Category: Statements and other writings

Anglican issues, Statements and other writings, Theology

Letter about Care in Dying

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.

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Anglican issues, Sermons, Theology

Fr. David Curry on Cranmer’s Eucharistic Liturgies, 1549/1552

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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Sermons, Theology

Redire ad principia: The Mystical Theology of The Book of Common Prayer

Fr. David Curry delivered this address to the AGM of the Prayer Book Society of Canada in Halifax on 29 April 2017. The version posted here omits footnotes. To download a pdf version complete with footnotes, click here.

Redire ad principia: The Mystical Theology of The Book of Common Prayer

There may be fifty ways to lose your lover and even fifty shades of grey which may or may not be the same thing, but the ways to lose your humanity? Not so many, it seems.

There is really only one question for our institutions, be they schools or churches, social clubs or societies. It is whether your institution is a factory producing robots or a breeding ground for Jihadis. In other words, are they places which contribute to a deeper understanding of our common humanity or are they simply the ghettoes of nihilism, having despaired of anything intellectual and spiritual; in short, the places where we lose our humanity by becoming machines or by blowing everything up including ourselves?

When Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk agree that the greatest threat facing our humanity is AI, artificial intelligence, then perhaps it is time to pause and think about our technocratic exuberance. For the concerns are very real especially for the millennial generation most wedded to the digital forms of the technocratic world. At issue is what it means to be human. In Albert Camus’ 1942 novel, The Outsider, the robot-woman is the image of a technocratic society in which technology is allowed to reign and rule and which in turn crushes and destroys our humanity and our individuality. We become robots. We make the machine that unmakes us. The novel ends with the Meursault going to his death which has been wrongfully decided on the basis of the absurdities of reason. He goes, tellingly, to the guillotine. The machine which itself is mindless is the machine that takes off your head. And that is the point.

The contradictions are startling. Homo Deus (2015) by Yuval Noah Harari turns out not to be about our humanity in God and with God but about our humanity as digitally enhanced as if that were a kind of divinity, a deus ex machina, I suppose. And while raising various problems about technology – all of which are, of course, solvable, since the naïve idealism of progress is his assumption – he denies that you exist. The idea of a self is an illusion. There is no you. We are nothing more than organic algorithms! He is oblivious to the ethical and philosophical problems pointed out last week in the Chronicle Herald by Professor Teresa Heffernan at St. Mary’s whose research programme, Where Science Meets Fiction: Social Robots and the Ethical Imagination, looks at big data and algorithms. They can only replicate the human biases inherent in their structure. Brains are not minds and machines cannot think.

In a way, this is not new. In 1749, the year Halifax was founded, Julien Offray de la Mettrie wrote L’homme machine, ‘Man the Machine’, a completely materialist and atheist account of our humanity. Romanticism and Existentialism both would react against the reductive assertions of a narrow and empty rationalism which looks at the world and our humanity in mechanistic terms. That is part of the importance of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, where the monster is not the thing that is made but the one who makes it. We are the monsters of our own nightmares and the makers of our own destruction. As Wendell Berry observes: “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” This, too, is our world. George Bernanos wisely noted in 1946 that “between those who think that civilization is a victory of man in the struggle against the determinism of things and those who want to make of man a thing among things, there is no possible scheme of reconciliation.”

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Statements and other writings

Rector’s Annual Report, 2016

Click here to download the Rector’s Annual Report for 2016 (pdf document).

The Rector’s Annual Reports for 2003 through 2016 can be accessed via this page.

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Statements and other writings

Rector’s Annual Report, 2015

Click here to download the Rector’s Annual Report for 2015 (pdf document).

The Rector’s Annual Reports for 2003 through 2015 can be accessed via this page.

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Statements and other writings

Rector’s Annual Report, 2014

Click here to download the Rector’s Annual Report for 2014 (pdf document).

The Rector’s Annual Reports for 2003 through 2013 can be accessed via this page.

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Anglican issues, Prayer Book Society, Statements and other writings, Theology

Address to the Prayer Book Society of Canada

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).

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Statements and other writings

Rector’s Annual Report, 2013

Click here to download the Rector’s Annual Report for 2013 (pdf document).

