Notes on Fr. Plant’s King Oswald’s Heirs:
Meditations on the Catechism of the English Church,
3rd Session, Chapters 22 – 40, November 12th, 2026
Intro: Fr. Plant’s book begins and ends with the image of trees, Oswald’s tree and its association with trees in other traditions, but primarily in the Scriptures with the Cross of Christ in the New Testament and the Trees of Life and Knowledge in Genesis. In a way the whole biblical story, he seems to suggest, is captured in the symbolism of trees. I want to begin our ending of his treatment of the Catechism with some tree references found in George Herbert’s poems which, I think complement Fr. Plant’s splendid and helpful reflections. The second stanza of Herbert’s poem “Easter” comes to mind.
Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part
With all thy art
The crosse taught all wood to resound his name,
Who bore the same.
His wretched sinews taught all strings, what key
Is best to celebrate this most high day.
Then in his poem “The Crosse”, he speaks of it as “this strange and uncouth thing … to make me sigh, and seek, and faint and die, / until I had some place , where I might sing, / And serve thee. “ Somehow we have to learn how to hold these different moments together, the things of suffering and the things of joy.
Chapter 22: My Heart At Liberty. This chapter considers God’s Commandments but from the consideration of law as freedom and not as coercion to arbitrary and random demands. He does not, however, take us through the (so-called – they aren’t exactly numbered) ten commandments but alludes to them as “the shape of reality itself”. They belong to our freedom, our being freed to the law which details the essential features of our relation to God himself and through God to our lives with one another; in short, love of God and Neighbour are inseparable and are a strong affirmation of life and truth. This can be complemented by seeing the Commandments not as a list – hence something arbitrary and disconnected – but as comprehensive, interdependent, and complete. Because God is God, we might say, everything else follows in an orderly fashion. The Ten Commandments, for example, are themselves an expression of natural law or reason here given authoritatively by God. But it is not simply that they are commanded by God, the quis of ‘who said’ but rather the quid, reflection on what is said. This is crucial and important; in short, their content and orderly interrelationship belongs to the relation between intellect and will in God, and in us. The false separation of intellect and will is a constant theme in Fr. Plant’s argument.
Chapter 23: With Heart, Mind, Soul & Strength. Fr. Plant moves directly to what we learn from the commandments; namely, the love of God and neighbour (and enemy!). He indicates some of the limitations of the various ethical theories in their mutual exclusion and separation from one another, particularly a feature of the modernity of the past two and a quarter centuries: deontology or duty ethics, utilitarian or consequentialist ethics, virtue ethics, for example. Yet these are properly gathered together in a complementary and interrelated fashion in the meta-ethical teaching that is part and parcel of the religious traditions and certainly of Christianity. Once again, it is the fragmentation and separation of what belongs together in a unity which embraces different distinctions.
Chapter 24: Blessed Inequality. This chapter focuses on our duty towards neighbour. He offers a lovely architectural image of the keystone of the arches in Medieval Cathedrals, related to the necessity and truth of hierarchy in creation or nature and in human lives and, of course, in relation to God; all as a corrective to the false forms of ‘social equality’ and more as a way to pointing towards who we are in the sight of God regardless of class and social distinctions without negating the differences between each person as embraced within the unity of the communion of saints and to the idea of reciprocal equality. It is an apt image of the tension that unites and holds together what is distinct and different.
Chapter 25: Noster Pater. From these three chapters (22, 23, & 24) dealing with the Ten Commandments, he turns to the consideration of the Lord’s Prayer which he approaches in reverse order, going from the end of the Lord’s Prayer (as Prayer, hence ‘lead us not into temptation’) to its beginning, ‘Our Father.’
Chapter 26: Dangers Ghostly & Bodily. This reflects on what is known as the Desire in the Common Prayer tradition. What do we desire of God in the Lord’s Prayer? Simply the entire orientation of ourselves to God as the absolute Good.
