Month: September 2023

Prayers and liturgy

Jerome, Doctor and Priest

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Jerome (c. 342-420), Priest, Monk, Translator of the Scriptures, Doctor of the Church (source):

O Lord, thou God of truth, whose Word is a lantern to our feet and a light upon our path: We give thee thanks for thy servant Jerome, and those who, following in his steps, have labored to render the Holy Scriptures in the language of the people; and we beseech thee that thy Holy Spirit may overshadow us as we read the written Word, and that Christ, the living Word, may transform us according to thy righteous will; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

The Epistle: 2 Timothy 3:14-17
The Gospel: St. Luke 24:44-48

Joachim Patinir, Landscape with St. JeromeOne of the most scholarly and learned early church fathers, St. Jerome devoted much of his life to accurately translating the Holy Bible from the original languages of Hebrew and Greek into Latin.

Born near Aquileia, northeast Italy, of Christian parents, Jerome travelled widely. He received a classical education at Rome and travelled to Gaul where he became a monk. He later moved to Palestine, spending five years as an ascetic in the Syrian desert. In 374, he was ordained a priest in Antioch. He then pursued biblical studies at Constantinople under Gregory Nazianzus and translated works by Eusebius, Origen, and others.

Travelling to Rome in 382, Jerome became secretary to the aged Pope Damasus. By the time the pope died three years later, Jerome had become involved in theological controversies in which he antagonised many church leaders and theologians. He left Rome under a cloud, returning to Palestine where he lived as a monk in Bethlehem for the rest of his life.

Over several decades, Jerome wrote biblical commentaries and works promoting monasticism and asceticism. Most importantly, he produced fresh Latin translations of most of the Old and New Testaments, based on the original biblical languages. This work formed the basis of the Vulgate, which remained the standard Scriptural text of the western church for over a millennium.

Artwork: Joachim Patinir, Landscape with St. Jerome, 1516-17. Oil on panel, Prado, Madrid.

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Sermons

Meditation for Michaelmas

“They overcame him”

We are in the company of angels. How to think about angels? The simple point is that you can only think them. You can’t see them. The visual imaginary, the way in which angels are depicted in art, is only useful if it contributes to our intellectual and spiritual understanding of the angels.

Michaelmas is a splendid reminder to us of the nature and the reality of the spiritual without which we have no way to think anything. The greatest and most important things in our lives are the things we cannot see, only think and feel, the things of intellect and spirit. You cannot see love. You cannot literally see a number, only the representations of number; you can only think them for they are mental realities. You cannot see a quark or a neutrino or any of the many other features of quantum physics. You cannot see words which are thoughts before they are spoken or written, only then can you see or hear them, sensibly as it were. Think of the magic and wonder of reading. Black marks on a white background that somehow entrance and engage our minds with the thoughts and ideas they represent. There is a constant dialectic between what is seen and unseen.

The angels are pure intellectual beings. They have no bodies. They are beyond number. Unlike the bits and bytes of our cyberspace world they occupy no space whatsoever. They are the pure thoughts of God, the intellectual principles that shape and “move our imaginations and strengthen the light of understanding,” as Thomas Aquinas, known as the Angelic Doctor puts it. They are precisely about the truth and the nature of intellection, that more profound principle of thought upon which our more prosaic and linear ways of thinking ultimately depend. They remind us of a kind of unitive thinking as opposed to our divided thinking. When we reduce reason to a tool, to a means of problem-solving, we can at best only discover that we are the problem as in Oedipus Rex.

Intellection is the gathering of everything into unity. It is to see things as a whole and not simply in the division and dissolution of things; of the endlessness of ‘this and that’. Michaelmas presents a cosmic vision that complements the cosmic vision of Genesis 1. The first chapter of Genesis unfolds the pageant of creation not as a prosaic temporal affair but as an orderly and intellectual process in which one thing is distinguished from another within an ordered whole.

