Rector’s Annual Report, 2022
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Rector’s Annual Report for 2022
February 19th, 2023
“Prayer the Churches banquet, Angels age/Gods breath in man returning to his birth,/ the soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage.” These are the opening lines of a lovely sonnet called Prayer (1) by George Herbert. The whole poem is a rich medley of images drawn from Scripture, from the traditions of Christian theology and spirituality, from music, from the liturgy of the Church, from domestic life, and from things remote and exotic, from things near and far way. “Church-bels beyond the starres heard, the souls bloud.” It ends with two words that are not images but the meaning of them: “something understood.” Prayer in all of these various images, ranging from “the Churches banquet,” a reference to the Eucharist, to “the land of spices,” a reference to the voyages of discovery and to what is exotic, is something understood. Thus the poem is not simply a random collection of images. The point is that something is understood in and through the images and not in flight from them.
There is something understood, meaning doctrine or teaching, that is conveyed through each image and in their order and sequence. Prayer is about our lives in pilgrimage through which we participate in the ways the grace of God is conveyed to us. Thus prayer is “Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest”; a reference to a passage from Augustine about looking at the Creed and seeing yourself in it as in a mirror, being dressed in the essential doctrines of the Faith, we might say. The Creeds come out of the Scriptures and return us to them in an order of understanding. In many ways, the poem signals a central feature of the liturgy and thus the life of the Parish in these uncertain times. It is simply doctrine in devotion.
That has been the constant and recurring point of emphasis in the forms of our encounter in prayer and praise with God in his eternal motions of love which belong to God in himself and God for us in his motions towards us. We constantly seek to enter more fully into the circling motions of divine love that belong to the interplay of the different seasons, and the feasts and festivals of the Church’s life. The underlying patterns of reformed catholicism are the interplay of justification – what God in Christ has done for us; sanctification – Christ in us through the gift of the Holy Spirit; and glorification – our end in God as imaged through the Communion of Saints. As the Creeds teach us, all three moments reflect the idea of penitential adoration through a focus on the forgiveness of sins. “Repentance,” Lancelot Andrewes says in an Ash Wednesday sermon, “is nothing else but redire ad principia, ‘a kind of circling’, to return to Him by repentance from Whom by sin we have turned away”.
That kind of circling is love, the divine love seeking the perfection of our imperfect human loves which is set before us on Quinquagesima Sunday. Lent concentrates the whole idea of Christian pilgrimage into the span of forty days in terms of the interplay and interpenetration of illumination, purgation, and perfection or union that constitute the classical nature of the soul’s journey to God, itinerarium mentis in Deum, as in Bonaventure’s classical treatise. It is really all about a kind of circling around and into the mystery of God and of God with us. “We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus says. We go up with Christ. We do so in the hopes of learning more clearly the nature of what Herbert in another poem calls “two vast spacious things” that transcend our human capacities to know, namely, “sin and love.” To understand something about those is the point of the Lenten journey understood as the pilgrimage of love, the love which never faileth as Paul says but which belongs to the good of our humanity in God through the uncertainties and confusions of our world and day. That pilgrimage of love is our life in prayer as “something understood.” It is a kind of circling around and into the mystery of God.
