Author: CCW

“The wedding is ready”

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments,” Shakespeare’s famous sonnet begins. “The marriage of true minds” is a wonderful concept. It reminds us that there are different ways of speaking about marriage including metaphorically. Scripture, too, uses the marriage image in different ways that go beyond the literal and institutional. In fact, marriage is frequently used as the image for the union between the grand opposites: between man and God, between heaven and earth.

The Gospel for The Twentieth Sunday after Trinity is a case in point. “The kingdom of heaven is like unto a certain king, who made a marriage for his son.” The parable is rich in its suggestive power. It points to the union of God and man in Jesus Christ, to the marriage feast of human redemption, as it were. But the parable is also about the impediments, the obstacles, that stand in the way. The wedding is said to be ready but are we? What does it mean to be ready?

This Sunday falls within The Octave of All Saints’. All Saints’, too, is about a kind of marriage, the union of God and man in the Communion of Saints. In a way, the Communion of Saints is a wedding celebration where everyone has on “a wedding garment” for all have been made ready for the marriage feast.

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“I beheld, and lo, a great multitude, which no man could number”

It is “that time of year… when yellow leaves or none or few/ do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold/ bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.” In the culture of scattered souls and in the season of scattered leaves, we are gathered together. There is something more than our just being scattered, it seems. Like leaves scattered on the wind in all their colourful autumnal array, but then gathered into heaps of burnished gold, so we are gathered to celebrate the gathering into glory of the scattered fragments of our humanity. Such is the meaning of the Feast of All Saints’.

Are we simply like leaves collected into bags tossed upon some compost heap? Yes and no. The image of the story of human lives as scattered leaves goes back to the Sibylline Oracles of Roman Antiquity as conveyed most wonderfully by Vergil and then used by Dante even more wondrously to capture our being gathered together into the Communion of Saints. The whole human story belongs to one book, divinely written, to be sure, but scattered about on the wind; the leaves of the pages, like the leaves of the trees, are scattered and blown about. But by God’s grace the scattered leaves are gathered together into one volume; the leaves of the autumn likened to the pages – the leaves – of a book.

It is a powerful image and one where the ancient culture speaks profoundly to our contemporary world. We are the culture of the scattered, the disconnected and the distracted – never mind the claims of connectivity. Has it never struck any one as passing strange that in the age of almost endless connectivity we have as well the culture of almost total distraction, indeed, the attention-deficit culture, par excellence? We are the culture of the connect to the disconnect.

Perhaps, just perhaps, the counter to these contemporary experiential realities is the Communion of Saints, the gathering together of the scattered leaves of the human story. Nothing speaks more profoundly to the loneliness and the despair, the desperation and fears of our contemporary world than the idea of the Communion of Saints. We are reminded in the strongest way possible that we are part of something larger than ourselves, that we are not alone but belong to a company beyond number, a spiritual company.

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