Author: CCW

“If I have not charity, I am nothing”

“Love bade me welcome,: yet my soul drew back,/ Guiltie of dust and sinne,/ But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack/ From my first entrance in,/Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,/If I lack’d any thing”. Love (III)

So begins the last poem in George Herbert’s remarkable set of poems, The Temple, published in 1633, the year of his death, by his friend Nicholas Ferrar, later of ‘Little Gidding’ fame, during what Helen Gardener calls “the great watershed of the Civil War” in England. Herbert’s poems offer, I think, a kind of English poetic summa of what has come to be called classical Anglicanism and provide a fitting complement and commentary on its embodiment in The Book of Common Prayer, the essence of classical Anglicanism, as it were.

“Love bade me welcome” Welcome to what? To the kingdom of heaven, to the heavenly banquet or marriage feast in the language of the parables of the Gospels and to the form of such things eschatalogical as participated in by way of the Eucharist. The phrase speaks to the beginning and end of the pilgrimage of the soul and thus to the readings for Quinquagesima Sunday. Love invites us to love.

Love is in the air! Or was that just yesterday with Valentine’s Day? What is that? At once the commemoration of an obscure Bishop and Martyr (maybe two or three!), bracketed in the Prayer Book calendar, without any date, thus suggesting that the commemoration belongs mostly to legend and story (probably owing to Chaucer’s satire of courtly life in his bird book, The Parlement of Fowls), and yet it has become a secular and commercial extravaganza of the erotic, the romantic, and the emotional bound up with chocolate, lingerie, flowers, and lots of little red heart-shaped images. Is love then just something sensual and sentimental?

It was the great insight of Plato to use one of the four Greek words for love in his Symposium, namely, eros. Yet he shows that it is more than simply about attraction to the beautiful in terms of bodies. Through the wisdom of Diotima, whom Socrates says taught him everything that he knows about love – something about which in a rather un-Socratic way he actually claims to know! She has initiated him in the mysteries of love understood as an ascent from the beauty of bodies, to the beauty of souls, to the beauty of the mind and beautiful discourses, and, ultimately, to the form of beauty itself; in short to the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘good’ that is in all things. Eros, she suggests, is “the passionate desire to know” in the journey of the soul to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, a journey up the ladder of love. This is a parallel to going up the divided line in Plato’s Republic, climbing up out of the cave, the ladder of being, we might say, but without negating the realm of images or shadows and of physical things, in the realm of the visible, and of mathematical concepts and the intelligible forms of all things, in the realm of the intellectual. But this doesn’t mean leaving behind the lower things in the ascent to the higher.

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This homily, preached by Fr. David Curry at an ecumenical service in 1999, offers an extended and charitable view about the common mind of the Church in and through the churches.  He recently sent this out to the discussion group about the concept of the consensus fidelium, and now we post it here.

“That they all may be one” (John 17.21)

“That they all may be one” is the prayer of the Son to the Father. The force of that prayer derives entirely from his being with us in the substance of our humanity. He is “the Word made flesh who dwelt among us”. His prayer expresses something of the purpose of his being with us. He seeks our “atonement”, our ‘at-one-ment’, that is to say, our being at one through our being with him in his being with the Father.

It was the poet and preacher John Donne who observed, in his magisterial Christmas sermon at the beginning of his ministry at St. Paul’s, London in 1621, that the “wholle Gospell [of John] is comprehended in the beginning thereof” and that “in this first chapter is contracted all that which is extensively spread…through the whole Booke. For here is … the Foundation of all, the Divinitie of Christ”. It was the burden of his sermon to show that Word, Son, and Light were more than mere metaphors; they belong “essentially and personally”, “truly and properly” to his divine identity, to his being one with the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. His being with us is the condition of our being one. We can only be one through him, through his being with us in his essential identity as the Word and Son of the Father.

This is the burden of the Church’s proclamation. What is proclaimed to the whole world is received for the whole world; and it creates a new world, as it were. That new world is the Church Oecumenical, the Church Universal (οικυηεναι), which is shaped fundamentally and essentially by what has been given to be proclaimed.

The Church, in some sense, is that whole new world, not the global village of cosmic orphans, mind you, but the whole world as the household of faith, defined by what has been received and by what is given to be proclaimed. The Church is not and cannot be a closed door society. The Church is open to the world, not to be overrun by its follies and concerns, noble or otherwise, to be sure, but to proclaim the world’s redemption in Christ, to set love in order and to be the place where the world is at peace with God in his reconciling love for the world. The Church is not a closed door society because, first and foremost, the Church exists to be open to God in the truth of his revelation, to be the place where God dwells with us, where his Word is preached and his Sacraments are celebrated, where his Praises are sung, where Prayers are offered in his Name; the place where our prayers find their place in his prayer.

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“The seed is the word of God”

The ‘gesima’ Sundays belong to the Lenten pilgrimage of our souls to the source and end of our lives in Christ. The readings for Septuagesima and Sexagesima complement one another in the metaphors and images about the nature of our lives in faith. They are all about the nature of our labours and activities in relation to the free gift of God’s grace and love. The kingdom of heaven is likened to a vineyard in the Gospel for Septuagesima and that agricultural image is further developed in today’s Sexagesima Gospel with the parable about the sower and the seed.

Such images concern the relation of human labour with the natural order of creation but extend that labour to ethical and spiritual matters. But more than just the parable itself in today’s Gospel, we have the unpacking of its meaning, the explication of the sign and the thing signified, as it were. If we are really serious about the challenge of living in the word proclaimed and celebrated in our liturgy then we have to pay close attention to the way in which ideas are made known to us so as to live in us. “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear,” Jesus tells us at the conclusion of the parable. That is the challenge for us. Contrary to popular belief, the parables of Jesus are not all that simple and easy to grasp. They have to be interpreted in order for us to enter into their meaning. It requires learning how to think our way into the images and metaphors and to begin to appreciate their radical power and vitality.

Life is in the seed as a kind of potency towards its actualization in the fruit. Life, in all its rich diversity, is something given but for it to come to fruition something is required by all living things. And so, too, for us as human beings. We have to work with the gift of life that is given to us in order for that life to come to fruition in us. The lovely metaphor of the seed as the word of God is complemented by the wonderful and humbling metaphor of our humanity as the ground in which the seed is planted and grows. Something is required of us in working with the grace of the gift of life and the gift of light, of illumination by grace. The ‘gesima’ Sundays belong to the interplay of the classical virtues of temperance, courage, prudence, and justice with the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity which transform all of the virtues into forms of love.

Those who strive for mastery have to be temperate in all things, as the Epistle for Septuagesima shows in pursuit of an “incorruptible crown” in contrast to the passing and “corruptible” crowns or goods of this world. We labour in the vineyard whether long or short but receive “whatsoever is right” or just from the standpoint of the eternal justice of God whose will is not constrained to our expectations and thoughts about what we think we deserve and want. In other words, as today’s Collect says, we “put not our trust in any thing that we do.” It is not us in our boastings about ourselves but the working of God’s grace in us, as Paul makes quite clear in today’s Epistle.

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