We have all had the conversation. Usually it’s with half-a-dozen people who’ve lingered in the parish hall an hour after coffee hour is over, or a few vestry members hanging around in the priest’s office long after the Vestry meeting adjourned. “Why doesn’t our parish attract the numbers that swell the ranks of the huge non-denominational conventicle on the freeway?” “I love the Anglican Church. Why don’t other people see what I see?”
There are a lot of answers, some of them actually—at least partially—correct: we think it’s in bad taste to talk to people about our religion, or our worship isn’t easy to follow if you weren’t brought up in it, or our church building is too small/old/hard to find. Our priest isn’t a good preacher, the hymns are too dull, or we don’t really want people we don’t know/who don’t look like us/who are of a different political party coming to our church.
A lot of these are silly, even if some of them are true. But even if we have a beautiful church building with a great choir and St John Chrysostom as the regular preacher at Sunday Mass, we won’t be giving the Abundant Life Center, with its 9,000 members, a run for its money anytime soon.
Why?
Because that’s not what Jesus had in mind when He founded His Church. At its heart, the Church is a group of baptized people, gathered with its clergy around the parish Altar. The Church is Christian people, living a common life, practicing common prayer.
St Ignatius, a first-century bishop of Antioch, was arrested and carried to Rome to be eaten up by lions in the Coliseum. As he traveled from Syria to Italy, he wrote letters to Christians he met along the way. In one of them, written to the people of Smyrna (a church mentioned by St John in his Book of Revelation), Ignatius said “Where the bishop appears [to celebrate the Eucharist], there let the people gather; just as where Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.”
This is the first time we have a written record of the Church being called the “Catholic” Church. This ancient and venerable word is familiar to most Christians. Those familiar with the Creeds know it because they say it every time they say the Creeds; those who aren’t equate it with the Roman Catholic Church. Protestants who use the Creeds (Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, etc) are careful to explain that “catholic” (with a small “c”) means universal, as in “all Christians everywhere.” Our Roman friends quite happily refer to themselves as Catholics (with a capital “C”) and insist they are the Catholic Church.
When St Ignatius wrote his letter to Smyrna, however, he meant something different, something tantalizingly subtle with a bit of a bite. Catholic comes from the joining of two Greek words—kata and holon. Kata means “according to” and holon means “the whole.” This kataholon Church is the One Church, the one the Lord Jesus founded. Ignatius understood it, and so did the people he wrote to, as having a leadership coming from Jesus Himself through His Apostles down to the Bishops to whom the Apostles entrusted the Church. This One Church passed along the One Faith.
St Ignatius saw the One Church as revealing itself in a variety of ways. It was the One Church, spread over the whole world (the Greek word for this was oekumene, from which our word “ecumenical” comes). It was the One Church for all Christians who followed the Faith preserved by those who followed the Bishops appointed by the Apostles. The One Church is not only those who are alive at any particular time; it cannot be broken by death, since it is joined forever to its Lord, Who destroyed the power of death. It is all Christian people of all times, in Heaven, on earth, and those who are at rest.
But Ignatius understood that this Catholic Church spread throughout the world, held in common by all Christians living and dead, had a real existence. If the Church exists at all times and in all places, it must of necessity exist at this time and in this place. The Church shows itself most perfectly at worship. Scripture tells us this is the Church’s calling in Heaven; it is her highest calling here on earth.
So for Ignatius—and for Christians keeping the same Catholic tradition and Faith Ignatius had received from the Apostles—the Church shows herself most as the Church when she gathers to offer the Eucharist. That’s the meaning of Ignatius words above: “where the bishop is, there let the people be; where Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.”
Great. What does all this have to do with Common Prayer and Anglicanism?
Quite a lot. But to see how, you’ll have to tune in next week, beloved, for Part Two of “Why Common Prayer?” Till then, I hope you have good air conditioning!—Fr Gregory Wilcox
Saturday, July 28, 2012
Saturday, July 21, 2012
Change for the Better
Regardless of where you stood during the tumult of the 1960s and the cultural erosion of the 1970s, time has passed; perhaps enough to give us a better, hopefully more mature, understanding of the events of those days. For the Church, it was a time of tumult and upheaval, too. For people like me, brought up with a love of tradition which the years have only deepened, the assault on the Church was embodied in the controversy over the ordination of women to the priesthood. We saw it as an assault on ancient Catholic Order, a denial of apostolic tradition.
Since those troubulous times, my thoughts on that topic have changed little.
