RCMP Sergeant Baltej Singh Dhillon a Proper Symbol of Canada or The Epiphany Continues to Illumine the Wastelands: Whitterings February 2011

I am pleased that with Common Worship the Church of England has claimed a ‘season’ for Epiphany. The central theme of the manifesting of the light of Christ to the world is no longer restricted to the Feast of the Epiphany but rather is continued as a theme through the Baptism of the Lord, the Calling of the Disciples, the Wedding Feast at Cana of Galilee (year C) and the Presentation of Christ in the Temple at Candlemass.

If you drop a stone in the middle of a pond the ripples move steadily outwards in all directions. The Incarnation of Christ was the central event whose ripples are still radiating outwards in time. We are still struggling to understand the full implication of the mystery of the Incarnation and so we must continue to move outwards towards new ways to understand both our fellow creatures as well as the creation itself. This means that as the Baptised we must explore the full implications of our humanity and the redemption of it. This involves a constant vigilance against labelling others as a way of deciding that we already know all we need to know about them. We need to study and learn about all of the cultures and expressions of humanity on the planet. Needless to say this is not primarily an endeavour of the mind but rather the heart. We strive to recognise Christ in one another. The wise men from the East, which are usually depicted representing the three ‘races’, are a symbolic of this.

As cliché as it might be, it is worth remembering that in the Christian world the idea that the Incarnation has given such a dignity to every human being that it is obvious that we should neither own other human beings nor trade or sell them is a relatively recent realisation. The same goes for the place of women in our society, although it is important to remember that his is still not the case in many societies of the world - many of them Christian.

Yet crude stereotyping still abounds. All of you know some dinosaur like men who remain misogynistic and think that jokes about women are still funny. I have heard gay men make anti-Semitic remark as well as repeating crude stereotypes of the Romani. The issue of modern day persecution and stereotyping (Antiziganism) of the Romani is one of the more complicated social issues in Europe and one I cannot cover here. It is worth noting, however, that Antiziganism has been rife in Europe since the 13^th century, the owning of Romani slaves in parts of Eastern Europe was only abolished in 1885, that it is estimated that one and a half million Romani were exterminated by the Germans during the Second World War, the sterilisation of Romani women in Czechoslovakia only ended in 1989, and the issue of basic human rights for the Romani is a major political issue today. The repeating of negative stereotypes about an actively persecuted people is simply dangerous. The irony of a gay man doing it is distressing. I assume most of you know that the Third Reich tried to wipe three groups of people from the face of the Earth: the Jews, the Romany, and homosexuals. The Nazis’ convinced the general population of the danger of these three groups by the use of extreme stereotyping. I would hope that if all three groups shared the same suffering in the concentration camps as well as the same fate, then we would at least feel enough solidarity to protect each other or at least refrain from repeating negative stereotypes. I said to one gay man who objected to my criticism of such stereotyping because the stereotypes were ‘true’, “sure stereotypes are not in the least bit destructive you effeminate faggity sodomite” - or at least something like it. Upon reflection I realise I should have used the label ‘predatory paedophile’.

I recently got into the old debate with a friend about Sikh RCMP Officers wearing their turbans. I want to point out that those who claim that the turban is not part of the Sikh religion but rather their cultural are incorrect. Whilst it is true that it is the wearing of uncut hair that is found as one of the Five Ks, Sikhs follow the teaching of the Ten Gurus and it was the tenth Guru Gobind Singh who directed that turbans be worn (although it was common since the sixth Guru) to protect the hair and the sacred comb – another of the five Ks.

By the beginning of WWI twenty per cent of the British Indian Army was made up of Sikhs and by the end of WWII held the highest number of Victoria Crosses awarded per capita. In 2002, the names of all Sikh VC and George Cross winners were inscribed on the pavilion monument of the Memorial Gates on Constitution Hill next to Buckingham palace. During World War I, Sikh battalions fought in Gallipoli , Egypt, Palestine, Mesopotamia, and France. Several Sikh Regiments were raised in World War II, served at El Alamein and in Burma, Italy and Iraq, and won twenty seven battle honours. Sir Winston Churchill said of them:

"British people are highly indebted and obliged to Sikhs for a long time. I know that within this century we needed their help twice and they did help us very well. As a result of their timely help, we are today able to live with honour, dignity, and independence. In the war, they fought and died for us, wearing the turbans."

General Sir Frank Messervy, GOC (General Officer Commanding) of the Indian Army said:

"In the last two world wars 83,005 turban wearing Sikh soldiers were killed and 109,045 were wounded. They all died or were wounded for the freedom of Britain and the world, and during shell fire, with no other protection but the turban, the symbol of their faith."

The rich and ancient history of the Punjab and the Rajputs aside, it seems to me that the Sikhs have more than earned the respect of the Western world (not that it should have to be earned as most students of history and world culture would have already given it). They are right to expect that their traditions would be respected and understood to be part of our history as well. It is a painful irony that for Sikhs the turban represents their commitment to the universal nature of the human family whilst for many in our society it is a sign of their ‘otherness’.

Those who argue against the allowing of Sikhs to wear a turban is that it prevents them from wearing a Stetson hat on the rare occasions RCMP officers wear their red serge dress uniform. The wearing of the Stetson seems to be seen as a crucial symbol of Canadian identity. Although the RCMP were not founded until 1920 the uniform is taken from the Royal Northwest Mounted Police founded in 1875. However the Stetson was not part of the uniform. They wore pith helmets. These helmets were considered impractical on the windy plains and so the Stetson was adopted in 1904. It seems odd to me that a hat adopted for pragmatic use about a hundred years ago, and now worn infrequently should be considered of such importance. This is especially true when the entire uniform is based on British military uniforms which were also worn by Sikhs throughout the Empire. Needless to say, I cannot see how the history and importance of the two head coverings in question are even remotely comparable.

The thing I admire most about Canada is her dedication to what is called the ‘mosaic’ model of multiculturalism as opposed to the ‘melting pot’ model used by our neighbour to the south. This is not really correct though as the Canadian way is really more ‘integration’. As Andrew Potter says in his November 8^th MacLean’s article ‘Canada has never offered a Mosaic’:

“.. the Queen’s political scientist Will Kymlicka, .... smartly observed that while Canada was not assimilating immigrants, it wasn’t offering a mosaic either. Rather, the institutions and policies we had designed were aimed at the middle path of successful integration: allowing newcomers to keep as much of their cultural traditions as possible, while providing the means for their full participation in civic life. The classic example here is the debate over the Sikh Mountie who asked for permission to wear a turban instead of the usual stetson. While the idea made assimilationists want to chew leather, they failed to understand that the whole point of permitting the turban was to integrate the Sikh community into one of Canada’s most visible and important institutions. The alternative—banning the turban—would have the perverse effect of alienating the Sikh community from the national police force, contributing to the very cultural isolation that assimilationists claim to abhor.”

Thus I was distressed to see that the Angus Reid Public Opinion Poll on ‘Mosaic or Melting Pot’ published at the beginning of November shows that support for this policy is eroding away.

“For decades, the concept of the mosaic—where cultural differences within society are deemed valuable and regarded as something that should be preserved—has been used to establish a difference between Canada and the United States. Americans consistently refer to their country as a melting pot, where immigrants assimilate and blend into society.

More than half of respondents (54%) believe Canada should be a melting pot, while one third of Canadians (33%) endorse the concept of the mosaic. The melting pot is particularly attractive for Quebecers (64%), Albertans (60%) and respondents over the age of 55. The mosaic gets its best marks among British Columbians (42%) and respondents aged 18 to 34 (47%).”

We have made huge strides in the West towards understanding one another and learning to celebrate human diversity – just look at the huge gain in the rights accorded to gay people since the Stonewall Riots of 1969 (although there is still a long way to go we too often forget how much has been accomplished in such a very short period of time). Yet there is still a long way for us to go, let alone the rest of the world. I have written at length before about the anthropology of clanism and religious fundamentalism as a response to the sudden emergence of globalisation. So it will suffice to say here that the fight to continue to educate ourselves about one another is of crucial importance at this point in our history. Canada can be a beacon of light as a successful template for how multiculturalism can really work in this rapidly changing world. I look to a Canada comfortable with her immigrant history as well as with the history of her more recent immigrants and not threatened by it. For me the sight of RCMP Sergeant Baltej Singh Dhillon in his dress uniform wearing his turban is the perfect symbol for the Canada I admire and want to see flourish. It speaks of a breadth of understanding of human culture and history and a challenge to provincialism.

