Author: CCW

“By his own blood he entered in once into the holy place,
having obtained eternal redemption for us”

We are like the mother of Zebedee’s children in today’s gospel. We want what is best not always knowing what that is. “Ye know not what ye ask,” Jesus says ever so gently and yet ever so devastatingly. There can be no greater commentary on the nature of human desire than this. What will it take for us to learn?  Nothing less, it seems, than our constant attention to the things of the Passion of Christ, to the things that are unfolded before us and which are explained to us, even more, the things with which we are involved, perhaps more intimately than we realize.

This Sunday is called Passion Sunday. It marks the beginning of deep Lent, a more intense focus on the nature of redemption. The word, ‘passion’, signifies our being acted upon. When we think of suffering we think about the hurtful and painful things which happen to us in body and soul. Yet we are active in this, as well. For example, we can worry ourselves sick; worrying is something which we do and rather well. Our acting upon our feelings can have disastrous consequences for us individually and collectively.

When we contemplate the bloody, sorry state of our world, we contemplate not the absence of God but the evil of our own doings. God is not the author of the horrible events that belong to the record of the day-to-day of our contemporary world, from torture to battles, from killings to shootings, from accidents to even the mysterious disappearance of airplanes. Troubling and horrifying events are about what we are capable of doing and what some actually do; they are also about accident and circumstance, the collision of events undertaken for different purposes. Yet, to blame God denies the freedom and responsibility which belongs to human dignity, something God-bestowed. The Passion of Christ allows us to see suffering in another light, namely, as belonging to our redemption, to our being at one with God, all the troubles and the sorrows of the world and our souls notwithstanding.

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This is the third of three Lenten meditations on the Beatitudes in Dante’s Purgatorio.  The first is posted here and the second here.

“Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God”

“Then the sermons begin,” one critic of the Purgatorio has observed, commenting on an important and integral feature of the journey of ascent. One of the essential ways of pilgrimage is the way of illumination; one form of illumination is through learning and learning through instruction and discourse. It says, perhaps, more about our world and day than much about Dante’s that we are ambivalent, if not hostile to instruction and learning. Sermons, it seems, are much to be endured and little to be appreciated.

The upward journey of the soul through the cornices of the Purgatorio entails a number of discourses. They are didactic accounts and yet they are fully part of the imaginative ascent of the soul to God. They belong to the essential orthodoxy of Dante’s poetic vision and they relate to a number of critical and important Christian and philosophical and theological ideas. Along with the discourses, there are as well two dreams.

Dreams and discourses. Both contribute to the way of illumination, the path of learning. “Friend, go up higher” could be the refrain of the Purgatorio. The first dream happens in the transition from the terraces of Ante-Purgatory to the cornices of Purgatory proper. The second dream is “the dream of the siren” that appropriately marks the beginning of the purgation of “love excessive” on the last three cornices of Mount Purgatory, the purging of the deadly but lesser sins of avarice, gluttony, and lust.

The discourses deal with an interesting array of questions: questions about the super-expressive nature of the Good which when shared is increased not decreased; questions about love and free will as the explicit counter to all and any kind of material determinism – just one of the ways in which Dante speaks to every age; questions about the forms of bodies, of spiritual bodies; questions, too, about human individuality countering the Islamic Philosopher, Averroes, whose teaching about the “passive intellect” effectively denies the rational and immortal individual soul without which the whole journey is meaningless; but, above all, the discourses underscore the essential insight about amor, love, as the defining principle of the soul’s life and character.

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“Whence shall we buy bread that these may eat?”

For our food obsessed culture, this gospel story is either welcome relief or anxiety inducing. It just might get our minds set on our bellies, thinking of food and all manner of kinds of breads and cakes! Relax! This Sunday you get to have your cake and eat it too but only after the service.

In a way, that is the real point. It is a question of spiritual priorities. What defines us? Are you what you eat? Though sometimes attributed to the French gastronomer or connoisseur of food, Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, it is literally a phrase from the 19^th century theologian Ludwig von Feuerbach, who influenced Marx, in his Concerning Spiritualism and Materialism, suggesting that our minds are affected by food and other aspects of the physical world. It was also the title of popular British TV dieting programme, “You-are-what-you-eat”. Food r’us, it seems! What eats and drinks today walks and talks tomorrow.

I want to suggest that this gospel story belongs to a theology of food that is really about our lives spiritually and sacramentally. As the great patristic preacher, St. John Chrysostom put it, “we do not preach so as to eat; we eat so as to preach.” We do not live for food; we need food to live for God and for one another. If we are part of a culture where “people treat food like religion,” as has been recently observed (Dr. Yoni Freedhof, National Post, Sat., March 29^th, 2014), then perhaps we need to think about the role of food in religion.

“Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit/ Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste/ Brought death into the world and all our woe,” begins Milton’s great poem, Paradise Lost. It all begins with food, it seems; that is to say, the story of human suffering and woe. The story of the Fall away from God is told in mythic form by way of eating what was forbidden, the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We fall into a world where there is not only sweat and tears – working in the sweat of our brow and in the literal labour pains and tears of child-birth – but blood, sweat, and tears are the realities of human experience as the fall-out from “man’s first disobedience.” Yet food – bread – becomes an integral part of redemption. It belongs to the story of our return to God.

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