Other controversies gnawed at the Church, too, but at the time they seemed less crucial. Paramount of these was the change to the Church’s liturgy. At the time it was passed off as simply an “updating” of our worship, enabling the Church to keep pace with the changes going on around us. I didn’t care much for the new rites: the language was pedestrian, the multiplicity of options (Rites One, Two or Three; Prayers A, B or C) gave off an odor of “change for change sake.” But to my way of thinking the battle was elsewhere. Banal liturgy wasn’t fatal, but you closed your eyes (and ears) and “thought of England.” (A good friend once remarked of the New Rites: “No one denies Jesus is present in the new Mass, He is. But He’s there s reluctantly as everybody else!”)
It’s thirty-five years since those days. Female bishops are now commonplace and up-to-the-minute new rites are being written everyday (with brand new liturgies now required for homosexual weddings and divorce celebrations!). The impact of the changes is not what was promised, though perhaps it is what was by some envisioned.
Today, as I ponder that time of troubles, I see things a bit differently. Yes, with the priesting of women Catholic Order was abandoned. But with the profound alteration of the liturgy an axe was driven into roots than run very deep in the psyche of Christian worship. Though the new rites retain old titles, it’s not just the language of the Book of Common Prayer, or the structure of its liturgies, which have been changed—the underlying notion of Common Prayer itself.
The Prayer Book isn’t just collection of venerable and ancient rites. It’s a purposeful gathering together of 2,000 years of Catholic worship, arranged and organized to form a group of Christians into a worshiping community. Common Prayer gives us a common faith, a common practice and a common life. We may not live up to it, but that’s why it was put together centuries ago. The tradition of Common Prayer means to form us, to change us into Jesus’ disciples, believing and doing what Christians have believed and done since the Holy Ghost came down that first Whitsunday. The new approach to things is not that we should be formed, but that we can now form and create a new faith, believing and doing what we think should be believed and done.
If somebody wants to make up a new religion, it’s their affair. But for those who want to hold the Faith which never changes, let’s not look for ways to improve it; let’s bring it to life by living Common Prayer in the parish it’s pleased God to place us. There’s a real way to change things!—Fr Gregory Wilcox
Since those troubulous times, my thoughts on that topic have changed little.
Other controversies gnawed at the Church, too, but at the time they seemed less crucial. Paramount of these was the change to the Church’s liturgy. At the time it was passed off as simply an “updating” of our worship, enabling the Church to keep pace with the changes going on around us. I didn’t care much for the new rites: the language was pedestrian, the multiplicity of options (Rites One, Two or Three; Prayers A, B or C) gave off an odor of “change for change sake.” But to my way of thinking the battle was elsewhere. Banal liturgy wasn’t fatal, but you closed your eyes (and ears) and “thought of England.” (A good friend once remarked of the New Rites: “No one denies Jesus is present in the new Mass, He is. But He’s there s reluctantly as everybody else!”)
It’s thirty-five years since those days. Female bishops are now commonplace and up-to-the-minute new rites are being written everyday (with brand new liturgies now required for homosexual weddings and divorce celebrations!). The impact of the changes is not what was promised, though perhaps it is what was by some envisioned.
Today, as I ponder that time of troubles, I see things a bit differently. Yes, with the priesting of women Catholic Order was abandoned. But with the profound alteration of the liturgy an axe was driven into roots than run very deep in the psyche of Christian worship. Though the new rites retain old titles, it’s not just the language of the Book of Common Prayer, or the structure of its liturgies, which have been changed—the underlying notion of Common Prayer itself.
The Prayer Book isn’t just collection of venerable and ancient rites. It’s a purposeful gathering together of 2,000 years of Catholic worship, arranged and organized to form a group of Christians into a worshiping community. Common Prayer gives us a common faith, a common practice and a common life. We may not live up to it, but that’s why it was put together centuries ago. The tradition of Common Prayer means to form us, to change us into Jesus’ disciples, believing and doing what Christians have believed and done since the Holy Ghost came down that first Whitsunday. The new approach to things is not that we should be formed, but that we can now form and create a new faith, believing and doing what we think should be believed and done.
If somebody wants to make up a new religion, it’s their affair. But for those who want to hold the Faith which never changes, let’s not look for ways to improve it; let’s bring it to life by living Common Prayer in the parish it’s pleased God to place us. There’s a real way to change things!—Fr Gregory Wilcox
Saturday, July 14, 2012
Divine Arithmetic
We live by the numbers. Insurance companies, government agencies and sociologists parse out our lives by percentages: take an aspirin a day and add five years to your life; eat the delicious, crispy fat on your lamb chop (God intended us to take some risks) and subtract four. Our lives are hedged in by numbers.
The Psalmist says some of us will live an allotted “threescore years and ten,” others more, others less. We buy because numbers in our bank account tell us we can; we work because the same numbers tell us we must. The digital age which now dominates our world is, I’m patiently told by those who know, is built on an endless sequencing of zeros and ones in countless orderings. Numbers are built into the fabric of creation. They’re one of God’s inventions.
