Day: September 18, 2022

“One turned back, … giving him thanks”

This Sunday marks a spiritual turn in the progress of the Trinity season, a turn towards thanksgiving as a profound spiritual activity with respect to our life in Christ. This quintessential thanksgiving gospel teaches us that in turning back and giving thanks we are made whole. It is read as we enter explicitly into the second half of the Trinity season which can be as long as twenty-six Sundays or as few as twenty-two depending on the date of Easter which determines the relative length of the Epiphany and Trinity Seasons. And this year the spiritual turn coincides with the autumnal equinox this week, the official beginning of Fall. We have already felt that turn, of course, in the changes of temperature!

This Gospel is also one of the propers appointed to be used “For National Occasions” such as “The Accession of the Reigning Sovereign. The Birthday of the Sovereign. Dominion Day and other occasions of National Thanksgiving” (BCP, p. 616).Thus it serves, perhaps, as a welcome prelude to the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II tomorrow as well as a segue to our thanksgivings to God for the accession of King Charles III.

Such things remind us of the web of interconnections that belong to our lives together in community in terms of the interplay of things sacred and things secular. They all belong under the umbrella of God’s sovereignty and its meaning for us in our lives. But the turn towards thanksgiving is particularly significant and suggestive and acts as a spiritual counter to some of our anxieties about the physical and material world.

Voltaire, the greatest wit of the 18th century Enlightenment, in his satirical novel “Candide”, provides a most concise illustration of the defining themes of the European Enlightenment as well as a compelling critique of its assumptions. The novel takes us more or less literally around the world, “around the world in eighty pages”, as the literary critic, Italo Calvino, nicely notes. At once euro-centric and euro-critical, it reflects something of the nature of the interchange of cultures. The only thing in the entire novel that is not European are humming-birds about which Voltaire has a kind of fascination. They are unique to the Americas and unknown in Europe.

In the novel, the character Candide at one point finds himself in Eldorado, the land of gold, fictionally located in South America. It is an Utopia – an ideal state that is at once a good place and no place. The point is that all utopias in literature and political philosophy function as criticisms of existing political communities. They highlight what should be in the face of what is which is less than satisfactory. Satire is a powerful literary device that points out the injustices and incompleteness of the status quo, of those in power; it calls our attention to problems about which we should not be indifferent while signalling ideas and principles that are greatly valued.

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