Christ Church

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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In Memoriam: Queen Elizabeth II

Our parish in its history and life has existed under the reign of nine monarchs over its 251 year history since its founding in 1771 during the reign of George the Third. He provided through the auspices of the Archbishop of Canterbury gifts of “two sets of [silver] communion plate” which we use on High Feast days such as Christmas and Easter. They arrived in 1790 before the original Christ Church building was completed. Some of the silver dates to 1729. But in that long history of the Parish under monarchical rule and governance, the longest reigns were those of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth who together constituted 134 years out of 251. The longest reigning monarch in English history and the history of the Commonwealth was Elizabeth II whose platinum jubilee (70 years!) was observed in Windsor at King’s-Edgehill School last spring and remembered in our prayers at Christ Church.

Elizabeth II embodied the very model of steadfastness and devotion to duty for which we can only be thankful. Her remarkable reign was testament not to the power of dominion and domination, of force and coercion, but to the power of duty and service in and through the changes and challenges of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. She was a figure of unity in divided times.

Her passing marks the beginning now of the reign of the tenth monarch, Charles III. God save the King. We remember Elizabeth II with gratitude and thanksgiving for her long reign of devotion and duty and commend her soul to God’s gracious keeping.

O God, the King of Glory, who raises up Kings and Queens as the instruments of your justice and mercy, we give thanks to you for the seventy years of faithful, compassionate, and dedicated service of Elizabeth II, Queen of England, of the Commonwealth of Nations, and of this country Canada, for her witness to truth and order, to peace and good government and the flourishing of all who are under her reign, and we beseech your grace and mercy upon her soul at this time of her passing at age 96, ever mindful that the hearts and souls of Kings and Queens are ever in your sight to the praise and glory of your Name and for the good of your church and people; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

Fr. David Curry
Friday, September 9th, 2022

“A Walking Sacrament”
An address to the St. John Vianney Chapter of SSC by Fr. David Curry
August 4th, 2022
Christ Christ, Windsor, Nova Scotia

This address can be downloaded as a pdf document (which includes footnotes) by clicking here. A PowerPoint presentation accompanying the address can be downloaded here.

Thank you, Fratres, my brothers, for being here at Christ Church, Windsor, Nova Scotia, and, especially, to those who have travelled such long distances in these seemingly ‘perilous times’ to come to what might seem to some of you to be, if not ultima thule, then at least very much next door to the farthest ends of the world!

SSC is a spiritual fellowship of Catholic Priests within the churches of the Anglican Communion, itself situated at least historically and traditionally within an understanding of how Anglicans, itself a later term, understand themselves as “an integral portion of the One Body of Christ composed of Churches which, united under the One Divine Head and in the fellowship of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, hold the One Faith revealed in Holy Writ, and defined in the Creeds as maintained by the undivided primitive Church in the undisputed Ecumenical Councils; receive the same Canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, as containing all things necessary to salvation; teach the same Word of God, partake of the same Divinely ordained Sacraments, through the ministry of the same Apostolic Orders; and worship One God and Father through the same Lord Jesus Christ, by the same Holy and Divine Spirit who is given to them that believe to guide them into all truth,” to quote at length one of the most remarkable statements of catholicity and doctrinal restraint that is the legacy and living force of things in Canada, the Solemn Declaration of 1893 (Cdn BCP, viii). Yet, in my view, it speaks to something much deeper and much more profound and which relates to the aims and objectives of the SSC in the face of the various disorders of polity, moral, and doctrinal understanding that beset the churches in our age.

The task and challenge is to locate the spirituality of the priesthood within such a catholic vision that the Solemn Declaration envisions. That means finding ways to think about our priestly life, what it means in a reformed catholic understanding, and how it speaks to the spiritual confusions of our age. To be a priest is to be a servant of Christ in the midst of the body of Christ. What is impressed inwardly upon our lives of the sacrificial love of Christ is to be expressed outwardly in our work “to the glory of thy Name and the edification of thy Church” (BCP, p. 546). We do not live for ourselves but for others.