The ripples of the Incarnation continue to move ever outwards as the divine light of the Kingdom of God continues to rise higher and higher shedding light on the world and her peoples. It will continue to rise until we recognise in one another the image of Him who came into the world. As Jean Vanier reminds us:

“The Word became flesh so that flesh can become Word.”

In the light of the Epiphany we are able to see clearly – all humanity (Adam’s humanity East of Eden as Saint Barnard of Clairvaux reminds us) has been sanctified. In the light of Christ there is no us and them, there is only us – those for whom he came and for whom he died.

The Empty Tomb as the New Mercy Seat of God: Whitterings, May 2010

The spirituality of the Jewish world in which Jesus lived was marked by separation. A prayer from Jesus’ day read

“Blessed is he who distinguishes between the holy and the profane, between light and darkness, between Israel and Gentiles, between the seventh day and the six working days, between water above and water below, between priest and Levite and Israelite.”

Holiness was marked by keeping the clean away from the unclean, the righteous from the sinner. Perhaps the most marked distinction was between what was alive and what was dead. The High Priest was not even allowed to acknowledge death and was forbidden to take part in the funeral rites even of his closest family.

The religious rites of the Temple were also ordered in this way with a succession of areas which one could only enter after successive levels of purification. Yet even when one kept all of the laws the presence of God was still closed off. At the very end of the Temple was the great veil or curtain that hid the Holy of Holies. Behind the veil was the Ark of the Covenant flanked by two golden Cherubim between which was the Mercy Seat of God. This was the place where the presence of God dwelt. Only one person, the High Priest, ever beheld it and then only on one day of the year, the Day of Atonement, so he could sprinkle the blood of propitiation upon the Mercy Seat. For everyone else the Mercy Seat of God was forever hidden and out of reach.

The holiness of Jesus was in marked opposition to this holiness of separation or Puritanism. He broke the Sabbath laws, did not keep the customs of ritual cleansing, associated with collaborators, with prostitutes and even let them touch Him. He touched lepers and the handicapped and even the dead. He taught us about finding Him in the sick and the imprisoned and the hungry, He taught us about gathering in the beggars from the streets to dine at the banqueting table of God. The theologian Nicholas Boyle wrote:

“The presence of what is alien, pagan, unholy, unclean at the heart of the Church is essential to its nature. When the Church finds what is unholy, then it must say ‘For this too Christ died’...In such moments the Church too must die, must swallow its pride, give up the boundary which it thought defined its existence, and discover a new and larger vocation. And that new vocation will itself be defined by a new boundary which in time the Church will also have to transcend.”

So you would assume that the Church would be the first community to recognise when it is defining itself as an ‘us’ against a ‘them’. If only it were so. Our history is one long, continual, struggle against the old purity holiness of the temple. There is always a new ‘them’. For the Anglican Communion today it is either ‘conservatives’ or ‘liberals’, ‘orthodox’ or ‘heretics’. Usually these lines are drawn because of differing understandings of human sexual orientation. There will always be some tribal, clan identity against which we will attempt to define ourselves against. The saddest part is that this type of spirituality discredits all religion and even makes it dangerous to humanity.

We should not be overly harsh with ourselves however because we evolved this way. From our earliest days we lived in small groups that were always on the lookout for the ‘other’ tribe who was out to get us. We are, after all, a particularly violent species. Even today, when we are threatened our first response in to retreat back into the clan for protection. In a world that has dramatically changed almost overnight most people feel threatened. For most of the world’s population their most primal clan identity is that of their religion. Of course this is not real religion in that true religion is not afraid and seeks to move outwards in worship to explore in faith the creation and all other creatures. Instead it is the opposite of faith – it is created out of fear. Thus this world is filled with fundamentalists whose hardness of heart too often betrays the absence of love and a fearless faith.

Father Timothy Radcliffe, the former Master of the Dominican Order (who introduced to me the concept behind this article), said in his book Why Go to Church:

“And who are the people whom we, the Church, thrust out, or at least leave hanging around on the edge, as second class citizens: the divorced and remarried, people living with partners, gay people. There must be a place for them around our altars, rejoicing in Christ’s hospitality along with everyone else. Often our Churches keep alive Old Testament understanding of holiness, separating off our communities from those who have gone astray. This may look like keeping up standards, refusing the moral relativism, but actually it is just failing to catch up with the novel holiness of Christ.”

We must keep pushing outwards to grow and be transformed like I discussed in my last column. For us as Christians this means seeking Christ in one another especially in those we find alien – the stranger and the enemy. He is seldom where we want Him to be. I never tire of reminding people that Elie Wiesel thought that if you had to choose between Christ and the Truth you must always choose the truth because if you choose Christ you are only choosing who you think He is, an idol of Him, and not who He really is. Remember the disciples did not recognise Him after He had risen. Mary Magdalene was looking for him in the tomb and did not recognise Him when He stood outside of it but rather thought He was the gardener.

At the Easter Day Mass this year most of us read the Resurrection account by St Luke:

“They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, ‘Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.’” LUKE 24:1-5

On Good Friday we read the Passion according to St Luke:

“It was now about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over the whole eland until the ninth hour, while the sun’s light failed: and the curtain of the temple was torn in two.” LUKE 23:44-45

Even more dramatic is St Mathews account:

“And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom; and the earth shook, and the rocks were split...” MATHEW 27:51

Do you see it? When Christ died the veil of the temple was ‘rent in twain’ revealing the Holy of Holies – the empty space between the two Cherubim – the Mercy Seat of God. That which had remained hidden, cut off from the people because they were not pure enough, was revealed - an empty space between two angels. God was no longer separated from His people. He was no longer to be found there.

On Easter morning a group of women, the very first people to encounter this new reality, found another empty space flanked by two angels. He was not there either.

The first painting is by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones entitled ‘Mary Magdalene and the Risen Lord’.

The second painting is by Joseph Love and is a Sumi ink drawing entitled ‘The Veil oft he Temple was Torn’.

The Questing Beast of Poor King Pellinore or The Goal is the Journey: Whitterings, April 2010

There is strange paradox in the Christian spiritual journey that all too often escapes us simply because it is so obvious. It is simply this: it is the journey which matters in life not the arriving. The end of the Christian journey is not part of human life but rather belongs to the realm that follows afterwards. St Thomas Aquinas tried to remind us of this repeatedly. He tells us that “God is a verb not a noun”, that we experience Christ not so much as risen but rising (homo resurgens), and one of his brethren tells us “God is not the answer he is the question”.

In our Baptismal liturgy we envision this Christian goal by paraphrasing the words of St Paul to the Ephesians: “to grow Into the Full Stature of Christ”. The Prophet Isaiah tells us to “Enlarge the place of your tent, and let the curtains of your habitations be stretched out: hold not back, lengthen your cords”. Isaiah 54.2 This growth means we must always be journeying, never cease from exploration, and when we stop then we must turn again ‘repent’ and start moving once more.

“The passion of faith lies not in testifying to an eternal happiness but in transforming one’s own existence into a testimony to it.” Soren Kierkegaard

“It is no good for us to bow and scrape before God in words and phrases and in such activities as building churches and binding Bibles in velvet. God has a particular language for addressing him – the language of action, the transformation of the mind, the course of one’s life.” Soren Kierkegaard

In the Letter to the Philippians Paul tells us “Brethren, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind, and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” Philippians 3:13-14 Here he reminds us of another aspect of the journey we sometimes forget, that it is not the past which is important but the present. To put it another way, it is more important where we are not where we came from. What is important about our past in the present moment is how we interpret it, what meaning we find in it, and how we tells our own story interpreted through the lens of the great narrative of salvation. Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote in the epitaph to his autobiography “Life is not about what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.” Let me give you an example by way of a juxtaposition. On YouTube you can find a video called ‘Spoilt Brat’ which shows the reaction of a sixteen year old girl throwing an angry tantrum, shouting at her father and crying because the expensive new sports car her parents had bought her for her birthday was red and not blue. What is much worse, in my mind, is the video she posted to ‘explain’ why she really needed a blue car to match her clothes and eyes and why she felt her parents were insensitive to her needs. Now here is a story told by Father Timothy Radcliffe OP, Former Master of the Dominicans, in his book Why Go to Church.

