Day: August 7, 2022

“Be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds” (Rom. 12.2)

“How came we ashore,” Miranda asks her father, Prospero, in Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest. Prospero replies, “by Providence divine.” It is a wonderful insight into the nature of our lives under the grace of God. He has just been explaining to Miranda how he was once the Duke of Milan and is about to tell her how they ended up on the far off “Bermoothes,” Bermuda. “What foul play had we that we came from thence? Or blessèd was’t we did?” she asks. “Both, both” he says, “by foul play … but blessedly [helped] hither.” And while he goes on to tell her about how he was betrayed by his brother, Antonio, who conspired with Alonzo the King of Naples to overthrow Prospero and seize his dukedom, he confesses his own failings, “having neglected worldly ends,” the duties of his office, which, he admits, “awakened an evil nature” in his brother.

Yesterday was the great summer feast of the Transfiguration of Christ. It is at once a divine vision and testimony to who Christ is in his essential divinity and who he is for us. There is something seen and something heard. A kind of epiphany of the Trinity in the voice of the Father, in the Son transfigured, and in the cloud of God’s spirit, it also points to our transformation, to the nature of our participation in the things of God, “that we being purified and strengthened by thy grace may be transformed into his likeness from glory to glory” (BCP, p. 289). How? By the words of the Father speaking out of the cloud about the Son transfigured before the inner circle of the disciples: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased: Hear ye him.” Will we have the ears to hear, the eyes to see, the hearts and minds to know and love and to act upon what we are given to see and hear, to know and love? This is the challenge and question of today’s readings.

The Tempest, too, explores the theme of our humanity transformed by grace, as Ariel’s song puts it, “a sea change into something rich and strange.” How? In part through suffering and by being called to account but all under the theme of Providence which, as Lady Philosophy notes in Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, “produces … a remarkable wonder, that evil men make evil men good.” God alone, Augustine notes, makes good out of our evil.

The play begins with a tempest conjured up by the magic of Prospero, itself a form of natural philosophy with the idea of our having a power over nature. By a kind of coincidence, the conjunction of various causes, all of Prospero’s enemies have now come within his reach. They had cast him out of Milan with Miranda and put them on a raft which somehow – such is the wonder of fiction, never mind that Milan is inland and not a port city – traversed the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. But what do we do with our enemies when they are in our hands? It was Abraham Lincoln, I think, who said that to test a man’s character, don’t make him suffer, give him power. What do we do when we have power over those who have injured us?

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