Year: 2022

“And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying, Blessed are … ye”

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.

(more…)

Print this entry

“All things are ready”

“All things are ready”, but are we? And for what? What does it mean to be ready for the banquet, for the wedding feast? The readings in the latter part of the Trinity season all have an apocalyptic quality to them. They point us to the end-times, to the idea of judgment, accountability, and responsibility that belong to the nature of our life in Christ. “Walk[ing] circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise,” Paul bids us, “redeeming the time, because the days are evil.” No kidding, we might say. Yet it is really all about “understanding what the will of the Lord is” in the face of the evil of our days.

But what, indeed, is the “wedding-garment” without which, it seems, we are not ready; without which, it seems, we are out even when we think we are in; without which, it seems, we shall be “cast into outer darkness” where “there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth”? A rather frightening and sobering spectacle.

The times are never so bad that a good man cannot live in them, though, no doubt, that raises the larger question about the struggle for the good in our lives. But the point is that the times in which we live cannot be the measure of virtue and character. I have often told students that they are not the victims of Covid. And neither are you. Rather that is simply part of the setting and circumstance in which virtue is shown and character is proved. The question for Christians “at all times and in all places” is whether we will be defined by circumstance or defined by grace. By grace, we mean the highest perfection of human virtue which is God’s work in us, come what may in the world around us. “Wherefore”, St. Paul bids us, “be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is.”

In Jesus Christ, the Providence of God is written out for us to read most clearly and most dramatically. He is, we might say, the Mind of Providence, the Word and Son of the Father who “came unto his own and his own received him not.” The parable in today’s gospel is really a parable of the whole Gospel itself. Jesus shows us a picture of our indifference, and even more, our evil to his love, to his good for us. Why? To awaken us to spiritual seriousness. To shake us out of our complacency and our evil and into readiness and preparation: preparation for the eternal banquet of the blessed in communion with God and preparation for the foretaste and participation in that feast now in the banquet of the faithful, the Holy Eucharist.

Here, in this service, we see the outpouring of God’s love for us. What, then, is the wedding-garment? It is nothing less than the charity of God in the sacrifice of Christ. The wedding-garment is Christ Jesus. “Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ,” we will hear on the First Sunday of Advent. Yet, even now in these late days of the Trinity season, we are being called to pay serious attention to our life in Christ: being “wise” (Trinity 20), “taking the shield of faith” (Trinity 21), being “partakers of grace” (Trinity 22), knowing that “our citizenship is in heaven” (Trinity 23); these all the point to our end in Christ, that “ye might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding: that ye might walk worthy of the Lord”, being made “meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light,” (Trinity 24). In other words we are being recalled to our vocation as Saints, wonderfully illustrated for us in the Feast of All Saints in the vision of the Communion of Saints and in the Beatitudes which define our spiritual lives.

(more…)

Print this entry

“If a man love me, he will keep my words, and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.”

In the gentle softness of October and in the quiet stillness of the ending of nature’s year, we celebrate the completion of the Apostolic foundation of the City of God with the Feast of Saint Simon and Saint Jude. All that can be said has simply to do with their apostleship. They are of the company of “twelve poor men, by Christ anointed,”as a hymn puts it. And after all, what more needs to be said than that? Very little is known about either apart from their apostleship in Christ though they have come to be known traditionally as the patron saints of zealots and of lost causes, respectively. But that only highlights perhaps the essential doctrine of the saints. Another lives in them and so for us. It is all about the sanctifying power of the grace of Christ reflected in those whose lives are hid in Christ and who point us to the nature of our abiding in the grace of God.

That abiding is wonderfully signaled in the lesson from Revelation as belonging to the image of the heavenly city, the city of God. The Collect emphasizes that the Church is built upon nothing less than “the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the head corner-stone” and emphasizes the unity of doctrine as the binding principle that makes us “an holy temple acceptable unto thee.” We abide in the temple and are to be ourselves temples of the Holy Spirit.

What this means is shown in the powerful gospel for their feast which speaks about keeping the commandments of God in love and about the Holy Spirit as the Comforter or Strengthener of our faith who “shall teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.” The Feast of St. Simon and St. Jude completes the festal round of the Apostles and prepares us for the harvest festival of All Saints. What is set before us is the wonder of our co-inherence with God and with one another. God in us and we in him.

Saints Simon and Jude usher us into the glorious celebration of that community of divine love in which we have our abiding, the Feast of All Saints; itself the celebration of “all that dedicated city, dearly loved of God on high.” All our agendas are, after all, but lost causes, all our zeal is but misplaced love apart from our abiding in the love of God which passes human knowing. And as the Gospel makes clear this abiding is our peace and our joy, come what may in the course of this troublous life.

(more…)

Print this entry