“In the summer of 2007, I visited the poorest and most violent barrio in Bogota, Columbia, where our Dominican students go every weekend, helping to establish a Christian community. The co-ordinator of the parish, Maria, lives in a primitive shed, hardly more than a few sheets of zinc resting against the face of a rock. She welcomed us with water. Most movingly she shared her vast gratitude for the blessings of her life, for her grandchildren, her home, her food. She is one of God’s good friends.”

So which of these women is hard done by? The answer lies in their own perception of their life and how they share that story of their life with others.

The distinctive Christian grace for this lifelong journey is hope. It is what keeps us on the path. Paul says: “For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” Roman 8: 24-25 In the Letter to the Ephesians he hopes for us “Having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints.”Ephesians 1:17-18. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews tells us: “we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to seize the hope set before us. We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters the inner shrine behind the curtain.” Hebrews 6:18-19; and “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Hebrews 11:1

This constant journeying is that which, paradoxically, leads to peace and not the sitting still as we would imagine. Like the Trinity itself, the oneness of God lies not in His eternal immutability as a static being but rather in His Trinitarian Nature of constant movement. The paradox is that the discipline of discipleship is not about strengthening the will to fight and to prevail by purity of mind and body, the old heresy of Pelagianism, but rather the opposite – to surrender. It is in vulnerability, need and asking that we are able to receive grace which alone enables us to keep our feet on the path.

The point I am trying to make is that the Christian spiritual journey is about constantly growing up in the faith and moving out of ourselves into connection with the wider creation. To do this one must be in the present and not see our past as an unchanging reality but as part of the present spiritual practice of redemption in how we redeem the narrative of our lives. The chief focus for this journey is hope. Finally I contend that surrender of the will is what is necessary to allow grace into ones journey.
In the 1989 Parenthood, Helen Shaw plays an elderly grandmother. At the end of film when the obsessive compulsive father of the family is stressed to the breaking point due to his inability to control and protect his family from life’s disappointments his grandmother comments to him:

“You know when I was 19 grandpa took me on a rollercoaster. Up, down, up down, oh what a ride. I always wanted to go again. You know it was just interesting to me that a ride could make me so frightened, so scared, so sick, so excited and so thrilled all together. Some didn’t like it. They went on the merry go round. That just goes around. Nothing. I like the roller coaster. You get more out of it.”

It is only at this moment that he is able to let go of the control and surrender into the messiness of being part of a family, being part of life.

The Questing Beast, also called the Beste Glatisant, is a mythical creature that appears in the Arthurian Legends of the middle ages. In French, it appears in three thirteenth-century texts : the Prose Tristan, Perlesvaus, and the Post-Vulgate cycle. In English, it appears in Malory’s fifteenth-century Morte D'Arthur. In both Malory and the Post-Vulgate, the noise it produces is similarly described as "lyke unto the questyng of thirty coupyl houndes, but all the whyle the beest dranke there was no noyse in the bestes bealy" Malory 42. In French and Middle English its name is a pun as the Middle English verb questen means to bark.

Many interpretations have been put forward to describe what the Questing Beast symbolises in the Arthurian legends. In Perceval the beast represents Christ hounded by the twelve tribes of Israel, while in Malory, Alexander Bruce suggests that when the Questing Beast appears it "symbolizes that a relationship between people is not right, that two elements which should have remained separate have been mixed, and that chaos will result from the unnatural situation at hand". Sir Palomydes, the knight who describes himself as "the knyght that folowyth the Glatysaunte Beste", seeks the beast rather than the Holy Grail perhaps because he was both a Saracen and a knight and thus of a mixed nature. Kara L. McShane says “Catherine Batt has suggested that the Questing Beast does not have a clearly defined function in Malory's narrative, but rather, it is ‘a series of signifiers without the satisfaction of ultimately recovering an intelligible meaning’. Malory describes the Questing Beast as ‘a full wondirfull beyste and a grete sygnyfycasion; for Merlyon propheseyed muche of that byeste’. However, Batt points out that its importance is never really explained in Malory's work as it is in the Post-Vulgate cycle. Merlin's prophecies about the Questing Beast are never mentioned again, and its great meaning is never made explicit. In effect, the Questing Beast invites interpretation while evading explanation; thought critics pursue its meaning, no consensus on the creature has been reached.”

However the reimagining of the Questing Beast by T.H. White in The Once and Future King is the story that speaks to me the most. In White’s version the Questing Best is pursued by King Pellinore his whole adult life, as it has been by all of the Pellinore’s before him (one wonders what state their Kingdom must be if the King is always away and how they held onto the throne!). He quested after the beast alone in the wild, sleeping out under the stars and living a life of constant movement. One day he is persuaded to stop for a while and rest by his friend Sir Grummore by the latter’s appealing to the King’s lifelong desire to sleep on a feather bed. Immersed in a life of luxury, King Pellinore soon loses the drive for the quest and settles into a life of comfort at Sir Grummore’s castle.

Many months later the King stumbles across the dying Beast whilst out hunting in the woods with his friends and comes to himself. I say ‘comes to himself’ as those are the words St Luke uses to describe what happens to the Prodigal Son while he is feeding swine in ‘a distant country’. In other words - he remembers who he is.

“The spectacle which they came across was one for which they were not prepared. In the middle of a dead gorse bush King Pellinore was sitting, with tears streaming down his face. In his lap there was an enormous snake’s head, which he was patting. ‘There, there’, the King was saying. ‘I did not mean to leave you altogether. It was only because I wanted to sleep in a feather bed, just for a bit.’ ‘Poor creature’, said King Pellinore indignantly. ‘It has, pined away, positively pined away, just because there was nobody left to take an interest in it. How I could have stayed all that while with Sir Grummore and never given my old Beast a thought I really don’t know. Look at its ribs, I ask you. Like the hoops of a barrel. And lying out in the snow all by itself, almost without the will to live.’ ‘I happened on it in this gorse bush here, with snow all over its poor back and tears in its eyes and nobody to care for it in the wide world. It’s what comes of not leading a regular life. Before it was all right. We got up at the same time, and quested for regular hours, and went to bed at half past ten. Now look at it. It has gone to pieces all together, and it will be your fault if it dies. You and your bed.’”

After giving the Beast wine and bread The King insists that the hunting party tie the Beast to a pole to transport it back to the castle to be warmed by the fire and fed and nurtured back into health. The King himself tended it until they were both ready to begin the quest anew.

“The questing Beast having revived under the influence of kindliness and bread and milk had bounded off into the snow with every sign of gratitude, to be followed two hours later by the excited King, and the watchers from the battlements had observed it confusing its snowy footprints most ingeniously, as it reached the edge of the chase. It was running backwards, bounding twenty foot sideways, rubbing out its marks with its tail, climbing along horizontal branches, and performing many other tricks with evident enjoyment. They had also seen King Pellinore – who had dutifully kept his eyes shut and counted to ten thousand while this was going on – becoming quite confused when he arrived at a difficult spot, and finally galloping off in the wrong direction with his brachet (hunting hound) behind him.” T.H. White, The Once and Future King, Page 152 & 154

White makes it clear that the relationship between the pursuer and the object of his pursuit is quite intimate and that their lives are intertwined. When the King gives up the quest he not only forgot who he is but actually wounded the Beast by taking away how it defined itself. Both lost their identity. The Beast needs the King to pay attention to it as much as the King needs the Beast to give meaning to his life. The danger in this story is nothing more sinister than the comfort of sleeping indoors on a feather bed. Yet it represents the comfort of the world which causes us to forget what our purpose is, what we are seeking, what we hope for, and that we are still on a journey and cannot stop for too long in one place (spiritually speaking). Or to be more precise, we can forget Who we are seeking. It has been cogently argued that all Christian practice is simply myriad ways to keep reminding ourselves over and over again, every Sunday, and several times a day of who we really are – Children of God and all that that entails.

