago. For in the illusion of a kind of confidence in technocratic reason as the solution to all our problems, there is the increasing sense that there are things which we cannot completely control, a fear not so much of the unknown as the unknowable. COVID-19 takes on the features of a frightening demon, a kind of modern Humbaba, “whose name is hugeness”, and said to be, in The Epic of Gilgamesh, “the evil in the land”. His hugeness indicates a power or a force over which reason has no control; he is in that sense unthinkable, ungraspable. The Epic shows the fear of chaos, the fear that order just might be completely overturned by chaos. There is the ‘fearful uncertainty’ of things both then and now.
Something of that kind of thinking inhabits our culture and our minds not just in terms of the fear of COVID but about the climate and the environment, about the global world in its disorders, and about the moral and intellectual collapse of our institutions. These are some of the tempests and storms of our world. How to face them is the question that today’s readings consider.
The fear of death in the Epic of Gilgamesh leads to the quest for wisdom, to the beginnings of an understanding about what it means to be human. It launches the long journey of the understanding to which Epiphany belongs and signifies. That quest is the counter to hedonism, to material pleasures and comforts by which we try to avoid the very idea of death and suffering. The care that belongs to the cure of souls in the Christian understanding is not simply about clinging to such comforts, for as important as they are, they are not everything and do not help us to face who we are as persons and as a community of souls. They are a limited form of care that avoids the deeper care that these readings suggest.
What is that deeper care that counters our fears and our lack of faith? It is the truth of God in his presence with us in the midst of the storms and tempests of life. This is a significant feature of the Christian idea of the Incarnation. It means that Christ is with us in these difficult times, in the sufferings and deaths of human lives. That awareness of his presence makes all the difference. Why? Because we are reminded of the essential goodness of creation and its order and truth as grounded in the Word and Will of God, the very lessons of the Epiphany. This is the counter to the gnostic nostrums which see everything in terms of a fatal opposition, a fundamental division between good and evil. The demonizing of COVID turns to the demonizing of one another, to a division and conflict that is ugly, unpleasant and self-serving. We do better to recall the forgotten teaching about redemptive suffering; “as dying, we live”, Paul points out.
A brief glance at different nations across the world reveals the variety of ways with which COVID is addressed. In some ways, it comes down to the level of trust and respect on the part of governments and authorities for those whom they govern, or the lack thereof, what one writer has called “the ugly business of scapegoating the unvaccinated”[2], projecting fear upon the ‘other’. There is a considerable difference between the politics of fear and the politics of love. It is the latter that allows us to face our fears and not be paralysed by them and allows us to care out of love and not out of fearful animosity and judgmentalism, seeking scapegoats for our own discontent and fear.
This allows us to recognise not only the legitimate differences of approach to our current stresses but to the qualities of prudence and wisdom that are not simply the possession of the vaccinated over and against the unvaccinated, for instance. That is too simplistic, stereotypical and often self-serving and self-righteous. The solutions to our current distresses are not simply in technology but in how we think about technology which is really the question about how we think about ourselves as human beings. We are perhaps learning how to live with COVID in the same way as having to live with colds and flues. There will be sickness and deaths, storms and tempests; at issue is how we face them whether in fear or in love and faith.
Vaccines are themselves a form of technology and a wonder of science. But they are not the solution but only one part of the picture. We can’t lay claim to a technological solution, after all, while ignoring the problem which is itself a product of our technocratic world. COVID is a modern ‘pandemic’ precisely because of global travel and the economic and social networks upon which we have become completely dependent and often with little awareness. In other words, there is the need to think about the forms of our technocratic dependency which enslave as much as they free. The struggle is to have a free and responsible relation to technology and to recognise how limited a form of reasoning and thinking it really is.