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Prayers and liturgy

Saint Michael and All Angels

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O EVERLASTING God, who hast ordained and constituted the services of Angels and men in a wonderful order: Mercifully grant, that as thy holy Angels alway do thee service in heaven, so by thy appointment they may succour and defend us on earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Revelation 12:7-11
The Gospel: St. Matthew 18:1-10

Viktor Vasnetsov, Archangel MichaelThe name Michael is a variation of Micah, and means in Hebrew “Who is like God?”

The archangel Michael first appears in the Book of Daniel, where he is described as “one of the chief princes” and as the special protector of Israel. In the New Testament epistle of Jude (v. 9), Michael, in a dispute with the devil over the body of Moses, says, “The Lord rebuke you“. Michael appears also in Revelation (12:7-9) as the leader of the angels in the great battle in Heaven that ended with Satan and the hosts of evil being thrown down to earth. There are many other references to the archangel Michael in Jewish and Christian traditions.

Following these scriptural passages, Christian tradition has given St. Michael four duties: (1) To continue to wage battle against Satan and the other fallen angels; (2) to save the souls of the faithful from the power of Satan especially at the hour of death; (3) to protect the People of God, both the Jews of the Old Covenant and the Christians of the New Covenant; and (4) finally to lead the souls of the departed from this life and present them to our Lord for judgment. For these reasons, Christian iconography depicts St. Michael as a knight-warrior, wearing battle armor, and wielding a sword or spear, while standing triumphantly on a serpent or other representation of Satan. Sometimes he is depicted holding the scales of justice or the Book of Life, both symbols of the last judgment.

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Sermons

Address to Society of Holy Cross Synod, 13 September 2023

Fr. David Curry delivered this address to the Society of Holy Cross Synod, Church of St. Anthony of Padua, Hackensack, New Jersey, on 13 September. It is a reworking and an expansion of the meditation he gave on August 4th here in Windsor.

To download a pdf version of this address, complete with footnotes, click here.

Unum necessarium: The Mercy that has no End

Fr. Brian Laffler of the St. John Vianney branch and our host priest for this SSC Synod of the Province of Our Lady of Sorrows tells me that “people speak funny here.” Now whether he means at St. Anthony of Padua in the polyglot nature of the Parish with its liturgies in Italian, Spanish, and some form of English or whether he means New York where every language in the world is spoken, it seems, except Hittite, Canaanite, Perrizite and all of the other ‘ites’, I am not sure. But I hope that it means some consideration and tolerance for the speech of a Canadian from Nova Scotia! We are a diverse group ethnically and linguistically but united in the catholicity of the sacred priesthood that defines the Society of the Holy Cross.

I want to thank the Master, Fr. Chris Cantrell, for the privilege and honour of addressing the fratres of our society. I would like us to reflect on the story of Martha and Mary which bookends the parable of the so-called Good Samaritan, the classic Christian ethic of compassion and service, and to do so in relation to the Feast of the Holy Cross. The point is to highlight the centrality of the Passion for the understanding of the life and purpose of the Society. It is what we pray: “We should glory in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” who “opened his arms on the Cross” and “has commanded us to love one another” that “through the saving power of the Cross + impressed inwardly and revealed outwardly … others may come to know the love and truth of God.” The love of God and the love of neighbour, of one another, are inescapably and intimately connected. Martha and Mary represent action and contemplation respectively in what is a long and rich tradition about the forms of spiritual life which are critical for the life and fellowship of the Society of the Holy Cross implicit in the Society Prayer.”

“One thing is needful”. It is unum necessarium, the one thing necessary, Jesus says. One of the most remarkable figures of the 20th century in all its disarray, the legacy of which is our own disordered world, is the philosopher and social activist, Simone Weil. Her essay, ‘Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God’, begins with the astute observation that “prayer consists of attention,” and, indeed, attention of the highest order, namely, “the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God”. This complements Richard Hooker’s observation that prayer signifies “all the service that ever we do unto God”. For him, as for Simone Weil, the connection between learning and prayer was ever so obvious. They belong to our relation to God’s truth and goodness.