“There is a preying creature, known for its cunning that slyly falls upon the sleeping. While sucking blood from its sleeping prey, it fans and cools him, making his sleep still more pleasant. This is how it is with habit – or maybe it is even worse! For the vampire seeks its prey among the sleeping, but it has no means to lull to sleep those who are awake. Habit, however, is quite adept at doing this. It slinks, sleep-lulling, upon a person, and then drains his blood while it coolingly fans him and makes his sleep all the more pleasant.” Soren Kierkegaard

The Author of the Letter to the Hebrews would argue that too much comfort can actually cripple us. If someone who has stopped journeying and has sunk down into comfort then they must ‘wake up’ and get moving again or things will only get worse.

“For the Moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant; later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but healed.” Hebrews 12: 12-13

We change because we quest and it is the pursuit that makes us who we are. It is the hope of who we pursue that gives our lives meaning. It is in having this great goal and purpose that gives us our peace.

“To venture the truth is what gives human life and the human situation pith and meaning. To venture is the fountainhead of inspiration. Calculating is the sworn enemy of enthusiasm, the mirage whereby the earthly person drags out time and keeps the eternal away, whereby one cheats God, himself, and his generation.” Soren Kierkegaard

As Christians quest after the truth then they and the truth come ever closer together like two travellers walking towards one another on a country road. We are made in the image and likeness of God. So unlike the story of King Pelenore and the Questing Beast, we hope that our story will end in our becoming like unto our goal. As St Paul tells us in the Letter to the Galatians “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me”. Galatians 2: 20

“Seeking the truth means that the seeker himself is changed, so that he may become the place where the object of his search can be.” Soren Kierkegaard

First Painting by Arthur Rackham (1867-1939). "The Questing Beast." From: Pollard, Alfred W. The Romance of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, Abridged from Malory's Morte D'Arthur. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1917. P. 220 facing.

Second Painting: Unknown.

Third Painting by Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898), "How King Arthur Saw the Questing Beast and Thereof Had Great Marvel" from: Malory, Sir Thomas. The Birth Life and Acts of King Arthur, of His Noble Knights of the Round Table, Their Marvellous Enquests and Adventures, the Achieving of the San Greal and in the End Le Morte Darthur with the Dolourous Death and Departing out of This World of Them All. London: Dent, 1893.

Fourth Drawing by T.H. White (1906-1964) from his Book The once and Future King, published in 1958.

Little Gidding and the Father Founders of the Oratory of the Good Shepherd: Whitterings, January 2010

If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places
Which also are the world's end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.

If you turn onto the old, rutted, one track roads in the isolated western part of Cambridgeshire, called Huntingdonshire, you will probably get lost fairly quickly. If you are lucky enough to find yourself on the desolate Old Western Road and head north you will come across the small hamlets of Steeple Gidding, Great Gidding, and if you are very lucky you will find Little Gidding and the small farm lane that leads through the fields to dead-end at the 12^th century church of St John’s -‘The World’s End’. There is really no hamlet left since the Great Plague wiped out the inhabitants in 1348 and the Parliamentarians wiped out the resettled community in 1646. There is not much to look at. Just a very small church with no particular attributes, the ‘Dull Facade’ referred to by Eliot, at least not physically. Spiritually it is a place of enormous power and of great importance in the history of the human heart.

Here in 1625, Nicholas Ferrar resigned from Parliament and settled with his extended family to found the first religious community since the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII in 1536. The Ferrar family set up residence in the old manor house and restored the abandoned church. Archbishop William Laud Ordained Nicholas to the Diaconate the same year. The community Read the Daily Offices from the Book of Common Prayer including a daily recitation of the entire Book of Psalms. They also kept a continual vigil of prayer in the sanctuary. They wrote books and stories of a spiritual nature, fasted regularly, and kept a life of poverty so as to be as free as possible financially to give to the poor. They spent their days in good works in the wider community teaching the children, caring for the sick and infirm, and visiting the old and vulnerable. King Charles I was so inspired by the religious zeal of the community that he visited it twice. The last time he was fleeing there for refuge after his defeat at the Battle of Naseby towards the end of the English Civil War: ‘If you came at night like a broken king’. Nicholas Ferrar died in 1637 and was buried in a tomb immediately in front of the church, Eliot’s ‘Tombstone’. His community continued however until the Puritan Parliamentarians under the rule of the Regicide denounced it as ‘an Arminian nunnery’ and forcibly dissolved it in 1646.

Although the community did not last long it set an example of what an Anglican Religious Community could look like. It was open, family orientated, and spiritually centred on the Book of Common Prayer. They were held together by the bonds of friendship and family and did not require formal vows. In 1913 during one of their yearly retreats to Little Gidding the Father Founders drew up the constitution of, and formally founded the Oratory of the Good Shepherd. They took Blessed Nicholas Ferrar as their patron. Years later the Oratory would found a parish church in Cambridge in honour of him.

Over the church door at Little Gidding is the quote taken out of the mouth of Jacob after he wakes from his dream about the angels ascending and descending the ladder from heaven:

“This is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” Genesis 28.17

As Eliot rightly points out, Little Gidding is a thin place that reminds you that the Peace of God is accessible everywhere and at all times. Even though wars may be raging there is still a peace that runs in eternity underneath of time. Eliot himself was trying to write in London during the air raids of the WWII and only broke his writers block by visiting Little Gidding. In places like Little Gidding that have been hollowed with prayer it is easier to remember to kneel down, open your heart to God, and let go. When one does then anywhere can literally become the ‘Gate of Heaven’. Then all falls into place “and what you thought you came for is only a shell, a husk of meaning”. We must remember with humility, that this is the chief purpose of our churches, to remind us of God. When we are able to pray deeply then each one of our parish churches becomes ‘The House of God’.

As one leaves the church one passes underneath the stained glass window that holds within a simple blue circle the dying words of Nicholas Ferrar to his brother John:

“It is the right good old way you are in. Keep in it.”

Soeteriological Efficacy is the key to knowing on this side, or more simply put, you shall know a tree by the fruit it produces. Nicholas Ferrar and the community of Little Gidding showed that at the heart of the Book of Common Prayer was a path of holiness that united prayer and good works, holiness of life and love for humanity. They proved that the Anglican path led somewhere, that the tree could produce the fruits of the Spirit. There were good reasons the Father Founders of the Oratory looked to Little Gidding as their spiritual home and their inspiration. Little Gidding gave encouragement and hope that the Religious Life in the Church of England could once again take root, sprout, and bear the fruit of the Catholic Faith.

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

Quotes from ‘Little Gidding’, The Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot, 1942.

The Feast Day for Nicholas Ferrar, Deacon, in the Anglican Church of Canada is December 4^th.

The Feast Day for William Laud, Archbishop & Martyr, in the Anglican Church of Canada is January 10^th.

The Feast Day for Charles Stuart, King & Martyr, in the Anglican Church of Canada is January 30^th.

The Unuttered Prayer: Whitterings, December 2009

I recently had an e-mail correspondence about prayer with Gordon Livingston, the famous American psychiatrist and author of the bestselling books Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart and Never Stop Dancing. We were discussing the pastoral damage which is caused by unreflective ways of talking about the effects of prayer.

There are several types of prayer: worship or praise, repentance, contemplation, thanksgiving and intercession. We were only discussing intercessory or petitionary prayer. Intercessory prayer is the natural response that comes from our loving people. Love is primarily seen in this world by the act of paying attention to one another. The love of God was shown to us because he came to live among us, to spend time with us. We pray for people because we are paying attention to them and spend time on them. This type of prayer expands our minds and our hearts beyond our normal selfish focus and reminds us that all human beings are our brothers and sisters. We pray especially for those who are sick or in need (we are also supposed to pray for our enemies although I seldom hear this in church). We want what is best for them so as an act of love we hold them up to God and pray that His will be done. I have spoken at length in previous columns about the idea that prayer without action is only half a prayer and lacks the incarnational aspect of Christianity. The effect of the individual and the community paying attention to those in need can be mighty and powerful. It can change the world. It is only when we pay attention to something or someone that we are able to then act as agents of Christ in the world.

