Our use of the "comfortable words" in the service of Holy Communion in the Book of Common Prayer (pp. 77-78) ties our regular Sunday worship right back to the origins of our priceless Anglican liturgy in the great upheavals of the Protestant Reformation. The use of the "comfortable words" after the general confession and the priestly absolution is intended to confirm the certainty of the pardon obtained through the mediation of Christ Himself. This assurance (using these Scriptural texts) goes back beyond our Prayer Book of 1962 and the great English Prayer Book of 1662 right to the very first attempts to produce an English language version of our common worship in 1548; and these same words have continued to be used and proclaimed throughout all forms of Anglican worship, right up until they became "optional" in the great liturgical reforms of the 1970s and the 1980s.
But the inspiration behind their use is not specifically Anglican or English, but derives from a German attempt to find a new way between the old Latin worship of our Western Church and the now universal use of the vernacular (the common language of the people) in public worship. We owe the introduction of the "comfortable words" into our worship to Archbishop Hermann of Cologne, who was excommunicated and deposed from his office in 1546, and died a member of the German Lutheran Church in 1552.
The first thing that is "comfortable" about these words, then, is the knowledge of their use in public worship for nearly 450 years in the presence of faithful (and repentant) Christian souls: they provide us with the assurance that our generation did not invent sin and need not regard itself as inherently more sinful than any previous generation, and that the guarantee of Christ's mercy delivered to our forefathers in the faith remains undiminished in our time. Our parents and our grandparents and our great-grandparents all had these same words read to them in their time, and all drew the comfort from them that we require so much today in our generation.
But we need to be careful about this word "comfortable"; it has nothing to do with our favourite easy-chair or the luxury of a properly heated home, nor does it have anything to do with casual attire; the "comfortable words" are one means by which we feel the presence of Christ's Holy Spirit in our lives, the presence of the "Comforter". In its root sense, to comfort means "to strengthen", not to encourage ease, or to enhance leisure. You will all recognize this if you think of the function of a "fort" in a nation's defences; it is set up to protect a port or harbour from the invasion of hostile or alien forces, and so the sending of "the Holy Ghost, the Comforter" is the sending of God's strength to us and with us (from the Latin word meaning "with" cum, God with us), so that "we may evermore dwell with him, and he in us". Martin Luther called God "a mighty fortress", or "a safe stronghold"; God is our Comforter, our strong tower.
When I was a lad, the Anglican Church of Canada commissioned a survey of the Anglican scene by the well-known journalist and author Pierre Berton; he entitled his study of our national church The Comfortable Pew, which he did not intend as a compliment, and which does not reflect the sense of "comfort" of which I am speaking.
Nowadays it doesn't seem a very accurate way of describing church life with falling attendance, shrinking revenues, increasing doubts, and endless controversies. (Nor has it ever, I suspect, reflected how people have felt sitting on a hard wooden pews half-way through a particularly long sermon!) But he would be right in seeing our Anglican Church as a place in which the people of God can derive "comfort", the strengthening of the Holy Ghost for the purposes of amending our lives and perserving in the tasks that God has given us in our homes, in our places of employment, and in our acts of charity.
I find myself as priest assisting in the parish of Seaforth on the Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia, and here the practice is for the people of the parish to recite the "comfortable words" after the priest has delivered the formula given for the Absolution. How this local custom arose no one seems to know; technically, it is not permitted as the rubric (or instruction) reads "Then shall the Priest say..." We do keep to the rubric to the extent that the priest introduces the "comfortable words", but then the people actually recite out loud the celebrated words of Holy Scripture, and since my coming here this has meant a lot to me.
I am given the impression by our faithful congregations that they are in turn imparting to me the "comfort" of Christ's holy words, that they (of their charity) are including me in the Absolution which has just been imparted by me in virtue of my office. And from these words, and from the parish's generosity of spirit, I derive the "comfort", the strengthening to make my way through another week of shortcomings and blunders, secure that these imperfections will be overlooked both by Christ's mercy and by the goodness of those souls of whom I am supposed to have "the cure". They "comfort" me, by accepting my ministry -- with all its warts and blemishes.
Some years ago Prince Charles spoke of the great "comfort" that a score of generations in the British Isles have derived from the memorable phrases of the Book of Common Prayer. I believe the Prince said that, in their "foxholes" and "trenches", the British soldiers who suffered the miseries of the First World War would have drawn "comfort" -- not ease, but strength and fortitude -- from the great phrases of the Book of Common Prayer, that they would have known these phrases by heart from their Sunday worship in English churches from their childhood onward.
In the damp and wet, in the cold and the squalour, this tragic generation would have found within themselves the resources of divine "comfort" in the great phrases which they would have recited publicly from their youth up. Can you imagine a world in which we are deprived of these inner resources, in which no one approaches "the throne of the heavenly grace", "with meek heart and due reverence", in which God does not write His "laws in our hearts", in which we do not finally "beat down Satan under our feet", and in which we are not invited to receive Christ's Holy Sacrament to our "comfort"?
A Nova Scotian priest has told me that the most moving thing he has ever experienced in his ministry since ordination was his presence at the deathbed of a faithful parishioner, whose last words were "Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden..." Most of us are not capable of great dying words, but we pray that we may still have at our disposal some of those great phrases of the English language "to our comfort" when our hour comes. And so many of these phrases are derived from the King James Version of Holy Scripture, and from the Book of Common Prayer, that "pearl of great price" of which we are the guardians.
II. Devices and Desires My rector has pointed out how important it is that, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells those assembled: "Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted" (Matthew 5:4). This "Beatitude" (or blessing spoken by Jesus) suggests that, even in their grief, those who mourn shall be comforted, or strengthened, by the coming presence of Christ, through the operation of the Holy Ghost, the Comforter. We hope that in our Anglican burial offices, there may never be wanting that sense of the comfort of Holy Scripture most manifestly offered in Deuteronomy's assertion that underneath us are "the everlasting arms" (BCP, p. 592), or in St Paul's assurance that "we shall be changed" (BCP, p. 597). But, of course, part of the comfort that we can derive from the Book of Common Prayer is just that familiarity of phrase and syntax and rhythm, which has been the glory and sustaining power of the reformed English Church since its inception.
