Category: Statements and other writings

Statements and other writings

Notes on St. Augustine’s Enchiridion

Notes Enchiridion: A Brief Outline of the Argument

Ethical Treatise – a handbook that answers Laurentius’ questions about “man’s chief end” what “to avoid” in terms of heresies, “to what extent religion is supported by reason”, “what there is in reason that lends no support to faith, when faith stands alone,” “what is the beginning and the end of religion, “what is the sum of the whole body of doctrine”, “what is the sure and proper foundation of the catholic faith.” He says these questions are all answered through the proper objects of faith, hope and love. The whole treatise is about the kind of Trinitarian relationship in us of these three theological virtues through a basic and essential form of theological reasoning that seeks to gather all things into unity in God from whom and to whom all things belong. Wisdom belongs to God. “We begin in faith, and are made perfect in sight. This also is the sum of the whole body of doctrine. But the sure and proper foundation of the catholic faith is Christ” (ch. 5).

The treatise seeks deliberately to avoid commenting on heresies. God is to be worshipped through the three graces understood in their necessary interrelation. The task of the treatise is to state what are the true and proper object of each of these three theological virtues.

Immediately he turns to the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer which he says (all in the introduction) “you have these three graces exemplified: faith believes, hope and love pray.” In a way this provides the structure of the treatise. But as he notes, “without faith the two last (hope and love) cannot exist, and therefore we may say that fatih also prays – i.e. faith prays through hope and love without which hope and love are incomplete, even though love is the fullest completion and perfection of faith and hope. This apparent paradox is explained through the argument as the conclusion of the Introduction (ch. 8) makes clear. “Wherefore there is no love without hope, no hope without love, and neither love nor hope without faith.”

The treatise is structured as follows: Intro – chapters 1-8

Faith – as that which we are to believe in regard to religion – Ch. 9 – Ch. 113; This is essentially a theological commentary on the Creed organized as follows: Ch. 9 -33 “God the Father in general: I believe in God the Father Almighty maker of Heaven and Earth, treating a number of questions about the attributes and nature of God and how we think and know things, (God as Trinity actually); “And in Jesus Christ, his only Son our Lord, conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary – Ch. 34-55; I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Church, Communion of Saints. Ch. 56- 63 .The Forgiveness of Sins, Ch. 64-84; the Resurrection of the Body and Life Everlasting, Ch. 84-113.

What follows is the consideration of Hope by way of the Lord’s Prayer (Ch. 114-116) and Love by way of the gathering into unity all that belongs to Faith and Hope – Ch. 117-122. A remarkably concise and coherent treatise on the theological substance of the three graces, Faith, Hope and Charity.

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Statements and other writings

Covenant in Ministry renewed

At its most recent meeting on 10 March 2026, the Parish Council of Christ Church approved a revised Covenant in Ministry between the Rector and the Parish. This document, which articulates the understanding of the parochial ministry, can be downloaded here (in pdf format).

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Statements and other writings

Rector’s Annual Report, 2025

Click here to download the full Rector’s Annual Report for 2025 (in pdf format).

The Rector’s Annual Reports for 2003 through 2024 can be accessed via this page.

Rector’s Annual Report for 2025
Fr. David Curry
Annual Parish Meeting, February 15th, 2026

“Charity endureth all things”

“Charity endureth all things,” Paul tells us in a remarkable sequence of encomia about charity. 1st Corinthians 13 is his great hymn to love read on Quinquagesima Sunday just before the formal beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday; this year on February 18th. The passage highlights the significance of the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, the greatest of which is charity. It complements the Gospel about “going up to Jerusalem” with Jesus. As the Gospel makes clear that has entirely to do with his Passion, about which we have to learn through the disciplines and journey of Lent. It is not enough just to be told about it: “they understood” after all, “none of these things.” There is the constant challenge to work at learning the meaning of what is revealed and made known to us that ultimately has to do with our participation in the disciplines that belong “to the observance of a holy Lent,” as the Penitential Service in the Prayer Book puts it. How? “By self-examination and repentance, by prayer, fasting, and self-denial, and by reading and meditation upon God’s holy Word.” All pretty concise and concrete. Such practices have their counterpart in the spiritual disciplines of other religions and philosophies. They belong to a deeper sense of the spirituality of our humanity.

