Month: March 2025

Prayers and liturgy

Thomas Aquinas, Doctor and Poet

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274), Priest, Friar, Poet, Doctor of the Church (source):

Everlasting God,
who didst enrich thy Church with the learning and holiness
of thy servant Thomas Aquinas:
grant to all who seek thee
a humble mind and a pure heart
that they may know thy Son Jesus Christ
to be the way, the truth and the life;
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.

The Lesson: Wisdom 7:7-14
The Gospel: St. Matthew 13:47-52

Guercino, St. Thomas Aquinas Writing the Hymn of the Blessed SacramentBorn into a noble family near Aquino, between Rome and Naples, St. Thomas was educated at the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino until age thirteen, and then at the University of Naples. When he decided to join the Dominican Order, his family were dismayed because the Dominicans were mendicants and regarded as socially inferior to the Benedictines. Thomas’s brothers kidnapped and imprisoned him for a year in the family’s castle, but he finally escaped and became a Dominican friar in 1244.

The rest of Thomas’s life was spent studying, teaching, preaching, and writing. Initially, he studied philosophy and theology with Albert the Great at Paris and Cologne. Albert was said to prophesy that, although Thomas was called the dumb ox (probably referring to his physical size), “his lowing would soon be heard all over the world”.

His two greatest works are Summa Contra Gentiles, begun c. 1259 and completed in 1264, and Summa Theologica, begun c. 1266 but uncompleted at his death.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 6 March

They understood none of these things.

“Behold,” Jesus says in the Gospel which sets us upon the spiritual pilgrimage of Lent, “we go up to Jerusalem.” Wednesday was Ash Wednesday and marks the formal beginning of the forty days of Lent, a time of renewal and reflection, of repentance, and of prayer and study of the Holy Scriptures. Dust and ashes are strong reminders of our being created from the dust of the ground and of the necessity of repentance which is our turning back to God in whom we find the truth and dignity and freedom of our humanity, knowing even as we are known in the divine love.

Something of the meaning of Lent is set before us in the Gospel reading from Luke about going up to Jerusalem, read along with Paul’s powerful hymn of love. It is really all about the divine love setting our human loves in order.

Jerusalem is more than just a place on a map, more than a historic city caught up in a long, long sequence of the endless conflicts of empires and cultures. It is important for Judaism anciently and at present in the state of Israel politically. It has been a place of conflict and conquest during the Crusades, thus indicating its significance religiously for Jews and Christians and Muslims. It remains an important place geopolitically in terms of the tensions that belong to the international global order. But beyond those things, Jerusalem holds a special symbolic meaning as the image of heaven, heavenly Jerusalem, we might say. It is an image of the community of our humanity’s highest good. Yet, as the Gospel passage read in Chapel makes clear, to go to Jerusalem means the hard lessons of sin and evil out of which comes the wonder and the glory of love.

Jesus tells the disciples exactly what going up to Jerusalem means. It means the awful things of his Passion. He speaks of his death and resurrection. But “they understood none of these things.” It is a profound statement that relates directly to the educational project. Things are taught but not always immediately learned or known. Yet our awareness of our not knowing is a crucial feature of our coming to know, especially concerning the things that matter most. To know that we don’t know, as Socrates famously taught, is the condition for our pursuit of knowing. Not the despair of learning but the passionate desire to know, what Plato calls the eros of knowing.

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Prayers and liturgy

Perpetua and her Companions, Martyrs

The collect for today, the commemoration of St. Perpetua, St. Felicitas, and their companions (d. 203), Martyrs at Carthage (source):

O holy God,
who gavest great courage to Perpetua,
Felicity and their companions:
grant that we may be worthy to climb the ladder of sacrifice
and be received into the garden of peace;
through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: Hebrews 10:32-39
The Gospel: St. Matthew 24:9-14

Perpetua, Felicitas, and five other catechumens were arrested in North Africa after emperor Septimus Severus forbade new conversions to Christianity. They were thrown to wild animals in the circus of Carthage.

The early church writer Tertullian records, in what appears to be Perpetua’s own words, a vision in which she saw a ladder to heaven and heard the voice of Jesus saying, “Perpetua, I am waiting for you”. She climbed the ladder and reached a large garden where sheep were grazing. From this, she understood that she and her companions would be martyred.

Tertullian’s The Passion of the Holy Martyrs Perpetua and Felicitas is posted here.

Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Saints Perpetua and FelicityArtwork: Saints Perpetua and Felicity, Mosaic, Saints Perpetua and Felicity Chapel, Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Washington, D.C.

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Sermons

Meditation for Ash Wednesday

Return to me with all your heart … return to the Lord, your God

The words of the prophet Joel reverberate throughout the Ash Wednesday liturgy. “Turn thou us, O good Lord, and so shall we be turned,” we pray. They are framed as well by recalling the dust of our creation. “Remember, O man, that dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.” Dust and ashes: the dust of the ground of our created being and the ashes of repentance. Yet both the dust and the ashes are profoundly about our turning and being turned.

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent. It is in every way a season of renewal, a renewal of our hearts and minds in the things of God. It is about our turning back to God from whom we have turned away. Yet that turning is itself the motion of God’s love in us returning us to the truth and dignity of our humanity found, as it only can be found, in God. It is all about the turning, or the “turning again,” as T.S.Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday puts it.