These are comfortable words, in that we are familiar with them, we have heard them with our ears, we have seen them with our eyes, and our hands have handled this Word, and these words, of life (1 John 1:1). Sometimes we want to pull on an old sweater, or insist on keeping a favourite easy-chair, long after these possessions are worn out, just because they are familiar, they have been ours for so many years, and they just "feel right" -- which in no way obscures the fact that there are newer, more practical, unmended products on the market. These have become our words, we know them by sight and name, and the simple recitation of them can give us comfort and pleasure, as we are invoking old, familiar friends.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the great phrases of Common Prayer which pop up all over the place in English poetry and prose. Surely, the most obvious example is P.D. James' use of the phrase Devices and Desires for the title of one of her recent detective novels.
This striking phrase is taken from the confession that we make at Morning and Evening Prayer, where we acknowledge before God that "we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts" (BCP, pp. 4 & 19), and there can hardly be a phrase which more neatly captures that sense we all have of undermining the good we want to do, by the scheming and calculations we are constantly making to our own advantage, always by necessity at somebody else's expense. These words evoke that sense that we are always calculating and bargaining, we are looking for advantage and trying to wriggle out of what we know we should be doing: we pretend to others that our motives are pure and unalloyed.
As it happens, in England, I had two special friends, both of whom intended to publish books with this very same title (Devices and Desires) long before anyone knew of Baroness James' novel in the making. One (Dick Davis) did publish his collected poems under this title well before the appearance of the novel, while, with the other, the intention to give an autobiographical fiction of his days as a cathedral chorister and then as a "lay clerk" in several cathedral choirs never came to fruition -- and to that extent at least he stayed in character!
My friend's book of collected poems does give the whole passage as a frontispiece, but P.D. James declined her publisher's suggestion to give an account of the origin of her title, on the grounds, I believe, that ordinary literate British men and women could be expected to know its origin. While the publisher's view that the title needed explanation was probably the more accurate reading of the cultural scene, there is no evidence that P.D. James' sales suffered for choosing this evocative (if obscure) title! We could say that such is her clout as an author, that she may do as she very well pleases!
Devices and Desires is just a late entry in a slew of allusions to the Prayer Book, which has as other notable examples, A.N. Wilson's more recent Incline Our Hearts (presumably from the rehearsal of the Ten Commandments: "incline our hearts to keep this law" on pp. 68 & 69), and the American journalist Joan Didion's novel A Book of Common Prayer (1977). Now whatever else may be said about our modern alternative Anglican liturgies, one certainty seems to have been established already: no great work of poetic imagination, and no new book titles are ever likely to be inspired by them, and to that extent, in adopting these liturgies, our Anglican Church is likely to yield its "high ground" in the "common culture".
The reason for this is simple: in our search for the rhythms and idiom of the everyday, common speech of our contemporaries, we are, by definition, looking for something more readily digestible, more easily comprehensible, more immediately accesible, than some of the magnificent, but difficult (and even obscure) phrases of the Prayer Book tradition. In that way, the liturgical product must by its very nature be blander to the taste: it must be marketable, inclusive and inoffensive.
A useful parallel here can be drawn with another aspect of old country British life, recently much revived: the traditional pint of bitter. This may seem a strange parallel, but if you bear with me, I think you will see what I am driving at. Brewers are, of course, primarily concerned with marketing their product, and there is constant pressure in our society to maximize sales by producing as much (inoffensive) beer as a mass-market will bear, so that every brewer's dream is to turn out as much bland, canned, convenience product beer as the market will bear.
But in England, there has come into existence a highly organized and committed popular movement which calls itself "The Campaign for Real Ale" (CAMRA), a pressure group, which has as its aim to force brewers and pubs to provide "traditional bitter" which is not pasteurized, which only completes its aging in the cask in the cellar of the pub and must be maintained at a certain temperature there, and which can only be drawn up by hand, thus avoiding the gassy quality of most beers which are pumped into the glass like "pop" by the means of CO2.
Now the important thing to note about this is that neither the brewers nor the landlords had any real interest in shipping out and serving beer which was by its very nature unstable, could easily "go off", and which required high maintenance. Nonetheless, the campaign did succeed because the consumer demanded it and was prepared to pay a higher price to get it. And what a richer country Britain is for it!
The English have an expression which is the equivalent of our "no big deal"; they will often talk of "small beer". Its early usage can be found in Shakespeare, where a rebel would (if he had his way) "make it a felony to drink small beer", because it is, by definition, something tasteless, watery, and bland. Shakespearian characters will reject "small beer" as being light, weak, and inferior. By its transferred meaning "small beer" now means something inoffensive and insignificant: "small beer" is "no big deal".
You will probably have understood by now, that my hope for the Prayer Book Society of Canada is that it can harness the same enthusiasm as CAMRA in ensuring that the landlords and innkeepers of our churches (the rectors and parsons) do not get away with serving up weak, bland, gassy "small beer", when we are asking for a drink of "living water" (John 4: 10). I am reminded of what a wag (Peter Ackroyd) said about our modern ecumenical theology; he suggested that it has the same quality as airline food: everybody can eat it, because it is so singularly inoffensive, but nobody actually enjoys it. (I am told that this may not ring true for the airlines' first and business class patrons, where the smoked salmon and champagne are anything but bland, but from where I sit in the airplane, I wouldn't know about that!).
I am arguing that an important pastoral tool is being forfeited, when we abandon the rhythms and language of the Book of Common Prayer, because a great deal of our book can properly be called "poetry", at least by Coleridge's definition of the same: "the best possible words in the best possible order". It is just because the Prayer Book is poetry in precisely the sense given above that it has been a well of inspiration for generations of British poets and authors.
I should like to add a final ingredient to the heady brew that we have been serving up, by sprinkling in a few more hops and a little more malt right at the end of the fermentation. By this means we may begin to brew something in imitation of the best British bitter, which one compliments by calling it complex (also an apt way of speaking about our Prayer Book, which is complex in all the senses given above: rich, tasty, fecund, but also obscure, difficult, challenging).
Remember Keat's poignant description of "the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home / She stood in tears amid the alien corn" (Ode to a Nightingale). What many of us are afraid of in our parish churches across this country is that we shall one day discover that, in place of the familiar, comfortable words of our tradition, we have been transported against our will into an alien environment, where the ancient, majestic language of "common prayer", the language of novels and poetry, has been replaced by the "corny" idioms of sentimentality and soap opera. Let us "make it a felony to serve small beer" in the inns and banquet halls where we worship!