Unfortunately we often speak recklessly of the effects of such prayers. When people recover from extreme illnesses or have miraculous healings (the effects of prayer on the body’s immune system have been well documented by science) we often claim they have been healed because we have prayed for them or because God has taken a particular action because of our prayer. This is true in the way I have already described, but this is seldom what people mean.

I recently receive an e-mail from a protestant minister in British Columbia whom I know whose son had been in a terrible car accident. He wrote to his congregation and friends that he was thankful that God had heard his prayers and saved his son. He claimed that his son’s survival was a sign that God loved him, had a plan for him and would always protect him. He said that God had intervened and slowed the impact of the car and kept him alive at the hospital. Although I felt for this minister in his time of fear and stress I was also horrified by the theology he used when communicating with his people. Over 44 thousand people are killed in automobile accidents in North America every year. My first thought was what will this minister say when the child of one of his parishioners in killed in a car accident? He has already said publicly that God intervened in the case of his own son and slowed the impact of the car. He already said that God responded to his prayers and ensured his son did not die after the accident. He also said that this was because God loved his son and had a plan for him and would protect him. It follows that for the 44 thousand who did die God intentionally did not intervene, did not heed the prayers of the family and friends of the victims, did not love them, and did not have a plan for them and would not protect them . I certainly would not want to hear that funeral sermon! I also wonder what would happen to this man’s faith if his son had another accident and did die. Of course this minister would be horrified if someone though he believed all this. He just did not think out the implications of his original statement.

To be blunt about it, do you really think that God does not love or take pity on the innocent children who are victimised, abused and killed in this world? Is his heart not moved by the lonely cries of a frightened and dying child? Did he not hear the cries of those in the Death Camps of the third reich? Did they just not know how to pray properly? Is he really so arbitrary that he will intervene and save one person from cancer and leave the next door neighbour to suffer and die of the same disease? If any of these things were true about God then I would refuse to worship Him.

I do not think that most people who attribute divine intervention to petitionary prayer are aware of the ‘other side’ of their prayer. Again they just have not though through the implications. However some intercessory prayers are just obscene, especially when coupled with patriotism. Dr Livingston, in his book And Never Stop Dancing, spoke about his experience of the Chaplains in Vietnam.

“It was customary to close each evening’s briefings with a prayer. One night, our commanding office, Col. George S. Patton III, turned to the chaplain and asked him, ‘What shall we pray for tonight, Chaplain? How about a big body count?’ The chaplain obliged as follows: ‘Help us, O Lord, to fulfil the standing order of the regiment. Let us find the bastards, then pile on.’”

Mark Twain wrote a beautiful short piece about the ‘other side of prayer’ in his work The War Prayer. In it he describes the patriotic gathering of a new battalion and the town from which they were raised in the village church to be blessed before going off to war. The preacher offers up a passionate prayer for the victory of the troops and the whole congregation gets carried away in his patriotic fervour and eloquence. Then a stranger in a white robe silently enters the church and moves to the pulpit where he gently nudges the preacher aside. He then speaks:

From ‘The War Prayer’, by Mark Twain

"I come from the Throne - bearing a message from Almighty God!" The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. "He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such shall be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import - that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of - except he pause and think.

"God's servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two - one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this - keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

"You have heard your servant's prayer - the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it - that part which the pastor - and also you in your hearts - fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: 'Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!' That is sufficient. The whole of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory-must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle - be Thou near them! With them - in spirit - we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it - for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen. (After a pause) "Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!"

It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.

Twain apparently dictated this around 1904-05; it was rejected by his publisher, and was found after his death among his unpublished manuscripts. It was first published in 1923 in Albert Bigelow Paine's anthology, Europe and Elsewhere. The story is in response to a particular war, namely the Philippine-American War of 1899-1902, which Twain opposed.

A moving but graphic animation of this story may be found on YouTube.

PART ONE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJsZCpp8hR4

PART TWO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsoJ-WJZGXM&feature=related

The Man of Sorrows, William Dyce, 1860, National Galleries of Scotland

The Outward Sign of the Ministers of God: Whitterings November 2009

I have put off writing about clerical attire for almost five years and feel, in the light of the sexual scandal of Bishop Lahey, it is now appropriate to throw in my two cents worth. In our modern, secular culture, especially in Quebec, it has become rarer and rarer to find priests wearing clerical collars. I find this disturbing for theological reasons. Before I wade in too deeply I want to clarify that my position is not about clerical collars per se but about a recognisable uniform for the clergy. In France priests do not normally wear collars but have adopted a particular form of dress that is easily identified in their culture. The Orthodox still wear full cassocks as their uniform and do not rely on a clerical collar as much as the western clergy. If there was another easily identifiable clerical uniform besides the clerical collar I would be more than happy with it. However, I am unaware of anything that is as easily identifiable as the collar and so I confine my position to its use.

Ordination, as a sacrament of the church, is a sign of God’s grace to the world. The clergy are the gift of God for the people of God. They are a sign of God’s love and presence in the world. I was taught that I did not have the right to hide this because of personal preference.

“When you wear a clerical collar is says to people that the Kingdom of God is open for business.”

Theologically, the outward and visible sign of ordination is the laying on of hands. Pragmatically, the collar is the outward and visible sign of the ordained. A uniform has many obvious benefits. The first is that uniforms do not imply a particular class. Someone in a uniform, such as a police officer, can interact with people from all socio-economic and educational backgrounds. A priest who wears secular clothes is immediately identifiable as belonging to one particular group with all of that group’s values visibly implied. In our culture this is usually middle class. This limits the practice of ministry.

I am reminded of the joke about the young nun in New York City who was walking home late to her Convent. It was after Vatican II and she was dressed in normal secular clothes. A strange man began to follow her through the deserted streets. She became more and more frightened until at last, with great relief, she spotted a policeman. She ran up to him and said” Officer, I am Sister Martha from St Agnes’s Convent and there is a man following me, I need help!” The policeman stared at her for a few seconds before responding “And tell me, Sister, how did you know I was a policeman?”

The second is that it makes the clergy easily identifiable in an emergency. When the shooting happened at Dawson College there were clergy present. However, only a couple were wearing collars and were thus immediately identifiable. Although other clergy were still there no one recognised them as such and so they were unable to provide much ministry to those who were afraid and traumatised. For all practical purposes they might as well have not been there.

I remember one evening when walking back to the Rectory after Mass in my habit I was passed by an angry looking biker who glared at me rather pointedly. As I approached the Rectory gates I noticed that he had pulled over on the side of the road and was staring back at me. I hurried my gate but was unable to reach my door before he had roared up the driveway on his motorcycle, jumped off and rapidly approached me. He was a large, tattooed, leather clad rough looking young man. I thought I was in for it and imagined he had had some sort of horrific experience with a priest when younger and now I was the one who was going to pay for it. He almost yelled at me “Are you a real priest!?” When I said that I was, he stared at me and then began to cry uncontrollably to the point of actually falling on his knees. After bringing him in, letting him cry, and trying to comfort him he told me what was going on. He was a heroin addict and had been in prison for several years. When he got out he had gone clean and tried to maintain his relationship with his former girlfriend. Things had not gone well and only an hour before she had finally left him. When he passed me on the road he was on his way to buy heroin with the purpose of overdosing. That is when he saw me on the sidewalk. He, of course, did not see ‘me’ he simply saw a priest and something deep inside of him knew that it meant something. I saw that man several more times over the next two years as he stopped off for a few minutes at the Rectory when he was in the region. I have a note that he left in my door one day that says “Thank God I saw you. You saved my life.” He is right; God saved his life that day by using one of his priests as a sign that there is still hope in the world. If I had not been in my habit or in a clerical collar he might very well have died that night.