The poem begins in an almost mantra-like fashion. “Because I do not hope to turn again,” It begins, it seems, with a sense of hopelessness and despair. He quotes Shakespeare’s Sonnet # 29, “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” with its sense of separation and abandonment, of “myself almost despising,” yet as one who “looking upon himself and cursing his fate” still hopes, “wishing me like to one more rich in hope,/ Featured like him, like him with friends possessed, /Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope.” Eliot changes but one word, art for gift, “Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope.” It is a nod perhaps to where his poetic meditation ultimately leads. In the sixth and last section of the poem, the mantra turns to “although I do not hope to turn” and ends with a prayer. “Suffer me not to be separated and let my prayer come unto thee.” Hope, over and against even the denials of hope, ultimately cries out in prayer, a longing for a sense of unity and wholeness.

Between the beginning, which seems to eclipse any possibilities of continuing, and the ending, which at the very least opens out the possibilities of renewal, there is a kind of meditation. The poem is a meditation upon the ambiguities, the hesitancies, and yes, even the denials of desire, but as interspersed with the countering cries of the heart in the language of prayer. There are the cries for mercy, for forgiveness, for salvation, for “our peace in His will,” quoting Dante. The poem captures something of the disquieting unsettledness of our contemporary culture and our restless hearts.

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Prayers and liturgy

Ash Wednesday

The collect for today, The First Day of Lent, commonly called Ash Wednesday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

Joseph Noel Paton, Christian at the Foot of the CrossALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou hast made, and dost forgive the sins of all them that are penitent: Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we worthily lamenting our sins, and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: St James 4:6-11a
The Gospel: St Matthew 6:16-21

Artwork: Joseph Noel Paton, Christian at the Foot of the Cross, 1873. Oil on canvas, Aberdeen Art Gallery, Aberdeen, U.K.

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Prayers and liturgy

Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Quinquagesima

Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on Quinquagesima Sunday.

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Sermons

Sermon for Quinquagesima

“If I have not charity, I am nothing”

Such strong and yet compelling words. They shape the great Collect for today. Love is simply everything and without it we are simply nothing. What? How can that be? It is an extraordinary statement yet it goes to the very heart of the Christian Faith. Without love, we are nothing. But what is love?

It is an ancient and modern question, perhaps considered more deeply by the ancients than the moderns, but then you would expect me to say that, wouldn’t you? Plato treats the question in his famous dialogue, The Symposium. It belongs, I think, at least alongside or in a kind of reciprocal engagement with Paul’s great hymn to love in today’s Epistle. That would be a symposium par excellence! But what is the love that Paul celebrates? It is nothing less than the love of God, the divine love which seeks the perfection of our human loves. This is not an add on but the underlying truth of all our loves, of all love and desire. All love and desire is for the good but our seeking is only one part of the equation. For our seeking is something given by God. God moves our souls to seek what our souls most desire which is nothing less than God. God is love.

But you will protest in contemporary fashion: Isn’t love, love? Love is love? But that is to say nothing, a tautology. Love of what, in what way, and for what end?, we have to ask. Love is not static but dynamic. It is the desire or the eros of our souls, though the word Paul uses is not eros but agape, a love that signals more the unity of the human community, the love that is fellowship. The preceding chapter ends with the words: “I will show you a still more excellent way,” having exhaustively gone through an analysis of the human community by way of analogy with the unity of the parts of the body yet as belonging to something more. For “now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” All our human attempts at justice and right, about a unity of diversities, to put contemporary social justice and identitarian concerns in the most positive light, is ultimately and only found in God.

Divine charity perfects human charity; it is its true end and meaning. The true desire of our souls for the unity that unites all differences is accomplished and concluded in the divine fellowship. That unity of differences is not quite the same thing as “diversities,” which Andrewes points out is just “a heap of things,” indefinite and indeterminant. But love cannot be indifferent to the realities of our lives and the lives of those around us. Love indifferent is imperfect love. What is love if it doesn’t care?

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Events, Month at a Glance

Month at a Glance, March 2025

(Services in the Hall until Palm Sunday, April 13th, 2025)

Wednesday, March 5th, Ash Wednesday
12:15pm Communion & Ashes

Thursday, March 6th, Comm. of Thomas Aquinas
5:00pm King’s College Chapel: Fr. Curry preaching

Sunday, March 9th, First Sunday in Lent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Tuesday, March 11th
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting

Sunday, March 16th, Second Sunday in Lent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Sunday, March 23rd, Third Sunday in Lent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Sunday, March 30th, Fourth Sunday in Lent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

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Prayers and liturgy

Quinquagesima

The collect for today, the Sunday called Quinquagesima, being the Fiftieth Day before Easter, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O LORD, who hast taught us that all our doings without charity are nothing worth: Send thy Holy Spirit, and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity, the very bond of peace and of all virtues, without which whosoever liveth is counted dead before thee. Grant this for thine only Son Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 13:1-13
The Gospel: St. Luke 18:31-43

Sebastiano Ricci, Christ Healing the Blind ManArtwork: Sebastiano Ricci, Christ Healing the Blind Man, c. 1712-16. Oil on canvas, Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh.

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Prayers and liturgy

Saint David of Wales

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint David (c. 520-589), Bishop of Menevia, Patron Saint of Wales (source):

Holy Trinity Sloane Square, St. David of WalesAlmighty God,
who didst call thy servant David
to be a faithful and wise steward of thy mysteries
for the people of Wales:
in thy mercy, grant that,
following his purity of life and zeal
for the gospel of Christ,
we may with him receive the crown of everlasting life;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
to whom with thee and the Holy Spirit
be all honour and glory,
world without end.

The Epistle: 1 Thessalonians 2:2b-12
The Gospel: St. Mark 4:26-29

Artwork: Saint David, stained glass, Holy Trinity, Sloane Square, London. Photograph taken by admin 20 October 2014.

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