The last "comfortable words" in this column must go to Baroness James for doing so much to keep the language of our Prayer Book in the public domain and discussion. In a tribute to her "hero" Thomas Cranmer, she wrote (with admirable precision): "The Prayer Book may be ignored and superseded but it will never be surpassed". Amen.
III. Reasonable Hope These words can be found in "The Order for the Burial of the Dead" in our Canadian Book of Common Prayer (pp. 599-600), and they are a token that not all change is bad or to be derided, since they do not originate from either the 1662 or 1928 Books currently in use in England. They are a brilliant addition to an already very fine and moving office.
What do these words convey to those who are mourning? First of all, they speak of the comfort of our religion. This is the comfort that Jesus offers in the Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted" (Matthew 5:4). This "Beatitude" (or blessing spoken by Jesus) suggests that, even in their grief, those who mourn shall be comforted, or strengthened, by the presence of God in their lives, and by the "hope", which our Burial Office demands we acknowledge.
We are to embrace hope even on those saddest of days, when we are forced to say farewell to a loved one, relative or friend. Our order of service exhorts us -- at a funeral most of all -- to remember and affirm the teaching of God's "holy Apostle" Saint Paul, namely, "not to be sorry, as men without hope for them that sleep in Jesus" (BCP, p. 603).
Our "comfortable words" offer us three adjectives describing our Christian hope, but these adjectives are not a random collection, three nice turns of phrase -- what they actually do is to provide a stairway of ascent: our hope must first be "reasonable", then "religious", and finally "holy". Here, we shall ask about the character of a "reasonable" hope, and shall leave for the future, what the defining characteristics of hope that is "religious" and "holy" might be.
The easiest entry into this question is to remember that the opposite (the antonym) of hope is despair, and that despair can be described as that "sin against the Holy Ghost", which removes us utterly beyond the "comfort" of God's holy Word and sacrament. Despair suggests that there is nothing worth living or fighting for, and places the individual, who succumbs to it, beyond the reach of earthly friends or heavenly ministrations. But what is "reasonable" about hope in such a world as that which we inhabit?
One must constantly remember that none of us can see the end of our doings beyond all doubt. Despair can only be justified if we know absolutely and unequivocally what the future holds for us, our families and friends. We do not. And what is the opposite of "reasonable" hope, other than "false hope"?
It is very simple to establish the distinction between the two: reasonable hope is that your circumstances can and might improve; "false hope" is the certainty that they will improve, because you are about to win the national lottery! When we come to the lowest moments in our lives, the choice before us seems to be between the darkness of despair and the "folly" of hope. Well, to hope is not folly, it is in fact the reasonable course, since no one can know how things will turn out, and hope alone offers us the hand of opportunity, a way forward, a course of action; despair has nothing to offer us except the destruction of our personality, and the rejection of friendship.
The world may very well be going to the dogs, but how does it help us to think so? How are we able to help our parents, our children, our neighbours with that attitude? To believe that things can and will improve, this gives us opportunities and options, it leaves a space for the future (which is hidden from us); despair has no room for anything other than itself. Despair cannot acknowledge the providence of God, that there are real opportunities in this world even for us.
Our Prayer Book is seeking to remind us that the antidote, the medicine for despair is hope, the faith that we cling to in our darkest hour and saddest moments. This faith is like the cock that crows during "the watch that ends the night". Faith is the constant reminder that daybreak is yapping at the heels of night. Reasonable hope is waiting for that moment when "the day-spring from on high" will visit us, where we are, here, today (BCP, p. 10).
IV. Religious Hope In our earlier discussion of this phrase from the Prayer Book Burial Office (pp. 599-600), we made two essential arguments: 1) the order of the adjectives here describing hope is not arbitrary, but represents a ladder of ascent; and 2) hope is the reasonable course, because a) no one can know the future with absolute certainty, and b) despair (which deludes us into thinking we do know the future) has nothing to offer us except the destruction of our personalities. There is a comfort (of sorts) to be had in reasonable hope, so how does a hope that is "religious and holy" go beyond it?
When a spouse, a parent or a child dies, our world literally falls apart. The security, the warmth, the whole order of our domestic life is tossed into a pit; the picture of a happy home is disfigured, as if a lunatic has entered into an art gallery and slashed the canvas of a masterpiece beyond repair. The components that made up the work of art are still in place, but the attraction of the unity of the composition is at best a memory. We feel that there is nothing of beauty left: "The stars are not wanted now: put out every one; / Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun..." (W.H. Auden, 1936).
Put baldly, a "religious hope" is one in which we continue to believe, amidst insupportable grief and sorrow, that there is nothing that "shall separate us from the love of Christ". It is St Paul who argues that "neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come... shall be able to separate us from the love of God" (Romans 8:35-end and appointed for use in the Burial Office on p. 592). This is the essence of a religious hope in Christ Jesus, as St Paul would say again, "so we preach, and so ye believed" (1 Corinthians 15: 11).
How can such a demanding, almost incomprehensible, "religious hope" be put into practice? Here I wish to turn away from our Book of Common Prayer in order to examine instead another glorious example of "the Protestant Reformed Religion" (so described in the Coronation Oath of Queen Elizabeth II) of which our Anglicanism is only one expression.
It is very instructive to compare the marriage vows of our Common Prayer service with those prescribed for couples being wed under The Book of Common Order of the Church of Scotland. We are accustomed to promise "to love and to cherish, till death do us part" (p. 566), but in Scotland the vow actually made by bride and groom is to "promise and covenant to be a loving, faithful, and dutiful" husband or wife until God shall separate us by death.
This is not just a matter of semantics, but an open, public assertion by the would-be spouses that when the divorce of death from life puts an end to their public pledge of fealty, it is not just the indiscriminate, arbitrary, maniacal work of the grim reaper which destroys the possibility of all human happiness: God must be seen to have a hand in the whole tragic business somewhere. God does not make people die; they die of old age, of illness, or by accident, or as the result of crime, or cruelty, or inhumanity -- but God Himself is not simply divorced from the process, this is after all His world, we believe, and so He cannot be a bystander, who watches all this suffering and sorrow from a distance (as a popular song performed by Nanci Griffith would have us believe).
