Sermon for Society of the Holy Cross Quiet Day, 4 August 2023
“One thing is needful”
It is unum necessarium, the one thing necessary. One of the most remarkable figures of the disturbed and disturbing 20th century, 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.
We might add that God 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 and our lives. The good, αγαθος, and the beautiful, καλος, are virtually interchangeable in Greek. Beauty belongs to our seeking truth and the good. “O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness” (Ps. 96.9), as the Psalmist bids us.
I want to reflect on our commemoration of St. John Vianney, the Curé d’Ars, and on the readings from Ezekiel and Matthew, about our priestly vocation as “watchmen unto the house of Israel,” sent by Jesus “to teach, to preach, and to heal,” by way of the story of Martha and Mary, read in the daily office this week. Martha and Mary represent action and contemplation respectively in what is a long and rich tradition about the forms of spiritual life which are, I think, crucial for the life and fellowship of the Society of the Holy Cross. It is implicit in the Society Prayer about the saving power of the Cross “impressed inwardly” and “expressed outwardly.”
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.
Augustine encapsulates the idea nicely in a phrase in ‘The City of God’. Otium sanctum quaerit charitas veritatis, negotium iustum suscipit necessitas charitatis. “The love of truth seeks a holy quiet; [yet] the necessity of love accepts a righteous busyness”. I have carved these words on panels of wood which hang in my house. They are a reminder to us about our priestly life of prayer in relation to the true, the beautiful, and the good; a reminder of what Augustine calls the vita mixta, a mixed life, which belongs to our journey, via ad patriam.
The story of Martha and Mary turns on the question of attention. Martha, you will recall, “was distracted with much serving” and complained to Jesus about Mary “sitting at his feet, listening to his word.”
