“I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again,
I leave the world, and go to the Father.”
All our comings and goings find their meaning and truth in the comings and goings of God made visible in Christ, the Word and Son of the Father. Prayer is our life as ordered to God and with God. The pilgrimage of our souls is gathered into the pilgrimage of the life of God in the going forth and return of God in creation and redemption; this makes visible the eternal love of God in himself. Perhaps nowhere is this more clearly expressed than in today’s Gospel for Rogation Sunday.
Rogation means asking. Prayer, in its most fundamental sense, is asking. Asking for what? For this or that commodity or thing? For privilege and prestige, power and domination over others? No. Prayer is our participation in God’s own gathering of all things to himself. It is our seeking or desiring but seeking and desiring what? It is not our seeking and desiring this or that thing in the false infinity of things which never satisfies. It is our seeking and desiring what is the absolute good and our seeking and desiring to do what is right; ultimately the justice of God. That presupposes a world that is not random and arbitrary, chaotic and aimless; it presupposes the goodness of creation as God’s creation and our place within that world as ordered to God. Prayer is nothing less than that complete orientation of ourselves to the will and truth of God. In the Christian understanding, as shown to us in this Gospel, prayer is nothing less than our asking the Father in the name of the Son and in the Spirit of their mutual love. It is Trinitarian.
Richard Hooker notes that “prayer signifies all the service that ever we do unto God.” It is our seeking and desiring what God seeks and desires and as such, in God, as Peter Abelard’s great hymn, O Quanta Qualia, puts it, “wish and fulfillment can severed be ne’er, /Nor the thing prayed for come short of the prayer.” It is a commentary on what Jesus means when he tells us that “the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me, and have believed that I came out from God.” Prayer “testifies,” as Hooker says, “that we acknowledge him as our sovereign good.” But up to now, “hitherto,” as Jesus says, “have you asked nothing in my name.” Prayer in the Christian sense is about asking the Father in the name of the Son in the Spirit of their eternal love: “ask,” Jesus says, “and ye shall receive that your joy may be full.” Peace and joy flow out of the Resurrection of Christ which makes visible what is present in the Passion; the “vision of peace, that brings joy evermore.”
But it requires our seeking, our desiring, our true longing for the truth and goodness of God. Simone Weil captures this best in the midst of the chaos and disorders of the 20th century. “Prayer,” she says, “consists of attention,” attention of the highest order, namely, “the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God.” Prayer participates in the reality of the life of God which it seeks and knows in faith and love. Prayer is and has to be our life; not just our hearing but also our doing as the Epistle reading from St. James emphasizes; it is “all the service that ever we do unto God.”
Rogation Sunday speaks to our current confusions and disorders about our relationship to the world and to one another. Prayer is essential to what it means to be truly human in the Christian understanding. It is our life lived to and for God and with one another in the world where we are placed, in the land where we are planted, as it were. How we see the world affects how we see one another. If we see the world as indifferent, as just there to be manipulated and used, as dead stuff subject to human domination and use, then we remain in an attitude of division and opposition to that world having forgotten that we are very much a part of it ourselves.
That sense of the world as indifferent to our humanity and even as an ominous and fearful threat is a feature of a modern approach to the world. Jean-Paul Sartre captures this attitude in La Nausée, Nausea. The world around us becomes nauseating to us because it seems indifferent and alien to us and our concerns. But it is not a big step from that to what he says in his play Huis Clos, No Exit, that “hell is other people.” In other words, how we think the world or nature shapes how we think about one another. The problem here in the existentialist viewpoint is the same as the one which dominates our technocratic culture: it is the idea of our humanity itself as completely separate and removed from nature and which leads to nausea and/or destruction; in short, a kind of nihilism in the isolation of ourselves.
What is forgotten is what Rogation Sunday reminds us. It is God’s world and our place in it is in accord with our vocation to act as God acts towards the world, namely, in loving care and service. As one local farmer once told me while looking over the landscape of the Avon Valley, our doings should be about “doing good to the land.” Theologically, as Thomas Traherne puts it, “you never learn to love the world aright until you learn to love it in God.” The world in God.
That is, I think, the true meaning of Christ’s concluding words in today’s Gospel. His words, he says, have been spoken to us “that in me you might have peace.” That peace is the peace of God which is something more and greater than what we can achieve on our own. For “in the world,” he says, “you shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” That overcoming is not the triumph of the will to power, not the domination and destruction of the world but rather what belongs to the pilgrimage of our lives in faith from wilderness to paradise. That can only mean our attention to the things of God made visible in the witness of the Scriptures to Christ and in our liturgy. That is itself about nothing more than the lifting up of our hearts and all things to God.
The Resurrection culminates in that idea of the lifting up of our hearts and minds, the lifting up of the world to God; in short, the Ascension of Christ. We find our end and purpose in the homecoming of the Son to the Father. “We ascend,” as Augustine says, “in the ascension of our hearts.” Prayer is the gathering of all things to God from whom all good things do come. It is nothing more and nothing less than the life of God in us.
“I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again,
I leave the world, and go to the Father.”
Fr. David Curry
Rogation Sunday, Easter V, 2024