by CCW | 7 August 2022 08:00
“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[1] 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[2]). 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?
What is the point of the tempest in the play and thus of the play, the Tempest, itself? Is it revenge? Or forgiveness?
The Trinity season has a practical character to it. It seeks the practical application of the saving work of Christ to our souls. God’s righteousness is our justification – what God wants for us must be what we want too. And it brings us progressively through the patterns of prayer and praise in all of the moments of our lives into the living will of God. His will is our sanctification in and through the ups and downs of our lives. And it belongs ultimately to something else, namely, glorification. “If so be that we suffer with him, that we may also be glorified with him.” As Miranda says about those who have suffered ship-wreck, “I have suffered with those I did see suffer.” Yet there is a wonder at work in human lives through the grace of God, the possibilities and the realities of transformation, what Ariel means by “a sea change into something rich and strange.” Such is the radical meaning of God’s Providence in today’s Collect. It is never-failing and it orders all things in both heaven and earth and points to our transformation.
The end of grace is glory. We have an end in God. What we proclaim, in that we also participate. As the great French writer, George Bernanos, rightly notes, “Grace is everywhere.”
Today’s Epistle and Gospel challenge us by recalling us to who we are in Christ by the grace of God and to the necessity of acting upon what we have received. There is the awareness in both the Epistle and the Gospel of the things of ourselves which stand in our way. There is our willful forgetting of our new life in Christ. There is our being consumed in the passions of our souls which immerse us in the material and sensual things of this world as if there was nothing else. There is our consequent failure to act upon what we have been given to know. “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.” This captures something of the practical force of the Trinity season. The Gospel expands or illuminates the theme of the Epistle: we are to act out of what we have been given to see and be; in short, to be the good tree that bears the good fruit of holy lives; such is our calling, our struggle, and our challenge. Providence is written out for us to read in Jesus. But if we don’t read or listen?
The Epistle recalls us to who we are by the grace of Christ. “You have received a spirit of sonship in which we cry aloud, ‘Abba, Father’, the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God, and if children then heirs and fellow-heirs with Christ: if so be that we suffer with him, that we may also be glorified with him.” This is who you are, my friends. We suffer with those whom we see suffer because we suffer in Christ by grace unto glory. This is our Christian hope and spiritual identity in Christ through his cross. Such is the wonder of God’s Providence. Yet it requires something of us at the same time as it counters our fears and our arrogant presumptions.
No one perhaps speaks more eloquently on the interplay of words and deeds, of preaching and living than the poet/preacher, George Herbert. “Lord,” he asks, “how can man preach thy eternal word?” Great question. Isn’t it entirely presumptuous and pretentious or even simply foolish nonsense. “He is a brittle crazie glass,” lovely image. Impossible but then there is the shift to what God makes possible. “Yet in thy temple, thou dost him afford/This glorious and transcendent place, /To be a window, through thy grace.”
The poem continues to make the point for preacher and people alike that what matters is not just what is said but what is done, not just what is heard but what is acted upon; such is the point of the Gospel. “But when thou dost anneal in glasse thy storie,” the story of Christ written out for us to read in the windows and in the saints, and even more ”making thy life to shine within/The holy Preachers;” Wow. “Then the light and glorie/More rev’rend grows, & more doth win:/ Which else shows watrish, bleak, & thin.” To hear and read those words convicts me and my brother priests of our own faults and failings. The challenge remains to be what we proclaim. Herbert concludes wonderfully with a sense of the grace of God’s Providence. “Doctrine and life, colours and light, in one / when they combine and mingle, bring/ A strong regard and awe: but speech alone/ Doth vanish like a flaring thing,/ And in the eare, not conscience ring”.
Our lives are to be in tune with God’s Word. What is wanted is that all of our consciences should ring with the resonance of God’s Word moving in us and compelling us to act out of what we have heard and seen. “Doctrine and life, colours and light, in one …” And all because of who we are in the grace of Christ and what we are called to be and to do by virtue of the grace which we have received. It is confessional. “I’ll be wise hereafter and seek for grace,” Caliban wonderfully says, himself the image of the native peoples of the Americas, colonized and mistreated as less than human, as Shakespeare knew, and yet most humanly capable of participating in the transforming grace of God, all our sins notwithstanding. Such is Providence divine that seeks “a sea change into something rich and strange” in us all.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 8, 2022
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