This year Quinquagesima Sunday comes right after Valentine’s Day, at once a minor religious observance commemorating a rather obscure Bishop and Martyr around whom swirl a host of legends and stories (see the Intro to the Calendar, BCP, p. ix) and a major commercial secular extravagance, it is fair to say, that somehow conflates chocolate, sex, flowers, and warm fuzzy feelings of being acknowledged and, perhaps, even appreciated but as focused on the erotic and the emotional aspects of human experience. Not exactly a complete account of ourselves or of love.

But it raises the question, ‘what is love?’ which Paul takes to a whole new level, a spiritual level that has to do with the end and purpose of our humanity as found in God. It is not a denial of the erotic and emotional, the cozy and the comfortable. Rather it places all our commonplace attitudes towards love on a new foundation, the divine love that redeems and elevates all our incomplete human loves. As such, the charity that endures all things is not simply stoicism, a kind of restraint and resilience in hanging on in the storms and tempests of nature and human hearts; keeping a stiff upper lip, and all that. As Paul says, almost as a kind of concluding coda, “charity never fails.” It is something ever present and everlasting upon which all things radically depend.

And along with charity goes faith and hope. They are all implied in each other and while charity is “the greatest of these”, it doesn’t eclipse or negate the other two. What Paul presents belongs to a profound understanding of human character and personality essential to the Christian understanding of what it means to be a person: our knowing even as we are known and loved in God’s eternal knowing and loving of all things. Faith speaks to a kind of knowing; hope to a kind of desiring or willing; but charity is what joins or unites both. Charity, as the Collect so concisely puts it, is “that most excellent gift, the very bond of peace and of all virtues.” Without charity “all our doings are nothing worth” and without charity “whosoever liveth is counted dead.”

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Theology

Advent Programme I: Ethics & Ecclesiastes

Advent Programme at Christ Church 2025
Ethics & Ecclesiastes (Dec 2nd) and Wisdom (O Sapientia – Dec. 16th)
Fr. David Curry

Why Ecclesiastes and why The Book of Wisdom, you may ask? And why Ethics? Let me attempt an explanation. In the Providence of God this Fall, the weekly readings for the Week of the 22nd Sunday after Trinity brought us to the Sunday Next Before Advent. In the Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer we read through the whole of Ecclesiastes and at Mattins on the Sunday Next Before Advent, we read the last two chapters of Ecclesiastes, which are always read at Mattins on that Sunday regardless of the length of the Trinity Season and whatever office readings followed from the last Sunday after Trinity in any given year. Yet this year we had the whole of Ecclesiastes to read and to lead us into the end and beginning of the Church Year. And why Ethics? Because The Book of Ecclesiastes raises the important question about Ethics, namely, about the highest or greatest good for our humanity and thus belongs to the purpose of Revelation. I am drawing upon lectures on Ethics which I have delivered over many years in The Theory of Knowledge course in the IB programme, though minus the wonderful cartoons of Calvin and Hobbes on matters of ethical thinking.

The American philosopher, Peter Kreeft, in his book Three Philosophies of Life: Ecclesiastes, Life as Vanity, Job, Life as Suffering, and the Song of Songs, Life as Love makes a nice analogy to Dante’s threefold division of his spiritual classic, the Divine Comedy – Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso by suggesting that Ecclesiastes in its remarkable treatment of boredom and vanity relates to the Inferno, the Book of Job to the Purgatorio in the positive and redemptive forms of suffering, and the Song of Songs to the Paradiso in the movement of love that perfects and restores all things to their unity in God. Dante himself suggests that the purpose of the Commedia is to lead us “from misery to felicity” or blessedness. All three biblical books belong to Wisdom literature and, especially, it seems to me, to the examination of the ethical.

And Wisdom? You may have noticed that the week following the Sunday Next Before Advent the Office readings at Morning and Evening Prayer are entirely from the Book of Wisdom as if leading us into the radical and deeper meaning of Advent. In the Calendar you will note that the 16th of December commemorates one of the ‘O’ Antiphons, specifically, ‘O Sapientia’, O Wisdom, deliberately recalling the Book of Wisdom and the image of Wisdom that it presents to us. It seemed appropriate to connect these two works for our Advent Programme at Christ Church this year.

