Christ Church

A spirit of respect and reconciliation is something for which we pray at every Chapel service. There can be no reconciliation without the acknowledgment of what has happened, the truth of events of the past, as it were. Reconciliation builds on truth to transcend the things of the past, not by forgetting and ignoring them, but by confronting them and yet looking beyond conflict and opposition.

The story is not a simple or a single story. It means looking back and inward to very different features of the interplay of indigenous and non-indigenous peoples of Canada Here is a contemporary artist, Heather Dale, performing Jesous ahatonhia, Canada’s first and oldest Christmas song:

The words were originally written in the Huron/Wendat language by the French Jesuit missionary and martyr, Fr. Jean de Brébeuf, probably in 1642. He was a linguist who took the time and care to learn the language of the Wendat people and to appreciate their thought and culture in interaction with Christian ideas and themes. By singing in the Wendat language, Heather Dale draws upon the work of Brébeuf, who, like many early and largely French missionaries, began the project of providing alphabets and thus a written form for the various first nations’ peoples. This work has continued even into more recent times with the Inuit peoples. Bishop John Sperry, for example, who learned Inuinnaqtun, translated the Bible, the Prayer Book, and various hymns into the Inuktitut dialect, one of the five dialects of the Inuit peoples of the Arctic.

This shows a very different kind of relationship between cultures and languages than what took place in the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries with the Indian Act (1876-present) which reduces the native peoples to “wards of the state,” and, particularly, with the notorious Residential Schools programme. Such things reveal a much more aggressive and destructive form of imperial colonialism derived from Britain and America in the 19th and 20th centuries. The Indian Act and the Residential Schools programme were intended to assimilate the native peoples into Canadian life but entirely and often brutally at the expense of the cultures and languages of the native peoples themselves. Assimilation was the buzz word of the times but in the view of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission it was “cultural genocide,” a policy undertaken “to kill the Indian in the child” (TRC Report, 2015).

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The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Jerome (c. 342-420), Priest, Monk, Translator of the Scriptures, Doctor of the Church (source):

O Lord, thou God of truth, whose Word is a lantern to our feet and a light upon our path: We give thee thanks for thy servant Jerome, and those who, following in his steps, have labored to render the Holy Scriptures in the language of the people; and we beseech thee that thy Holy Spirit may overshadow us as we read the written Word, and that Christ, the living Word, may transform us according to thy righteous will; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

The Epistle: 2 Timothy 3:14-17
The Gospel: St. Luke 24:44-48

One of the most scholarly and learned early church fathers, St. Jerome devoted much of his life to accurately translating the Holy Bible from the original languages of Hebrew and Greek into Latin.

Born near Aquileia, northeast Italy, of Christian parents, Jerome travelled widely. He received a classical education at Rome and travelled to Gaul where he became a monk. He later moved to Palestine, spending five years as an ascetic in the Syrian desert. In 374, he was ordained a priest in Antioch. He then pursued biblical studies at Constantinople under Gregory Nazianzus and translated works by Eusebius, Origen, and others.

Travelling to Rome in 382, Jerome became secretary to the aged Pope Damasus. By the time the pope died three years later, Jerome had become involved in theological controversies in which he antagonised many church leaders and theologians. He left Rome under a cloud, returning to Palestine where he lived as a monk in Bethlehem for the rest of his life.

Over several decades, Jerome wrote biblical commentaries and works promoting monasticism and asceticism. Most importantly, he produced fresh Latin translations of most of the Old and New Testaments, based on the original biblical languages. This work formed the basis of the Vulgate, which remained the standard Scriptural text of the western church for over a millennium.

Artwork: Piero della Francesca, The Penance of St Jerome, c. 1450. Oil on panel, Staatliche Museen, Berlin.

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth … when the morning stars sang together and the sons of God shouted for joy?”

God’s question to Job echoes God’s first question in Genesis to our humanity. Where are you? In the Book of Job, the question deepens the metaphysical and spiritual meaning of that first question. They have entirely to do with the world as spiritual and intellectual, as ultimately good and deserving of reverent respect and of ourselves as spiritual creatures who find themselves in a spiritual community. God’s question to Job points us to that community of spiritual creatures: the morning stars and the sons of God are the Angels. We are in the company of angels, something which our liturgy constantly reminds us. “Therefore with Angels and Archangels, and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious name”.

There is more to reality than what meets the eye. It is what belongs to the mind, to intellect and spirit. Michaelmas testifies to the spiritual nature of reality, not as solipsistic and narcissistic nonsense in flight from the world and the body as evil, but as signalling the intellectual and spiritual structure of the world in which we find our truth and being. Thomas Aquinas, the great Angelic Doctor, as he is called, remarks that the Angels move our imaginations and strengthen our understanding. They are an essential aspect of creation as intelligible and good and belong to a long and profound tradition of reflection about the world as in principle knowable, as known and loved by God in the Christian understanding.