Yet we do so as a spiritual fellowship of priests, as those who have been called and chosen, set aside, dedicated, and charged by God’s grace to be “messengers, watchmen, and stewards of the Lord” (BCP, p. 648). It is not us per se but what is given to move in us. SSC at its best, historically and prophetically, is about the radical nature of the call to service in Christ. It is not political or worldly; it is meant to be transformative spiritually. It speaks to the very heart of the ministry: another lives in us so that Christ can live in those whom we serve.

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‘Nothing has changed’
A statement about same-sex marriages in the light of the decision of the General Synod and Archbishop Ron Cutler’s response

It is incumbent upon me, for what it is worth, to say something about the recent decisions of the Anglican Church of Canada with respect to the question about same-sex marriages. Simply put, nothing has really changed. The Anglican Church of Canada remains caught in the confusions and the contradictions of contemporary culture about the politics of identity. Yet the General Synod, meeting in Vancouver, ultimately voted against equating same-sex marriage with the Christian doctrine of marriage articulated most clearly in the Book of Common Prayer. The result of a long and drawn out process of discussion, this was the result, whether or not one agrees with it, or, for that matter, whether or not one agrees with the assumption that national and diocesan churches have anyauthority to determine on such matters of doctrine, in this case, moral doctrine.

Councils “may err and sometimes have erred, even in things pertaining unto God,” as our Articles remind us (Art. XXI), and so Councils will err though sometimes, too, they may be right. There is also the question about which councils and upon what issues. Archbishop Ron Cutler of the Diocese of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island notes that this issue can be revisited within the institutional structures of the Anglican Church of Canada. Everything, it seems, is endlessly ‘provisional’ especially when one is in pursuit of a predetermined end which only then becomes, mirabile dictu,definitive. Thus, despite the decision of the General Synod, he has declared that Diocesan local option takes precedence against it. Same-sex marriages will be allowed where desired in the Diocese of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. At the same time, we are told, no parish or priest will be forced to marry same-sex couples. Nor can they be. And so the division continues and endlessly so.

We live with the confusions and complexities of our age about identity, about what it means to be a self. What matters are the assumptions underlying such decisions. Marriage, according to the Archbishop, and in this he simply reflects the assumptions of the culture, is fundamentally about ‘committed relationships’. If that is so, then there can be no discussion, no debate. And while commitment is an important concept, the question is, commitment to what? After all, one can be in a ‘committed relationship’ with any number of things, including oneself, and to any number of social constructs of whatever sort. While we would all want to agree about the importance of commitment, the classical understanding of Christian marriage is not simply or even primarily about commitment beyond a commitment to the character and nature of marriage; in short, to what it is. We cannot be of one mind if we cannot say what something is; in this case what marriage is. At issue are the principles which govern our understanding about the meaning of our humanity as found within the doctrines of creation and redemption in which marriage is located as oneof the ways of living out the Christian faith.

Nothing has changed inasmuch as the institutional church remains caught in the controversies of identity in our contemporary culture. And nothing has changed with respect to my own contributions to the debate theologically. “The sad tragedy of the Anglican Churches” continues to be “the inability … to distinguish between two different things: marriage and the blessings of friends.” I continue to be committed to upholding the principles of Christian Faith doctrinally and morally as they have been received by the Anglican Churches insofar as they lay claim to be and are an integral part of the Catholic and Universal church regardless of the statements of Synods and Bishops. We live in a divided church but prayerfully and, I hope, charitably with respect to these divisions.

Rev’d David Curry
July 18th, 2019

Given the reference to the Solemn Declaration of 1893 in this morning’s homily, it seems appropriate to post Fr. David Curry’s paper “The Solemn Declaration: The Net of Memory”, which was published years ago in the Machray Review by the Prayer Book Society of Canada.

Click here to download “The Solemn Declaration: The Net of Memory” (in pdf format) or click here to read it online.

Dear Parishioners,

I want to offer some thoughts about the serious questions that belong to “end-of-life” issues. This has to do with dying and death and how we face such things from a Christian perspective, especially in the light of legislation about what is now called “medical assistance in dying” – M.a.i.d.