Advent Reflections on Ethics & Ecclesiastes (2025)

Austin Farrer in his classic ‘The Glass of Vision’, the Bampton Lectures of 1948, recalls an intriguing observation that in Scripture “there is not a line of theology, and of philosophy not so much as an echo” (Lecture III). Peter Kreeft, on the other hand, states that Ecclesiastes is the only book of philosophy, pure philosophy, mere philosophy, in the Bible” and indeed is “the greatest of all books of philosophy” (‘Three Philosophies of Life’, 1989). I think both are right.

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Anglican issues, Statements and other writings, Theology

Quiet Day on Classical Anglicanism

Two Reflections on the First of the Christ Church Quiet Days,
Fall 2025: re Classical Anglicanism
Fr. David Curry

I: The Ordinal

At our first Quiet Day on October 25th at Christ Church, the Rev’d Dr. Ross Hebb reminded us of things which we have to “unlearn” in considering the history of the English Church such as thinking in terms of ‘denominations’. I reminded us that classical Anglicanism is robustly non-sectarian. The whole emphasis of understanding is on the idea of being “an integral portion of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church,” as articulated in the Solemn Declaration 1893 and as further elucidated in Fr. Crouse’s paper ‘The Essence of Anglicanism’.

It is worth noting how this emphasis is expressed in the 1962 Canadian Book of Common Prayer, and especially with respect to ordination. The phrase “The Anglican Church of Canada” appears nowhere in the public liturgies of the Offices and Communion and other sundry services. It appears in the Preface to the Ordinal (BCP, p. 637), but only once in the oath of obedience of bishops to the Metropolitan (BCP, p. 661). It does not appear in the ordination oaths for Deacons and Priests. Even with respect to Bishops, it is there only in the context of subordination: the profession and promise of the bishop elect “to hold and maintain the Doctrine, Sacraments, and Discipline of Christ, as the Lord hath commanded in his holy Word, and as the Anglican Church of Canada hath received and set forth the same” (BCP, p. 661, my italics). This reflects the same sensibility as the Solemn Declaration where there is also no mention of the Anglican Church of Canada; only “the Church of England in the Dominion of Canada” (BCP, p, viii) and again emphasizing what has been received and the setting forth of the same by way of the Book of Common Prayer.

The point for the postulants is simply this. Those who are ordained are ordained as deacons, priests, and bishops in “Christ’s Church”(BCP, p. 637),“the Church of Christ” (BCP, p. 662), or “the Church of God,” (BCP, p. 643, p. 655, p. 666) of which “the Anglican Church of Canada” or “the Church of England in Canada” understands itself to be an integral or whole portion through the magisterium of the classical Book(s) of Common Prayer. This is a necessary and important subordination without which one moves in a sectarian direction.

The Ordinal in the BAS is, for the most part, conservative, or, at least, can be read in that way, but in the ordination rites themselves there is a tendency to collapse “the Church of God” or “Christ’s Church” to “the Anglican Church of Canada”; in short, to the institution itself. For instance, in the BCP Ordination of Bishops, the profession and promise “to hold and maintain the Doctrine, Sacraments, and Discipline of Christ” is defined unambiguously “as the Lord hath commanded in his holy Word, and as the Anglican Church of Canada hath received and set forth the same” (BCP, p. 661, my italics). By way of contrast, in the BAS, the ordination of bishops, priests, deacons requires the solemn “promise to conform to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of the Anglican Church of Canada” (BAS, p. 635, p. 645, p. 654). The Preface in the BAS may act as a corrective to this tendency and, of course, in principle, the BAS is subject to the Book of Common Prayer; it is not an equal or substitute authority. Thus BAS ordination rites are strictly speaking to be understood in terms of the doctrine of the Prayer Book and the Ordinal which is included in it (Cdn. BCP.)

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Anglican issues, Statements and other writings, Theology

Robert Crouse: “The Essence of Anglicanism”

The Essence of Anglicanism

A Transcription of a Lecture delivered October 3. 2002 at Regent College, Vancouver, by Dr. Robert Crouse (For a pdf version of this lecture, click here.)

It is a great honour to be the first lecturer in this proposed lecture series, and I thank the sponsors for the opportunity. And I cannot resist complimenting Regent College on the production of ordinands. It holds promise for a speedy reformation of the Anglican Church of Canada.