Remember that the Christian religion is the one which teaches that God Himself must die in the person of His Son, otherwise Jesus would not be fully human (or humane). And we know from our Scriptures that Jesus does not welcome death as a blessed relief from "all the dangers of this troublesome world" (BCP, p. 523), that He does not simply long for the separation of body and soul, so that His soul may at last find its eternal rest in God. In the Garden of Gethsemane, we overhear Jesus saying, "My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death" (Matthew 26:38 & Mark 14: 34) -- these are not the words of a man who yearns to be separated from everything that He loves and holds dear on this earth.
The problem with a "religious hope" is that it is not something that can be switched on at will like a lightbulb, and it's not like going to the bank to draw on money that we are holding in reserve. To have a "religious hope" in a time of sorrow is only possible because of the sustained effort of a lifetime. Just think what the word "religion" means. It is connected to the Latin word religare, which means "to bind". A religious life is one then in which we bind ourselves to God, as He has already bound Himself to us in the person of His Son, Jesus Christ. "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us..." (1 John 4:10). We bind ourselves to God through the reading of His Holy Word, through our Baptism and Holy Communion, through the keeping of His commandments, and when we follow the injunction "to do good and to distribute forget not" (BCP, p. 73).
But this is not the work of an afternoon, or of one Holy Week, or a holiday fortnight; to be kept in "the fellowship of Christ's religion" (BCP, p. 193) is only possible by the grace of God in conformity with a sustained spiritual discipline, by which that free gift of grace becomes the central reality of our lives. In His religion, we bind ourselves to Christ, as He first bound Himself to us.
We have not yet said anything about that "holy hope", which represents the summit: a "reasonable hope" is the foothills, and a "religious hope" is the arduous climb up the rockface. But in anticipation, allow me to cite the incomparable "Exequy" of Henry King, Bishop of Chichester. The word "exequy" conveys the sense of a "funeral procession" or "funeral rites" and was written for his wife Anne, who died in 1624.
In his poem the grieving husband awaits his "dissolution with hope and comfort", and the title of this poem deserves to be given in full, for it surely represents the feelings of millions and hundreds of millions who have tried to support the grief of losing a spouse: "An Exequy to his Matchless never to be forgotten Friend".
King's poetic conclusion allows us to see at a distance and through the mists and shadows of grief, as it were, the faint outlines of that "holy hope" to which we are called:
...Dear (forgive The crime) I am content to live
Divided, with but half a heart,
Till we shall meet and never part.
V. Heirs Through Hope Each service of Holy Communion performed according to The Book of Common Prayer assures us that we are "heirs through hope" of God's "everlasting kingdom" (p. 85). This formula brings us into the central mystery of our religion: we have been indivdually named in Christ's last will and testament. We have been assured by our loving Father that we are rightful heirs of that "hope of glory" (BCP, p. 15), which is the common legacy of the saints in light.
The problem, as every offspring discovers, is that we may indeed be the legal inheritors of our parents' estate, we may already be named in their wills, we may in principle partake of their substance, we may be assured that everything belonging to our parents may soon be ours, but there remains the fact that what will be is not yet, that our desperate endeavours to eke out a livelihood here and now are not really made all that much easier with the promise of future inheritance. In fact, those adults of our acquaintance who are constantly eyeing their parents' estate and wealth are likely to commit grotesque errors of judgment, all the while assuring others that present difficulties will be ironed out shortly, when....
The purpose of Holy Communion is not primarily, or even necessarily, to bring to mind some future reward, some future happiness, some future resolution of our problems. This is perhaps made more clear in some modern liturgies, where the phrase from the Prayer of Absolution (BCP, p. 77) which speaks of Almighty God's "bringing" you to everlasting life, through Jesus Christ our Lord, is replaced by the formula that He is already keeping you in the eternal life which is your destiny and hope (e.g.,BAS, p.191).
you in the eternal life which is your destiny and hope (e.g., BAS, p. 191).
Of all the "comfortable words" which make our Book of Common Prayer an outstanding example of the English language and of Anglican piety, this notion that we are already "heirs through hope of thy everlasting kingdom" is the one we must most completely take to heart. May each of you hoard it, and care for it, and treasure it, so that in your moment of need, you can bring it to mind and "hope against hope" for that just, providential, beneficent resolution of all things, when the end comes, and Christ Himself shall have delivered the kingdom to His Father (1 Corinthians 15:24). These words of Scripture, which form so essential a part of our burial office, find their echo in Julian of Norwich's famous conviction that "all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well".
In the meantime, while we continue our difficult homecoming, our journey of "threescore years and ten" or, if we should be so fortunate, "fourscore years" (Psalm 90), allow me to remind you that we live and die in "the comfort of a reasonable, religious, and holy hope" (BCP, pp. 599-600). I want to reconfirm this teaching under these same three headings.
Hope is "reasonable" the psychologists tell us: your disposition, your attitude is so important in the wake of the inevitable minor and major setbacks that we all have to face each and every day. Do you think that the bottle is "half empty" or "half full"? Do you sink into despair, because you have been the victim of a car accident, or do you remind yourself how lucky you are that you were not, in fact, involved in a far more serious accident? Do you regard yourself as continually subjected to bad luck, or do you try to make the most of all those unfortunate situations, which are simply the condition of a human life?
A hopeful, optimistic outlook is the "reasonable" course because, even in adversity, optimistic people are known to go out and create more opportunities for themselves, whereas their pessimistic counterparts see themselves as the victims of a terrible fate that then renders them completely powerless.
Hope is also a religious matter. Recently, there was that terrible sinking of the car ferry Estonia in the Baltic Sea. 910 passengers and crew are said to have lost their lives. Two strangers, however, managed to survive: Sara and Kent met for the first time on the deck of the sinking ship.
Sara was sitting on the highest part of the deck not yet submerged in water -- she had a life-jacket -- and Kent was tugging at a lifeboat that had got stuck. With seconds to go before the complete sinking of the ferry, they made a pact that somehow they were going to survive this ordeal and meet for dinner in Stockholm the following week; then the two of them walked hand and hand "towards the water and the darkness".
Somehow they managed to drag themselves into a lifeboat, after they had actually been submerged in the icy water. They had 15 companions in the lifeboat with them, not one of whom survived the effects of hypothermia. Kent and Sara alone of all those in their boat were rescued alive by the helicopters that appeared the following morning. To cling to life in this way, to "hope against hope" in the icy, wintry sea, that can be described as a religious hope: such a profound binding of yourself to the principles which govern human life can only be described as spiritual.
