Christ Church

Fr. David Curry has collected his four Lenten Programme addresses (with footnotes) into a single pdf document. Click here to download “Lenten Meditations on the Lord’s Prayer”.

This is the fourth and final address in this series. The first is posted here, the second here, and the third here.

“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us”

Our Lenten study of the Lord’s Prayer brings us to the last three petitions, to the triad of forgiveness, temptation, and evil. They draw us into the deeper meaning of Christ’s Passion. To pray for forgiveness for ourselves and towards one another, to pray not to be led into temptation, and to pray to be delivered from evil is to pray the Passion of Christ.

We pray to our Father in all of the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. To pray “Our Father” achieves, Thomas Aquinas tells us, “five things.” First, the words “Our Father” serve to “instruct us in our faith”; second, they “raise our hopes”; third, “they serve to stimulate charity”; fourth, they lead us “to imitate God”; and fifth, they call us “to humility”.  In other words, the phrase “Our Father”, which is present throughout the Lord’s Prayer, gives us confidence in God. As Aquinas says, “Our Lord, in teaching us how to pray, sets out before us those things which engender confidence in us, such as the loving kindness of a father, implied in the words, Our Father.” Once again, we see how the Lord’s Prayer is an essential of the Christian Faith.

Augustine breaks off his commentary on the Lord’s Prayer in the sixth chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel to speak about the Creed. He is speaking during Holy Week in the context of preparing catechumens for baptism. Both the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed are to be learned by heart. “When you have learned [the Creed], that you may never forget it, say it every day when you rise; when you are preparing for sleep, rehearse your Creed, to the Lord rehearse it, remind yourselves of it, and be not weary of repeating it. … Call your faith to mind, look into yourself, let your Creed be as it were a mirror to you. Therein see yourself, whether you do believe all which you profess to believe, and so rejoice day by day in your faith. Let it be your wealth, let it be in a sort the daily clothing of your soul. Do you not always dress yourself when you rise? So by the daily repetition of your Creed dress your soul.” It is a powerful passage complemented by his teaching about the creedal nature of the Lord’s Prayer as being an essential form of our participation in the life of God in Christ.

From these remarks about the Creed, he turns to the “Our Father,” and highlights its essential and radical nature. In saying “Our Father,” he says, “you have begun to belong to a great family. Under this Father the lord and the slave are brethren; under this Father the general and the common soldier are brethren; under this Father the rich man and the poor are brethren. All Christian believers have various fathers in earth, some noble, some obscure; but they all call upon one Father which is in heaven.” Like the Creed, it is to be prayed every day.

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This is the third address in this series. The first is posted here and the second here.

“Give us this day our daily bread”

Who are we asking? Our Father. Not our Lord. It is perhaps important to remember that all of the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer are addressed to God as “Our Father.” As with the first three petitions, so too with the last four petitions. What we ask for we ask “Our Father.”

Origen already remarked on this unique and special feature of the Lord’s Prayer. Nowhere in the Hebrew Scriptures do we find any prayer addressed to God as Father. Augustine several centuries later also calls attention to this as does Aquinas in the thirteenth century.

The opening words of the “Our Father” carry over into all of the petitions and serve to ground our prayers in a kind of praise and wonder about God himself that acts as a counter to the ways in which we invariably seek to make God subject to ourselves. That, of course, is how we lose ourselves because we lose sight of God. “For many things are said in praise of God,” Augustine notes, “which, being scattered variously and widely over all the Holy Scriptures, everyone will be able to consider when he reads them; yet nowhere is there found a precept for the people of Israel, that they should say ‘Our Father,’ or that they should pray to God as a Father; but as Lord He was made known to them.” It suggests something intimate and important about the “Our Father” as belonging to the essential understanding of the Christian faith.

The seventeenth century Anglican Divine, Lancelot Andrewes, in his Holy Devotions, notes that the Lord’s Prayer begins with “a Father, not a Lord/ One being a name of love./ The other of dignity … One being, a name of Goodness, Comfortable … the other of Power, Terrible … Who then durst be so bold as to call the Father, but that Christ did command it?” The Lord’s Prayer is grounded in the Son’s love of the Father; his Father is “Our Father” at his bidding and command. We are bold to say, “Our Father.”

Jesus provides instruction about prayer and about persevering in prayer in many places such as in Matthew 7.9. “What man of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone?” Christ’s first temptation, too, was about the manipulation of the world, about turning stones into bread. The image of “Our Father” reminds us of the essential goodness of God and about what he seeks for us, namely, not stones but bread. Why? Out of the love of the Father for the Son and in the power of the Son’s love for the Father; out of the bond of their mutual and indwelling love, we learn the deep love of God for us. Thus this fourth petition, which marks the beginning of the second set of petitions, concerns what we seek from God in terms of our lives here and now but only as grounded in the deep love of God himself and that love as turned towards us; in short, God’s love for us.

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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 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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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).

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.