Christ Church

“Whose is this image and superscription?”

What’s it all about? Can it be that we are defined, controlled and governed by money? Does everything comes down to money? “Money makes the world go round, of that we all are sure,” sings the chorus in Cabaret? Is the “cabaret of life, old chum,” simply the cash nexus as Thomas Carlyle first suggested and Karl Marx famously claimed? And if so, what does that make us?

“The love of money” is proverbially and scripturally said to be “the root of all evil”. Not money itself, but the love of money. Why? Because money is power. The misuse of money is the abuse of power. Money is twisted from a medium of exchange to being a form of domination and control. There is, at once, the use of money to dominate and manipulate others and the fact that money comes to dominate us. At issue are our loves, our desires.

The love of money causes us to forget who we are. Nowhere, perhaps, is this more prevalent than in our day. Whether we are rich or poor, employed or unemployed, pensioned or unpensioned, we are under a constant barrage of images that seek to persuade us that we are merely economic beings, that our worth and the meaning of our lives is to be measured materially and financially. This is not only destructive of human personality and the human community but destructive of the forms of honest and meaningful exchange so necessary to the welfare of souls and communities. Their end, our end, “is destruction, whose god is their belly” as Hebrews provocatively observes.

Money comes to possess us because we allow it to define the space in which we live out our lives. Means become ends which they cannot be. Economic ends fail for the simple reason that our lives and the worth of our lives cannot be reduced to an economic quantity. When we are defined economically, then we are but “bellies”, as it were, consumers (and, no doubt, “bellyachers” as well!). We are seduced into thinking that everything, including religion, must be a consumer product, a marketable commodity. The evil of money lies precisely in making us forget who we are.

(more…)

Print this entry

“It was winter; and Jesus walked in the temple in Solomon’s porch”

It is a provocative and compelling image and the setting for the continuation of the radical meaning of Christ the Good Shepherd. In other words, it belongs to the theme of gathering, to Christ’s gathering of our humanity to himself in truth and love. “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: and I give them eternal life.” Pretty powerful words that go to the answer to the question, “If thou be the Christ tell us plainly,” to which Jesus responded, “I told you and ye believed not.” Somehow our believing hinges upon our hearing the voice of Jesus. Only so can we discover that we are embraced in the Son’s love for the Father.

The Feast of All Saints’ embraces the Solemnity of All Souls’. From the glory of the Saints we turn to the somber realities of our common mortality. The gathering of the Saints in glory does not simply eclipse the darkness of death, the common death that awaits us all. Such thoughts may seem to belong to the winter of our souls but they simply underline the point of the Burial Office that nothing “shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Nothing, not even death. Why? Because Christ goes through the valley of the shadow of death for us and with us. The golden thread of the life of Christ runs through the grave and gate of death.

We are tasked to remember and in so doing we discover yet another one of our failings. We cannot always remember even those who were once so close and dear to us. Names and faces fade from our minds and memories. They may or may not be stirred again to memory by some thought, word or action but they are not simply and readily always there in our minds. We confront our limitations. Our memories are fragile and fragmented.

(more…)

Print this entry

“And he opened his mouth and taught them”

It is, to be sure, “that time of year… when yellow leaves or none or few/ do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold/ bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.” And yet in the season of scattered leaves and in the culture of scattered souls, there is a gathering, a great and profound gathering. Christ the King strides across the barren fields of our humanity to gather us into glory. It is the glory of the Communion of Saints. It is his gathering, a kind of collecting together of all that is scattered and lost.

The image of human lives as scattered leaves goes back to the Sibylline Oracles of Roman Antiquity conveyed most wonderfully by Vergil and then used by Dante even more wondrously to capture our being gathered together into the Communion of Saints. The whole human story belongs to one book, divinely written, to be sure, but scattered about on the wind; the leaves of the pages, like the leaves of the trees, are scattered and blown about. But by God’s grace the scattered leaves are gathered together into one volume; the leaves of the autumn likened to the pages – the leaves – of a book.

(more…)

Print this entry