As teaching bringeth us to know that God is our supreme truth; so prayer testifieth that we acknowledge him our sovereign good.

God, too, is for us ‘most beautiful’ and so completes the triad of Plato’s transcendentals, ‘the true, the beautiful, and the good’, which belong to the intellectual and ethical structure of reality. The good, αγαθος, and the beautiful, καλος, are virtually interchangeable in Greek. Beauty belongs to our seeking truth and the good. That sense of beauty is not simply about smoke and bells in rituals “merrily on high” but paradoxically and primarily concentrates our thinking on Christ crucified; “this beauteous form assures a piteous mind” as John Donne puts it in one of his holy sonnets, with which we will conclude.

Following Plato and Aristotle, contemplation is the highest form of human activity, an inner activity of spiritual and intellectual reflection, but not at the expense of outward activity which belongs to our lives physically and socially with one another. There is, after all, something spiritual, intellectual, and ethical about our interactions with one another, even necessary. At issue is the interplay between action and contemplation; in short, between Martha and Mary.

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Prayers and liturgy

Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop and Scholar

The collect for today, the commemoration of Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), Bishop of Winchester, scholar, spiritual writer (source):

Lancelot AndrewesO Lord God,
who didst give Lancelot Andrewes many gifts
of thy Holy Spirit,
making him a man of prayer and a pastor of thy people:
perfect in us that which is lacking in thy gifts,
of faith, to increase it,
of hope, to establish it,
of love, to kindle it,
that we may live in the light of thy grace and glory;
through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: 1 Timothy 2:1-7a
The Gospel: St. Luke 11:1-4

A prayer of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes:

Thou, O Lord, art the Helper of the helpless,
The Hope of the hopeless,
The Saviour of them who are tossed with the tempests,
The Haven of them who sail; be thou all to all.
The glorious majesty of the Lord our God be upon us,
Prosper thou the work of our hands upon us,
Oh! prosper thou our handiwork
Lord, be thou within us, to strengthen us;
without us to keep us; above us to protect us;
beneath us to uphold us; before us to direct us;
behind us to keep us from straying;
round about us to defend us.
Blessed be Thou, O Lord our Father, for ever and ever. Amen.

Southwark Cathedral, Lancelot Andrewes TombGraphic: Tomb of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, Southwark Cathedral, London. Photograph taken by admin, 20 October 2014.

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Prayers and liturgy

Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity

Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity

“And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her.”

Today’s Gospel is a powerful and moving illustration of what Paul means by our “being rooted and grounded in love.” The compassion of Christ is the deep love of God in himself and for us. Thus these readings illuminate the theme of the Trinity season captured in the Scripture phrase for the Trinity season: “God is love and he that abideth in love abideth in God and God in him.” In a way, the entire project and purpose of the Trinity season is about our circling around and into the divine mystery of God’s love, seeking that love as the moving principle in us.

To understand the compassion of Christ shown in the Gospel story of the widow of Nain is “to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge.” It might seem paradoxical: to know what is beyond our knowing. Yet that is the great philosophical insight: our knowing is always about what is greater than us. Our knowing is finite and partial but belongs to the greater knowing of God. Knowing and loving go together which is itself another challenge for us: to see the connection between knowledge and love is to be awakened to the deeper and greater reality of God in his ultimate being, ultimate knowing and ultimate loving. Such is the mercy that never ends and as such it is the “continual pity” of God which alone can “cleanse and defend” God’s Church. That “continual pity” is the compassion of God made visible in Christ.

Luke provides the greatest number of Gospel readings in the Trinity season. Dante, in a wonderful phrase, identifies Luke as scriba manseutudinis Christi, the scribe of the gentleness of Christ. That gentleness is the compassion of Christ. Thus, Luke’s Gospel is sometimes called the “Gospel of Compassion” because of the touching and compelling scenes and stories which his Gospel highlights. Luke alone, for example, gives us the stories of the Good Samaritan, the prodigal son, and the widow of Nain.

All three turn on the idea of seeing that leads to compassion. In the parable of the good Samaritan, the certain Samaritan “when he saw him [the certain man, the symbol of our humanity, lying wounded and half dead on the roadside], he had compassion on him.” In the story of the prodigal son, it is the father who when his son “was at a distance, saw him and had compassion.” And Jesus coming to the gate of the little city, Nain, meets the funeral procession of the only son of the widow of Nain as they proceed to the graveside. “And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her.”

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 25 September – 1 October

Tuesday, September 26th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club: Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World by Jennifer Rogan-Lefebvre (2022); and I drink, therefore I am: A Philosopher’s Guide to Wine by Roger Scruton (2009).

Thursday, September 28th, Eve of Michaelmas
7:00pm Holy Communion

Sunday, October 1st, Trinity 17/Michaelmastide
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Events:

Saturday, November 18th
4:00-6:00pm Annual Ham Supper – Parish Hall

Also please take note of the annual Missions to Seafarer’s Campaign for 2023.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Sixteenth Sunday After Trinity

The collect for today, the Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O LORD, we beseech thee, let thy continual pity cleanse and defend thy Church; and, because it cannot continue in safety without thy succour, preserve it evermore by thy help and goodness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Ephesians 3:13-21
The Gospel: St. Luke 7:11-17

Matthias Gerung, Resurrection of the Son of the Widow of NainArtwork: Matthias Gerung, Resurrection of the Son of the Widow of Nain, c. 1530-32. Illumination, Ottheinrich Bible, Bavarian State Library.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 23 September

Imago Dei!

The first chapters of Genesis are especially foundational and formative for our thinking. They belong to a long tradition of reflection about the world and about what it means to be human; questions that are always with us and which challenge our thinking about our relation to nature and to our lives with one another. As such it touches upon a common question for students, especially new students at KES: “Where do I fit in?” That in turn is part of a greater question: “What is the place of our humanity in the givenness of creation?” After all, we find ourselves in a world which exists prior to us and in institutions such as schools which have a tradition and life shaped and formed by principles which are also prior to us.

The challenge of education is learning not so much what to think as how to think. It means at the very least an exposure to principles and ideas which require reflection and thought. Teaching is not mere technique. It is really about the passing on of things which have been learned and thus making them part of ourselves in one way or another. Genesis raises some of the great questions that become the foundational basis for many subsequent quests of the mind.

It begins, as we have seen, with a principle, God. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” But what is meant by God? The philosophical and theological traditions offer a number of suggestions. Thomas Aquinas, in a kind of summary statement about ancient Greek wisdom complemented by Jewish, Christian, and Islamic understandings, simply says that “God is the beginning and end of all creatures, especially rational creatures,” referring to angels and our humanity. This alludes in some fashion to one of the great insights of the Genesis story of creation. ‘Adam, an inclusive term and not yet a personal name (and “functionally gender-indifferent” ), refers to our humanity in general which is said to be made in the image of God. “In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”

At least three things are emphasized in that statement: first, our humanity comes at the end of the litany of creation which distinguishes one thing from another thing within a unity of order. But are we, as in the ancient Sumerian view, simply an after-thought of the gods and thus insignificant beings? No. Because, secondly, ‘adam as the work of the sixth day is not only connected to every other created thing but alone of the things of creation is said to be made in God’s image. What does that mean? All that we can say about God is that God the Uncreated is the creative and ordering principle who speaks things into being and sustains them in their being. This underscores the idea of the world as intelligible (without which ‘science’ would be impossible). Our humanity understood in relation to God informs our role and place in the created order. Creation is order and not chaos; something significant is being suggested about us in terms of responsibilities and care. Thirdly, we are much like everything else in the created order as ‘beings in the world’ in terms of the basic categories of male and female.

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