— Collect for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, Book of Common Prayer
Part One
The collect points to the great transcendence of God and the glorious blessings and promises eschatologically stored up for us. Thus the collect stirs our hearts with intense hope and sweet anticipation of the perfection of the next existence. At the same time it disturbs us in our life. This collect, deeply prayed, stirs up troubling questions about the sorts and conditions of love and desire in this mundane existence. Between the realities of this existence and the next, how do we love what we love, and how do we desire what we desire? What is the relationship between those transcendent and excellent realities and the realities of love and desire known in this life? Thus in this collect we confront issues ineluctably bound up in fundamental paradox and ambiguity for Christian life.
The collect begins with this deceptively straightforward assumption — that God has prepared and promised us such good things as surpass our understanding and exceed our desire. Great comfort and joy move our hearts with such a high doctrine. Yet also, reflecting further on the collect, we encounter more than just comfort and joy. We discover nuances of meaning and life that reveal deep paradox and ambiguity in Christian existence.
As noted, the collect states, almost casually, that God’s good things and promises surpass our understanding and exceed our desire. In fact this idea introduces a problem. To experience comfort and joy in an eschatological hope for those good things, their nature must not so surpass our present understanding that we know nothing of them at all in the things of this world and this life. The divine blessings and promises must bear some relationship to the loves and desires we know in this world — some relationship that does not negate our present existence but heartens us in it. Otherwise, in that it directs our hope and anticipation to the next life, this doctrine of surpassing blessings and promises would only drive us to sheer despair and denial of this world, of our perceptions of and desires for the good and amiable in this life.
Yet, we should not misunderstand the point here. I am not arguing that the nature of those transcendent realities must be “thus and so” in order to fit our experience of this world, as if our understanding of and desire for this world’s blessings and beauties determine what is true or false of transcendent realities. That would disorder matters radically, for the first beauties do not establish the last. The last beauties establish the first. Rather, I argue that the eschatological blessings and promises, while surpassing our present understanding, must somehow be graspable within the experience of our mundane loves and desires. Somehow in what we love and desire of good things in this life there must be real and discernible hints or prefigurings of those sublime gracious realities yet to come.
Were this not so, we would be forced to conclude that those blessed realities so surpass and exceed our understanding and our loves and desires that there is only radical disjunction between the goods and hopes of this life and those of the next. Were this true, utterly shorn in this life of even the least hints or prefigurings of the sublime nature of those divine realities, we would eventually conclude only despair about the nature of this existence. This life and this life alone would equal the pitiable sum of all we love and desire; death would enter the absolute negative that zeros out the sum. No accumulation, no depth, no height, no strength of good and beauty in this existence could overcome or even compensate for the futility and terror experienced in the final and absolute loss of all such good and beauty in the utter oblivion of death.
We must be clear about this. I do not argue that therefore the loves and beauties of this world are or ought to be the sum of reality, the sum of all our hope. The argument here depends precisely upon the opposite truth; namely, that finally all our hope must rest in the surpassing things and promises yet to come. However, as stated above, the argument contains the further assertion that in our ultimate hope we must taste some sense of those surpassing goods in the very things of this ordinary existence.
If our present loves and desires grasp nothing at all of those promised excellencies, then in actuality all we really know of good and desirable things rests wholly upon things and experiences of this life only. Hence, as this life will inexorably be wrenched from our grasp, and as we could put no hope in that of which we have absolutely no knowledge, our response would be only utter fear and loss at the devastation exacted upon us by death. And no hoarding of good things and desires could forestall the sheer and horrifying bankruptcy of that inexorable devastation.
To pray the collect then presses upon us this crucial issue: the relation between love and desire for mundane goods and beauties and love and desire for those transcendent goods and beauties eschatologically stored up for us by God. As we begin to wrestle with this issue in depth, we find bound up in it a deeper and darker question — a stark question that confronts us with almost imponderable depths of paradox and ambiguity in mundane Christian existence. Why persist in this existence rather than pass on directly to the next?
After all, in the next existence are the surpassing blessings of divine realities. This fact and the hope we derive from it expose to us the ultimate inadequacy of this existence, even as we do and we must know love and desire in this life for as long as we persist in it. This question and the issue from which it derives are not mere intellectual meanderings. They are the very stuff of faithful loving and desiring in this life.
This crucial issue then resolves into this intense and ineluctable dilemma of Christian existence in this world. We cannot give up mundane objects of love and desire, else we give up life itself. At the same time, we cannot grasp these objects as if they were ultimately adequate and final sums of love and desire, else we give up the next life.
How then do we love and desire in this mundane life when our love and desire cannot ultimately rest in their objects? How do we love and desire the things (personal and impersonal) of mundane life even as we know our love and desire cannot ultimately rest in them, and as we know that our love and desire cannot now entirely locate in transcendent realities (because they surpass our understanding and exceed our desire; because they are eschatological, whereas we as yet are not)?
How then in this life do we attach ourselves to penultimate realities—and we must attach ourselves to them or we effectively give up this life altogether—even as we long to grasp transcendent divine realities? How do we love and desire divine realities in all things of this life—implying an acceptance of this life and its realities—yet finally above all things—implying a rejection or a transcendence of this life and its realities—without committing one of these errors:
(1) reduction of the nature of divine realities to fit wholly within our present experience, whereby we lose the eschatological tension of love and desire, and thus deify this life; or
(2) elevation of divine eschatological realities so above our experience of love and desire in this life that present realities are utterly distinct from them, whereby either (a) we despise this life entirely in longing for the next life, or (b) we cling desperately to this life because we know absolutely nothing of the hope and comfort of the next?
[Part Two tomorrow]
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