Christ Church

“If I must needs glory, I will glory of the things which concern mine infirmities”

Temperance is the virtue that concerns the mastery of our appetites, of our bodily desires. It is about self-mastery, but to what end?, we might ask, which is why it was coupled with parable of the labourers in the vineyard last Sunday about what is right; in short, justice. Courage, highlighted wonderfully and to the point of deliberate exaggeration, is set before us in today’s Epistle from 2nd Corinthians. It is complemented by Luke’s parable of the sower and the seed which considers the virtue of prudence; necessary, we might say, in relation to courage.

Courage speaks to our hearts. Cor is Latin for the heart. The cardinal or classical virtues belong to a way of thinking about the constituent elements of our humanity, about what it means to be human in terms of the activities of the soul. Thus temperance pertains to the body; courage to the heart; prudence to the mind; and justice to the proper relation of each of them without which, as Augustine suggests, the virtues become splenditia vitiae, splendid vices. Paul suggests something of this in his litany of courage, noting that he is speaking foolishly, even recklessly, even with a kind of madness. He is alluding to the problem of courage. Courage can be reckless folly if it is not tempered by prudence and justice. You can be brave but foolish.

Yet even that is not enough. The virtues undergo a kind of “sea-change into something rich and strange” (Shakespeare, The Tempest, I. ii) in these ‘gesima’ Sundays and in ways that belong to the itinerarium of our souls in the pilgrimage of Lent, itself the concentration of the journey of our souls to God within the span of forty days. In other words, these readings speak profoundly to the entirety of our lives in relation to God and one another. They reveal the deep struggles of the soul in the awareness of the limitations of its own activities. In that lies the awareness of the principle of the Good upon which all our doings depend and to which all our doings are ordered. As the Collect trenchantly puts it, “we put not our trust in any thing that we do.” This opens us out to the power of God and to the movement of God’s grace in us. Such is the transformation of the virtues into the forms of love. Divine love seeks the perfection of our human loves in and through the reordering of the virtues to their end in God.

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“The Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple”

Candlemas is a wonderfully multi-layered feast of interrelated concepts and themes. It marks the transition from light to life, from Christmas to Easter. It celebrates the intersection of what will become the Old and the New Testaments. Thus it complements the truer meaning of last week’s feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, which belongs at the very least to the beginnings of the emergence of Christianity yet happens entirely within the context of Israel.

Even the title is a conjunction of themes: “The Presentation of Christ in the Temple commonly called The Purification of the Saint Mary the Virgin,” at once a feast of Christ and of Mary. Its proper name for Eastern Orthodox Christians is hypapante, meaning meeting: the meeting of Old and New, of young and old, of men and women, of aged Simeon and old Anna, of a child and a mother, of Joseph and his mother in wonder, of prophecy and fulfillment, of suffering and revelation. There is a wonderful complexity to the images of this feast. We should be glad of its contraction into the simplicity of Candlemas, a blaze of light in the bleak midwinter signalling life and joy.

Yet the meeting of themes all happens in one place, the temple in Jerusalem. The lesson from Malachi highlights the theme of the preparation of the way for the Lord who “shall suddenly come to his temple,” a coming which portends judgement and purification; in short, redemption. “They found him in the temple,” the Gospel for the First Sunday in Epiphany tells us in the story of the child Christ. Here at the age of forty days is his first journey to the temple in Jerusalem and like the childhood journey it, too, is in accord with the customs of the Law, the ritual practices of ancient Israel. These are not simply superseded but transmuted or transformed. In a way, Candlemas, like the Conversion of St. Paul, highlights the vocation of Israel in the universality of its mission. It is signaled here in Simeon’s words, quoting Isaiah, but with a startling emphasis upon the infant Christ as the embodiment of those words: “a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel,” words which become the Church’s evening canticle, the Nunc Dimittis.

The temple itself takes on a whole new meaning. It is at once the sacred space that encapsulates and intensifies the teachings of Israel but extends to the sacred space that is the womb of Mary, itself an habitaculum dei. She, too, is the temple even as Christ’s body is the temple, and our bodies, too, are to be the temples of the Holy Spirit. The temple carried the temple into the temple, as a preacher once put it. There is this wonderful sense of the necessity of the embodiment of ideas, a wonderful sense of the ways in which ideas are bodied forth, the ways in which we are gathered into the light and life of God through the forms of mediation.

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Go ye also into the vineyard”

It is a suggestive and powerful image that belongs to the essential qualities of the itinerarium or spiritual journey of the soul upon which we embark this Sunday known as Septuagesima Sunday. Along with the other ‘gesima’ Sundays, it seems that we turn to the landscape of creation, literally to the vineyard, to the ground, and to the road near Jericho. Yet in all these ‘gesima’ Sundays, we are being turned to Jerusalem, to the image of the heavenly city, the city of God, in which the true yearnings of the soul are realized. What follows immediately from today’s Gospel, for instance, is Matthew’s account of what we have in the Gospel from Luke on Quinquagesima Sunday about “going up to Jerusalem” and which continues on to form the Gospel for Passion Sunday from Matthew.

In every way, these ‘gesima’ Sundays belong to the spiritual pilgrimage of Lent. As such they speak directly to the forms of spiritual discipline necessary to the quintessential itinerary of the soul to God. Something is required of us. The spiritual journey is an activity of the soul in relation to God imagined here in terms of our relation to nature, to the landscape of creation, presented as a vineyard in which we labour.

As the Epistle teaches, that labour requires self-mastery or temperance in terms of the ultimate goal which is not a perishable or “a corruptible crown” but “an incorruptible”. What we strive and labour for is not something transitory and passing but everlasting. Such is the true yearning of the soul. “For it has become clear,” as Boethius puts it in his itinerary of the soul, The Consolation of Philosophy, “that all perfect things are prior to the less perfect.” All our desires are but shadows of the human longing for what is absolute, the great all-good, as it were.

Thus the ‘gesima’ Sundays are more than mere prelude to the play of Lent and are really part of the Lenten pilgrimage but with a certain sensibility about the land; in short to our relation to the land. But vineyards? Hardly so, it might seem, in the cold of January, however much vineyards have become such a distinctive feature of Nova Scotia, particularly here in the Valley. But in looking to Jerusalem in the itinerary of these ‘gesima’ Lenten Sundays, we look to the spring of our souls even in the throes of winter.

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