God, though, is above them—outside them. “God” writes St Maximus the Confessor with wonderful theological insight, “is above arithmetic.”
It’s one of the most basic notions of Christian teaching that God is not only above arithmetic but above everything. Before He said “Let it be,” nothing existed. Part of the basic notion that God is above everything is that God is above even existence. Existence, “being,” is part of God’s creation. Because God is above existence, we can’t even say, in a theological sense, that God exists. Existing is what created things do, and He is most definitely NOT created, or part of creation.
Yesterday I had a fun conversation with a very bright, very earnest and very unconventional Protestant minister. He and I are poles apart (he began our conversation by saying he “loathes tradition,” so you can imagine we had a hard time finding much common ground), but we both obviously relish lively conversation.
He declared the Church’s teaching was fundamentally flawed with its dogma of the Trinity. “It’s a logical impossibility,” he said with an assured certainty. “You can’t have three equaling one, or vice versa. Ever since 325” he said (the date of the Council of Nicaea, which promulgated our Nicene Creed), “the Church has been teaching an absurdity.” We had a fun conversation, and he said he wants to stop by St Joseph’s to cross friendly swords again. I look forward to it, but this morning I sent him an email of a single sentence. It’s the quotation from St Maximus: “God is above arithmetic.”
For us human beings, three equaling one is a logical absurdity. God the Three-in-One, though, isn’t an arithmetic problem. We know He is Three in One because Christ our God told us so. He didn’t concern Himself with proving it, any more than we can prove God’s existence—and you can see from the above that we needn’t even bother to try. It’s not because belief in God is illogical, but because it’s above logic—above numbers—above existence. That’s the “high and holy place” where God simply Is. And incredibly, unbelievably, if we consider Who He Is and who we are, that, St Maximus further says, is where He calls us.—Fr Gregory Wilcox
The Psalmist says some of us will live an allotted “threescore years and ten,” others more, others less. We buy because numbers in our bank account tell us we can; we work because the same numbers tell us we must. The digital age which now dominates our world is, I’m patiently told by those who know, is built on an endless sequencing of zeros and ones in countless orderings. Numbers are built into the fabric of creation. They’re one of God’s inventions.
God, though, is above them—outside them. “God” writes St Maximus the Confessor with wonderful theological insight, “is above arithmetic.”
It’s one of the most basic notions of Christian teaching that God is not only above arithmetic but above everything. Before He said “Let it be,” nothing existed. Part of the basic notion that God is above everything is that God is above even existence. Existence, “being,” is part of God’s creation. Because God is above existence, we can’t even say, in a theological sense, that God exists. Existing is what created things do, and He is most definitely NOT created, or part of creation.
Yesterday I had a fun conversation with a very bright, very earnest and very unconventional Protestant minister. He and I are poles apart (he began our conversation by saying he “loathes tradition,” so you can imagine we had a hard time finding much common ground), but we both obviously relish lively conversation.
He declared the Church’s teaching was fundamentally flawed with its dogma of the Trinity. “It’s a logical impossibility,” he said with an assured certainty. “You can’t have three equaling one, or vice versa. Ever since 325” he said (the date of the Council of Nicaea, which promulgated our Nicene Creed), “the Church has been teaching an absurdity.” We had a fun conversation, and he said he wants to stop by St Joseph’s to cross friendly swords again. I look forward to it, but this morning I sent him an email of a single sentence. It’s the quotation from St Maximus: “God is above arithmetic.”
For us human beings, three equaling one is a logical absurdity. God the Three-in-One, though, isn’t an arithmetic problem. We know He is Three in One because Christ our God told us so. He didn’t concern Himself with proving it, any more than we can prove God’s existence—and you can see from the above that we needn’t even bother to try. It’s not because belief in God is illogical, but because it’s above logic—above numbers—above existence. That’s the “high and holy place” where God simply Is. And incredibly, unbelievably, if we consider Who He Is and who we are, that, St Maximus further says, is where He calls us.—Fr Gregory Wilcox
Saturday, June 30, 2012
What’s God Saying?
Genesis tells us God spoke to Adam. Before the wily serpent enticed them from friendship with God, Adam and Eve walked with Him in the Garden He made for them. The words that passed between them as they walked together were meant to be the beginning of a Communion, a “sweet converse together.” But rather than the words of his Friend, Adam chose to listen to the enticements of the snake. The friendship God created us for faltered; Adam’s hearing (and ours as a result) became garbled. God continues to speak to us, but what we hear, we often misunderstand.
God hasn’t changed. Since the beginning, His words of love and friendship for us remain the same. Since Adam munched the apple, though, our hearing has changed, and the clarity of God’s words has become muted.