The ordained ministry is a lifelong vocation. It is not an identity you can take on and off like changing in and out of your McDonald’s work uniform; ‘I am now on duty and now I am off duty’. We are all aware of the creeping tide of professionalism amongst the clergy: the 9-5 job with office hours; and answering messages that do not give emergency home numbers for off hour pastoral needs. I see the lack of wearing the uniform when not ‘on duty’ as another sign of this alien professionalism.

“You are not your own for you have been bought with a price” 1 Corn.6:19-20

Some seem to think that clerics that wear the uniform take themselves too seriously. I would argue that the opposite is actually the case. The uniform takes the pressure off of your own unique personality and allows you to be seen as belonging to something larger than yourself. This is hardly taking yourself too seriously. Those who rely on their own personal charisma for ministry are the ones in danger of putting too much emphasis on themselves instead of God. After the sacrament of marriage people happily wear their wedding bands to show their sacramental status in the world. The collar is simply the clerics’ wedding band (albeit a neck is a little more prominent than a finger).

There are several other reasons that a clerical collar is useful. It helps remind the actual cleric that they are always on duty and held to a high moral standard. One is less likely to get drunk in a bar while dressed in clericals. The wearing of a clerical collar is also a perpetual vocations advertisement. It reminds people, who otherwise tend to forget, that the church is still here and that ordained ministry is always a possible vocation. Most of all, every time someone sees a cleric in a uniform, they are reminded that the church remains here in the midst of life, whatever connotation that has for them. For many it will simply remind them of God. Is that not a good definition of a priest: one who by their life points beyond themselves to God?

Wearing a collar does forfeit a cleric’s anonymity and this can be uncomfortable. My own experience has been that some of the best conversations in pubs, airplanes, and waiting rooms have come about because of the collar. I can count on two hands the number of times I have been spit at or harassed. These incidents pale in comparison to what seems to still be seen as a positive or at least mysterious association with clerical life. I am not convinced that the public associates us all with deviance as much as many of the clergy fear they do.

I also understand why in today’s culture the clergy are reluctant to be associated with the public’s views of the priesthood. We live in an age of anticlericalism mostly derived from the sexual abuse scandals in the church. In Quebec the association of the clerical collar with the theocratic rule of the Roman Church is equally as palpable. If a priest is a sign of the love of God in the world and of His care and protection then a priest should be the safest person in a community. The priest is the one who should go out of their way to protect the weak and give a voice to the voiceless. So the idea of sexual abuse of a vulnerable child by a priest is one of the most horrific disconnects I can imagine. I understand why these cases have shaken the society’s trust in priests to the very core.

However, we must be honest about what is actually going on. The sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church and the Residential Schools Scandal has been rightfully traumatic and scandalous. Yet the deep emotions associated with this abuse have seriously distorted the image of priests in western culture. The John Jay report, the in-depth report on the sexual abuse allegations in the United States, gives actual numbers and details about the trend. Although the numbers of those abused in the US over a 52 year period were high at 6,700 allegations against 4392 priests, the percentage of the 109,694 priests serving during the time was 4%. All the cases in the Roman Catholic Church throughout the world were just less than 5000 with over 500,000 priests serving. The priests accused were less than 1%. It also became clear that the sexual abuse scandals began to rise in the 1960s, peaked in the 1970s, declined in the 1980s and returned to 1950s levels in the 1990s. It turned out that the sexual predation on children (under 10 years of age) was 22% and older adolescents was 78%. The persistent claim is that most of the victims were 15-17 years of age. Although sexual contact with 15-17 year olds is sexual abuse and predation it is not the same as actual paedophilia as defined by psychology. 70% of all the abusive clergy were educated pre Vatican II. The Roman Catholic Church in Canada has had less than 20 priests accused of sexual abuse against the young. Unfortunately, although the Anglican Church of Australia has provided a comprehensive report on the issue the Anglican Church of Canada has not. I have begun enquiries with the national church to address this lack of statistics.

I pass these statistics along not in any way to minimise the horror of what has occurred but rather to emphasise that the number of priests who have brought the entire ministry into disrepute and subjected it to mistrust is infinitesimally low. Although the media has used the scandal to make all priests suspect it does not do so in other fields. In the US 4392 out of 109,694 Roman priests were found to have molested youth over a 52 year period. In contrast 2570 out of 3 million teachers (almost 1%) were found to have done the same things but only over a 5 year period. Yet there is no huge public outcry against teachers and fear about sending children to school. Merited cases of police brutality in the United States for 2002 were 2000. Considering that there are about 800,000 police officers in the US, the percentage of officers charged is as low as 0.25%. Yet public opinion and media coverage on police brutality in the US is hardly in keeping with the reality.

My point is that I choose to associate the priesthood with the 105,302 priests who were NOT child abusers instead of the 4392 who were. If we allow the criminal and blasphemous actions of these men to completely undermine the high nature of the priesthood so that we are embarrassed and afraid to be seen as priests then we have made a serious mistake. I believe it is even more important that the clergy wear the uniform today so that we can witness by our actions that the church is still at work in the world and that priests are still agents of God’s love and reconciliation in a fallen world. If we desert the field how will people learn that most priests are compassionate representatives of a Gracious God? Surely the witness and good work of the 99% can provide damage control for the 1% that betrayed their calling and those they abused. This is especially true if the main generation that is responsible for this scandal is passing away.

Having said that, I ask your prayers for those of us who have given our whole lives to God in this public way and now find ourselves the object of fear and distrust. We will live through this, but in the meantime it takes courage to be exposed to the public on a daily basis. Although we do not risk our lives, as many of our colleagues throughout the world do, it is still our duty to witness to the honour of the ordained life and the goodness of the Church by courageously continuing to wear the collar around our necks.

Deification or The 'Firstfruits of His creatures’: Whitterings, October 2009

As improbable as it may sound, I believe I may have discovered a new interpretation of the doctrine of the Dormition, or Assumption, of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I have investigated widely, and have not found a similar commentary in either Roman Catholic, Orthodox or Anglican writings.

First let’s being with the background; the Feast of the Dormition, which means the ‘The Falling Asleep’, of the BVM is the title used for the doctrine by the Orthodox and Anglicans while the Roman Catholics refer to it as the Assumption. The ancient tradition states that the BVM at her death was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory. The feast has been celebrated since the 5^th century. The Emperor Maurice (539-602) finally confirmed August the 15^th as the set date for the feast in the 6^th century. The doctrine was first formulated in the West by St Gregory of Tours (d. 594). In the East a passage by Dionysius the Pseudo Areopagagite (c. 500) was taken by St Andrew of Crete (d. 740) to confirm the teaching. The doctrine was first upheld by St Augustine (354-430) and later defended by St Albertus Magnus (d. 1280), St Thomas Aquinas (c.1225-74) and St Bonaventure (c. 1217-74).

The Church of England dropped the feast in the first Prayer Book in 1549 but restored it in 1928 and it is currently in the Calendar of Common Worship. The Scottish Episcopal Church kept the feast. The Canadian Church contains the feast in the Book of Common Prayer as ‘The Falling Asleep of the BVM” and in the BAS it is kept as the principal Marian Feast but as just ‘The BVM’. The Orthodox, along with the Anglicans, consider the doctrine to be an aspect of traditional piety. In neither church is the doctrine precisely defined.

In the Roman Catholic Church the doctrine of the Assumption became a formal doctrine in 1950.With all due respect to my Roman Catholic brothers and sisters, I am uncomfortable with the formal RC doctrine of the Assumption. My discomfort has more with the focus of the theological underpinnings of the doctrine than with the doctrine itself. The language used seems very ‘scientific’ and focuses on the ontological status of the BVM rather than on the personal spiritual significance of that status. For example, a RC argument for the doctrine states that as the BVM was immaculately conceived then she was not tainted with original sin and thus she did not have to suffer death as death is the direct result of original sin. Another argument is that as the BVM stood at the foot of the Cross at Our Lord’s Passion then, and as she loved him so much as she was his mother, then she partook in his death and thus did not have to die a bodily death herself. Very logical, but very A Priori (A fact proved within a closed system by reference to other facts with the same system, from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason published in 1781). There is little reference to how this effects us except that as the BVM did not have to die and undergo judgement she has already entered into glory and thus her intercessions for us are more powerful than any other Saint.