Chapter 27: Generally Necessary. From the Lord’s Prayer, he turns to the Sacraments as “generally necessary,” a nice catechetical phrase that counters an overly positivistic approach to Christian life as mere rule-following, and reminds us of the ordained and, we might say, ordinary means of grace as given by God. Here he begins as the Catechism does, not with a definition of Sacrament but their number. He unpacks why that is and what it means in the historical context of the Reformation before going on to explain the idea of a sacramental principle which is an essential feature of the Christian Faith.
Chapter 28: Effective Signs. Here he examines the meaning of the word ‘sacrament’ as derived more or less directly from Augustine of Hippo and more or less universally accepted by the “entire Catholic Church”. The sacraments are not about personal assertions of faith but about the way and means by which God uses the material things of creation to gather us into all things spiritual.
Chapter 29: Sacramental World. This chapter speaks to one of the forms of our modern disconnect from the world by reminding us that it is God’s world and, thus, as sacramental in its deeper meaning and truth.
Chapter 30: Slaying Leviathan. This chapter offers a further exploration of the sacraments in terms of things visible and invisible, including an exposition of baptism in terms of going down into the water, into the abyss, even into Hell; all images of the radical overcoming of evil. The chapter ends with the lovely passage from the 1662 BCP baptism that offers a virtual theology of water via the imagery of the Old Testament.
Chapter 31: Drowned with Christ. This continues the examination of the radical nature of baptism as the overcoming not of the chaos of the world but of the chaos in our hearts.
Chapter 32: Locust Eater. A play, perhaps, on Homer’s The Lotus-Eaters (Odyssey – those who forfeited their homecoming through forgetting themselves because of hallucinatory plant, drugs)?! Here he focuses on the figure of John the Baptist and on the theme and meaning of the wilderness and about being called back to Paradise, especially through the ministry of John the Baptist seen artistically in its angelic dimension. Nice to know that locusts are kosher! But best to know the significance of repentance and the positive aspect of the desert as the place of temptation and its overcoming, the place of our remembering and a return to Paradise.
Chapter 33: Suffer the Little Children. This examines the question about the baptism of infants and how that is understood in a reformed catholic tradition. He draws on the imagery of the Old Testament that prefigures the sacramental practices that belong to orthodox Christianity albeit in varying forms. Baptism makes us Christians and initiates us into a way of life and recalls us to Christ’s victory over spiritual enemies and dangers.
Chapter 34: Why was the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper Ordained? The title is taken directly from the Catechism in its treatment of the Sacraments. Here the focus turns towards the Holy Eucharist and to the aspect of sacrifice as an essential feature of worship, grounded in the Hebrew Scriptures upon which Jesus drew at the Last Supper. “The Church,” as Fr. Plant puts it, “did not just make the Eucharist up,” nor is it an incidental aspect of the Church and Christian life but rather lies at the center of the Christian understanding as shown in the Passion of Christ. “Remembrance.” as he suggests, “is to be lifted up into the simplicity of that divine contemplation;” in short, “to have what St. Paul calls the Mind of Christ. It is to remember and to be re-membered in His glorious light.”
Chapter 35: Bethlehem & Cana. This chapter explores the catechetical question about “the outward part or sign of the Lord’s Supper”. He offers an extended set of reflections on the cultural and spiritual significance of bread and wine that leads us from Bethlehem as the “House of Bread” and then to the miracle at Cana of Galilee, the first miracle which embraces and informs all of the miracle stories, especially in the New Testament. They all point to our being made partakers of the divine nature through our lives as incorporated and conformed to Christ. It is about a radical transformation in which “every good thing of this world is an icon of the eternal wedding banquet to which every one of us is personally invited.”
Chapter 36: Hard Sayings. In a way, this chapter is a commentary on the ‘Bread of Life Discourse’ in Chapter 6 of John’s Gospel. It provides a strong argument for Christ as the “bread of life” but which is, quite simply, “a hard saying”. But to receive and embrace hard sayings is part and parcel of Christian life and witness. As he points out, this hard saying testifies to who Christ is as the Word and Son of the Father, the one who as Peter says, has “the words of eternal life.” This counters the various views of Jesus as simply “a great moral teacher” and the idea of communion as simply a symbol of his teaching and an affirmation of individual faith. He offers a brief overview of some of the historical views and controversies about the Sacrament of the Altar, concluding with a marvelous passage from Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.