Our hearing problem isn’t only with God, it’s with each other. The problem isn’t really with our ears, but with our hearts and minds.
I hear what I want. All of us do. God’s call to us is plain, but it’s not a call I particularly want to hear. At all times and in all places, He calls us to His charity, not just when we want to, not just with those we care for, but with every person, like ‘em or not. He’s calling us to be like Him, to love like Him. He means us to show His love in the ho-hum everyday circumstances of our lives.
When the Lord Jesus did this—and that’s practically all He did when He walked the dusty roads of Roman Palestine two thousand years ago—it cost Him. But He heard the Divine Voice with crystal clarity, and He passed it on to us. “You shall love the Lord with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” That’s what He did every day of His life. Every person He met, the bitterest Pharisee and the most corrupt tax-collector and the scoffing, full-of-himself know-it-all, He loved them all perfectly and fully. He loved—and loves—every human failure: each one of us who tell ourselves we’re so successful.
“God,” St John tells us, “is love.” That is the core of Christian truth, the necessary dogma of the Catholic Faith. It has nothing to do with sentimental schlock or pious emotion. At the center of everything visible and invisible is this Truth: the Father eternally loves the Son, the Son eternally loves the Father, and the Holy Ghost, the Love of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father, is their living Bond of Love. God created us, mirabile dictu, to enter into those ties of Love. That’s what salvation is. That’s your High Calling and mine.
God bothered to make us out of nothing at all, so we could come to know love and become partakers of His Love. That’s why we’re alive. It’s not to see who wins, who claws his way to the top of the human heap, who has the most stuff when he dies: we’re made to find out what love is, so we can understand what’s going in when we wake up in eternity. The language of eternity is Love—the Father’s Love for the Son, the Son’s Love for the Father, and the Holy Ghost breathing that Love into us. Love is self-giving.
Hell isn’t so much a fiery lake of bubbling magma as much as it is a state of utter, joyless incomprehension. It’s an eternity spent in the presence of Love when you don't know what Love is.
A lot of people say they wish God spoke to us now as Scripture tells us He spoke to them then. The Good News is that He does. His call to us is the same now as it was when He spoke to Adam. He still wants us to walk with Him as friends. In this fallen world, though, the Gospel choice always costs us. As we walk with Him along that narrow Way, we hear a little more clearly the Voice which is calling us. It is Love Who speaks, calling us to be who we were made to be.-Fr Gregory Wilcox
God hasn’t changed. Since the beginning, His words of love and friendship for us remain the same. Since Adam munched the apple, though, our hearing has changed, and the clarity of God’s words has become muted.
Our hearing problem isn’t only with God, it’s with each other. The problem isn’t really with our ears, but with our hearts and minds.
I hear what I want. All of us do. God’s call to us is plain, but it’s not a call I particularly want to hear. At all times and in all places, He calls us to His charity, not just when we want to, not just with those we care for, but with every person, like ‘em or not. He’s calling us to be like Him, to love like Him. He means us to show His love in the ho-hum everyday circumstances of our lives.
When the Lord Jesus did this—and that’s practically all He did when He walked the dusty roads of Roman Palestine two thousand years ago—it cost Him. But He heard the Divine Voice with crystal clarity, and He passed it on to us. “You shall love the Lord with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” That’s what He did every day of His life. Every person He met, the bitterest Pharisee and the most corrupt tax-collector and the scoffing, full-of-himself know-it-all, He loved them all perfectly and fully. He loved—and loves—every human failure: each one of us who tell ourselves we’re so successful.
“God,” St John tells us, “is love.” That is the core of Christian truth, the necessary dogma of the Catholic Faith. It has nothing to do with sentimental schlock or pious emotion. At the center of everything visible and invisible is this Truth: the Father eternally loves the Son, the Son eternally loves the Father, and the Holy Ghost, the Love of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father, is their living Bond of Love. God created us, mirabile dictu, to enter into those ties of Love. That’s what salvation is. That’s your High Calling and mine.
God bothered to make us out of nothing at all, so we could come to know love and become partakers of His Love. That’s why we’re alive. It’s not to see who wins, who claws his way to the top of the human heap, who has the most stuff when he dies: we’re made to find out what love is, so we can understand what’s going in when we wake up in eternity. The language of eternity is Love—the Father’s Love for the Son, the Son’s Love for the Father, and the Holy Ghost breathing that Love into us. Love is self-giving.
Hell isn’t so much a fiery lake of bubbling magma as much as it is a state of utter, joyless incomprehension. It’s an eternity spent in the presence of Love when you don't know what Love is.