Finally, there is the holy hope, which is the greatest of the three. Hope may be reasonable, and hope may be religious, but the essence of a holy hope is not to be too hasty in judgment: not to be certain of the outcome as being "beyond all hope". At the most mundane level, don't give up hope yet, wait until morning, for "tomorrow is unknown, and resolution is often found at the rising of the sun" (or so we are advised by the elf Legolas of Tolkien's Middle-Earth).
More profoundly, we have the warning of St. Thomas Aquinas (in Dante's Paradiso) that, contrary to all reasonable expectation, he has actually seen on the tip of the briar "a prickly thing and tough the winter through... the very rose at close of spring..."(Canto xii; tr. Sayers). So too, we should not always judge people and circumstances too immediately by their outward appearances, by their labels and packaging; we should not be too smug in the power of our own reason and insight, not be too certain that there is no room for hope in our wayward condition.
We do not know the end, how things will turn out; we cannot say for certain how the rest of our days will be spent; our tomorrows are unknown to us. But they are not unknown to God, who does not live in time, but dwells forever in His eternity, the simultaneous possession of all time in its everlastingness. And it is just because all the threads of all the lives we live out in sequence here on earth come to rest in the hand of God, just for that reason, we are now "heirs through hope" of that everlasting kingdom, which is His and will be ours. For the present we should be content with Alexander Pope's famous dictum:
"Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never Is, but always To be blest." (An Essay on Man)
But those who know themselves as "heirs through hope", will want to amend these lines to read:
Hope's source eternal in the human breast;
Man's present Is, and future Will be blest.
Friends of Classics In speaking of the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831), an image of philosophical obfuscation invariably falls upon the mind's eye, as his name embodies the height of idealist abstraction of which German speculative philosophy was capable. This picture notwithstanding, it is as well to note that Hegel did not achieve a settled professorial chair until his forty-sixth year, when he was called to the University of Heidelberg in 1816; and his academic ambitions were only fully realized when he was appointed to the chair of philosophy at University of Berlin (1818) in succession to the considerably more obscure first occupant of that chair, J.G. Fichte (died 1814).
On the speculative highway to his apotheosis in Berlin, Hegel was compelled down to earth to make a living, first by becoming a newspaper editor in Bamberg (1807/8), and then by the Rectorship of a Gymnasium (roughly equivalent to a Grammar School) in Nuremberg from 1808 to 1816. By this means, as his loyal biographer Rosenkranz declared, "the speculative Pegasus was harnessed to the wagon of schoolwork".
A familiar aspect of his duties as Head -- the administrative side of the school's life, the preparation of reports, of lists, of certificates (all by hand!), and the ever-present financial constraints hardly constituted the philosophical ideal -- was the Prize Day addresses, where (to my mind) we find one of the most persuasive apologies for a Classical education ever delivered in any European school. Hegel describes the "spirit and purpose" of his institution (in the sense of its telos) as the prepartion of young men for academic study on the foundation of ancient Greek and Roman culture. Just as Antaeus, the son of the newly fashionable Gaia, was able to renew his physical strength by every contact with Mother Earth (1809), so Hegel's pupils were (in imitation of scores of preceding generations) to recover the profoundest instances of human wisdom as these appeared in their ancient garb. Our Western culture is like that of the plants: we may grow as tall as we wish, yet we cannot deny that the nourishment and stability of our lives rest in the soil. The study of classical antiquity is our "profane baptism" into the mysteries of the human spirit; it is the place where it all began, where we can rediscover the infancy of the human soul.
If the first Paradise of Adam and Eve is the paradise of human nature, then the second Paradise of the Ancients is the paradise of human spirit -- and, the argument seems to imply, if the first Paradise can only be restored by the washing away of original sin, the second is then re-established by critical attention to the language, customs and culture of the Greeks and Romans, "the most beautiful" that have ever been crafted in this world: "he who has never known the works of the ancients has lived without knowing what beauty is."
This rhapsodic account (for the benefit of parents) of the importance of classical studies is now given a concrete foundation in the mandatory study of the ancient languages. It is, of course, possible to recover some of the classical ideal through the works of translation, but these "copies" have the same relation to their sources as that between plastic roses and their originals in nature; they have the resemblance, but miss the delicacy and softness of what is real.
The music of the language is missing, and whatever "elegance and refinement the copy has belongs to the copy alone": we have the salt alright, but where is its flavour? The acquisition of the ancient languages is truly a burden, a feat of application, which is the only key to the lock of the ancient treasure trove; we may always have access to the substance of ancient poetry and learning in translation (the gold can be transported from one place to another), but it is how the ancients shaped the gold in the forms of their language and culture that gives it its real value. In translation the substance of the gold is there, but it has been melted down for easier transport, and who could be satisfied with a golden nugget, once one has caught a glimpse of the Mask of Agamemnon?
But it is important that children be made to learn the ancient languages, for in this toil they are taught "to distance" themselves from their own immediate interests and particular historical circumstances -- has this ever been more necessary? Classical civilization is for the child an alien world, to which the prejudices of our time remain impervious; to enter into its study is to begin a journey into foreign, mysterious territory, and has for the young the same attraction as a stint with Robinson Crusoe, shipwrecked a long way from home. The study of antiquity takes the adolescents out of their native circumstances and transports them to a rich, pregnant world, complete in itself and independent of the opprobrium or approval of contemporary opinion. It can be an adventure and must be made to seem so.
Hegel makes the excellent point that the study of the grammar of ancient languages allows the pupil and the student to recover consciously the habits by which "without thinking" we speak our own modern language grammatically; through the knowledge of a foreign language we learn what we mean by "parts of speech" and "the rules of their combination". We learn with M. Jourdain (Moliere's Le bourgeois Gentilhomme), so to speak, what a glory it is to speak prose: "Strict grammatical study is accordingly one the most universal and noble forms of education." How are we to account for the fact that our schools have been so determined in putting aside this fundamental condition of rational human thought and speech?
But we have not yet come to the heart of the matter: the study of antiquity, even at the most basic level of its language and grammar, is already a speculative work. Speculation is the highest activity of the philosophical mind. As Hegel defines it, even in the introduction (1812) to his most abstract work The Science of Logic, to speculate is to grasp the unity in difference -- it consists in grasping the unity with ourselves of what is set over against us.
