by CCW | 17 November 2024 11:00
It is, as Shakespeare puts it, “that time of year when yellow leaves or few or none do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold, bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang”. His words are suggestive and belong to one of the most important and yet most neglected aspects of our humanity, remembering. November is the grey month of our remembering, a remembering of our end in God in the Communion of Saints; in short, our vocation as the children of God. Yet this includes our remembering too of the harsh and hard realities of sin and evil, of war and destruction signalled by Remembrance Day last Monday. It is really a kind of secular All Souls’ day.
“Bare ruin’d choirs”. It could be a metaphor for what T.S. Eliot called the Waste Land, the waste land of modernity following upon the carnage of the First World and its legacy of death and destruction that continues to haunt us. Shakespeare may be alluding to the literal ruins of the choirs of the English monasteries through their dissolution by Henry VIII between 1536 and 1541, the confiscation of church properties by the State. But he is also reflecting on the passage of time, of aging, of the personal realities of dying and death. Momento mori, a remembering of our common mortality is an important feature of what belongs to our humanity. It is not simply morbid and negative but reflective in the sense that it opens us out to something more and something greater. At least that is the kind of holy remembering that is set before us in this time of endings and beginnings. They recall us to what is eternal and abiding even in the face of the sins and evils of ourselves and our world. A remembering which is ultimately restorative and healing.
“But remember – for that’s my business to you”, Ariel says in a famous scene in The Tempest that seeks to convict the consciences of “ye three men of sin”: Alonso, Antonio and Sebastian. They are meant to remember how they sought the harm of Prospero and Miranda, having usurped Prospero’s dukedom of Milan. Yet, as Ariel indicates, this remembering which is a calling to account is “nothing but heart’s sorrow”, meaning repentance, “and a clear life ensuing”. In the judgement there is mercy and truth, grace and hope through the greater power of forgiveness. This is the same point that Luke is making in this morning’s second lesson.
Louise Penny’s latest novel in her Armand Gamache mystery detective stories is The Grey Wolf. In her novels, the fictional community of Three Pines plays a central role and within it she often makes reference to the little church of St. Thomas. In this novel, she calls attention to the stained glass window which depicts three brothers who marched off to the Great War and never returned home. Yet their image is there, captured in the brilliant colours of the stained glass window which commemorates their sacrifice. In a poignant phrase, she writes that “there was in that little chapel, the stench of shame and the overpowering fragrance of forgiveness for the unforgivable”. I am most moved by the juxtaposition of those phrases: “the stench of shame and the overpowering fragrance of forgiveness”. She means, I think, the sense of horror in remembering the catastrophic carnage of the Great Wars that consigned entire generations to oblivion. How to remember that without being utterly destroyed and thrown into despair and hopelessness? Only by the deeper remembrance of “the overpowering fragrance of forgiveness”, even a forgiveness “for the unforgivable”. That can only make sense through the Cross of Christ. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”
The church year runs out in remembering, one of the most important and yet most neglected of the human faculties of the soul or mind. Yet the readings all call attention to a kind of profound reflection or remembering about who we are in the sight of God, a remembering which is ultimately about forgiveness, the highest expression of God’s goodness towards our humanity in its waywardness and disarray. That requires humility in us, the humility which alone awakens us to God in his truth and mercy.
How to be attentive in the age of distraction? It is the greatest challenge of the Church and our culture and age. Attentive to what? Not what is endlessly ephemeral and passing but what is eternal and ever-abiding; in short, to what belongs to the motions of God’s Word coming to us and abiding with us. Next Sunday is the Sunday Next Before Advent. It signals the transition between the end of the Trinity Season, the ending of the Church Year, and the beginning in Advent of a new Church Year, a beginning again upon the eternal foundation of our lives in Christ.
The remembering is about the radical meaning of faith. In the Octave of All Saints, there are wonderful readings that recall us to the homeland of spirit, to the meaning of the Communion of Saints as the heavenly city that embraces all the moments of our lives in redemption, the redemption of our humanity. One such reading for the commemoration of “Founders, Benefactors and Missionaries” – itself an important remembrance that others have gone before us and we have entered into their labour – is a powerful passage from the Letter to the Hebrews (BCP, p. 302). The passage is taken from the 11th chapter and the beginning of the 12th. “These all died in faith”, we are told. Who are those who died in faith? And what does that mean? The previous verses provide a wonderful litany of figures from the history of Israel reaching back to Abel and Cain, to Noah, to Abraham and Sarah, to Isaac, Jacob and Esau, to Joseph, to Rahab the Harlot, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David and Samuel, and the prophets and extending to a unnumbered number of the unnamed who suffered persecution, those of whom the world was not worthy. A remarkable list.
The Chapter begins with a strong and compelling definition of faith that challenges and counters all our contemporary notions of personal faith and claims of identity. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen”. That idea underlies the idea that all those who died in faith – all figures from the Hebrew world – were “strangers and pilgrims on earth” who looked to the promises from afar off, the promises of God for the proverbial promised land. “They seek a country”, Hebrews says. But then, and this is intriguing, “had they been mindful of that country they might have had opportunity to have returned.” Yet in evident contrast to that idea of returning, Hebrews says “but now, they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly”, which is the city of God prepared for us and for them by God.
“They desire a better country” is the motto of the Order of Canada, the highest civilian honour in the country. It is in Latin but in a different translation than Jerome’s translation into Latin from the Greek. Desiderantes meliorem patriam is probably a translation into Latin from the English of the King James Version, overlooking or ignoring Jerome’s “nunc autem meliorem appetunt.”
We no doubt desire a better country but face the sad realities of sin and evil and the recognition that so often what we think is better and good turns out to be worse. But what the motto says is incomplete without the accompanying phrase, “an heavenly”. This is not a flight from the world into the fantasies of our imaginations but the idea of the redemption of our desires as realised in the Communion of Saints. It is that larger sense of faith as something substantial and eternal that makes all the difference and redeems all our desires and makes us “partakers of the divine nature”. It is something beyond, eternal, and ever-abiding. It is the true nature of our remembering, itself a kind of attention to what we see and hear in these readings and in the constant pattern of the liturgy.
Morning Prayer is an undertaking of attention to the Word proclaimed. It seeks our attentive participation in the hearing of the Scriptures but also in the praying and singing of the Canticles and responses. It is fully immersive in quite striking ways that require you to open your mouths and to pay attention to one another. It all happens within the order of the service which carries us, if we will try to attend, into a deeper meaning and understanding of what is said and heard. Herbert’s great sonnet on prayer begins “Prayer the churches banquet, Angels age,/ God’s breath in man returning to his birth, the soul in paraphrase, the heart in pilgrimage,” before ranging over a whole world of things exotic and domestic, natural and divine, images that capture our attention and allow us to see how everything belongs to our life with God when we are in prayer. It ends with the words, “something understood.”
Faith is really “right opinion”, as Plato teaches. Faith and opinion are the same word in Greek, pistis. Faith is presupposed in all our doings especially as rational and spiritual creatures who seek to know. This led Anselm to the great phrase that impels our journey as strangers and pilgrims on earth, fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding, each according to our capacities. It is about something active and alive in us that moves us into a greater understanding of what we are already a part. My prayer for all of us is that we may have an attentive ear to the wisdom of God, to the forms of remembrance that recall us to “the overpowering fragrance of forgiveness for the unforgivable”.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 25, 2024
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