My position takes as its starting point the significance of the Dormition for individual Christians. What does it say to us? What is it a sign ‘of’? To understand my position, one more piece of the puzzle needs to be added. This is the doctrine of Deification. Deification is the normative term for the transforming effect of Grace on the Christian soul. The term was used primarily by the Greek Fathers (Patrisitcs) and in Eastern Orthodox liturgy. The scriptural evidence is found in the Second Letter of St Peter, Chapter 1, verse 4:

“that you may be partakers of the Divine nature.”

However, the idea is clearly similar to the idea found in the 8^th Chapter of St Pauls Letter to the Romans that we are sons of God through the working of the Holy Spirit. In chapters 14-17 of St John’s Gospel we find the same idea in the ‘Indwelling of the Holy Trinity’. St Irenaeus (c. 130-200) argued that as God shared in our humanity in the Incarnation so we are destined to share in his Divinity. St Clement of Alexandria (c.150-215) understood this idea as being the same as the Platonic ideal of assimilation to God. They all believed that through the power of Grace man can overcome the effects of original sin and acquire ‘Divine’ attributes, especially incorruptibility and immortality. The main point is that the Incarnation of Christ has called mankind to share in the Divine life in Christ. St Athanasius (c.296-373) said:

“The Word became flesh...that we, partaking of His Spirit, might be deified.” De Decretis, 14

St Cyril of Alexandria (d. 444) wrote:

“For we have all become partakers of Him in ourselves through the Spirit. For this reason we have become partakers of the Divine nature and are called sons”. In Joan. 9

In the East this doctrine received its definitive formulation in the writings of St Gregory Palamas (c.1296-1359) who argued that man can become united with the Divine energies rather than with the Divine essence. In the West this language became rarer although was still found in the writings of the Mystics of the church. The Patristic revival of the Oxford Movement in Anglicanism stimulated renewed interest in the doctrine of Deification by the Western church.

Jean Vanier often uses the phrase “The Word became flesh so that flesh may become Word” to emphasise the resulting acts of Christ’s grace working in us for the benefit of others that results from our acceptance of the Divine will. St Teresa of Avila emphasised the same charitable and missionary result of Deification.

I hold that the power of doctrine lies not in the conceptualisation of ontological (the nature of being) statements but rather in teleological (the nature of becoming) and soeteriological (the nature of salvation) understanding. Thus the importance of the Annunciation of the Angel Gabriel to the BVM does not lie in the ‘fact’ of the encounter but rather what it says to us as Christians along the road to salvation. If the BVM’s acceptance of the total Will of God ,“Be it unto me according to Thy Word” (Luke 1.38), was the act of cooperation by the human race to participate in the salvitic plan of God then she is the model of every individual Christian who is called to do exactly the same thing. If by her acceptance of God’s will she was able to give birth to the Christ, then our acceptance of God’s will also allows for Christ to become manifest in the world as St Paul teaches us:

“For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Galatians 2. 19-20

Thus the Annunciation of the BVM and the resulting Incarnation of Christ becomes the model of Christian salvation for all people.

Having laid the groundwork for my commentary, I am now ready to state the simple notion that has come to me: IF by her submission to the Divine Will the BVM became the model of the Christian life and, IF her acceptance and participation in both the joys and sorrows of the Incarnation showed her continued acceptance of the Divine Will, THEN her Assumption into the Divine Glory of God is also the model, sign, and hope of the fulfilment of the Christian life as understood by the doctrine of Deification.

She has become the ‘Firstfruits of His creatures’ as the Epistle of St James speaks. She has ‘finished the race’ and stands at the end of each Christian’s life as a sign of the eternal promise of God to mankind. From her unique vantage point she offers us hope, encouragement and strength to persevere. She stands, so to speak, at the finish line beckoning to those of us still in the race the way home.

It is our relationships that give meaning to our lives. To have our hearts stirred they must first be touched through relationships. So in conclusion I contend that what is more important to us than ‘what state’ the BVM is in is ‘what’ she has to say to us from that position. It is our relationship with her as the forerunner of every individual Christian that allows us to love her.

Now I need to make a disclaimer. After having finished this article I found the following quote by the great Orthodox writer Vladimir Lossky (1903-1958):

“The glorification of the Mother is a direct result of the voluntary humiliation of the Son: the Son of God is incarnate of the Virgin Mary and is made ‘Son of Man’, capable of dying, while Mary, becoming Mother of God, receives the ‘Glory which belongs to God’ and is the first among human beings to participate in the final deification of the creature.”

Well, so much for thinking I had stumbled across a totally new take on the Dormition. As the Preacher saith “There is no new thing under the sun.” Ecclesiastes 1.9

The first, third and last photograph is taken from the Roman Catholic Church of the Dormition on Mount Zion in Jerusalem. There may have been a church here as early as the 4th century and by the 6th century a large Basilica was built. The Roman Church claims this as the site of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin.

The second and fourth photograph is taken from the Orthodox Church of the Tomb of the BVM at the base of the Mount of Olives. This is one of the most atmospheric holy sites in Jerusalem. It is carved out of the rock of the mountain and descends 47 steps into the earth. The first tomb was made in the 1st century and was expanded in the 3rd and 4th century. It was destroyed by the Persians in 614, rebuilt by the Crusaders and destroyed again by Saladin in 1187. However the site is also holy to Muslims as legend says that the Prophet Muhammad saw a ‘light over the tomb of his sister Mary’ during his Night Journey. There is a mihrab in the tomb added by Saladin. The burial place of St Anne and St Joachim are here as well as the graves of many of the Latin Kings and Queens of Jerusalem. Services are held here by the Greek, Armenian, Coptic and Syrian Orthodox Churches.

I visited both churches recently while on pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Whitterings, September 2009

Der Untergang des Abendlandes

In 1776 Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) published the first volume of his six part Magnus Opus The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In this seminal work Gibbon emphasises the loss of Civic Virtue as one of the main causes of the collapse of Rome. The concept of Civic Virtue occupies a central place in the foundation of Western Civilisation. Plato and Aristotle considered it essential for any form of republic and a difference in civic vision led to the trial and death of Socrates. Basic Civil Virtues include: Civic Conversation - which entails listening to others, trying to reach an agreement, and keeping yourself informed so that one can make a relevant contribution; Civic Behaviour - which entails the control of feelings and needs in balance with the feelings and needs of others; and Civic Work - which entails the necessity of work which makes a useful contribution to society as a whole. The Civic Virtues are a secular parallel to St Paul’s description of the duties we have to one another because we are all part of the same body.

Constant vigilance is necessary to keep a civilised society from falling into decay. An anecdote has a woman asking Benjamin Franklin “Well, Doctor what have we got a Republic, a Democracy or a Monarchy?”He famously responded “A Republic, if you can keep it.” According to Gibbon once a society loses the love of the society over the love of the individual it begins to decay. Cicero spent his later years lamenting that this had happened to Rome.

In 1918 Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) published another seminal work on the causes of the collapse of a civilisation specifically focusing on our current historical period. He called it Der Untergang des Abendlandes which roughly translates as the ‘the going under of the evening land’ and known in English as The Decline of the West. Spengler classes modern Western Civilisation as being Faustian in that it has a proud but tragic character. This is because although it strives for the unattainable it secretly knows that it will never reach its goal. He breaks the rise and fall of a civilisation into four periods corresponding to the seasons. Winter, the last phase of a civilisation, is marked by an exhaustion of creative mental strength and organisation. In Winter: religion will be marked by Materialism and the Cult of Science, the dominance of Ethical-Social ideals over Mystical-Soteriological ideals, Scepticism, the decline of Abstract Thought, and the rise of Specialised Academic Philosophies that look inward to their own systems. Politics will be marked by Democracy, the Rule of the Rich and an advanced Bureaucracy. Art will be marked by the end of Symbolism and the deterioration of Aesthetics into Fashion. He saw the emergence of pure Democracy, the rule of the majority, over Republicanism, Rule by Law, as a sign of decay because without law to hold the majority vote in check mediocrity and short term vision will prevail. He believed that an economically driven media and the rise of consumer capitalism to be another sign of the advanced decay of civilisation.