This reminds me of the story of a sea-captain interrogating a midshipman. ‘What would you do if a storm came up on the port side of the ship?’, he asks. ‘Throw out an anchor, sir’, he replies. ‘What would you do if a storm came up on the starboard side?’ ‘Throw out an anchor, sir’. ‘What would you do if a storm came up on the stern?’ ‘Throw out an anchor, sir’. ‘What would you do if a storm came up on the bow?’ ‘Throw out an anchor, sir’. ‘Good God, young man, where are you getting all these anchors?’ ‘The same place you are getting those storms, sir’, he replies. Storms and tempests play out in different ways in our lives. And, perhaps, there are different anchors to hold us firm.
In many ways, it is about rediscovering the ancient wisdom of learning to live within limits, a way of embracing in thoughtful care the communities, cultures and landscapes in which we live rather than indulging in flights of techno fantasy. Against the competing tyrannies of individual freedoms and the dictates of state or church we will have to reclaim what belongs to our responsibilities where we live. It should be apparent in our current troubles that things play out differently between one locality and another, between one community and another. That should mean acknowledging the principle of subsidiarity over and against the overreach of central authority. This would allow us to continue to operate in responsible ways such as what we have been doing as a Parish in the embodied context and reality of where we are. It would mean to respect the forms of delegated authority right on down the line. It means respect and dignity. It means acting out of love not out of fear and fatalism.
Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, raises the interesting question about the good that can come out of the tempests and storms of our lives. The play begins with a tempest which Prospero with his magic, a form of natural philosophy, conjures up to bring to the island of his exile and isolation those who had betrayed him by usurping his power as the Duke of Milan, setting him and Miranda adrift. They end up on the “Bermoothes”, Bermuda. What, then, is the purpose of the tempest? Revenge or forgiveness? What do you do when the enemies who have sought your harm are now in your hands? Ultimately love and forgiveness are seen to triumph even in the face of those who are unrepentant such as Prospero’s own brother, Antonio.
The play signals the epiphany theme of “being transformed by the renewing of your minds” expressed in Ariel’s song about “a sea-change into something rich and strange” that has to do with facing our short-comings and evil. “O brave new world, that has such people in it”, Miranda, herself a wonder, will say, not knowing what a mixed bag they are – both noble souls and complete scoundrels. Her statement is without any of the irony of our modern dystopias as in Aldous Huxley’s later novel by that title, Brave New World. The play points towards a new form of political order based not on fear and resentment but on love and the power of the Good signaled in the love of Miranda and Ferdinand, seen playing chess but trying to let each other win, and the reconciliation through forgiveness of those who had wronged Prospero.
Caliban, Shakespeare’s remarkable literary creation, symbolic of the aboriginal peoples, chafes against the injustices of his enslavement – the result of having made sexual advances towards Miranda. Here Shakespeare touches upon the European contradiction, at once treating the native peoples as human but then enslaving them as less than human. Yet he is given some of the most beautiful poetry in the play as well as one of the greatest lines in its resolution, “I’ll be wise hereafter and seek for grace”. He has been pardoned and given his freedom and found his dignity. The paradox is wonderful since earlier, as he says to Miranda, he has been taught language but only so as to know how to curse! As Prospero says to Alonzo with whom Antonio had conspired, “let us not burden our remembrances with a heaviness that’s gone”. Love in forgiveness is renewing and ever new; it is not about being buried in the bitterness of our past and current troubles. Like today’s Gospel, there is a peace found even in the midst of the tempest. “Peace, be still”, Jesus says not just to the tempests of nature but to the tempests in our disordered souls and communities.
We had hoped to return to the sacraments today after an enforced eucharistic fast. It would have been your Christmas Communion and far from being a right it is a privilege; a grace which, of course, it is. If nothing else, the eucharistic fast may help us to appreciate the essential spiritual and sacramental care of the Church. It is really about Christ and Christ in us in the midst of the storms and tempests of our uncertain times; the strong counter to our fearfulness and the ugliness of our divisions.
Fr. David Curry
Epiphany IV, 2022
(return to worship in the Parish Hall but service was canceled owing to severe winter storm!)
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