The Rector’s Annual Reports for 2003 through 2012 can be accessed via this page.

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Anglican issues, Events, Prayer Book Society

The Prayer Book Society of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island

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

Weyden, Last Judgment 1450The 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.

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Statements and other writings

Pastoral Letter: Summertime & Finances

Dear Friends,

This is a pastoral letter to you about two things: summertime and parish finances.

First, I want to thank and commend you for your commitment and diligence. There has been a noticeable increase in the regularity and amount of the committed givings. We asked you to consider giving $3.00 more per week and many of you have responded. Thanks be to God. It has helped us to keep on an even keel in the post-winter season.  A marvel and a miracle!

It never ends, of course. We have been making a concerted effort to stay on top of both operational and maintenance costs. We have at least one major roofing concern that needs to be taken care of, in the short term, we hope. It is the reshingling of the roof of the large part of the Church on the Parish Hall side – the last of the major roofing matters. There are, as well, material concerns about the pointing of the chimney and the repair to the corner foundation of the Hall, not to mention some interior work with respect to the plaster. All maintenance issues, as it were. I want you simply to know about these things because they go to the core of our being here faithfully and with a sense of purpose and joy.

There are so many, many things about which to be grateful. I look forward to another year of activity and witness to the Gospel of Christ by our Parish in our life and work together. It is astounding to think about how many things as a Parish we do. For that may God be praised.

This brings me to the summer. I know, it is a kind of miracle in the Maritimes to arrive at summer! June 23rd is the first Sunday of the Summer, following upon the summer solstice which is always very close to the Feast of the Nativity of John the Baptist (June 24th), the one whose birth points us to Christ and to his holy birth and sacrifice, birth and death, we might say. But the summer is often a difficult time for Parishes, such as ours. There was a time, perhaps in relatively recent memory, when at least a certain portion of the town of Windsor decamped (I use the term advisedly) to Martin’s River and the Chester area, sometimes called the Windsor Shore, for the summer months. The result in terms of the Parish was pretty slim collections.

We have promoted and encouraged the programme of special summer offerings, recognizing that people’s lives are complicated and that travel and extended families make for very different summer habits. My request is that you realize that the Church carries on and that we need your support during the summer months as well.

I encourage you to take this into account and to contribute as generously as possible towards the special summer envelope. This will help us both in terms of the summer and in terms of the Fall and Winter.

On a personal note, a very personal note, Marilyn and I are very happy to announce that Elizabeth, our eldest child, is to be married this summer on August 17th. She and her fiancé, Evan King, have many friends in Halifax and so the wedding will take place at St. George’s, Halifax.

Looking ahead to the next year, there are a couple of events that are in the works. First, 2013 marks the 225th anniversary of the School, King’s-Edgehill. The connection between the School and the Parish is not only historical but real and significant. The actual anniversary is November 1st, 2013. There will be a special commemorative service at 4:00pm on that day and with special dignitaries in attendance. It signals, yet again, the larger dimensions of the Parish’s life and mission.

I am also pleased to announce that on Friday, December 20th, 2013, Capella Regalis will be back as part of our Christ Church Concert Series, To Bethlehem with Kings! An outstanding programme last year, it will be so again. So take note of the date and spread the word.

I would also remind you of the last concert in this season’s series, Ensemble Seraphina on Saturday, July 20th at 7:30pm here at Christ Church.

“THE ROAD TO THE ISLES” – Chamber & Folk Music from the Isles – Ensemble Seraphina: Susan Toman harpsichord/Celtic harp, Dawn Bailey  soprano, Andrew Pickett counter-tenor; Composers: Thomas Moore, John Playford, Robert Burns, Henry Purcell, others TBA). Admission: $ 10.00.

These are but a few of the things that belong to our life and witness. They require, of course, your support and commitment. I thank you for all you help and service.

The Trinity Season, now before us, provides with wonderful reminders of the nature of our life in Christ. It is always about being clothed in humility and ultimately about being clothed in Christ. “Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ.” His life defines us and it is all our joy and all our blessedness.

Do not lose heart but rejoice in Christ and in his Church.

Many blessings upon all of you for your commitment and service and, again, many, many thanks.

May His Holy Name be praised.

In Christ,

(Fr.) David Curry

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