In 2016, I was asked to serve on a Diocesan Task Force to provide theological reflection on what was then called Physician Assisted Suicide. That term was then in the process of being changed to Physician Assisted Dying, reflecting the unease about the term suicide. Now the terminology has changed to Medical Assistance in Dying. These changes in terminology contribute, I think, to a certain ethical unease and confusion about our current situation, particularly after the passage of Bill C-14 legislating “the right to die.”

What is legal is not necessarily ethical and there are many, many questions about the so-called “right to die.”

While serving on the Task Force, I was asked to present some reflections on the documents produced by the National Church: first, a document called Care in Dying produced in 1998; the second, a draft of a subsequent document about Physician Assisted Dying produced in 2016, I believe. After the first paper, I was asked to prepare an article for the Diocesan Times about the classical and traditional theological understanding of dying and death that would appear alongside other points-of-view, which I did. But nothing happened and the Task Force seemed to fall into abeyance. I did send on the second paper to the National Church but never received any response.

On Saturday, May 26th, I served on a panel along with an ethicist, a gerontologist, and the Diocesan Hospital Chaplain, discussing M.a.i.d before a number of editors of Anglican Church papers in Canadian dioceses. In the light of that experience, I want to share with you these theological reflections that deal with the notion of autonomy, intentionality and causation, some of which also came up in the panel discussion. There is, for instance, an important difference between palliative care and M.a.i.d. The difference lies in intentionality, the intention to end a life via M.a.i.d and the desire to ease the dying via palliative care. The increasing medicalisation of death and dying means that people need to have some understanding of these processes and, more importantly, the principles that seem to inform them.

In this past year, I have focused on the rich tradition of consolation literature which is related to the theology of redemptive suffering which I think is central to Christian witness. The documents which I offer simply provide you with a way to think about these things and to be aware of the concerns. In many ways, the ideas of choice and control drive the current provisions and present certain challenges to pastoral care in dying. As priest and pastor, it is my obligation to try to provide pastoral care even in the difficult situations that are not consistent with Christian teaching. But it is equally important to provide some teaching. That is the point of making these things available to you. You may find the article to be the most accessible of the three.

As time permits, I may be able to provide you with some more materials and further reflections on these important questions. I hasten to add that thinking about death and dying is not about being morbid; it is part and parcel of the Christian understanding.

In Christ,

Fr. David Curry

Links to Fr. Curry’s writings referenced above (pdf format):

1. “As dying, we live: Some Reflections on Care In Dying”
2. “Some Theological Reflections on the Draft 2016 Document of the National Task Force of the Anglican Church of Canada on Physician Assisted Dying”
3. Proposed Article for Diocesan Times: “As Dying, We Live”
4. The three papers compiled into a single file.

An address delivered at the University of King’s College, Halifax, 19 March 2018.

Like eagles in this life

Thank you for the privilege of being with you and speaking with you this evening. It is nice to be back in familiar surroundings and in a place that has been so much a part of my own life. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Fr. Gary Thorne for his ministry as College Chaplain here at King’s College and for his excellent labours in the challenge of opening young and inquiring minds to the wonders of the Gospel in its engagement with other religions and philosophies.

“We should understand the sacrament, not carnally, but spiritually,” Cranmer argues “being like eagles in this life, we should fly up into heaven in our hearts, where that Lamb is resident at the right hand of his Father which taketh away the sins of the world … by whose passion we are filled at His table … being made the guests of Christ, having Him dwell in us through the grace of his true nature … assured and certified that we are fed spiritually unto eternal life by Christ’s flesh crucified and by his blood shed.” An intriguing and suggestive passage, it conveys, I think, much of what belongs to Cranmer’s Eucharistic theology and which contributes to an Anglican sensibility, to use a much later term (19th century).

There are many others who are far more qualified than I am to speak on the matter of Cranmer’s liturgies.^[1] Sam Landry has asked me to speak about “Cranmer’s alterations of the Liturgy (especially those of the very Protestant 1552 BCP),” as he put it and “how we might understand his theological project in relation to our own Prayer Book, which has re-introduced some of the practices which Cranmer removed.” These are important questions that speak to the many confusions that belong to our thinking about Cranmer’s reformed project. Not the least of which has to do with the word ‘Protestant’.

