Year: 2023

“Make me a clean heart, O God,/ and renew a right spirit within me.”

‘Ashes, ashes, we all fall down,’ as one version of a children’s rhyme puts it. Yes, but only so as to rise up. And no, it has nothing to do with the Great Plague or the Black Death. That is a meta folkloric myth or invention of the 19th century.

Dust and ashes are the symbols of the beginning of Lent. They recall us at once to creation and to repentance which has to do with our awareness of having turned away from God. As such dust and ashes belong to the idea of our turning back to God from whom in sin we have turned away. They belong symbolically and in a sacramental fashion to our seeking God’s will for our re-creation rather than remaining in separation. But it is about the seeking. That is why Lent is really the pilgrimage of love, our loves seeking the divine love which seeks our good. We seek the good which God seeks for us and which belongs to his essential nature as the All-Good, we might say. We can only seek the goodness of God for us through God’s love.

The exhortation in the Prayer Book Penitential Service is a masterpiece of doctrinal minimalism. It speaks about the custom “in the primitive Church” – a phrase which is intentionally unspecified but refers in general to the early Patristic period which witnesses to the emergence of three interrelated things: the Holy Scriptures; the Creeds, and the ascetic patterns of the Church’s life of devotion. One forgets that the books of what we mostly mean by the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, to use Christian language, were only explicitly named by St. Athanasius in a letter in the early 4th century but as bearing witness to what had been received and recognised much earlier. Thus the emergence of the Canon of Scripture parallels the establishment of what Irenaeus and others called the Rule of Faith, namely, the Apostles’ Creed, and, then the emergence of the Nicene Creed in the 4th century first at the Council of Nicaea and then at Constantinople, 325 and 387 AD respectively. What we call the Nicene Creed is properly speaking the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. Later there came into use the so-called Athanasian Creed. These are the three Creeds of the Church Universal.

All that the exhortation says in its modest way is that it was “the custom to observe with great devotion the days of our Lord’s Passion and Resurrection, and to prepare for the same by a season of penitence and fasting.” It is not only minimalist but highlights the essential features of the Gospel narratives. To put it somewhat cryptically: Just as there can be no Easter without Good Friday so too there can be no Good Friday without Easter. The accounts of the Passion which are set before us in Holy Week are only possible through the mystery of the Resurrection. And so, too, with Lent as a time of discipline. It is only possible through the radical meaning of Christ’s Resurrection which never hides or conceals the marks of the crucifixion. Indeed, as Lancelot Andrewes emphasizes rather beautifully, “Christ crucified is the book of love opened for us to read,” liber caritatis. Lent is really about our reading that book of love.

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“Charity never faileth”

“Love bade me welcome”. So begins George Herbert’s poem, “Love (III),” which concludes a wonderful collocation of poems known as The Temple. They are poems that continue to attract across the spectrum of ecclesial identities. As the Puritan theologian, Richard Baxter notes, “Herbert speaks to God like one that really believeth a God, and whose business in the world is most with God. Heart-work and heaven-work make up his Books.”

Today is Quinquagesima Sunday, commonly known as ‘Love Sunday;’ in part because of Paul’s powerful hymn to love from 1st Corinthians 13, and, in part because of the Gospel story. “We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus says. Like Herbert’s poem, it is an invitation to love. The journey is the pilgrimage of love. Love is God.

This challenges many of our assumptions about love as something personal, emotional, sexual, and psychological; in short, our all too human loves are incomplete. What Paul sets before us is Divine Love, the love which seeks the perfection of our human loves by gathering us into the life of God himself. It is very much about a kind of wisdom in love, about the divine knowing and loving which is greater than the partial, fickle and limited forms of our human loves and our human knowing. We “see in a glass darkly.” Even more, we are meant to see ourselves in the “certain blind man” sitting by the way-side near Jericho, itself the image of the earthly city in contrast to Jerusalem, the image of the heavenly city.

Without charity, we are nothing, and, as the Collect says, all our works without charity are “nothing worth,” drawing upon the language of the Epistle. Charity is the Englishing of one of the several words for love in Latin, namely, caritas, itself the Latinising of one of the several words for love in Greek, namely, agape. Charity means more though not less than the idea of providing for the poor and needy. The point is that through the recognition of the limitations of our human loves we are awakened to the Divine love which seeks our good in the motions of the Goodness of God himself.

In faith I do not love thee with mine eyes,
For they in thee a thousand errors note;
But ‘tis my heart that loves what they despise,
Who in despite of view is pleased to dote.
Nor are mine ears with thy tongue’s tune delighted,
Nor tender feelings to base touches prone,
Nor taste, nor smell, desire to be invited
To any sensual feast with thee alone. (Sonnet # 141)

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