by CCW | 18 September 2022 10:00
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[1]).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.
Voltaire is especially critical of the European exploitation of the natural and human resources of the new worlds and of human injustice in general. He is also highly critical of religions in all of their different forms. He is an equal opportunity insulter, we might say, with a particular hate for the Jesuits even though his vast knowledge of the new worlds is largely dependent on their extensive writings.
In Eldorado, Candide, “who always had a taste for metaphysics”, asks “whether there was a religion in the country?” “Do you take us for ingrates?”, replies the most learned and wise old man of Eldorado. When asked what was the religion, he says that it is “the religion of everyone. We worship God from morning till evening.” “Do you worship only one single God?”, he is then asked, to which he replies “it appears that there are not two, or three or four. I must admit that the people of your world ask very singular questions.” But Candide wants to know more, particularly, “how they prayed to God in Eldorado.” He is told that “we do not pray to him” for “we have nothing to ask him for; he has given us all we need, we thank him without ceasing”.
It is the religion of thanksgiving, pure and simple, which Voltaire suggests is in some sense universal. It is equally part of his critique of European greed and of the interminable religious disputes in the Europe of his day. The whole novel is structured around the idea of the Fall from paradise and redemption as a kind of return: ”we must cultivate our garden”, meaning to do the best you can to make things better whatever the circumstance. Voltaire is a deist, a kind of rational religion sceptical of miracles and of revelation.
The religion of thanksgiving is importantly directed to God. In the orthodox Christian understanding, thanksgiving is one of the important forms of prayer along with adoration, petition, intercession, and confession. The Gospels show us many examples of prayers of intercession and petition, rooted in a profound sense of God’s healing grace and goodness. The Caananite woman who seeks the healing of her daughter, grievously vexed with a devil, the blind man by the wayside who cries out incessantly to Jesus that he may receive his sight, are but two examples of praying to God for our spiritual and physical needs. They are prayers for what we think we need and in which we acknowledge God as the one from whom we seek what we need yet always “thy will be done.”
St. John Vianney, the Curé d’Ars, was famous as a confessor of souls and for the miracles that resulted from his ministry in the first half of the 19th century. A cripple pestered him incessantly for a cure. The Curé exhorted him time after time to be reconciled to his condition, to bear his burden as a daily sacrifice and as a way of bearing the burdens of others and so fulfilling the law of God as today’s Epistle bids us. But all to no avail, the cripple could not accept this advice. “‘Very well,’ the Saint said, with tears in his eyes. ‘Put your crutches in the corner, and walk out.’ And he did.”
As Austin Farrer observes, miracles are a concession to our condition; no doubt, “but then the whole work that God did in Christ and still does for our salvation is a concession to our condition, extorted by our need for his compassion. Every line, every page of the Gospel records the concession of divine wisdom to human folly.” As such “we have every reason to rejoice, and to thank the mercy that has no end”.
The religion of thanksgiving simply in itself seems incomplete and misunderstands the much more radical nature of our life in Christ. And yet this Gospel shows us the intensity of prayer not as petition and intercession but as thanksgiving. It begins with ten lepers who petition Jesus for healing. He bids them “go show yourselves unto the priests,” and “as they went, they were cleansed.” All ten were healed. But only one turned back and in an extravagant set of gestures indicative of an intensity of feeling “with a loud voice glorified God, and fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks.” It is quite a picture. As Luke adds, “and he was a Samaritan.” Here is another story where the outsider, a Samaritan, teaches us about love. Jesus calls him “this stranger” and bids him “arise, go thy way, thy faith hath made thee whole.”
It is in turning back and giving thanks that we are made whole. This is something more than being healed. Our wholeness is found in our giving thanks for all that belongs to God and for all that comes to us from God which is everything that is good and holy. Our life of prayer is about the constant struggle to discern the will of God for us but in the acknowledgement that “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” What is wanted is our willing the will of God, thus learning what that will is whatever the circumstances. Thus the intensity of thanksgiving shown to us in this Gospel belongs to the deepening of our lives in faith, to our being made whole in Christ.
We seek from God what we need, to be sure, but only in the profound sense of awareness that he provides for us even more than what we need. Thanksgiving is both for what we are given and to the God who gives. It counters the impulse about always getting rather the greater spiritual freedom of giving, something which is akin to God himself.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 14, 2022
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