Rector’s Annual Report, 2025
Click here to download the full Rector’s Annual Report for 2025 (in pdf format).
The Rector’s Annual Reports for 2003 through 2024 can be accessed via this page.
Rector’s Annual Report for 2025
Fr. David Curry
Annual Parish Meeting, February 15th, 2026
“Charity endureth all things”
“Charity endureth all things,” Paul tells us in a remarkable sequence of encomia about charity. 1st Corinthians 13 is his great hymn to love read on Quinquagesima Sunday just before the formal beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday; this year on February 18th. The passage highlights the significance of the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, the greatest of which is charity. It complements the Gospel about “going up to Jerusalem” with Jesus. As the Gospel makes clear that has entirely to do with his Passion, about which we have to learn through the disciplines and journey of Lent. It is not enough just to be told about it: “they understood” after all, “none of these things.” There is the constant challenge to work at learning the meaning of what is revealed and made known to us that ultimately has to do with our participation in the disciplines that belong “to the observance of a holy Lent,” as the Penitential Service in the Prayer Book puts it. How? “By self-examination and repentance, by prayer, fasting, and self-denial, and by reading and meditation upon God’s holy Word.” All pretty concise and concrete. Such practices have their counterpart in the spiritual disciplines of other religions and philosophies. They belong to a deeper sense of the spirituality of our humanity.
This year Quinquagesima Sunday comes right after Valentine’s Day, at once a minor religious observance commemorating a rather obscure Bishop and Martyr around whom swirl a host of legends and stories (see the Intro to the Calendar, BCP, p. ix) and a major commercial secular extravagance, it is fair to say, that somehow conflates chocolate, sex, flowers, and warm fuzzy feelings of being acknowledged and, perhaps, even appreciated but as focused on the erotic and the emotional aspects of human experience. Not exactly a complete account of ourselves or of love.
But it raises the question, ‘what is love?’ which Paul takes to a whole new level, a spiritual level that has to do with the end and purpose of our humanity as found in God. It is not a denial of the erotic and emotional, the cozy and the comfortable. Rather it places all our commonplace attitudes towards love on a new foundation, the divine love that redeems and elevates all our incomplete human loves. As such, the charity that endures all things is not simply stoicism, a kind of restraint and resilience in hanging on in the storms and tempests of nature and human hearts; keeping a stiff upper lip, and all that. As Paul says, almost as a kind of concluding coda, “charity never fails.” It is something ever present and everlasting upon which all things radically depend.
And along with charity goes faith and hope. They are all implied in each other and while charity is “the greatest of these”, it doesn’t eclipse or negate the other two. What Paul presents belongs to a profound understanding of human character and personality essential to the Christian understanding of what it means to be a person: our knowing even as we are known and loved in God’s eternal knowing and loving of all things. Faith speaks to a kind of knowing; hope to a kind of desiring or willing; but charity is what joins or unites both. Charity, as the Collect so concisely puts it, is “that most excellent gift, the very bond of peace and of all virtues.” Without charity “all our doings are nothing worth” and without charity “whosoever liveth is counted dead.”