We might respond by asking, ‘which form of Protestantism?’ It is a problematic term, so much so that Diarmaid MacCulloch in his magisterial biography on Cranmer eschews its use almost entirely. The important point is that the First Edwardian Prayer Book of 1549 is just as ‘Protestant,’ if you will, (or ‘Catholic’ for that matter) as the Second Edwardian Prayer Book of 1552. Both reflect Cranmer’s basic Eucharistic theology at the same time as the two books reveal the pressures and tensions that were part of the reformed world in England and on the continent about which Cranmer was fully aware. There was constant debate about what constituted an adequate and proper reform. Cranmer himself was part of that debate which continued long after him.

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Fr. David Curry yesterday delivered an address to the Annual General Meeting of the Prayer Book Society of Canada, held in Charlottetown. Here are the opening paragraphs (footnotes omitted):

“Through the eyes of John”

Philosophy begins not in wonder, as the ancients supposed, a contemporary English philosopher, Simon Critchley, claims, but in disappointment. The particular forms of disappointment for him belong to religion and politics and result in the culture of nihilism which confronts us everywhere. Nihilism is the breakdown of the order of meaning; it declares and asserts the meaninglessness of all life.

Philosophy begins not in wonder but in disappointment, he says. Critchley has in mind Plato and Aristotle both of whom, to be sure, spoke of philosophy as beginning in wonder. But is this a complete and adequate account?

Click here to download the full text of the address (pdf document).

The following notes were included in the Order of Service for the Choral Evensong held this afternoon in commemoration of The Rev’d Dr. Robert Crouse and sponsored by The Prayer Book Society of Canada, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island Branch.

St. Michael and All Angels
Choral Evensong
St. Mary’s, Crousetown
4:00pm Sunday, September 29th, 2013

The Prayer Book Society of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island welcomes you to the first of this season’s anchor events. This is the First Annual Choral Evensong commemorating the Rev’d Dr. Robert Crouse.

On Sunday, January 26th, 2014 (Epiphany III), the Society will sponsor a Choral Evensong at the University of King’s College Chapel, Halifax, followed by a reception in the Senior Common Room.

The Society is pleased to sponsor the annual Lenten Quiet Day to be held at King’s-Edgehill School, Windsor, Nova Scotia on Saturday, March 8th from 9:00am-4:00pm on the theme of Lent and Original Sin, led by Rev’d David Curry.

The Society is committed to celebrating the deep prayerfulness and the rich spiritual understanding of the Prayer Book tradition that speaks so powerfully to the complexities of our contemporary church and world.

The Society is most grateful for the gracious hospitality of Fr. Oliver Osmond and the Parishes of Petite Riviere and New Dublin in allowing the Society to hold this service at St. Mary’s, Crousetown, the Church which evokes so much of the spirit and legacy of Fr. Crouse.

[…]

Rev’d Dr. Robert Darwin Crouse

The Rev’d Dr. Robert Crouse spent a life-time of dedicated service to God as a teacher, a scholar, and a priest. A noted Patristic and Medieval scholar, his passion was Dante. Through his patient and passionate commitment to the texts of our spiritual and intellectual tradition, he instilled a deep love of learning in generations upon generations of students. Acknowledged as “the conscience of the Canadian Church,” he constantly and consistently reminded the church of the spiritual integrity of the Common Prayer tradition and its fundamental importance for our Christian identity. We may say of Dr. Crouse what Dante said of St. Luke, that he is the “scriba mansuetudinis Christi,” the scribe of the gentleness of Christ, a gentleness which is firm and resolute on the high things of God, the things which are our joy and delight, the things, too, which are embodied in the spiritual riches of The Book of Common Prayer. Through it we may learn what Dante showed us and what Fr. Crouse taught us: that we are “soul[s] made apt for worshipping.”

