Trinitytide Pastoral Letter 2023

“Our life and our death is with our neighbour. If we win our brother, we win God. If we cause our brother to stumble, we have sinned against Christ.”

~St Anthony the Great, d. 356 AD

June 25th, 2023

Dear Friends,

The man who came to be recognized as the father of Christian monasticism spent many years in solitary prayer, living as a hermit in the Egyptian desert, first in a vaulted sepulchre among the dead, then in an abandoned fort, apart from society and the ordinary exchanges of human community. How, one may wonder, could such a life of extreme austerity and sheer physical separation lend itself to true insight about living in human community? How could such deprivation from human contact lead to wisdom about what it means to be human in terms of loving our neighbour? How could such a flight from company, conversation, and fellowship among human beings yield teaching of any practical worth about the ethical responsibility we have for our neighbour before God? By the grace of God, this was the fruit of Anthony’s ascetic life: “Our life and our death is with our neighbour.” But the human solidarity here envisioned—our being with, for, in our neighbour—is more than an act of agreement with, or show of support for, another; it is in fact a spiritual law of the universe, constitutive of our humanity which Christ redeemed. Our salvation, our healing, our wholeness, our sanctification, our very life in the perspective of eternity is inextricably bound up with that of our neighbour. Such is the law of love: “bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2).

The saying of St Anthony about the practice of the Christian life is a profound meditation on the teaching we encounter at the beginning of every Trinity Season: “We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren. He that loveth not his brother abideth in death. Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer; and ye know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him. Hereby we know love, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. . . . If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? And this commandment have we from him, that he who loveth God love his brother also” (1 John 3:14-16; 4:20-21). The way of the Cross is the exact opposite of the way of Cain, for our Lord assumes that we are our brother’s keeper. This is what he taught not only by his words, but in truth and in deed by laying down his own life for our sake. That divine love which Christ revealed on the Cross is the same love which we are to practice towards one another. The whole of Trinity Season, the entire second half of the Christian year, is designed as a catechesis of love, that divine charity may take deep root in us, that we might learn such love anew, and that we might therefore become more truly alive in the very life of God who is Love.

In C.S. Lewis’ spiritual classic, The Screwtape Letters, which we have been reading as a parish, the senior devil, Screwtape, points out to his underling that “[t]he whole philosophy of Hell rests on the recognition . . . that one self is not another self. My good is my good and your good is yours. What one gains another loses. ‘To be’ means ‘to be in competition’” (Letter 18). In such a diabolical vision of the world, the love of neighbour—willing the good of another—is impossible. But Christ, the Apostle Paul, St John, St Anthony, and the Christian tradition down the ages turns the axiom of Hell upside down. Love takes place by voluntary acts of substitution; all life is to be vicarious. We are to love each other as God has loved us, laying down our lives ashe did, that this love may be perfected in us. Our neighbour is our life. And our neighbour is our death, which means dying to self for our neighbour’s sake. Rowan Williams puts it well: “Every believer must have an urgent concern for the relation of the neighbor to Christ, a desire and willingness to be the means by which Christ’s relation with the neighbor becomes actual and transforming. . . . We love with God when and only when we are the conduit for God’s reconciling presence with the person next to us. It is as we connect the other with the source of life that we come to stand in the place of life, the place cleared and occupied for us by Christ” (Where God Happens: Discovering Christ in One Another, 31, 35).

The saying of St Anthony quoted above is no doubt a difficult teaching. But the radical demand of the Gospel of Christ has never been easy or convenient. It requires mortifying our self-preservation and all worldly security. To love is to die and live again. “And he said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it” (Luke 9:23-24). The truth of Christ’s teaching must be something understood not merely in the abstract, but it must be something put into practice, and woven into the fabric of our lives. We as a parish church, as the visible Body of Christ in this place, must practice this love by the grace we have been given. Our parish does not exist for itself. Like the Body of Christ, the purpose of the parish is to be broken and given for the life of the world. In no other way can the parish become the visible sign on earth of the new community of Christ, of the future kingdom already here and now. Only a church that lives by acts of substituted love will have anything different to say to the world. Only thus can we be signs of Christ to one another.

May God grant us his grace to love our neighbour as Christ has taught and commanded us. I commend to your reading and prayerful consideration the enclosed financial update from our Treasurer, Evelyn Lewis.

Under the Mercy,

Fr Benjamin+

The Third Sunday after Trinity,

in the Octave of the Nativity of St John the Baptist