Christ Church

A Love Song for all times

“Let me sing for my beloved a love song.” St. Augustine long ago spoke about the Scriptures as “letters from home,” a lovely image. They are ‘love letters,’ we might say, writings that speak to us about the love of God who seeks the perfection of our broken and disordered loves. That is signaled in the Scriptures as a whole and rather pointedly in a number of texts that are explicit about the underlying theological idea of God’s love for our humanity in the face of the disorders and disarray of our world and our hearts. In that sense, the love letters of Scripture encourage a spirit of inquiry and self-criticism that act as a check upon our self-righteousness or pride and our self-obsessions and the divisions and animosities which they so often occasion.

In Chapel, the readings and reflections have often revolved around the love of God and the love of neighbour, what is known as “the Summary of the Law,” to illustrate the way in which the divine love shapes, orders, and re-orders our human loves. That theme is clearly present in Paul’s great ‘Hymn of Love’ in 1st Corinthians but in many other texts as well. Isaiah 5, verses 1 to 7, is a beautiful love song which convicts our consciences in order to awaken us to the divine love which Paul celebrates in his paean of praise to charity, the love that binds our humanity together as a body, a community of love. As John says in a passage frequently heard in Chapel, “God is love and he that abideth in love abides in God and God in him.” This consolidates and concentrates the overarching theme of the Scriptures overall.

Speaking in the first person, Isaiah says, “Let me sing for my beloved a love song concerning his vineyard.” God here is ‘the Beloved’. What or who is “his vineyard”? It is us as God’s creation. “My beloved,” he says, “had a vineyard.” He goes on, speaking now in the third person, to describe God in relation to his vineyard. “He [God] digged and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines; he [God] built a watchtower in the midst of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it.” It is a lovely image of God as the gardener or vinedresser of creation. “He looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.” Ah! Trouble in paradise, in the vineyard, it seems!

(more…)

Print this entry

Light in the dark, Love in the ruins

Not the same thing as love in ruins! Sunday just past was Candlemas. Whatever one makes of groundhogs and their shadows, Candlemas marks a significant transition of the year in a number of different registers: astronomically, historically, socially and religiously. It is the meeting, hypapante to use its Greek title, a coming together of Law and Prophecy, of the Old Testament and the New, a meeting of ancient Simeon and aged Anna the Prophetess and the very young, of the infant Christ and his young mother, Mary, in short, of men and women and a child. A meeting in the Temple in Jerusalem.

The full title itself joins together the practices of Eastern Orthodox and Western Christianity. The former marks that day as the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, forty days after Christmas; the latter as the Feast of the Purification of St. Mary the Virgin; in short, a joint festival of Mary and Jesus. Since the fifth century, it has been observed with lighted candles, and, hence, the more convenient moniker, Candlemas. It was a 17th century Anglican Bishop, John Cosin who joined the titles in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the mother Prayer Book of the Anglican Communion.

Candlemas looks backward to Christmas and ahead to Holy Week and Easter. As such it marks the transition from light to life. Astronomically, February 2nd is one of the cross-quarter days in between Christmas Day, Dec 25th, and Lady Day, the Annunciation, March 25th. It falls roughly half-way between the winter solstice (December 21st) and the spring or vernal equinox (March 20th). Already we have seen some of the quantum leaps in sunlight and the lengthening of the days.

Yet the themes of Light and Life meet in the greater wonder of Love. Christmas in the Christian understanding never loses sight of Christ’s sacrifice and thus to the underlying principle of the divine love which seeks the ultimate good of our humanity, even in the face of the disorders, chaos, and evils of our hearts and our world.

(more…)

Print this entry