Christ Church

“My Lord, and my God”

The Apostolic Saints are part of the Advent and none more so than Thomas, “called Didymus,” whom we more commonly call ‘Doubting Thomas.’ In the darkest time of nature’s year, there is another form of darkness that deepens nature’s darkness into something even more strange and fearful. The darkness of doubt leads to despair, the death of souls and communities, of cultures and churches.

Thomas’ feast day falls always within the season of Advent.  He is the advent saint par excellence not just because his day of commemoration falls always within Advent and so close to the winter solstice and to Christ’s holy birth, the birth of God’s Son into our world of darkness, but because his doubting leads not to the darkness of despair and death but to the light of faith and hope. The doubting of Thomas provides for “the greater confirmation of our faith,” as another Thomas, Thomas Aquinas, reminds us.

The propers for his feast-day illumine the radical nature of Christ’s Incarnation. Ephesians reminds us of the fellowship of faith, that we are “fellow-citizens with the saints,” that we are “of the household of God,” “an holy temple in the Lord,” “an habitation of God through the Spirit,” and that Jesus Christ himself is “the chief corner-stone,” the structural and animating principle upon which all these images of indwelling depend.

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“Art thou he that should come or do we look for another?”

Among the many great and imaginative features of Dante’s poetic and theological Summa, The Divine Comedy, there is the amazing poetic invention of the Vestibule of Hell, a place deliberately designed by God, Dante suggests, for those souls unworthy of either Heaven or Hell! They are “a dismal company of wretched spirits” barely worthy of mention, who willed and then unwilled their will, unable to commit to anything. They follow for eternity the whirling banners of the ages, chasing first this and then that, utterly distracted and endlessly fickle. Vergil, the pilgrim Dante’s guide, explains that “they’re mingled with the caitiff angel-crew/Who against God rebelled not, nor to Him/were faithful, but to self alone were true.” Heaven has cast them forth and Hell rejects them too!

“But to self alone were true.” That is a haunting indictment of much of our contemporary world where being true to yourself has often been touted as the highest virtue, taking literally Polonius’ tendentious advice in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. What we have forgotten is what Dante knew. You cannot be true to yourself without being true to God and to the good order of his creation. Self-knowledge requires knowledge of others and of an objective order without which no knowledge is possible.

What happens to a culture when there is no longer any confidence in knowing or willing anything objective or true? Where there is nothing to live for, then, there are the conditions of mindless violence and evil such as what has happened in Newtown, Connecticut; the sad, mindless and wicked massacre of the little ones. No place is safe from such senselessness. We have seen in our own day too much of the massacre of the little ones. It is itself one of the hard themes of Christmas, the massacre of the Holy Innocents, which, while given a political reason, namely Herod’s fear of a rival to his throne, is also viewed as a kind of senseless act: “all the little boys he killed/At Beth’lem in his fury;” a senseless and disturbing act that nonetheless is gathered into the redemptive purpose of Christ’s holy birth. “Jesus Christ was born for this!” For only God alone can make sense of the mindless wickedness of human evil. As Bruce Cockburn puts it in “Festival of Friends”:

Some of us live and some of us die
Someday God’s going to tell us why
Open your heart and grow with what life sends
That’s your ticket to the festival of friends.

Like an imitation of a good thing past
These days of darkness surely will not last
Jesus was here and he’s coming again
To lead us to his festival of friends.

We want to know the reasons for the things which belong to human sin and wickedness, to all the forms of our radical unreason. But all too often we want things on our terms. The deeper challenge is to reclaim the vision of truth which constitutes the good of intellect and to will it in our lives.

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“Art thou he that should come or do we look for another?”

Among the many great and imaginative features of Dante’s poetic and theological Summa, The Divine Comedy, there is the amazing poetic invention of the Vestibule of Hell, a place deliberately designed by God, Dante suggests, for those souls unworthy of either Heaven or Hell! They are “a dismal company of wretched spirits” barely worthy of mention, who willed and then unwilled their will, unable to commit to anything. They follow for eternity the whirling banners of the ages, chasing first this and then that, utterly distracted and endlessly fickle. Vergil, the pilgrim Dante’s guide, explains that “they’re mingled with the caitiff angel-crew/Who against God rebelled not, nor to Him/were faithful, but to self alone were true.” Heaven has cast them forth and Hell rejects them too!

“But to self alone were true.” That is a haunting indictment of much of our contemporary world where being true to yourself has often been touted as the highest virtue, taking literally Polonius’ tendentious advice in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. What we have forgotten is what Dante knew. You cannot be true to yourself without being true to God and to the good order of his creation. Self-knowledge requires knowledge of others and of an objective order without which no knowledge is possible.

(more…)

Print this entry