by CCW | 29 May 2022 08:00
The spectre of “endism” hangs over us – an ominous presence of foreboding and despair in our current age. It is an endemic feature of our fragmented world in the sense of the collapse of cultures and institutions that belong to human flourishing and dignity. This is the dominant form of fear that is with us. A deeper fear than the fear of Covid-19, it is the pandemic of fear itself, a fear of death and of the end of the world. “This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper” as T.S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men puts it, though perhaps with both a bang and a whimper, we fear.
One hundred years ago, in 1922, T.S.Eliot wrote The Waste Land, his poem on the wilderness of modernity. Composed of five sections, the first one is entitled The Burial of the Dead, an explicit reference to the Prayer Book Burial Office. It presents a telling image of a world and church in ruins.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree give no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you,
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
The images of death and decay are drawn from the poet-prophet of the Exile, Ezekiel, and from Ecclesiastes, the poet-philosopher of the Hebrew Scriptures. Son of man, ben adam, taken from Ezekiel, alludes to our common humanity and to Christ but also to our uncertainties about life and death. “You” – we – “cannot say, or guess, for you know only a heap of broken images.” That, too, is from Ezekiel: “and your altars shall be desolate, and your images shall be broken” (Ezekiel 6.4). His world, too, was a world of ruin and fragmentation, of loss and exile on Babylon’s strand.
It all seems so dark and ominous, so negative and dystopian. Yet the poem offers more than despair and darkness, more than fear and death, and again as drawn from Scripture and as belonging to the life of the Church in all times and all places. It is found in the idea of “com[ing] in under the shadow of this red rock,” an allusion to Isaiah 32.1-2: “a king shall reign in righteousness, and princes shall rule in judgment./And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.” The images belong to God and his Providence.
Even the idea of “fear in a handful of dust” is about hope and life. It refers explicitly to the practice of throwing earth on the casket or urn of the dead. Fear is more than the fear of death; it is also the fear or wonder of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom. “Earth to earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes, in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life.” These powerful words at the committal recall at once the mortality of our common humanity, “dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3.19), and the hope of our immortality through the resurrection of Christ. He is our eschatological hope, our end, our good, and our joy.
We have an end with God, an end in the sense of purpose and meaning. Ascensiontide celebrates the homecoming of the Son to the Father having accomplished all that belongs to human redemption. In a radical sense, we live and only live in the end times which is about eternity in our midst. As the gradual psalm this morning so wonderfully puts it, “God is gone up with a merry noise”; is not has, because God ever is.
The Scripture readings for this Sunday counter our fearfulness about comfort and security, about the practical and the material, by recalling us to God in Christ. His homecoming signals our homecoming, “the exaltation of our humanity,” our sense of abiding in the love of God now and always, even love in the ruins. It is not about a flight from the world but the redemption of the world. For thine is the kingdom. God is life.
As Augustine wonderfully puts it, we ascend in the ascension of our hearts, ascendimus ascensiones in cordis. But he adds “et cantamus canticum graduum,” we sing a song of ascent, of degrees, of stepping up into the wonder of God, the God who ever is. The Ascension of Christ marks the culmination or the end of the Resurrection as essential life. It celebrates the gathering of all things back to God. We live in these motions of divine life.
As the Epistle makes clear, this sense of ending is not about a foreboding of apocalyptic gloom and doom but about prayer and praise. This sense of an end with God strengthens us in the promise of the sending of the Comforter, the Paraclete, the Spirit of truth who is the love-knot of the Father and the Son. “In the world ye shall have tribulation,” we heard last Sunday. There shall be persecution and even death: “They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the time cometh, that, whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service,” we heard this morning. But why? “Because they have not known the Father, nor me”; again, this recalls the Passion and Christ’s first word from the Cross. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” In other words, we are more than the things which happen to us and even the things that we do. Ascensiontide reminds us of the truth and dignity of our humanity as grounded in the essential life of God. “These things have I told you, that, when the time shall come, ye may remember that I told you of them,” Jesus tells us. And “the Holy Spirit,” he says, “shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you” (Jn. 14.26).
This sense of ending counters the spectre of “endism” which paralyses us in our fears about our world and one another. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” Eliot says at the end of The Waste Land. At the very least it hints at the idea of the gathering of all things back to God and to our life with God. “Gather up the fragments,” Jesus says to us in the wilderness, “that nothing be lost.” Thus “the end of all things is at hand,” is not about fear but about love, and joy, and peace. The Waste Land ends with the Sanskrit words which mark the ending to each Upanishad in the Hindu spiritual tradition. Shantih. Shantih. Shantih. Eliot’s notes to The Waste Land explain that this is equivalent to “the peace that passeth understanding.”
Our liturgy is the liturgy of the Ascension, the lifting up of our hearts and minds to God and to our place with God. This church building itself embodies the motions of prayer. We are embraced in Christ as the beginning and the end symbolised in the Alpha and Omega beams. The whole building engages us in the motions of prayer drawing us forward and upward under the Rood Screen to the Altar, a veritable gathering up of our fragmented lives and world into the life of God. Such is our life and such is our witness even in the face of our fearful and fragmented world. We are embraced in the love which gives us strength.
It is not that “the world is too much with us, late and soon” as Wordsworth puts it; no, we are too much with ourselves and have lost a proper sense of ending and purpose. Gerard Manley Hopkins offers a corrective to the forms of reactionary romanticism, on the one hand, and to technocratic determinism, on the other hand. The world, “charged with the grandeur of God,” he notes, also “wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod;” a lovely image of our disconnect from nature and our discontent. Yet, he says, “nature is never spent;/There lives the dearest freshness deep down things … because the Holy Ghost over the bent/World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.” Such is the deep truth of our abiding in the Ascension, in the lifting up of our hearts and all things to God.
Fr. David Curry
Sunday after Ascension Day 2022
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