The Anglican Communion, the fellowship of Anglican Churches throughout the world, exists by virtue of a voluntary allegiance to a common tradition of Christian faith and worship. Faithfulness to that tradition, and that alone, constitutes the definition of Anglicanism, and that tradition is its principle of cohesion. It has, after all, no racial unity. People of Anglo Saxon origin who once dominated its membership are now a small proportion of it. It is not a linguistic unity. Its liturgies have been translated into many languages and most of the world’s Anglicans nowadays are not English speakers. It is not even really an organizational unity, not really. The Archbishop of Canterbury has a primacy of honour and the Lambeth Conferences bring together Bishops for consultation from all over the world. But no Primate, no Conference, no Council has any legislative authority over the Anglican Communion. So the Communion adheres only by faithfulness to a common tradition, and if that faithfulness falters it moves toward disintegration. No one can legislate for the Anglican Communion. Insofar as its member churches fail in their allegiance to the common tradition the communion disintegrates. And that, I think, is the nature of the current crisis in global Anglicanism.

Signs of disintegration are, as you well know, manifold. The Primates at their meeting in ler Portugal several years ago deplored the fact that repudiations of the resolutions of the Lambeth Conference have come, as they said, to threaten the unity of the Communion in a profound way. And they strongly urged those repudiating Lambeth “to weigh the effects of their actions and to listen to the expressions of pain, anger, and perplexity from other parts of the Communion.” Another sign of the times was, of course, the consecration of bishops to be missionaries to the Episcopal Church in the United States. And, of course, we have all become familiar with the phenomenon of separated or Continuing Anglican Churches in our own country and elsewhere and we have learned to live, somehow, with the condition of what is somewhat euphemistically called “impaired communion,” a condition brought about by unilateral decisions on the part of some Provinces of our Communion.

But these and other disquieting phenomena are merely symptoms of a malaise which threatens the continued existence of the Anglican way. The fundamental issue, I would insist, is faithfulness to a tradition of Christian faith and worship. But just what is that common tradition, and what precisely are its elements? What is the essence of Anglicanism?

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Statements and other writings

Rector’s Annual Report, 2024

Click here to download the full Rector’s Annual Report for 2024 (in pdf format).

The Rector’s Annual Reports for 2003 through 2023 can be accessed via this page.

Rector’s Annual Report for 2024
Fr. David Curry
February 16th, 2024

“Whatsoever is right, that shall ye receive.”

The Annual Parish Meetings are special occasions and not just because of the culinary pleasures of a pot-luck! They are an important and crucial aspect of our corporate life as a Parish because they locate the temporal life of the Parish within the primacy of our spiritual mission and vocation. On the one hand, it is about ‘taking care of business,’ if you will pardon the commonplace expression, but, on the other hand, it is a profound moment of collective reflection about our life together in the body of Christ, a way of looking back on the year past and looking ahead to the year before us. It is a way of concentrating our attention on our life in Christ, recognising the various challenges that we have faced and continue to face.

Septuagesima is the first of the pre-Lenten Sundays that orient us towards Lent as the pilgrimage of love, charity, to use the older English word from the Latin, caritas. The ‘gesima’ Sundays point us to Easter by their very names. They signify the weeks and days before Easter: the weeks of the seventieth, sixtieth and fiftieth days. Lent itself is known as quadragesima, pertaining to the idea of forty days, symbolic of the forty years in the wilderness of the Exodus and the forty days of Christ fasting and praying in the wilderness. The ‘gesimas’ belong to the transition from Christmas and Epiphany to Lent and Easter and remind us of their crucial interrelation. Light and life are grounded ultimately in love, the charity without which “all our doings are nothing worth,” as the Quinquagesima Collect so emphatically states. “If I have not charity, I am nothing,” Paul reminds us.

The ‘gesima’ Sundays highlight the transformation of the classical or cardinal virtues of temperance, courage, prudence, and justice by love. They speak to a profound sense of the forms of the ethical that belong to the pilgrimage of our souls to its end in God, an end in which we participate now in our life together as a Parish through service and sacrifice, through word and sacrament, and in worship as penitential adoration.

In other words, these activities that belong to human character are perfected by the divine love, the charity of God, which as Paul says, “never faileth.” That cannot be said about our human loves which are always incomplete, partial, and often in disarray. But God seeks something more for us than what belongs to human sin and experience. And as Holy Week shows, he makes a way for us out of our sin and evil. Tears of sorrow, and tears of joy. All because of the love of Christ.

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Statements and other writings

Rector’s Annual Report, 2023

Click here to download the full Rector’s Annual Report for 2023 (in pdf format).