So the schoolboy is encouraged to enter the apparently strange, remote world of antiquity, only to discover through "the sweat of his face" (Genesis 3:19) that what he took to be alien and arcane is actually "the starting point...for a return to ourselves". We all know the feeling young people have that for something to be truly profound it can only be discovered in a vast distance from the society in which we live, and at the farthest remove from anything one's parents could possibly hold dear (mostly now in the ancient wisdom of the Orient).
But the alienation and exile of learning a "dead language" brings with it the discovery that, in the ancients, we can be brought back to ourselves: we rediscover ourselves (in our origins) in what we at first took to be utterly alien. That too is precisely the work of speculative philosophy as Hegel practised it: the difference is that whereas the Hegelian logic has always been understood to be the highest level of abstraction, in the study of antiquity any schoolboy can grasp precisely the same principle for himself. In forcing a schoolboy to learn Greek, we apparently abandon him in the centre of the labyrinth, but unknown to him, simultaneously, we hand him the end of a ball of thread by which he will return to the world that he actually inhabits, now knowing "the place for the first time" (T.S. Eliot's "Little Gidding" V).
This last point enables us to see how "idle speculation" can help the schoolboy at the most basic and concrete level. Peter Jones, the classical scholar, has characterized the "culture and language of Rome" as "a mirror" (speculum is the ancient word that springs to mind). Roman culture and Latin language, he claimed, are "a mirror on ourselves, arguably, the sharper for being so alien". Hegel could not have put it better!
VI. OPPOSITES The Feast of St Thomas the Apostle, 1996:
A Sermon preached at the first celebration of the Holy Eucharist
by the Rev'd Dominic Barrington
in the Parish of Mortlake with East Sheen in the Diocese of Southwark, England
"He is ... a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief..." (Isaiah 53: 3 AV). A well-known English writer (A.N. Wilson) has devised a wonderful title for one of his recent novels: the inspired title is The Vicar of Sorrows, and I wager that Dominic will have ample opportunity to come to think of himself as "a vicar of sorrows" in the months and years ahead, as he tries to go about his work of "the cure of souls" in this parish of Mortlake with East Sheen.
As a Christian priest, Dominic will be expected to chart an impossible, miraculous course, steering clear of the tragic oppositions which are quite simply the stuff of every human life. You all know what I mean: "what is our life" but "a play of passion"? (Sir Walter Raleigh) That is to say the unhappy, tragic opposition between good and evil, truth and error, belief and doubt, health and sickness, joy and sorrow, and finally the opposition which is the basis of every other: life and death.
As we commonly understand this matter, you are either placed on one side of this equation or you are placed on the other. And the tragedy of human life is that, wherever you happen to find yourself on any particular day, your place on the compass always cancels out its diametrical complementary, its antipode. So, an act is either good or evil, a statement is either true or false, you are either a believer or a doubter, you are alive, healthy and joyful -- or you are ill, sorrowful and on your inevitable way towards the grave. As the damned Francesca famously tells Dante in the first circle of his Inferno: "No sadness is greater than in misery to rehearse memories of joy..." (my italics; tr. Pinsky). This pitiful sentiment is, in its turn, just a restatement of Boethius' retort to philosophy: "the most wretched kind [of (mis)fortune] is once to have been happy." (ii, 4; tr. Watts).
As you, Dominic, begin your priestly office, and become a vicar of sorrows, "acquainted with grief", perhaps your congregation will permit me to say something very directly about these tragic oppositions which form the basis of human life, and to make a theoretical point which has incalculable practical consequences. The crucial thing to understand about the Christian religion is that it does not regard all opposites, all contraries, as necessarily carrying equal weight.
What do I mean? Well, when you think of the conventional oppositions of everyday existence -- positive and negative, right and left, North and South, day and night, Summer and Winter, hot and cold, even sweet and sour -- we commonly assume that one choice eliminates the other: you either head left or right, North or South, it is either day or night, morning or evening, Summer or Winter. There is no common ground here, each term cancels the other, eliminates the other, and disposes of the other: and so we discover that there is no sadness "greater than in misery to rehearse memories of joy...", that is, the discovery that "your joy now has passed" (Hegel) -- since sorrow dismisses joy.
But the philosophers have something to teach us about the character of opposites, something which, at first glance, seems deeply contradictory. They remind us that however intense the contrast between opposites, however absolutely one side of the opposition seems to eliminate the other, what you have to understand is that opposition expresses a relation, just as much as it represents an antagonism.
So, you cannot even begin to understand the direction to turn left without holding in your mind the simultaneous conception of how this contrasts with right; you are unable to articulate any sense of positive, if you do not have in your mind's eye some notion of what might be meant by negative. How can you describe life on the "inside" without appealing to a notion of the "outside"? Every opposition is also a relation, and however firmly we think of one term as cancelling out the other, what we actually do, in affirming one side of an opposition, is to draw attention to the other.
We have to: the very notion of opposition, of contrasting opposites, requires it. Remember that Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat of the fruit of "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil" (Genesis 2: 17); what can this mean but that there is no actual knowledge of good, apart from the complementary, contrasting knowledge of evil? And for this reason the fruit of this tree is so dangerous: without a knowledge of good and evil, we don't actually know what we are talking about.
Doesn't this just underline more effectively what we have said earlier about the tragic contrariety of our human existence: we are unable to experience pleasure apart from a knowledge of pain, we don't give any thought to our health apart from being confronted with illness, we have no notion of justice except when challenged by injustice.
Plato's great work The Republic is all about this question; Plato even shows how we are liable to confuse pleasure and pain -- thinking them inseparable. Someone is standing on your foot, after two or three minutes the brute gets off. What do you experience? Pure pleasure! Not so, says Plato, you are experiencing an absence of pain, which you are confusing with pleasure. The object of Plato's Republic is to find an adequate definition for justice. How does he do this? The philosophical disciples are made to examine the character of injustice in all its aspects.
Haven't the philosophers brought us to the point of despair -- demonstrating ever more effectively that the Christian priest cannot possibly chart a course between Scylla and Charybdis? It is not possible, they tell us, to steer away from the one without falling into the arms of the other.