Chapter 37: King and Martyr. Here he offers a consideration of King Charles I as an example of the catechetical question about the benefits that belong to being partakers of the sacrament. He corrects the mistaken view that sees the sacrament in negative terms and that undermines the nature of the sacrament as sacrifice as something positive and joyful. He connects such misguided views with aspects of contemporary culture in its disconnect from the spiritual tradition, recalling instead the patristic understanding of the Eucharist as “a sacrament of strength not weakness” and offers examples from some of the British and English saints: St. Cuthbert, St Wulfstan, and St. Edmund, for instance, before treating Charles I and his ‘martyrdom’ on January 30th, 1649, a monumental moment in English Church and Political history. He mentions as well the idea of relics and the miracles associated with them and the importance of Charles King and Martyr for the Oxford Movement.
Chapter 38: Afore the Needfare. This chapter focuses on the catechetical question about “what is required of them who come to the Lord’s Supper?” The title comes from the ‘death-song’ of the Venerable Bede (late 7th, early 8th c.) and serves as the entry point into the importance of repentance and confession in the Common Prayer tradition. He calls attention to various places in the Prayer Book that explicitly reference private confession along with general confession. It all belongs to our constant readiness for the hour of our death, hence the Needfare of prayer and sacrament that belongs to the pattern of the BCP. “All we can do,” he says, “is to be ready.” In this sense, his whole book complements a recurring theme of Fr. Crouse about living in the end-times, the importance of an eschatological outlook that seeks what God seeks for us, the God who knows our hearts better than we do ourselves and who seeks our good in his grace and glory, whatever the condition of the times. This concludes formally the treatment of the catechism but not his book
Chapter 39: Church & Nation. This penultimate chapter offers an interesting account of the legends about St. George and the Dragon to help us think more comprehensively and spiritually about the dragons and demons of our own world. Ultimately, they belong to the Devil himself, to the misrule of pride and pretension, presumption and self-obsession. The counter to this is various but it all comes down to “serving something greater” and which does not “cut us off from the world” but belongs to our engagement with it through Christ’s redemptive work. This is exemplified in the different virtues and qualities of the saints, each of whom has “a different hue” and yet radiate “the one light cast by their Lord and Master.”
Chapter 40: The Return of the King. Fr. Plant’s book concludes by returning us to the tree of King Oswald and offers a commentary on the symbolic significance of trees culturally and in literature, referencing Tolkien’s work and Odin’s tree Yggdrasiil, (an ash tree). He notes that certain pagan images complement and are gathered into the Christian understanding found in early Anglo-Saxon writings. He calls attention to The Dream of the Rood – the “oldest of English meditations on the Cross,” p. 353. He notes the symbolic significance of that poem which sees the cross in terms of Christ’s Cross and the Trees of Life and Knowledge in Genesis. As he tells us, Oswald’s tree was an ash tree on which Penda hung the severed limbs of Oswald whom he had conquered. The point is that he did so to humiliate and shame Oswald. Just so with Christ’s crucifixion but God makes something good and glorious out of death and loss. This looks back to Chapter 12 entitled Love Strong as Death which is now love stronger than death. He ends on that substantial and underlying theme of the power and truth of love. “For every act of love participates in that Love who governs all things and never rests in restoring the cosmos to Himself. Nothing in the end is lost” p. 355. This echoes, I think, the Gospel traditionally read on The Sunday Next Before Advent in John’s account of the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness and the gathering up of the fragments that remain that nothing be lost (also read on Laetare or Refreshment Sunday on the 4th Sunday in Lent).
Fr. Plant’s book provides a strong and moving encouragement to a more lively faith in each of us, an encouragement that speaks to the temptations to despair in our contemporary world and yet gives us strength and hope and a way to read and think what by the grace of God we have received. Such is the re-enchantment of the Good by the Good. Such a mercy and such a grace! Laus Deo.
Fr. David Curry
12 November 2026