The Rector’s Annual Reports for 2003 through 2022 can be accessed via this page.

Rector’s Annual Report for 2023
Fr. David Curry
February 18th, 2024

“We go up to Jerusalem”

The word parish (παροικια from παροικεω) refers to where we dwell as sojourners in the land, and thus to the idea of the place of our abiding with God. The parish is where the concrete and corporate realities of our lives in faith are lived, via ad patriam. “For here we have no continuing city,” as Hebrews reminds us (Heb. 13.14), “for our citizenship is in heaven” (Phil. 3. 20). The parish is the place of our abiding in that hope and desire for the “Jerusalem which is above”(Gal. 4.26). The distinction between the eternal and the temporal is essential against the tendency to collapse the one into the other.

We go up to Jerusalem. It is one of the great images of pilgrimage, of our journey in and through the wilderness to the paradise of God in his beauty and truth. It signals the true fulfillment of our longings and desires. We journey in the abiding love of God which shapes and moves our hearts and minds. It is embodied in our liturgy and in our prayers and praises, our service and sacrifice; they are the motions of God’s love in us.

We have persevered and endured faithfully and in good cheer through all of the ups and downs of the past year amidst the confusions and chaos of our time spiritually and experientially. It has been a year of faithfulness and commitment and for that I am most grateful to all of you. We are continuing to learn and find strength and comfort from God’s Word and Sacraments that help us to bear witness and to face the uncertainties of a divided and divisive world. It seems to me that as a parish we are gaining a deeper sense of penitential adoration and contemplation as what defines and guides our lives.

There have been of course the constant challenges of maintaining roofs and other building and operational concerns. This includes the re-shingling of the north side of the Hall roof and so too emergency repairs on the clerestory roof on the King Street side of the Church. Most significantly, the solar panels installed in the Fall of 2022 became operational in late January of 2023 and we have been pleased with how this has contributed to the reduction of our electrical costs. In the fall-out from the Covid years, it has been challenging to find workman and carpenters who are able to undertake some of the work which needs to be done. I want to thank Alex Jurgens and David Appleby for their diligence and perseverance in finding ways to get things done. We have been fortunate, it seems, to have found an excellent carpenter as a result of the pre-Christmas wind and rain storm which wreaked such havoc everywhere. We are hoping to be able to get a number of projects done in a responsible fashion. Bear in mind, that as a parish, we have long recognised that the buildings are part of the mission and life of the parish for which we have stewardship obligation.

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Anglican issues, Statements and other writings, Theology

Celebrating an Outstanding Scholar: Robert Darwin Crouse (1930-2011)

Celebrating an Outstanding Scholar: Robert Darwin Crouse (1930-2011)

The sermons, lectures, and writings of Robert Darwin Crouse have influenced generations of students and clergy world wide. Clear and concise, scholarly yet pastoral, they address many of the current confusions of a post-secular and post-Christian world by way of connecting the contemporary world to its Christian origins and principles. A remarkable scholar with a poetic soul and gift of expression, his writings speak across the ages and generations with clarity and charity. His sermons are the pastoral distillation of decades of careful reading of ancient, biblical, patristic, medieval, and modern writings with a deep appreciation for the power of the arts to draw us into an engagement with Christian spirituality. They address the waste land of modernity without leaving us in the waste land and without defaulting to a romantic longing for some imagined golden age. Perhaps no collection of sermons captures better the character and concerns of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries by bringing the perennial wisdom of Christ before the thoughtful reader. The sermons are a refreshment and a source of spiritual renewal for many a community of souls and for all times. For those of us who had the privilege of being his student and spending time at his place in Crousetown, these sermons are like being once again in his presence and hearing his voice, partaking of his hospitality and generosity of mind.

Dr. Crouse was the most outstanding scholar ever to come out of the School (1944-1947) and College. A theologian and Anglican priest, a musician, poet and preacher, he had a remarkable career as a scholar of Medieval Philosophy and as a beloved teacher at King’s College in the Foundation Year Programme and at the Dalhousie Classics Department in Halifax. He taught at Trinity College, Toronto, and at Bishop’s University, Sherbrooke, Quebec (where Guy Payne first met him). He also taught at the Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum in Rome where he lectured for many years as a visiting Professor of Patristics. He was a graduate of King’s College and Dalhousie University, of Trinity College, and of Harvard.