A lot of people say they wish God spoke to us now as Scripture tells us He spoke to them then. The Good News is that He does. His call to us is the same now as it was when He spoke to Adam. He still wants us to walk with Him as friends. In this fallen world, though, the Gospel choice always costs us. As we walk with Him along that narrow Way, we hear a little more clearly the Voice which is calling us. It is Love Who speaks, calling us to be who we were made to be.-Fr Gregory Wilcox
Saturday, June 16, 2012
“Maker of Heaven and earth…”
We’re born into splendor. Whether we first see light in a ghetto or a palace, we see light.
The light we see flooding the front yard at breakfast time left the sun eight minutes earlier, rushing at 186,282 miles a second, to get here. What do we see in its light? Trees and grass, flowers and bumblebees, grazing deer and coiling snakes: the earth is pregnant with wonder. Fireflies, diamonds, moss and nosehairs: we live in a storehouse of treasures.
The Creed says God is “Maker of Heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.” We can see butterflies and waterfalls, but what about those things we can’t see, the realities our senses can’t perceive?
Over the past few centuries we’ve amassed mountains of information about the heavens and the earth. Schoolchildren memorize banal facts that would have beggared the imaginations of Galileo and Kepler. We can graft skin from the back of a cadaver to renew the burned skin of a baby. In the days of Augustus Caesar, the average person died at 28 years; today our life expectancy is 68. Within a few years, people will be vacationing in space.
Collecting facts—even coordinating them to build a car or replace a liver—doesn’t lead to wisdom. We all know the names and something of the careers of Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking, celebrated scientists, famous thinkers and dedicated atheists. They knew much more about the sun than anybody who’ll read these words, but they dismissed as naïve a belief in the Maker of the sun. They “had no need of that hypothesis,” as the French mathematician Pierre-Simon de Laplace replied to Napoleon when asked about God.
Most people wouldn’t go as far as Laplace. Most people, if asked, will say they believe in God. He’s a convenient explanation for things. We need to explain the overwhelming sense we get when we look up at the night sky spangled with stars. God fits the bill. He’s a useful hypothesis.
Over the next few centuries (assuming we don’t destroy ourselves), we’ll continue collecting facts. Facts to make Sagan and Hawking seem like Neanderthals by comparison. But the great and invisible Truths that make it all matter won’t be then—and indeed, can’t ever be—calculated by computers. They’ll never be in science books. They’re the invisible stuff of the Spirit. Here is its most profound Truth:
“And the Catholic Faith is this: that we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity.”
All wisdom, all knowledge, all facts, all life leads to us to God the Trinity or it leads us astray.
All our accumulated knowledge, every scientific discovery, every mathematical calculation advances our species. Medicine can restore lost limbs, renew sight, lengthen our lives and overcome unendurable pain. But none can answer childhood’s constant question: “why?” The answer doesn’t lie in ourselves. It doesn’t even lie in the totality of God’s creation.
The “why” to creation is completely outside creation. Sagan and Hawking and you and I will never find the answer as long as we look in the wrong place.
God made the heavens and the earth. But He is utterly outside them. He is completely different. We’re created, we exist, because He said (and still says) so. He is Uncreated. We exist in time. He does not. St Thomas Aquinas tells us the problem with even talking about God is we have to use words (they’re all we have) to say things about Him, and He’s above the ability of words to describe. No wonder there are atheists. To accept the Trinity is to accept that there is Truth above our capacities.
We’re born into splendor. The splendor around us, though, is a “preparatory” splendor. To discover wonder amidst the butterflies and bees (and scorpions and rattlers), is a necessary step in opening our eyes to the Splendor beyond the ability of our minds to comprehend and a love our hearts can never fathom. An Uncreated Heart beats at the center of all creation. For those who have eyes to see, It is the One Thing Necessary, the fountain to which all wisdom and knowledge lead, and from Whence they come.—Fr Gregory Wilcox
The light we see flooding the front yard at breakfast time left the sun eight minutes earlier, rushing at 186,282 miles a second, to get here. What do we see in its light? Trees and grass, flowers and bumblebees, grazing deer and coiling snakes: the earth is pregnant with wonder. Fireflies, diamonds, moss and nosehairs: we live in a storehouse of treasures.
The Creed says God is “Maker of Heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.” We can see butterflies and waterfalls, but what about those things we can’t see, the realities our senses can’t perceive?
Over the past few centuries we’ve amassed mountains of information about the heavens and the earth. Schoolchildren memorize banal facts that would have beggared the imaginations of Galileo and Kepler. We can graft skin from the back of a cadaver to renew the burned skin of a baby. In the days of Augustus Caesar, the average person died at 28 years; today our life expectancy is 68. Within a few years, people will be vacationing in space.
