Author: CCW

“Go ye also into the vineyard, and whatsoever is right I will give you”

Septuagesima, Sexagesima and Quinquagesima are the three Sundays of Pre-Lent. They remain only in the Book of Common Prayer; no longer even part of the contemporary ecumenical landscape. And yet, they teach us something quite profound. They recall us to a moral discourse which is part and parcel of the larger life of the Church and which connects us to the traditions of moral philosophy in antiquity which is also part of the heritage of Jews and Muslims.

That moral discourse is about the four cardinal virtues, anciently understood to be the defining elements of human character in the pursuit of excellence. Those four cardinal virtues are temperance, courage, prudence and justice. They are activities of the soul with respect to every aspect of our lives; principles, we might say, that are cultivated within the soul and which guide and govern the whole of our lives. It belongs to the sophisticated wisdom of the ancient Greeks to understand that the inward aspects of our being determine our outward actions; these are the virtues that define the ancient sense of dignity and respect.

Temperance is about self-control, particularly of our appetites and emotions, “subduing the body” as Paul puts it. Courage is about our hearts in the face of each and every challenge and hardship of life. Prudence is about the right exercise of our reason; practical wisdom, as it were. Justice, the greatest of these four is about the right ordering of all the parts of the soul – body, heart and mind.

To ponder the four cardinal virtues themselves would be a wonderful thing but these three ‘Gesima’ Sundays (which are terms of temporal reference pointing us towards Lent and Easter; in short, the weeks of seventy, sixty, fifty days before Easter) are about something more and something greater. They point us to the radical transformation of these worldly or natural virtues of human excellence by God’s grace. In other words, the cultivation of the four classical or cardinal virtues in our souls and in our lives belongs to human redemption, to the ultimate perfection of our humanity as found (to use Augustine’s terms) not in ‘the City of Man’ but in ‘the City of God’ which of course becomes the pattern for our lives in the world. Jesus’s parable is about the kingdom of heaven, imaged as a householder hiring workers for his vineyard. This belongs to the Christian transformation of the ancient moral wisdom. The cardinal virtues all become forms of love; ways in which we participate in God’s love written out for us to read in Jesus Christ.

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“What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

“When icicles hang by the wall,/ And Dick the Shepherd blows his nail,/ And Tom bears logs into the hall,/ and milk comes frozen home in pail,/ When blood is nipped and ways be foul” … “When all aloud the wind doth blow,/ And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,/ And birds sit brooding in the snow,/ And Marion’s nose looks red and raw,/ When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,/ Then nightly sings the staring owl,/ Tu-who/ Tu-whit, Tu-who – a merry note,/ While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.” Ah, winter, at least as Shakespeare envisions it in Love’s Labour’s Lost, a wee bit threatening but mostly manageable, even “a merry note”.

How do we think about winter? Is it something that we dread and fear? Something from which we seek to flee, seeking out some warmer clime, fleeing the bitter cold as if fleeing from discomfort if not from death itself? Or is winter, as another poet, William Cowper puts it, the “king of intimate delights”? Certainly, the season and experience of winter varies from place to place, from culture to culture, and even from age to age. “Winter in Venice”, Adam Gopnik observes, “is very different from winter in Whitehorse”, or, for that matter, Windsor! It is “a truth”, as Alden Nowlan, the Canadian poet from Stanley, just down the road from Windsor, puts it in a poem entitled “January Night”, “that all men share but almost never utter. This is a country where a man can die simply from being caught outside.” Winter has to be respected.

But how we think about winter is part of a larger question about how we think about nature and how we think about the created order. In other words, it belongs to how we think about God and about creation and redemption. This Gospel story speaks directly to those ideas and extends them into the world of our hearts and minds as well. There is a storm at sea and all seems lost. Jesus is with them, asleep. He seems indifferent to the fearful fatalism of the men. They awaken him: “Master, carest thou not that we perish?” It isn’t a request for anything to be done; only a wake-up call to our imminent death and destruction in the storm.

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