The Angels are the pure thoughts of God. To think is to think with the Angels and to think with the Angels at once counters and redeems our limited linear forms of reasoning, ratio, by recalling us to intellectus, to the unity of thought, to the grasp of things as a whole without which the parts fall away into nothingness. God’s question to Job echoing God’s question to us in the garden of Eden calls us to account as intellectual and spiritual beings and to a self-consciousness which recalls us to God and thus to the truth of our humanity as made in the image of God.

This does not deny the reality of suffering and evil. God’s question to us in Eden calls us to account because of our denial of what God had said about not eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. By disobeying we learn two great truths, our mortality and ourselves as self-conscious creatures who like God know good and evil. But unlike God, we learn this through separation and negation, through contradiction and so unlike God who knows evil through the good we have to learn the good through the experience of suffering and evil. Yet the vocation to know even as we are known remains. It impells the spiritual journey in which we are in the company of Angels who assist us in our thinking and doing. They bring down to us the thoughts of God and raise us up to the things of God.

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Unde malum?

Whence cometh evil? Why, if everything is so good in the Genesis accounts of creation, are things, well, so often so bad? The Judeo/Christian/Islamic understanding offers a way to think about the question of evil, of suffering and death that speaks, perhaps, to our contemporary world in its certainties and uncertainties.

Simply by beginning with the idea of creation as an orderly process whereby things are called into being and distinguished from one thing and another, order as good is strongly affirmed. This changes the whole perspective on the question of evil because the problem can’t be with the created order, with the world itself, as it were, nor with God, the intellectual and spiritual principle of the being and knowing of all things. In some cosmogonies – accounts of reality – order arises out of primordial chaos but, as a consequence, there is always a sense of uncertainty about the order of things, always the fear that chaos might overturn the order of the world. This ancient fear has its counterpart in the fears and anxieties of our own world. It is part of the contemporary disconnect from the world and from our own embodied being. Evil, it seems, is somehow ‘out there’, somehow external to us.

Genesis suggests to the contrary that the problem is not simply ‘out there’ in the fabric of the world nor is it simply ‘other people’ whom we demonize. The problem is with us, at least in terms of an aspect of our humanity. Are we not part of that good order of creation? To be sure, as made in the image of God, as the dust into which God breathes his spirit, at once connected to everything else in creation and yet distinct and having the responsibility of care for the order by acting out of the image and spirit of God that properly defines us. Unde malum, then? Whence evil? The poet John Milton offers an answer in his great poem, Paradise Lost. “Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste brought death into the world and all our woe”.

‘Adam in the garden is given a commandment not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The commandment has to be seen as also being good, as being part of the good order of things. At issue, then, is how do we come to know good and evil? Or to put it in another way, how do we come to know that we know? Milton names the problem as disobedience. We learn but through separation, through contradicting the basis of our own knowing and being, through the experience of suffering and death, quite unlike God who knows evil through knowing the good Yet we learn and indeed embark upon the arduous journey of education, not to return to the Garden, for there is no going back, no unthinking what we have thought and done. There can only be our learning through repentance – metanoia – literally, our thinking after the things of God. We learn the good in part by learning and experiencing evil.

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The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O EVERLASTING God, who hast ordained and constituted the services of Angels and men in a wonderful order: Mercifully grant, that as thy holy Angels alway do thee service in heaven, so by thy appointment they may succour and defend us on earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Revelation 12:7-11
The Gospel: St. Matthew 18:1-10

The name Michael is a variation of Micah, and means in Hebrew “Who is like God?”

The archangel Michael first appears in the Book of Daniel, where he is described as “one of the chief princes” and as the special protector of Israel. In the New Testament epistle of Jude (v. 9), Michael, in a dispute with the devil over the body of Moses, says, “The Lord rebuke you“. Michael appears also in Revelation (12:7-9) as the leader of the angels in the great battle in Heaven that ended with Satan and the hosts of evil being thrown down to earth. There are many other references to the archangel Michael in Jewish and Christian traditions.

Following these scriptural passages, Christian tradition has given St. Michael four duties: (1) To continue to wage battle against Satan and the other fallen angels; (2) to save the souls of the faithful from the power of Satan especially at the hour of death; (3) to protect the People of God, both the Jews of the Old Covenant and the Christians of the New Covenant; and (4) finally to lead the souls of the departed from this life and present them to our Lord for judgment. For these reasons, Christian iconography depicts St. Michael as a knight-warrior, wearing battle armor, and wielding a sword or spear, while standing triumphantly on a serpent or other representation of Satan. Sometimes he is depicted holding the scales of justice or the Book of Life, both symbols of the last judgment.