Collecting facts—even coordinating them to build a car or replace a liver—doesn’t lead to wisdom. We all know the names and something of the careers of Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking, celebrated scientists, famous thinkers and dedicated atheists. They knew much more about the sun than anybody who’ll read these words, but they dismissed as naïve a belief in the Maker of the sun. They “had no need of that hypothesis,” as the French mathematician Pierre-Simon de Laplace replied to Napoleon when asked about God.
Most people wouldn’t go as far as Laplace. Most people, if asked, will say they believe in God. He’s a convenient explanation for things. We need to explain the overwhelming sense we get when we look up at the night sky spangled with stars. God fits the bill. He’s a useful hypothesis.
Over the next few centuries (assuming we don’t destroy ourselves), we’ll continue collecting facts. Facts to make Sagan and Hawking seem like Neanderthals by comparison. But the great and invisible Truths that make it all matter won’t be then—and indeed, can’t ever be—calculated by computers. They’ll never be in science books. They’re the invisible stuff of the Spirit. Here is its most profound Truth:
“And the Catholic Faith is this: that we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity.”
All wisdom, all knowledge, all facts, all life leads to us to God the Trinity or it leads us astray.
All our accumulated knowledge, every scientific discovery, every mathematical calculation advances our species. Medicine can restore lost limbs, renew sight, lengthen our lives and overcome unendurable pain. But none can answer childhood’s constant question: “why?” The answer doesn’t lie in ourselves. It doesn’t even lie in the totality of God’s creation.
The “why” to creation is completely outside creation. Sagan and Hawking and you and I will never find the answer as long as we look in the wrong place.
God made the heavens and the earth. But He is utterly outside them. He is completely different. We’re created, we exist, because He said (and still says) so. He is Uncreated. We exist in time. He does not. St Thomas Aquinas tells us the problem with even talking about God is we have to use words (they’re all we have) to say things about Him, and He’s above the ability of words to describe. No wonder there are atheists. To accept the Trinity is to accept that there is Truth above our capacities.
We’re born into splendor. The splendor around us, though, is a “preparatory” splendor. To discover wonder amidst the butterflies and bees (and scorpions and rattlers), is a necessary step in opening our eyes to the Splendor beyond the ability of our minds to comprehend and a love our hearts can never fathom. An Uncreated Heart beats at the center of all creation. For those who have eyes to see, It is the One Thing Necessary, the fountain to which all wisdom and knowledge lead, and from Whence they come.—Fr Gregory Wilcox
Saturday, June 9, 2012
Extraordinary Time
Trinitytide, coinciding (in Texas at least) with the long, hot summer, is on us. Stretching from June to November, it’s “green”: not from ecological commitment, but ecclesiastical custom: green vestments of the clergy, green hangings on the Altar, the liturgical color traditionally representing “hope.” Trinitytide is a medieval English and French invention. Before that, those days reaching from Whitsunday till Advent were simply lumped together as tempus per annum, “time through the year.” Nowadays, with our lowest common denominator language, many call this season “Ordinary Time.”
Whether we follow Medieval English or contemporary American use, this long season seems to lack the focus of the “other” half of the Church’s Year. Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost: every child who’s gone through confirmation class knows these great seasons and what they celebrate. Trinitytide, the tempus per annum, seems to be the time of year we tread water till November reminds us Advent is coming again. It’s a time for committee meetings, clerical conferences and continuing education programs.
Nothing wrong with any of that: building committees need to meet. Maybe we’re missing something, though. I think there may be something in the treasury of the Church’s tradition we’ve overlooked for a while, and the clue to what it is lies out in the open, right in front of us, waiting to be picked up again and restored to its former use.
Trinity Sunday, the day we’ve set aside for reflection on one of the two great dogmas of the Catholic religion, comes after those cycles of celebration of the other great dogma of the faith: the Incarnation—God became one of us in Jesus Christ. From Advent through Easter we keep the feasts of that great truth. Whitsunday, the end of that cycle, is not a feast of the Incarnation—our Lord wasn’t around anymore when the Holy Ghost fell on the Apostles. He was in Heaven. Whitsunday is a feast celebrating “what are we gonna do now?” Now that God has come “for us men and our salvation,” what’s next?
When our Lord was about to ascend with His human body and soul into Heaven (taking the fullness of our humanity into glory) He told His disciples “Wait here. You’re about to be given power from on high.” They did and they were.
The power (dunamis is the Greek word; our English word “dynamite” comes from it) they were given was—and still is—the power of the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost is God’s power active in Christians today. It’s the dunamis of the Sacraments, the dunamis of prayer, the dunamis of sacrifice, the dunamis of love. The Holy Ghost is meant to be the Power of your life and mine as disciples of the Lord Jesus. The Church’s ancient calendar teaches us how to live out that dunamis.
