by CCW | 1 November 2022 21:00
It is, as Shakespeare suggests, “that time of year … when yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold, bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.” His sonnet (# 73) always reminds me of November and of All Saints. In the barren greyness of the dying of nature’s year, there is a gathering into the fullness of life. We are ultimately to “love that well which thou must leave ere long” but more importantly, perhaps, to have a greater hold of what “makes thy love more strong.” And what is that? Simply the Communion of Saints: our lives as embraced in God’s holy love. It is about our wholeness, our holiness, as found in God.
A vision of our redeemed humanity, All Saints speaks to the world of scattered souls and celebrates instead the gathering into wholeness and blessedness of our fractured and fragmented selves. It speaks to the wholeness of ourselves as found in communion with God and with one another. It is in that sense profoundly counter-culture, a counter precisely to our fractured and fragmented selves in our fractured and fragmented world, the “Unreal City” of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, written one hundred years ago.
Our churches, it seems, are “bare ruin’d choirs” but this is to forget the grace of God who alone makes something out of the empty nothingness of human souls which is the cause of our “bare ruin’d choirs”. Shakespeare, perhaps, had in mind the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century in England and the accompanying sense of a loss of devotion and love. Yet the imagery of the passing away of nature’s year as an analogy to human mortality actually serves to awaken us to that which abides; in short, to the redemption of our humanity and to its abiding in the love of God.
All Saints offers a profound critique to our fragmented world and to our fragmented selves caught in the vortices of the subjective and radically limited categories of indeterminacy about personal identity. We live in a world in which we have turned ourselves into objects. George Bernanos observed that “between those who think that civilization is a victory of man in the struggle against the determinism of things and those who want to make of man a thing among things, there is no possible scheme of reconciliation.” And then, there is Wendell Berry’s remark that “it is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” To be a machine is to be a thing, where even our bodies have become objects, things, to ourselves, as the French philosopher, Michel Henry noted, things that we can manipulate and destroy as we see fit according to the technological means at our whim and fancy.
All of these concerns are countered by the very different vision of our humanity which All Saints presents both in the lesson from Revelation and in the great teaching of the Beatitudes. The Beatitudes are the blessednesses that speak to the spiritual charter of divine love which seeks the perfection of our humanity. They are profoundly counter-culture and, like the Buddha’s Fire Sermon, they correct our over-attachment to things. They are about a deep inward relation to God which properly defines us.
They form a complete picture of our redeemed humanity in a dynamic and provocative fashion. The first and last Beatitude promise the kingdom of heaven as the true counter to pride and persecution. “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of God”; “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs in the kingdom of heaven”. The poor in spirit are those who are not puffed up or obsessed or buried in themselves; such is really pride and in our day, narcissism; the radical separation and isolation of the self in its illusion of itself completely independent of the body and the world. The poor in spirit are the humble who alone are open to the truth and grandeur of God and his kingdom. That persecution is blessedness only makes sense if we are defined by something more than how others see us and treat us. This last Beatitude complements the seemingly impossible demand to “love your enemies”. It is about seeing one another not as other but as ‘brother’, as friend, as a child of God. “These are they which came out of great tribulation”.
The second Beatitude is equally compelling. “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted”. Sorrow and loss are not for ever. There is something beyond such experiences. What is it? Simply knowing one another in the embrace of God’s love. “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes”. “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.” The meek are the gentle ones who in the gentleness of wisdom know the world as God’s world of which we are all a part. “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled” reminds us of the proper quest for justice which is about nothing less than the good for all and not simply for the privileged few. And most wonderfully, in the middle of the Beatitudes, the fifth, we are reminded of the underlying principle of God’s mercy. “Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.” Mercy for mercy is the highest form of justice which frees us from the spirit of revenge and envy. It frees us precisely to the Good, to the quality of mercy alive in us which cannot be constrained or limited by human presumption.
“Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.” Our liturgy begins with the Collect for purity without which we cannot properly love God or one another. In contrast to our divided hearts and minds there is the sense of our wholeness and clarity of vision. “Blessed are the peace-makers: for they shall be called the children of God.” God’s peace is the peace which passes human knowing. The peace of God is our true peace and true blessedness but it is a peace purchased by the blood of Christ and purchased through persecution. “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”. And as if to drive all of the Beatitudes into our hearts, Jesus concludes, “Blessed are ye when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake.” This, too, belongs to our witness in the midst of the wasteland of modernity. In the place of fragmentation and brokenness we are offered a vision of holiness and wholeness. Such is our blessedness, especially, it seems, now, in “that time of year”.
Fr. David Curry,
All Saints, 2022
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2022/11/01/sermon-for-all-saints-day-6/
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