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

“Therefore I say unto you, Be not anxious”

Perhaps no words of Jesus in the Gospels speak more directly to us. We live in a world of fears and anxieties. Angst ‘r us, to borrow from the deeper sense of dread named by Kierkegaard in the 19th century at feeling rudderless and without direction in a world of choices and possibilities, on the one hand, and a world which seems to be falling apart all around us, on the other hand. This sense of ‘endism’ is crippling and paralyzing. But the point, as the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke reminds us, is that the problem is not with the world “for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors,” our fears, our anxieties.

It is really all about us, something which the initial chapters of Genesis go to great lengths to remind us. The world as opposed to God is evil but that is not the truth of creation; it is, after all, very good. We turn the world and ourselves as creatures within the good order of creation against God. The problem is with us but God is greater than our folly and confusion, greater than our fears and worries, greater than our sin and folly.

This gospel provides the antidote to our anxieties and fears about our life, about the things that worry us. It offers us a wee bit more than Bobby McFerrin’s famous lyrical song, “Don’t worry, be happy/In every life we have some trouble/ But when you worry you make it double” (1988). Which is true enough. But what Jesus says here is something deeper, something more profound. It speaks exactly to the meaning of Reece’s baptism, itself a reminder to us of our own baptisms, and as such a poignant reminder of the grace and goodness of God.

In our fears and anxieties, we pit the world against ourselves and God. We forget that this is God’s world and that we are his children, his dearly beloved. So much so that God gave his only-begotten son for us. The gospel recalls us to the wondrous pageant of creation and to the truth of ourselves as made in God’s image and called to act out of that image in terms of our care and respect for the created world and for one another. Jesus strongly suggests that we can learn from the birds of the air and from the lilies of the field; in short, from beholding the providence of God at work in nature and in human affairs.

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Tuesday, September 27th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club: The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray (2019) and The Madness of Crowds (2021) by Louise Penny.

Thursday, September 29, St. Michael & All Angels
7:00pm Holy Communion

Sunday, October 2nd, Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Event:

Sunday, October 9th, Harvest Thanksgiving / Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity
Thanksgiving for the 140th Anniversary of the building of Christ Church, 1882-2022!
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

The collect for today, the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

KEEP, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy Church with thy perpetual mercy; and, because the frailty of man without thee cannot but fall, keep us ever by thy help from all things hurtful, and lead us to all things profitable to our salvation; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Galatians 6:11-18
The Gospel: St. Matthew 6:24-34

Artwork: James Tissot, The Man Who Hoards, 1866-1894. Opaque watercolor over graphite on gray wove paper, Brooklyn Museum.

Dust

Genesis 2 complements rather than contradicts Genesis 1 but in an altogether different register. It offers a kind of check upon any notion of presumption about our humanity. In short, it humbles us by recalling us precisely to the dust of the ground and thus to our place within the order of creation. As such it complements, too, the efforts of the Indigenous peoples of Canada to recall our connection to creation and to honour and respect it rather than to presume to dominate and destroy it.

‘Adam, as yet not a proper name, refers to our humanity generically speaking. “The Lord God,” Genesis 2 tells us, “formed the ‘Adam of dust from the ground.” We are dust. Yet we are the dust into which God breathes his spirit and only so did “‘Adam became a living being.” Such is the dignified dust of our humanity, a complement to our being made in the image of God.

The passage read in Chapel this week serves as a further commentary on the question about who we are as human beings and about an educational programme which emphasizes character. ‘Adam is placed in a garden, the proverbial Garden of Eden, later known as paradise, drawing upon an ancient Persian word for a pleasure garden. “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it”. This garden in Genesis 2 is the source of four rivers Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, and Euphrates. But the commentary tradition from very early on sees the rivers as symbolic of the classical virtues that belong to human perfection and character, the virtues of temperance, courage, prudence and courage. This connects the Genesis accounts of creation to the poetic and philosophical teachings of ancient Greece and contributes to the idea of the education of the whole person and to the primacy of the ethical.

Genesis 2 introduces us to two important concepts by way of the imagery of trees: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Living and knowing are somehow closely connected with respect to what it means to be rational and spiritual creatures. Importantly and in relation to our being made in the image of God, ‘Adam is given a commandment in the garden not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil “for in the day that you eat of it you shall die”. Bearing in mind that creation in its parts and as a whole is good, indeed very good, then this commandment has to be taken as good for us as well. The underlying question is about how we come to the knowledge of good and evil. That will be the story of the Fall.

Why are things so bad if everything is so good? The problem can’t be with the world or with God in this view of things. It has more to do with the form of our relationship to God. This will launch us into the long, long story of human redemption understood in its different modalities, not the least of which is learning through suffering and hardship, learning about the good even in and through our separation from it in the experience of sin and death.

(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, Head of English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy