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.
O Lord God,