A number of the faculty and the board of the School have also had the privilege of being taught by Fr. Crouse. He baptized, for instance, Christian and Zachary Lakes, the twins of Kevin and Penny Lakes, at the School Chapel. He was one of my mentors. As Trevor Hughes, former Chairman of the Board, remarked, Robert had the nicest way of telling you that you were wrong. I think this is captured in his response to students’ comments on whatever subjects were before us: “You might say that,” he would say, meaning “I wouldn’t,” which (by interpretation) suggested that it was foolish or at least mistaken.

Sunday, January 14th, and Monday, January 15th, mark the book launch in Halifax of two books by the Rev’d Dr. Robert D. Crouse, a book of sermons and a meditation on the theme of pilgrimage, the beginning of a publication project that we hope will include many of his scholarly writings. The first two volumes are available through Amazon: Images of Pilgrimage: Paradise and Wilderness in Christian Spirituality and The Soul’s Pilgrimage Volume 1: From Advent to Pentecost.

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Statements and other writings

Rector’s Annual Report, 2022

Click here to download the full Rector’s Annual Report for 2022 (in pdf format).

The Rector’s Annual Reports for 2003 through 2021 can be accessed via this page.

Rector’s Annual Report for 2022
February 19th, 2023

“Prayer the Churches banquet, Angels age/Gods breath in man returning to his birth,/ the soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage.” These are the opening lines of a lovely sonnet called Prayer (1) by George Herbert. The whole poem is a rich medley of images drawn from Scripture, from the traditions of Christian theology and spirituality, from music, from the liturgy of the Church, from domestic life, and from things remote and exotic, from things near and far way. “Church-bels beyond the starres heard, the souls bloud.” It ends with two words that are not images but the meaning of them: “something understood.” Prayer in all of these various images, ranging from “the Churches banquet,” a reference to the Eucharist, to “the land of spices,” a reference to the voyages of discovery and to what is exotic, is something understood. Thus the poem is not simply a random collection of images. The point is that something is understood in and through the images and not in flight from them.

There is something understood, meaning doctrine or teaching, that is conveyed through each image and in their order and sequence. Prayer is about our lives in pilgrimage through which we participate in the ways the grace of God is conveyed to us. Thus prayer is “Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest”; a reference to a passage from Augustine about looking at the Creed and seeing yourself in it as in a mirror, being dressed in the essential doctrines of the Faith, we might say. The Creeds come out of the Scriptures and return us to them in an order of understanding. In many ways, the poem signals a central feature of the liturgy and thus the life of the Parish in these uncertain times. It is simply doctrine in devotion.

That has been the constant and recurring point of emphasis in the forms of our encounter in prayer and praise with God in his eternal motions of love which belong to God in himself and God for us in his motions towards us. We constantly seek to enter more fully into the circling motions of divine love that belong to the interplay of the different seasons, and the feasts and festivals of the Church’s life. The underlying patterns of reformed catholicism are the interplay of justification – what God in Christ has done for us; sanctification – Christ in us through the gift of the Holy Spirit; and glorification – our end in God as imaged through the Communion of Saints. As the Creeds teach us, all three moments reflect the idea of penitential adoration through a focus on the forgiveness of sins. “Repentance,” Lancelot Andrewes says in an Ash Wednesday sermon, “is nothing else but redire ad principia, ‘a kind of circling’, to return to Him by repentance from Whom by sin we have turned away”.

That kind of circling is love, the divine love seeking the perfection of our imperfect human loves which is set before us on Quinquagesima Sunday. Lent concentrates the whole idea of Christian pilgrimage into the span of forty days in terms of the interplay and interpenetration of illumination, purgation, and perfection or union that constitute the classical nature of the soul’s journey to God, itinerarium mentis in Deum, as in Bonaventure’s classical treatise. It is really all about a kind of circling around and into the mystery of God and of God with us. “We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus says. We go up with Christ. We do so in the hopes of learning more clearly the nature of what Herbert in another poem calls “two vast spacious things” that transcend our human capacities to know, namely, “sin and love.” To understand something about those is the point of the Lenten journey understood as the pilgrimage of love, the love which never faileth as Paul says but which belongs to the good of our humanity in God through the uncertainties and confusions of our world and day. That pilgrimage of love is our life in prayer as “something understood.” It is a kind of circling around and into the mystery of God.

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