Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message
September 19, 2018
“Dreadful Toadying”
Proper from last Sunday:“O God, because without you we are not able to please you, mercifully grant that your Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,one God, now and for ever. Amen.”
When
I first heard this collect after coming into the Episcopal Church, I was struck
by what I thought was its unhealthy demeaning of self and implicit Calvinist
stress on human depravity. I had been
raised Mormon, a Pelagian tradition that denies Original Sin, stresses the
innate goodness of every human being upon birth, and affirms in its Articles of
Faith that “Men shall be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam’s
transgression.” Free choice was a real
thing, not just an appearance. So the
idea that we are crippled, unable to choose the right or please God unless somehow
God worked a fix on us first, was wholly strange to me. The
prayer struck me like the prayer in the English Public School scene in Monty
Python’s Meaning of Life:
“O Lord, you are so big! So absolutely huge! Gosh, we are really impressed down here, I can tell you! Forgive us, O Lord, for this our dreadful toadying. But you are so strong and just so SUPER! Amen.”
Part
of the reason I had left Mormonism was the high psychological cost many of its members paid for
a thoroughgoing Pelagianism: people with
obsessive or compulsive problems, including addictions, were often seen as wholly
unregenerate and willful, stubborn in their sins because they could just not
seem to be able to pull up their socks, change their behavior, and stop
relapsing. I knew many Mormons who had a hard time
mouthing the words of, let alone believing, the first part of any of the 12
Step Programs: “We admitted that we were powerless and that our lives had
become unmanageable.” This, despite the LDS Church's endorsement of the Twelve Steps as a therapeutic and pastoral program.
It
took me years to understand what the true teaching of the Christian Church on
such things was: the doctrine original
sin is not so much a doctrine of inborn depravity and universally merited
punishment as it is an affirmation that as good as creation and human life are,
we are in the final analysis unable to do it all ourselves. God’s
creative work in us is not yet finished, and we need to get out of the way to
let God finish the task of creating us as something “good, very good.”
I
no longer think this week’s collect is toadying or self-denying. Rather, it talks of God’s universal salvific
will, the fact that God wants us all to reach the measure of our creation. It talks of what theologians call “prevenient
grace,” God’s unconditional loving kindness that goes before us and empowers us
to choose and act beyond what we otherwise are able to do on our own.
Most
of us have had the experience of having a spouse be unhappy with us for not
doing some task, or meeting some need, and when we say “but you didn’t ask me
to do that,” hearing in reply, “That’s exactly why I’m angry—I should not have
to need to ask you for this. You should
know without me asking.” Relationship
implies a knowledge of the beloved, and the ability to anticipate needs and
desires. Faith is a relationship with
God, the Beloved. And what we cannot
anticipate of the Beloved’s desires, the Beloved makes up for with grace
itself. As we continue living in the Spirit, having
the Spirit rule and direct our heart and minds, such grace becomes mutual, and
our love of God becomes as unconditional as is God’s love for us.
Grace
and Peace,
Fr.
Tony+
No comments:
Post a Comment