Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert Leo Sevensky, OHC
Epiphany 3 C - Sunday, January 23, 2022
We find ourselves once again in the midst of the annual Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. And the biblical readings we have heard this week have given us much to think about. We have heard Jesus’ prayer offered on the night before he died, as recorded in John's gospel, wherein he pleads with the Father that all may be one, both his followers and disciples and by extension, all the human family, perhaps even all creation. We have heard the reading from the Letter to the Ephesians which tells us that: “…there is one body and one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is above all, and through all, and in all.” And in our second reading this morning we hear St. Paul talking to that contentious and divided Corinthian church: “… in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”
There is an interesting connection between the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity and the Order of the Holy Cross. As many of you know, the week of prayer was begun in 1908 by Father Paul Watson, an Episcopal priest from nearby Kingston NY who founded the Franciscan Society of the Atonement and who spent a training year with Holy Cross when we were still located in Westminster, Maryland. Fr. Paul was a staunch Anglo-papalist and he campaigned vigorously for the incorporation of the Episcopal and Anglican Churches and the entire Christian world into the Roman Catholic Church under the sovereignty of the Bishop of Rome. The early decades of this week-long observance, known then as the Chair of Unity Octave, was totally directed to this end. And as you might imagine, such an observance was not enthusiastically received in non-Roman Catholic circles. It was only much later, in the 1930s and 1940s and under the influence of a remarkable French Catholic priest, Paul Couturier, that the week of prayer began to take shape as we know it today, that is as an invitation to pray for unity as Christ wishes in the way Christ wishes and at the time Christ wishes.
I remember the excitement of the 1960s when the ecumenical movement, spurred on by the Second Vatican Council, seemed to take off with enthusiasm, optimism, and a big dose of naivete. I remember going to ecumenical prayer services which were often rather bland events, focused on the least common denominator and carefully avoiding anything that might give offense to those who were different from us, whoever “us” was. But it did offer an opportunity to visit other churches and meet people of varied spiritual backgrounds and practices at a time when that was still somewhat rare. But times have changed.
I have been working lately in our library here at the monastery with Brother Bernard and Brother John as we weed out our collection to make it more useful and contemporary. This past week I've been weeding into the 260s—that’s Dewey Decimal—where I've come across a century or more of writings and reflections on the nature of the church and the possibility of unity. There are tomes on doctrine and beliefs of course, which remain central. There are books on liturgical worship and sacramental practice. And there are many volumes concerning church order and polity: on the nature of the ministry and the role of the episcopate; books on the historical role of bishops and the idea of Apostolic Succession and whether the episcopacy is necessary for the very existence of the church or perhaps only for its full being (its plene esse as they say in Latin), or maybe just for its wellbeing or finally perhaps just an historic accident. There are endless volumes on the debate over the validity of Anglican priestly orders shaped largely by Pope Leo XIII’s 1896 declaration that they are “absolutely null and utterly void.” There are books about the nature of authority and governance in the church, including the role of the Bishop of Rome and the so-called Petrine ministry or function. And then there are volumes of schemes of unity or institutional merger, most of which never happened.
And truthfully, I was wearied by it all. What once had been exciting to me and provocative or at least intriguing now seemed dry and empty and fruitless. I know, of course, that's not the whole story. I know there have been real advances in church relationships and mutual understanding and cooperation among Christians. I know that historical investigation and scholarly argument are vital and that issues such as intercommunion and shared ministry and some agreement on basic Christian doctrine is not unimportant. And as dry as they are, I recognize and have even read some of the agreed statements produced by various doctrinal commissions that attempt to advance theological understanding or heal centuries of misunderstanding that have marked the Christian experience. A case in point, for example, is the quite extraordinary Lutheran/Roman Catholic agreed statement on justification or the Roman Catholic/Anglican statement on Mary.
Still, I was wearied. There's something wrong, something lacking in this approach. Something more or other is needed. What might that be? Two things come to mind.
The first is a post by the Reverend Bosco Peters, an Anglican priest from New Zealand. He publishes regularly on his website called Liturgy and he can be quite entertaining and informative. A few years ago, he posted an entry titled “Week of Prayer for Christian Diversity. [2] Noting that Christians cannot even agree on when to pray for unity, since the observance of this event in the Southern Hemisphere usually takes place in the Easter season, he says such a Week of Prayer for Christian Diversity would celebrate difference. It would be a week about being more honest and more realistic, accepting diversity as the only way forward. And he reminds us that the best bit about a Week of Prayer for Christian Diversity is that you don't have to have all your ideas consistently worked out: “This week is about lovingly accepting disagreement with others. It is also about lovingly accepting disagreement within yourself.” He takes as his patron Saint Thomas Aquinas who stopped writing his monumental work Summa Theologiae almost in mid-sentence, stating famously: “Everything that I have written seems like straw to me compared to those things that I have seen and have been revealed to me."
What can we learn from each other, especially from those who differ from us in ways small and large? What gift, what tradition, what virtue or value or insight have others preserved for the sake of the world, even if, in our opinion, they get much else wrong? What has been revealed to them or to us that we need to treasure, just as Thomas Aquinas did his own mystic vision?
Father Peters speaks of orthodoxy and reminds us that it means something closer to “right prayer” rather than right belief. It is, as he puts it, about shared spiritual disciplines and common prayer and not about: “…making windows into people’s souls and minds to check, by the belief police, whether my list of dozens of literally-taken beliefs match up identically to your list.” It is precisely these shared spiritual disciplines and common prayer that provide an undergirding unity to our diversity. And: “It is in praying together for the diversity that our unity is already being found.”
I've come to believe that unity, real unity, Christian unity is not primarily about institutional structures, as necessary as they are. Nor is it about uniformity, nor absorption, nor merging, nor anything else like this. It is rather about God's work, a work so wonderfully summed up in that phrase from the Eucharist Prayer that I opened with: Reveal its unity. I believe that we are more united than we know. Our risk and our role is to pray and to love. To pray that God reveal the unity of the church and of all creation, a unity that is already there beyond division and distinction. And to love both what is revealed and what remains mysterious. It is to put on the mind of Christ and to hold it in deep humility. And to trust that God will be all in all even as we pray for and live into that promise.
I conclude with another prayer from the Book of Common Prayer that says it better than I can:
O God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, our only Savior, the Prince of Peace: Give us grace seriously to lay to heart the great dangers we are in by our unhappy divisions; take away all hatred and prejudice, and whatever else may hinder us from godly union and concord; that, as there is but one Bodyand one Spirit, one hope of our calling, one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of us all, so we may be all of one heart and of one soul, united in one holy bond of truth and peace, of faith and charity, and may with one mind and one mouth glorify you; through Jesus Christ our Lord. [3]Amen.
______
[1] 1979 Book
of Common Prayer, Eucharistic Prayer D
[2] https://liturgy.co.nz/week-prayer-christian-diversity
(accessed January 22, 2022)
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