Dear People, Neighbours, and Friends of St. Thomas’s,
With the rise of a new variant of concern in this wretched pandemic, some of us may have renewed feelings of powerlessness or anxiety (or both, among many other possible feelings). When we cannot plan our holiday outings and gatherings without wondering whether all our plans will come to naught, the best thing we can do is ask God to give us the grace to live in hope. Though they won’t necessarily get us out of this mess, hope, faith, and love are the gifts of the Holy Spirit that will get us through all our troubles and afflictions, our trials and tribulations, and through our mundane daily disappointments and frustrations, as well.
In such times as these, it is important to remember that it is perfectly fine to feel what we are feeling, especially if we are not feeling especially fine! Life brings us both consolation and desolation; sometimes it will feel like we are getting far more than our fair share of the bad and not nearly enough of the good. But, with St. Paul, I remain convinced that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).
At Morning Prayer on Friday, after we prayed the Litany together, our seminarian Daniel McCarley mentioned the Supplication on pages 35–37 of the BCP. The rubric is that it be used “especially in the Penitential Seasons and in times of trouble.” So we prayed it at the end of Morning Prayer, and I commend it to you for your personal devotions, as well. Both the Litany and Supplication can be found online courtesy of the Prayer Book Society of Canada, as can its superb Common Prayer mobile app.
Every time I pray the Litany itself, I am struck anew by how timeless it is. Certainly its majestic language is of an era, as the Litany was the first service in English to be authorized for public worship in the Church of England in 1544, several years before the first Book of Common Prayer was promulgated, in 1549. But if we pay attention to it rather than simply rattle it off, we will find that its contents resonate deeply with where we find ourselves today.
One thing really good liturgy does is reflect accurately who we are in relationship to God, our neighbours, ourselves, and all of creation. Since human nature and creation have not changed in their essence since 1544, the petitions of the Litany speak to what we need and want God to do for us, and remind us of what God has in fact accomplished for us in Christ Jesus our Lord.
I’m not going to go into full-on didactic commentary mode here, tempting though that may be (and I know everyone reading this letter would love nothing more than a pedantic disquisition, given all the free time we are enjoying in this season). Those of you who tire of my pontificating can stop here, but a few catechetical notes may be helpful to those of us interested in praying the Litany with more intentionality.
So in what follows, I will provide a summary of how the Litany functions like a catechism oriented toward the truth that lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi – that is, praying shapes believing, and believing shapes how we live, with God’s help.
The Litany begins by clarifying to Whom our prayers are directed (the Trinity) and what we are praying for in general (God’s mercy). What “mercy” means is then defined more specifically in the next petition: “Remember not, Lord, our offences, nor the offences of our forefathers; spare us, good Lord, spare thy people, whom thou hast redeemed with thy most precious blood.” In response, we sum up that petition by praying “Spare us, good Lord.” We don’t repeat this response as we do with all the others, because God already knows why we are praying the Litany in the first place. This petition serves to define for us why we are doing what we are doing.
But what does it mean for God to “spare” us? It means to be delivered from all the evils of this world, which are helpfully enumerated in the next five petitions. The first three petitions basically sum up the Seven Deadly Sins, which are all too relevant in all our lives. Curiously, sloth and greed are not explicitly singled out, but the purpose of these three petitions is to convict our hearts of the fact that we have, in the words of the General Confession at Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, “left undone those things which we ought to have done, and…done those things which we ought not to have done.” The Litany itself is a sort of expanded commentary on the General Confession; compare the two and you’ll see for yourself. (There’s a good blog post about the forms of confession in the 1662 BCP here.)
While the first three “Good Lord, deliver us” petitions are concerned with personal sin, the second two are concerned with the results of our sin. As a consequence of the Fall of Humankind, the world isn’t what it should be: We are beset by natural disasters, disease (!), and violence. Further, our corporate sins manifest themselves both in Church and State: We betray lawful authority in the civil sphere, and in the ecclesiastical sphere, we fall away from both orthodoxy and orthopraxy, which, as Methodist pastor Jason Valendey has written, are unified only when God gives us orthocardia, which sounds like a terrible disease, but is in fact what it means to be given the grace of a redeemed heart that desires to live in truth and love.
But exactly how does God change our hearts and redeem us, despite the consequences of sin and death that continue to surround us in this mortal life? To find out, read the final four petitions to which we respond with “Good Lord, deliver us.” (A catechetical oration on petitions six through nine may be coming to a pulpit near you, perhaps in Lent.)
The rest of the petitions, to which we reply, “We beseech thee, good Lord,” comprise literally a litany of all the gifts of grace that we cannot acquire through our own merits or control through our own powers. These petitions concern what we need from God in order for humanity and creation to flourish. And again, these petitions address both the corporate level of Church and State and the personal level of individuals, families, and relationships.
I could do a deep dive into the twenty-three times we beseech God prior to wrapping up the Litany with an appeal to Christ in the final section ending with the Kyrie, but you’ll have to be content with a few words on the final two petitions in this section, which to me is the crux of the matter, and arguably the single biggest challenge that faces us as we seek a redeemed heart that desires to live in truth and love. The first is, “To forgive our enemies, persecutors, and slanderers, and to turn their hearts,” which is a tall order in and of itself, but note that it is immediately followed by “To give us true repentance…to amend our lives…” These two petitions go hand-in-hand. We can’t simply want “them” to change without recognizing that “we,” too, need to change. Immediately after praying that God would “turn their hearts,” we turn around and pray that God would turn our hearts through repentance, or conversion, which literally means “turn around.”
Much of my ministry is centred on this dynamic between forgiving our enemies and taking responsibility for our own ongoing conversion. While much of this spiritual work is interior and individual in nature, when God gives us a redeemed heart that desires to live in truth and love and we do exercise the discipline of forgiveness, it has a tangible corporate dimension. The word for that dimension is “reconciliation.” Reconciliation is what happens when God works through our prayer to shape our believing, so that we can live lives of faith, hope, and love. This personal and corporate work continues whether the times are good or ill, although our current circumstances certainly provide particular challenges when it comes to our common life. We are “living in the meantime,” waiting for the day to come when litanies and supplications will be unnecessary because all things—all people and all of creation—will be reconciled in Christ. And so our Advent prayer must always be Maranatha, O Lord, come quickly!
Yours in Christ’s service,
N.J.A. Humphrey+
VIII Rector
CONFESSIONS IN ADVENT
Christmas is only a few days away, and the clergy are available by appointment to meet with you to make your confession in preparation for this great feast, so “that we, without shame or fear, may rejoice to behold his appearing,” as the proper preface for the season of Advent promises us. If you have never made your confidential confession before, or have never experienced the liberating power of the sacrament of reconciliation in the way it is intended as a gift from God, you are warmly invited to do so this year. The easiest way to make an appointment for a confession with Fr. Humphrey is to visit rector.youcanbook.me at your convenience to choose a time during his office hours on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. You can also arrange a time to meet on any day of the week except for Mondays via email: frhumphrey@stthomas.on.ca. Likewise, Fr. D’Angelo may be reached via frdangelo@stthomas.on.ca and Fr. Shire via frshire@stthomas.on.ca. Any of the clergy who serve as celebrants of our weekday Masses would also be happy to be of assistance, and the parish clergy can easily put you in touch with any priest whose contact information you do not already have. Fr. D’Angelo is compiling a list of area clergy who are available to serve in this capacity, and all members of St. Thomas’s are encouraged to make their confessions to a priest prior to Christmas and Easter every year, and at other times as may be advisable for the comfort and edification of their souls. —Fr. Humphrey