Christ Church

“Go thy way, thy son liveth”

But is God’s word alive in us? Here is the Gospel story of someone who having heard, believed, and having heard again, believed yet again, and all without seeing. And its effects extend to define a community of faith, “himself believed, and his whole house”. “Faith cometh by hearing” has its illustration in this touching scene. But does his Word have its resonance in us?

We meet in the Octave of All Saints, that marvelous festival of spiritual life that reminds us of our homeland, the homeland of heaven in the Communion of Saints, and recalls to us as well the common reality of human mortality in the Solemnity of All Souls. The thread of Christ’s glory runs through the grave of our deaths. Such reflections speak profoundly to the worries and anxieties of our world and day, of our church and world.

They remind us of what so much of our culture and church is often in flight from, namely, the spiritual realities that, properly speaking, define our humanity and shape our souls, our communities, and, of course, our churches. Forget or ignore such things, then there is only the empty barrenness of a world and a church that has despaired of all that makes life worth living, a world and a church that can only experience its own emptiness, what one theologian has called “metaphysical boredom”.

This is the modern disease of secular society which has denied the deepest questions of meaning. But banishing such questions leaves a God-shaped hole in our hearts and our culture into which run a whole plethora of false gods. George Steiner, in a largely forgotten Massey Lecture, called attention to this modern phenomenon as “Nostalgia for the Absolute”, noting that in the place of religion, the ideologies of secular atheism rushed in with such things as Darwinism, Marxism, Freudianism and the social anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, all ideologies which have come and gone. They have left in their wake “the incredulity of meta-narratives”, as François Lyotard puts it, a defining feature of what is sometimes called post-modernism.

Yet in the barren emptiness of November we are reminded of those greater spiritual realities, the metaphysical realities, if you will, without which our lives are radically incomplete. In a way, these remembrances are altogether about the resonance of God’s word in human lives. Without them our churches, like our souls, are but “bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang”, in Shakespeare’s poignant words.

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“And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying, Blessed are … ye”

It is, as Shakespeare suggests, “that time of year … when yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold, bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.” His sonnet (# 73) always reminds me of November and of All Saints. In the barren greyness of the dying of nature’s year, there is a gathering into the fullness of life. We are ultimately to “love that well which thou must leave ere long” but more importantly, perhaps, to have a greater hold of what “makes thy love more strong.” And what is that? Simply the Communion of Saints: our lives as embraced in God’s holy love. It is about our wholeness, our holiness, as found in God.

A vision of our redeemed humanity, All Saints speaks to the world of scattered souls and celebrates instead the gathering into wholeness and blessedness of our fractured and fragmented selves. It speaks to the wholeness of ourselves as found in communion with God and with one another. It is in that sense profoundly counter-culture, a counter precisely to our fractured and fragmented selves in our fractured and fragmented world, the “Unreal City” of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, written one hundred years ago.

Our churches, it seems, are “bare ruin’d choirs” but this is to forget the grace of God who alone makes something out of the empty nothingness of human souls which is the cause of our “bare ruin’d choirs”. Shakespeare, perhaps, had in mind the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century in England and the accompanying sense of a loss of devotion and love. Yet the imagery of the passing away of nature’s year as an analogy to human mortality actually serves to awaken us to that which abides; in short, to the redemption of our humanity and to its abiding in the love of God.

All Saints offers a profound critique to our fragmented world and to our fragmented selves caught in the vortices of the subjective and radically limited categories of indeterminacy about personal identity. We live in a world in which we have turned ourselves into objects. George Bernanos observed 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.” And then, there is Wendell Berry’s remark that “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.” To be a machine is to be a thing, where even our bodies have become objects, things, to ourselves, as the French philosopher, Michel Henry noted, things that we can manipulate and destroy as we see fit according to the technological means at our whim and fancy.

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