Spengler emphasises the importance of cultures that imbue the widest sense of historical knowledge and involvement. People in these cultures see themselves as part of a greater design and not in an inward looking self contained manner. He believed that only these people are capable of ‘building’ the future of a culture. He contrasted Culture, as the process of creativity in ‘becoming’ (which corresponds to the theological term teleology), and Civilisation, as the process of rigidity that sets in after the idealism of the culture is lost – the ‘being’ (which corresponds to the theological term ontology). He summed up his world view like this:

“Plato and Goethe stand for the philosophy of Becoming, Aristotle and Kant the philosophy of Being. The following saying of Goethe must be regarded as the expression of a perfect definite metaphysical doctrine. I would not have a single word of it changed: ‘The Godhead is effective in the living and not the dead, in the becoming and the changing, not in the ‘become’ and set-fast; and therefore, similarly, the reason is concerned only to strive towards the divine through the becoming and the living, and the understanding only to make use of the ‘become’ and the set-fast.’ This sentence comprises my entire philosophy.”

In 1961 Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) finished the publication of his twelve volume work on civilisation entitled A Study of History. He theorised that the breakdown of civilisations occurs when the ‘Creative Minority’ grows tired and degenerates into a ‘Dominant Minority’. This occurs when they cease to be forward looking and proactive in seeking solutions to the problems that lie ahead but instead ‘rest on their laurels’ and idealise their past achievements and become prideful. This trend reaches its zenith in the Universal State. Within such a state abandonment of self control and discipline replace creativity and Civic Virtue. Such a state will be characterised by archaism (the idealisation of the past), futurism (idealisation of the future), and most of all detachment (the removal of oneself from the realities of a decaying world by the use of escapism via entertainment, sports, acquisition of goods, and the reckless pursuit of the sexual and bodily appetites). On the positive side he believed that the advanced state of decay brings about new vision of transcendence that will emerge from the old church that will become the kernel from which a new culture can emerge.

The last thinker I will reference is Harold Adams Innis (1894-1952), a Professor of Political Economy at the University of Toronto, who many believe to be one of Canada’s most significant and original thinkers. He warned us that Western Civilisation is deeply imperilled by a powerful advertising-driven media obsessed by ‘present-mindedness’ and the ‘continuous, systematic, ruthless destruction of elements of permanence essential to cultural activity’.

If you have made it thus far in this month’s column, you will be wondering why I have spent so much time summarising these theories about the fall of empires and especially the fall of our own. I do so to add some very basic background to my continual claim that we are living in a Dark Age – an age filled with ever increasing signs of the collapse of the ‘Western Empire’. The technological and telecommunication revolution, the existence of a global capitalistic economic system, and mass migration mean that it is hard to know how long it will take us to decay or even if this is an irreversible process. Regardless, the decay is only too real, even if it is only a long downtrend before renewal. I am not necessarily being apocalyptic.

It took Rome almost 250 years to fall. Of the men who could see the writing on the wall (Mene, Mene, Tekel u-Pharsin) there were two types. The first stayed in the centre to fight against the inevitable decay so that civilisation could remain intact as long as possible. These men’s lives were often cut brutally short as they were caught in the crosshairs of rapidly changing, and increasingly unsophisticated, short sighted, incompetent, and violent Emperors. The second type also tried to save civilisation. They did this by fleeing Rome to the Provinces and living simple agrarian lives with their families. They used the peacefulness of their lives to read and write and think. They used their lives to be examples of civilisation simply by living civilised lives. This happened again during the dark ages when some men tried to blow flames on the dying embers of civilisation in the beginnings of feudal Europe and others retreated to the monasteries to keep civilisation alive by imitating Noah and the Ark. I understand the motivation of both sorts of men and I admire them both.

I have already gone on at length in other columns about the decline of our own civilisation and the effect this has on the Church. Thus, the overlap with this column is so significant that I feel the need only to point out again that the church is showing parallel signs of decay as those found in society at large. We are not immune.

I am getting to the age when I need to discern and make some significant decisions about what path my ministry should take. I have always ministered in rural or semi-rural areas away from the city and the central administrative offices of the Diocese. I have done my duty to the centre by travelling in on a regular basis but I relish the fact that I can always return to the countryside where I can see the stars at night. I often think that I can best preserve the faith by living a quiet life in which I have ample time for prayer, meditation and study. I can best ‘save’ the essence of Christianity in this generation simply by trying to be Christian away from the collapse. The fact that I am a Religious only adds to the appeal of this path. In previous columns I have explored the concern of the Archbishop of Canterbury about the decline in vocations to the religious life. He believes that the monasteries provide the ‘heartbeat’ of the faith. He considers their weakening as a sign of disease – the proverbial canary in the mine.

Yet I find I am not able to really settle. I feel guilty, as if I am letting the side down. I am continually thwarted from any kind of deep peace by my anxiety about the future of the church. It is not the ‘C’hurch about which I worry as I am convinced that we will survive the fall of this Empire just as we have survived the fall of all of the others. Rather it is the ‘c’hurch about which I worry. The day to day existence of this branch of Catholicism we lovingly call ‘our church’. When I read the biographies and autobiographies of Anglican clerics I am amazed at the passion and anxiety over the ecclesiastical issues of their day which we have all but forgotten. I suspect the zeal of our wrestles today will also pale into insignificant when looked at in hindsight. However, although I do not want to be drawn into the drama and the conflict, I feel the duty to participate.

The Kingdom of God lies within us and the pursuit of holiness of life makes real in time the eternal existence of the Kingdom. In this then is our peace. There is a well known story in which Neil Swanson records:

“A Russian youth who had become a conscientious objector to war through the reading of Tolstoy and the New Testament was brought before a magistrate. With the strength of conviction he told the judge of the life which loves its enemies, which does good to those who despitefully use it, which overcomes evil with good, and which refuses war. ‘Yes,’ said the judge, ‘I understand. But you must be realistic. These laws you are talking about are the laws of the kingdom of God; and it has not come yet.’ The young man straightened, and said, ‘Sir, I recognise that it has not come for you, nor yet for Russia or the world. But the kingdom of God has come for me! I cannot go on hating and killing as though it had not come.’”

I wish I were like that youth and had already come home in the midst of this darkening world. However I often feel more like Dylan Thomas and want to “Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light!” I believe this makes me spiritually immature. I do not yet have the balance right. I almost wish I could feel the freedom and detachment that comes from knowing that it is all coming down no matter what I do. Noel Coward captures the irony of this in his description of a party on the French Rivera. He knows the decadence is part of the great decay but he enjoys the decadence anyway.

You know, if you have any mind at all,
Gibbon's divine "Decline and Fall”
Well, it sounds pretty flimsy
No more than a whimsy...
By way of contrast,
On Wednesday last
I went to a marvellous party
We didn't sit down 'til ten
You know, young Bobby Carr
Did a stunt at the bar
With a lot of extraordinary men!
And then Freda arrived with a turtle,
(Which shattered us all to the core)
And then the duchess passed out at a quarter to three
And suddenly Cyril cried "Fiddle-de-dee!",
Then he ripped off his trousers
And jumped in the sea!
And I couldn't have liked it more!

I Went to a Marvellous Party, 1938, Noel Coward

However I am unable to pretend that it does not matter when I know it does. As a Christian I also do not have the luxury of pessimism and must work perpetually with hope. So here I sit firmly on the fence. Do I stay in the ‘provinces’ patiently keeping the flame alive for the reminder of my days and hope that the anxiety will fade with the passing years? Do I turn my face back towards Rome and abandon a life of peace so I can ‘fight’ in the ‘city’? I wish I knew. When He is ready I am sure He will let me know.

“Should I stay or should I go? Bum, bum, bum, bum bum, bum ba.”

The Clash