We need times of reflection, of contemplation, retreat, times devoted to bathing in the deep waters of the Spirit. We need Advents and Lents. We need times to discover joy, to renew ourselves in the realities that answer our spiritual needs. We need Christmases and Easters. But God didn’t put us into His creation to rise, guru-like, above it. We are an integral and necessary part of God’s creation. We need Lenten discipline and Easter joy as we need Whitsun fire and dynamite.
St Leo the Great never tires of saying “Christ is born in us at Christmas. He suffers in us on Good Friday. He rises in us on Easter.” The calendar doesn’t merely recall those long-ago events, in the Liturgy it makes them active in us. That dynamite ignited by the Spirit on Whitsunday wasn’t meant to fizzle out on Trinity. Let the necessary building and finance committees meet. But Trinitytide should be the time for letting the Power of the Spirit, burning over our heads at Whitsunday, to explode like dynamite. Let’s make it so. Ask and then, like the disciples waiting to be turned into apostles, wait. The dunamis we so desperately need is not our own.—Fr Gregory Wilcox
Whether we follow Medieval English or contemporary American use, this long season seems to lack the focus of the “other” half of the Church’s Year. Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost: every child who’s gone through confirmation class knows these great seasons and what they celebrate. Trinitytide, the tempus per annum, seems to be the time of year we tread water till November reminds us Advent is coming again. It’s a time for committee meetings, clerical conferences and continuing education programs.
Nothing wrong with any of that: building committees need to meet. Maybe we’re missing something, though. I think there may be something in the treasury of the Church’s tradition we’ve overlooked for a while, and the clue to what it is lies out in the open, right in front of us, waiting to be picked up again and restored to its former use.
Trinity Sunday, the day we’ve set aside for reflection on one of the two great dogmas of the Catholic religion, comes after those cycles of celebration of the other great dogma of the faith: the Incarnation—God became one of us in Jesus Christ. From Advent through Easter we keep the feasts of that great truth. Whitsunday, the end of that cycle, is not a feast of the Incarnation—our Lord wasn’t around anymore when the Holy Ghost fell on the Apostles. He was in Heaven. Whitsunday is a feast celebrating “what are we gonna do now?” Now that God has come “for us men and our salvation,” what’s next?
When our Lord was about to ascend with His human body and soul into Heaven (taking the fullness of our humanity into glory) He told His disciples “Wait here. You’re about to be given power from on high.” They did and they were.
The power (dunamis is the Greek word; our English word “dynamite” comes from it) they were given was—and still is—the power of the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost is God’s power active in Christians today. It’s the dunamis of the Sacraments, the dunamis of prayer, the dunamis of sacrifice, the dunamis of love. The Holy Ghost is meant to be the Power of your life and mine as disciples of the Lord Jesus. The Church’s ancient calendar teaches us how to live out that dunamis.
We need times of reflection, of contemplation, retreat, times devoted to bathing in the deep waters of the Spirit. We need Advents and Lents. We need times to discover joy, to renew ourselves in the realities that answer our spiritual needs. We need Christmases and Easters. But God didn’t put us into His creation to rise, guru-like, above it. We are an integral and necessary part of God’s creation. We need Lenten discipline and Easter joy as we need Whitsun fire and dynamite.
St Leo the Great never tires of saying “Christ is born in us at Christmas. He suffers in us on Good Friday. He rises in us on Easter.” The calendar doesn’t merely recall those long-ago events, in the Liturgy it makes them active in us. That dynamite ignited by the Spirit on Whitsunday wasn’t meant to fizzle out on Trinity. Let the necessary building and finance committees meet. But Trinitytide should be the time for letting the Power of the Spirit, burning over our heads at Whitsunday, to explode like dynamite. Let’s make it so. Ask and then, like the disciples waiting to be turned into apostles, wait. The dunamis we so desperately need is not our own.—Fr Gregory Wilcox
Saturday, June 2, 2012
“…there are not three incomprehensibles nor three uncreateds…”
“Trinity Sunday,” the old adage runs, “is the one Sunday on which no clergyman should be allowed to preach!” As with every pithy saying, there’s more than a kernel of truth to this old bon mot. It’s certainly true that no one can grasp the truths it proclaims and few preachers, ancient or modern, up to the challenges it presents.
Nonetheless, in many parishes tomorrow, the stately and intricate phrases of the Athanasian Creed will be recited. Though it’s lacking in the American Book of Common Prayer, the American Church is singular among Anglicans in not printing this ancient version of the Creed in its Prayer Book. In spite of that, for generations many American parishes have sung it on this day.