Well, what the Christian religion really has to say on this matter is that there is a lack of imagination, that there is a faithlessness, a Godforsakenness, in simply assuming that every pair of opposites is equally balanced, as in the picture of the scales of justice in perfect equilibrium. Can you imagine, Christian theology is asking you, can you imagine that there is a form of opposition between good and evil, truth and error, belief and doubt, health and sickness, joy and sorrow, where the terms are not simply taken as equivalent, equally weighted, at par -- but that one term might have the pre-eminence over the other, without in any way eliminating their opposition? Can you make that speculative leap of the imagination? That is the question that Christianity puts to every enquiring soul -- not as a theoretical proposition, but as the tenet according to which one lives a life.
You may find this hard to believe, but this is the question we are asked every time that we remember and celebrate the feast of St Thomas the Apostle; indeed I would go so far as to say this is why we celebrate the feast of St Thomas the Apostle. The Collect for the day (ASB, p. 785) makes this absolutely clear: we began this evening's Collect with the invocation: "Almighty and eternal God, who, for the firmer foundation of our faith, allowed the apostle Saint Thomas to doubt the resurrection of your Son..."
This formulation is based on the older Prayer Book version, which I think has more punch: "Almighty and everliving God, who for the more confirmation of the faith didst suffer thy holy Apostle Thomas to be doubtful in thy Son's resurrection..." Just think about what that phrase means: doubt is permitted; why? "For the more confirmation of the faith." Here, you see that faith and doubt are not simply treated as equal opposites, either you are a woman of faith (like St Mary) or a man of doubt (like St Thomas); it doesn't work like that, and it doesn't make any sense. Who can be free of doubt?
But the ubiquity of doubt does not cancel faith, it challenges faith to reveal itself, to manifest itself, and to explain itself in a fashion that takes account of the doubt, and so it challenges faith to transform itself into a faith, which, because it is not afraid of doubt, can embrace the doubt and make it part of its own life: "for the more confirmation of the faith".
The Pope's recent (1994) best-seller Crossing the Threshold of Hope places the philosopher Rene Descartes (whom we commemorate this year especially, since he was born in 1596) at the "forefront" of modern European rationalism (p. 51), and John Paul II argues that the source of the doubts engendered by this rationalism do not have their "source" in "the great Judeo-Christian tradition", instead these doubts have their origin in a standpoint "that is purely rationalist, one that is characteristic of modern philosophy" (original italics).
These doubts, the Pope tells us do not refer us to "Saint Thomas or to Saint Augustine" (pp. 37-8). To be fair, the Pope's remarks here are probably being made with reference to Saint Thomas Aquinas, the medieval theologian, and not to Saint Thomas the Apostle. But on this feast of Saint Thomas, let me follow our Prayer Book Collect and say that it does a disservice to our faith to seal it off from doubt in this way, especially as the Collect reminds us that the doubt of Saint Thomas (the Apostle) is permitted for "the more confirmation of the faith".
Perhaps you will agree with the Pope that the philosopher Descartes, whom we now celebrate for his four centuries of philosophy, inaugurated a disastrous, rationalist, modern era of doubt, from which we shall never recover, that the method Descartes employs in his famous Meditations of doubting everything is indeed the opposite of our Judeo-Christian tradition. But why not allow Descartes to defend himself against this charge of excessive rationalism, as he does very well in his own summary of his Meditations: perhaps, Descartes says,
...it is not immediately apparent that so general a doubt [as I have employed in my
Meditations] can be useful, [yet] it is in fact very much so, since it delivers us from
all sorts of prejudices and... it is useful in making it subsequently impossible to doubt
those things which we discover to be true after we have taken doubt into consideration.
("Synopsis", tr. Lafleur)
Descartes' formula here actually sheds some light on how the phrase "for the more confirmation of the faith" might be understood. Faith which can take doubt into consideration, first, has a mechanism for freeing itself from unexamined opinions, which is what prejudices are; but secondly, and far more importantly, there is a greater confidence in the faith which has embraced the reality of doubt and not fled blindly from it.
By his method of universal doubt, Descartes promises a truth beyond all doubt. But it can only achieve this glorious status, because this certainty has not fled before the face of doubt, but turned to meet its competitor in the public forum face-to-face.
Now let me try to make exactly the same point with relation to the contrasting pair of sickness and health -- in a fashion that will be familiar to all of you. Again it is only natural to think of these conditions as opposites, where one term of the opposition cancels out and eliminates the other. You are either healthy or you are ill, and the sensible thing to do is keep as far away from illness as you can.
But this is also patently wrong. Should we imitate the greatest entertainer of his generation (this year's Brit Awards), and agree to appear in public only if our surgical mask is firmly in place? Perhaps the only kind of health worth having is a health of body which does not shy away from illness, but rather one that is able to confront illness directly.
I am told that many parents here this evening have actually taken their perfectly healthy children to surgeries and clinics, where they have asked, indeed demanded, that physicians and nurses inject into the blood stream of their perfectly happy, robust children traces of disease and wasting illness. Why do they do this, their children ask them, confronted as they are with a menacing needle: to make them ill? No, to keep them healthy!
How do you think that smallpox was defeated? By dividing the world into those places that had the disease and those places that didn't -- making sure that there would be not be traffic of any kind between the two realms? No, the actual form of its defeat was by circulating traces of the virus ever more fully; by introducing it as widely as possible, so that health might embrace illness. Only by means of universal inoculation -- and by this method alone -- could there be any guarantee that the sickness of smallpox would never again achieve an upper hand over health.
This may explain a certain priority that health has over sickness, but how is it possible to combine joy and sorrow in the same breath? How is it possible to think that joy has a priority over its opposite, when there is no sadness "greater than in misery to rehearse memories of joy...."
Those of us who are parents also know the answer to this question: we are so proud of our children, they take their first steps, they recite their first poem, they win their first prize or competition, they receive an excellent report, they graduate, they land their first job, they marry, they become professionals, lawyers, doctors, even priests! And yet every parent knows, that every first is also a last, every independent step taken by a child, which makes the parent's breast swell with pride, also inevitably takes that child a little further away from us, gives them a little more distance from us, establishes them on their own course of life, which is the one, paradoxically, that we have been working for all along.
But as happy as we are, even on this day, must we not also shed a tear, that our little one is now so grown up, so independent, and just a little farther removed from us than he was yesterday? I am told that mothers often weep at the weddings of their children.