The Rev’d Dr. Thomas Curran teaches at the University of King’s College and Dalhousie University. He is the past president of the Prayer Book Society of Nova Scotia and PEI. We are most grateful for his wisdom and guidance over many years and for being the preacher at this special commemorative service.

Nico Weltmeyer is the Organ Scholar at the Chapel of the University of King’s College, Halifax

The Rev’d Fr. David Curry is the Rector of Christ Church, Windsor, and Chaplain, English, History and Philosophy Teacher at King’s-Edgehill School. For many years he has been one of the Vice-Presidents of the Prayer Book Society of Canada and is now also President of the Prayer Book Society of Nova Scotia and PEI.

Artwork: Rogier Van Der Weyden, Last Judgment, c. 1445-50, Beaune, France.

Note on Finances

Our offerings are down this year thus far, both regular weekly offerings as well as Special Offerings such as Easter, Summer and Thanksgiving. We are looking at an overall drop of approximately $10,000 for the year, and while our expenses are also down, this presents a serious concern about the stability of the Parish and its future apparently. We have continued with fund-raising events but such things can never be the basis of the Parish’s operations and existence. The times are not easy economically; nor is this the first time that the Parish has faced the harsh realities of financial short-falls. I can only call your attention to this and prevail upon your generosity.   It is, to be sure, a difficult time for Churches and indeed for all organisations that depend entirely upon volunteer commitment.

At issue is our commitment and our confidence in what we believe and what it means, not just for ourselves but beyond ourselves. We live for God in Jesus Christ and live in his body, the Church. The challenge is to be the Church.

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Address

The challenge to be the Church is, I think, the burden of a wonderfully thoughtful address by the outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, presented to the Council of Bishops in Rome in October. It touches upon a number of themes which we have explored and to which I remain committed. The following quote from his address is especially important. What he means by contemplation here has to do, in part, with the primacy of worship and prayer, the primacy of our thoughtful  attention to the things of God rather than mimicking the culture in its preoccupations, fantasies and, indeed, insanities (see below). There is always something theologically revolutionary about the Church; it shapes cultures, to be sure, but it is also profoundly counter-culture because the Gospel challenges our assumptions. His insights at least give us pause for thought. He writes:

To be contemplative as Christ is contemplative is to be open to all the fullness that the Father wishes to pour into our hearts. With our minds made still and ready to receive, with our self-generated fantasies about God and ourselves reduced to silence, we are at last at the point where we may begin to grow. And the face we need to show to our world is the face of a humanity in endless growth towards love, a humanity so delighted and engaged by the glory of what we look towards that we are prepared to embark on a journey without end to find our way more deeply into it, into the heart of the trinitarian life. St Paul speaks (in II Cor 3.18) of how ‘with our unveiled faces reflecting the glory of the Lord’, we are transfigured with a greater and greater radiance. That is the face we seek to show to our fellow-human beings.

And we seek this not because we are in search of some private ‘religious experience’ that will make us feel secure or holy. We seek it because in this self-forgetting gazing towards the light of God in Christ we learn how to look at one another and at the whole of God’s creation. In the early Church, there was a clear understanding that we needed to advance from the self-understanding or self-contemplation that taught us to discipline our greedy instincts and cravings to the ‘natural contemplation’ that perceived and venerated the wisdom of God in the order of the world and allowed us to see created reality for what it truly was in the sight of God – rather than what it was in terms of how we might use it or dominate it. And from there grace would lead us forward into true ‘theology’, the silent gazing upon God that is the goal of all our discipleship.

In this perspective, contemplation is very far from being just one kind of thing that Christians do: it is the key to prayer, liturgy, art and ethics, the key to the essence of a renewed humanity that is capable of seeing the world and other subjects in the world with freedom – freedom from self-oriented, acquisitive habits and the distorted understanding that comes from them. To put it boldly, contemplation is the only ultimate answer to the unreal and insane world that our financial systems and our advertising culture and our chaotic and unexamined emotions encourage us to inhabit. To learn contemplative practice is to learn what we need so as to live truthfully and honestly and lovingly. It is a deeply revolutionary matter.

The full text of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s address is posted here.