In younger years, I spent Trinity Sunday engrossed in the wonderfully obscure repetitions and delightful Latinisms of the Creed. “Which Faith except everyone do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly…we worship God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons nor dividing the Substance.” And so on it rolls, if not tripping off the tongue, at least tantalizing to the mind.
And yet, if we allow ourselves to fall into its phrases we can find ourselves instructed beyond its words. Its repetitions and reiterations draw us in like a Bach fugue, the verbal interplay teaching us a Truth beyond words.
The Creeds that are our daily teachers, the Apostles’ Creed of the Office and the Nicene at the Mass, are happy anchors of our Faith. While the words are pregnant with meaning, they’re straightforward in their presentation. Not so the Athanasian. It reminds us of an essential but sometimes shaded aspect of our Faith: the Athanasian Creed helps us to hold on to essentials of the Faith by telling us not only what we do believe, but also by insisting there are things we do not believe—and even more importantly—insisting that much of the Truth about God is completely and forever beyond us.
“The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, the Holy Ghost incomprehensible…and yet there are not three incomprehensibles…but one incomprehensible.”
God, St Athanasius’ Creed ponderously but enticingly insists, is utterly beyond us. We cannot understand Him and we never will. He is, the Creed proclaims, “uncreated,” “eternal,” “incomprehensible,” “almighty”: and we are not. We never will be. Even in Heaven, we will ever remain created, contingent and limited. “He became like us,” St Athanasius says, “to make us like Him,” but not by nature—by grace. Through God’s saving acts we become like God because God recreates who we are.
The more we allow God to draw us to Himself, to renew His image and re-shape His likeness in us, the more we rest happily in the Complete Difference between He Who Is and we who are His creatures. Every sin I commit and every corruption I cherish distorts the likeness He’s planted in me. That’s why sin is so bad, demanding our contempt and combat. It keeps me from God because it convinces me, as the Serpent so long ago hissed: “Do what you want and you’ll be like God.”
The Truth of Trinity Sunday, the Truth of the Athanasian Creed, is that God does want us to be like Him. But to really enter into the Trinity Truth, we have to spend the rest of the year, day by day, embracing the Truths we recite on this day.—Fr Gregory Wilcox
Nonetheless, in many parishes tomorrow, the stately and intricate phrases of the Athanasian Creed will be recited. Though it’s lacking in the American Book of Common Prayer, the American Church is singular among Anglicans in not printing this ancient version of the Creed in its Prayer Book. In spite of that, for generations many American parishes have sung it on this day.
In younger years, I spent Trinity Sunday engrossed in the wonderfully obscure repetitions and delightful Latinisms of the Creed. “Which Faith except everyone do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly…we worship God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons nor dividing the Substance.” And so on it rolls, if not tripping off the tongue, at least tantalizing to the mind.
And yet, if we allow ourselves to fall into its phrases we can find ourselves instructed beyond its words. Its repetitions and reiterations draw us in like a Bach fugue, the verbal interplay teaching us a Truth beyond words.
The Creeds that are our daily teachers, the Apostles’ Creed of the Office and the Nicene at the Mass, are happy anchors of our Faith. While the words are pregnant with meaning, they’re straightforward in their presentation. Not so the Athanasian. It reminds us of an essential but sometimes shaded aspect of our Faith: the Athanasian Creed helps us to hold on to essentials of the Faith by telling us not only what we do believe, but also by insisting there are things we do not believe—and even more importantly—insisting that much of the Truth about God is completely and forever beyond us.
“The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, the Holy Ghost incomprehensible…and yet there are not three incomprehensibles…but one incomprehensible.”
God, St Athanasius’ Creed ponderously but enticingly insists, is utterly beyond us. We cannot understand Him and we never will. He is, the Creed proclaims, “uncreated,” “eternal,” “incomprehensible,” “almighty”: and we are not. We never will be. Even in Heaven, we will ever remain created, contingent and limited. “He became like us,” St Athanasius says, “to make us like Him,” but not by nature—by grace. Through God’s saving acts we become like God because God recreates who we are.
The more we allow God to draw us to Himself, to renew His image and re-shape His likeness in us, the more we rest happily in the Complete Difference between He Who Is and we who are His creatures. Every sin I commit and every corruption I cherish distorts the likeness He’s planted in me. That’s why sin is so bad, demanding our contempt and combat. It keeps me from God because it convinces me, as the Serpent so long ago hissed: “Do what you want and you’ll be like God.”
The Truth of Trinity Sunday, the Truth of the Athanasian Creed, is that God does want us to be like Him. But to really enter into the Trinity Truth, we have to spend the rest of the year, day by day, embracing the Truths we recite on this day.—Fr Gregory Wilcox
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