Are they crying because they are happy? Are they crying because they are sad? Or are they weeping because they know a joy that embraces sorrow, and leads us to a knowledge beyond the facile opposition of good times and bad times: we are all of us living in "the best of times" and "the worst of times"; we are all of us living in Charles Dickens' epochs of "belief" & "incredulity"; we are all of us living in seasons of Light and seasons of Darkness, in "the spring of hope" and "the winter of despair" (A Tale of Two Cities), if only we had the eyes to see, and we could learn to understand with our heart. (Matthew 13: 15)
For here, you see, we have come to the central mystery of our religion: Christ has come into our world to teach us that the opposition between good and evil, truth and error, belief and doubt, health and sickness, joy and sorrow, and above all between life and death, need not be viewed simply as a contest between equal opponents in an elimination bout, but that good may have the priority over evil, its opposite, belief may have the priority over its opposite, doubt, that health may have the priority over its opposite, sickness, and that life may have the priority over its opposite, death.
But how can this be demonstrated, really demonstated, except that the greater embrace the lesser cause, the stronger embrace the weaker argument (Socrates was accused of promoting the inverse), the anterior embrace the posterior, the protagonist embrace the antagonist, the noble embrace the ignoble, belief embrace unbelief, and that God embrace our Godforsakenness. Only if life can stare death in the face and embrace it, can life ever gain that victory over death that we all long for: but this is no easy victory: Christ's pain, we are told, was "the depth" of the unity of the divine and human nature in life and suffering (Hegel), and this will be no quixotic, fanciful victory, since our Saviour is not buried in a shallow grave, but is made to descend into hell (the Apostles' Creed), in order to verify his triumph.
On my side of the Atlantic, we take to heart the words of Benjamin Franklin: his personal motto was to "imitate Jesus and Socrates", and how well we would do to heed his words.
First, because Socrates in his great vindication of himself before the Athenian public defends himself by saying that "the unexamined life is not worth living" (Apology 38a), which is to say that belief is impoverished if it is not nourished by doubt, "for the greater confirmation of the faith". Secondly, an ancient biographer tells us that Socrates "was so orderly in his way of life that on several occasions when pestilence broke out in Athens he was the only man who escaped infection." (Diogenes Laertius).
This report may be fanciful, but it does have this seed of truth that Socrates did not become the father of our civilization by fleeing Athens, but only by living out the principles of the Athenian marketplace more thoroughly and completely than any other citizen. He embraced his opposition for all to see by voluntarily drinking the hemlock, by draining his cup of desolation (Ezekiel 23: 33) "to the lees".
We come then to the inequality of opposites as demonstrated by Christ, and as taught in the Christian religion. Jesus enters into "the house of Simon the leper" (Matthew 26:6) and lives a life which embraces death. And in that embrace he teaches us the true character of our life, which is not in our cowering and cringing before the inevitability of our death, but in our certain victory over it.
The greatest poet of the Anglican tradition -- a Londoner, of course -- explains how this is so. John Donne addresses death in a famous Holy Sonnet (X) and tells death that it has no reason for too great a pride in its accomplishments. Of course, death seems to have the final say and to render everything with which it comes into contact beyond retrieving, broken beyond mending, by emptying the vessel of life and pouring it onto the ground.
Yet Donne points out to death that rest and sleep are in this world as its imitators (he calls them "pictures" or images of death). Then Donne also informs death that, in truth, it is from rest and sleep that we derive "much pleasure". We do not sleep when we are tired, and we do not rest when we are ill, in order to escape the world, but rather so that we may have the energy to face the world, refreshed, invigorated and renewed. We die nightly to the world -- we pray for God's "priceless gift of sleep" (BCP, p. 731) -- only so that we may return into the world with better spirits, more ready to cope, better able to face the trials of the new day with fresh determination.
"This is the day which the Lord has made:" we say, "we will rejoice and be glad in it." (Psalm 118: 24). Then Donne challenges us: if, by means of death's imitators, death's lesser copies, we are given the opportunity to have life and to have it more abundantly (John 10:10), isn't it just possible, isn't it just conceivable, that a life which looks death squarely in the eye, refuses to cower before it, and embraces it when necessary -- Imitate Jesus and Socrates! -- may show the superiority of life over death, may even show the unity of life with its greatest opposite, may open the windows of life more fully than we ever thought possible?
Can Christianity teach us to grasp "the positive within the negative" (Hegel), and can Christianity teach us how the tragic oppositions in life are unequal, that there is a positive to be had in the very heart of the negative itself? Isn't it just possible, that by this speculative leap of the imagination that Christianity requires of us we might have life, and have it more abundantly? As we drink life to the lees with the great Ulysses (Tennyson), are we not also bound to drink -- to the dregs -- Christ's cup of sorrow? Donne's conclusion to his Holy Sonnet:
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.
-- is just an echo of St Paul's magnificent words from the burial office: "Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" (1 Corinthians 15: 54-55).
Please pay attention to these extraordinary words: "Death is swallowed up in victory." The embrace of death by Jesus Christ is our victory over it; the opposition is not eliminated, but embraced, and the greater has incorporated the lesser cause into itself.
For me, this is the central teaching of the Christian faith, and I pray that Dominic will never forget that he is a priest in a Church which proclaims the inequality of opposition between good and evil, truth and error, belief and doubt, health and sickness, joy and sorrow. This night Dominic will follow that ancient commandment: "For as often as ye eat this bread and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death till he come." (1 Corinthians 11: 26; Epistle for Maundy Thursday) By offering us, here, this night, Christ's cup of sorrows, paradoxically, Dominic will be teaching us that we "shall not die, but live: and declare the works of the Lord." (Psalm 118:17).
And it is just by this knowledge of the inequality of opposites, that our Dominic will transform himself from a "Vicar of Sorrows" into a "Vicar of Blessings", a "Vicar of Cheers" and a "Vicar of Comforts"; and it just by this knowledge of the inequality of opposites that he will lead the people of Mortlake in priestly procession as far from the waters of death as the East is from the West (Psalm 103: 12).
By the grace of God, Dominic, our pastor, will feed us "in a green pasture" and will lead us "forth beside the waters of comfort" (Psalm 23: 2 BCP). "Take this holy Sacrament to your comfort." Amen.
