Author: CCW

“Gather up the fragments that nothing be lost”

It is a powerful statement about the radical nature of human redemption. Coming as it does on the Fourth Sunday in Lent, it completes a pattern of reflection about our journey in the wilderness even as it marks a transition to the deeper wilderness of Passiontide.

We are lost in our temptations which set us in opposition to God. We are lost in our griefs and sorrows, our fears and worries about our children. We are lost in the utter emptiness of ourselves. These aspects of loss have been before us on the preceding Sundays in Lent. They have marked an aspect of the teaching about original sin which serves to catapult us more firmly into the redemptive grace of Christ.

Here, again, we are in the wilderness, but here we are fed in the wilderness. Loaves and a few small fishes. Even more, the fragments from the picnic are more than enough to sustain the redeemed community of our humanity. And in a way, that image of bread has been an underlying theme of the preceding Sundays reaching a kind of crescendo of meaning on this day which is sometimes known as Refreshment Sunday. The Fourth Sunday in Lent is Mid-Lent Sunday and it provides almost a kind of oasis of refreshment for our souls in the mid-point of the Lenten journey overall.

(more…)

Print this entry

This is the third of four Lenten meditations on original sin. The previous meditations are posted here and here.

“A house divided against itself falleth”

In the course of these little considerations of the big theme of “original sin”, I have tried to locate our reflections in the propers for the Sundays in Lent. The Third Sunday in Lent would seem to offer a particularly dismal view of our humanity that complements perfectly the negativity, as some would see it, of the doctrine of original sin. To the contrary, I would hope to argue, since the doctrine of original sin is really part and parcel of the good news of human redemption. Without the honest appreciation of the sin-wracked nature of our humanity, it is pretty hard to make sense of human experience and the grace of Christ crucified.

In other words, the honest recognition of how compromised we are by the habits of sin is really the entry point to the transformative power of God’s grace that leads us as Dante puts it, “from misery to felicity.” It does so by working on our hearts and minds. We are drawn into the drama of our redemption. The doctrine of original sin belongs to that drama.

We are, in the words of the gospel, radically divided within ourselves. The many divisions and tensions and contradictions within the institutions that drive our social and political lives are really a further extension of the idea and the doctrine of original sin.

The doctrine of original sin is the necessary counter to a variety of social and political viewpoints in our world and day. It is the counter to the ideology of progress, the idea that things are always going forward, that our humanity is constantly on the march towards the more and the better, the better, of course, always measured in terms of the more. It is the counter to the idea that the future is ever brighter and the past always a yawning abyss, the proverbial dark ages. The doctrine of original sin reminds us instead of the perennial darkness of the human heart, the much more persuasive concept of “the heart of darkness,” to borrow Joseph Conrad’s title.

(more…)

Print this entry

“And the last state of that man is worse than the first”

It is a terrifying picture really, the picture of the darkness of utter desolation. It is something which our contemporary culture knows about or, at least, experiences in one way or another. We have all been there. “I am desolate and in misery,” the Psalmist says. You know about desolations and miseries. It may because of sorrow and loss; it may be because of hardship and troubles. It may be because of the enmity of others or it may be because of our own sinfulness. “Look upon my adversity and misery, / and forgive me all my sins.”

It can lead to a sense of hopelessness, the sense of utter futility, the sense of the empty nothingness of life.

We live, of course, in a world that is seemingly full of everything; there is a fullness of images. We are constantly besieged and bombarded by a vast array of images which flicker and dance before our imaginations. The consequence is that our sensual imagination is overloaded. What are these images? They are the images of violence and self-indulgence; in short, the images of destruction and consumption.

And yet, there is a terrible emptiness to this fullness of images. They are, as it were, nothing worth and quite unsatisfactory. But, they consume us. We are possessed by what beguiles us. We find that we are strangers to ourselves. We are alienated from ourselves.

What shall we do? Shall we empty our selves of these empty images through some heroic effort of will? Just disconnect the internet? Pull the plug on the TV? Perhaps, but is it really “nirvana,” a state of empty nothingness that we seek? For in the culture of images even the emptying ourselves of the images of sensual immediacy is to find ourselves empty and lost. Whether we are full of these empty images or aware of their emptiness we are nonetheless empty and lost to ourselves. “And the last state of that man is worse than the first.”

(more…)

Print this entry