By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit. [Jn 15:8]
10 May 2009
Made in the image and likeness of God, it is man’s calling, man’s destiny, to reflect back to Him the glory of his Creator. How are we to do this? How are we, in St John’s words, to bear fruit which will glorify the Father? We probably share a pretty common understanding of what makes for a fruitful life: one in which our talents and abilities are developed to the full, and put to best effect, and not only for our own enjoyment and satisfaction, but to bring pleasure and advantage to others too. But life is so unfair. Were I to be locked in a practice room with a violin for the next twenty years, I am entirely confident that I would fail to produce a single performance which would thrill an audience in a concert hall; likewise I am reconciled to the dreadful truth that I will never open the batting for England at Lord’s, win Strictly Come Dancing, or be exhibited at the Royal Academy unless there is a sudden fashion for stick-men and drawings of cats which look like horses. (Perhaps not entirely impossible given the vicissitudes of the art world).
Playing the violin or playing cricket, painting or doing the Paso Doble. I don’t have the gift. Yet we are not so generally dismissive of the great multitude of the un-gifted, the great majority of men and women the world over (and in most respects, we ourselves), as to say that their lives, our lives, are wholly unfruitful. In a modest way, we can work away at something so that we display some skill, some competence at a particular task, given sufficient diligence and application. We know – unlike those whom we call truly gifted – that our achievements, such as they are, will depend on these workaday things – determination, effort of will, sheer bloody persistence. With gritted teeth, fixed jaw, sweat and tears, we have a sporting chance of producing something which isn’t too bad after all.
What of the moral life? What of our capacity to bear fruit in right attitudes, right judgments and right living? Here, we might see something of an analogy with what we have just said about the way in which we can make something of our modest and limited talents, by means of practice and effort of will. Following the greatest of the ancient philosophers, we can say that proper to each human person are the natural virtues, those ethical and intellectual ‘skills,’ if you like, by means of which we can acquire moral uprightness, and become just and good. The virtues are implanted in us, like seeds: we have to cultivate them by our continual striving to do the right thing and choose the good. Eventually we will become habituated to morally right living, and the practise of the virtues – classically prudence, temperance, justice and fortitude – by means of this constant exercise of moral discipline, will be an almost spontaneous option in our lives: we will reach a point at which we do what is right with scarcely any conscious process of decision-making. For Aristotle (who gave us that foundational taxonomy of the virtues), the image is that of the master craftsman. Just as a master carpenter, who has carefully learned his trade, will make a beautifully constructed cabinet, and the master baker turn a trough of dough into a good loaf, so the man who has served his apprenticeship in the school of the virtues will eventually become a master craftsman in the art of living well.
The Christian tradition (exemplified particularly by Aquinas) has not been afraid to adopt the wisdom of the pagans in understanding the virtues as the key to the right development and maturation of the human person, but with this crucial difference. The Church speaks not only of the natural, but also the supernatural or theological virtues: faith, hope, and what we traditionally call ‘charity’ but can better call ‘love.’ Here we move away from the world of hard graft, practice and diligence yielding solid, if modest results, for the theological virtues cannot be acquired by any effort of our own. They are pure gift: they are gifted to us at our baptism. They are given (to employ the master-image of today’s Gospel reading) when we are made a branch of the Vine who is Christ, when we are rooted and grafted into Him, when His life and ours become one; a co-mingling initiated at our baptism and renewed by our participation in the mystery of the Eucharist and our reception of the Lord’s Body and Blood. It is no exaggeration to say that the exercise of faith, hope and love, these supernatural virtues and gifts, will enable us to accomplish that purpose for human existence with which I began: to reflect the glory of the Creator, to become like God.
Is there not, however, something of a problem lurking here? If we stress – as we must – the utter gratuity, the freely-given graciousness of these gifts, then how do we make them our own? We are not simply empty vessels to be filled, completely passive and undifferentiated recipients of the divine gift. It must mean something to say I hope, I believe, I love. Every bit as much as with those natural virtues delineated by the ancient philosophers, we have to make the theological virtues ‘part of ourselves,’ the gifts of God and yet our own, springs whose source is divine yet welling up as springs flowing in and through our own being. How do we go about this? How do we cultivate the seeds of faith, hope and love, these virtues which are pure gift?
The extract from St John which we heard this morning is part of that much longer discourse addressed by Our Lord to his disciples, after he has washed their feet. It goes right through from Chapter 13 almost to the end of Chapter 16 of the Fourth Gospel. At its heart is the promise which Jesus makes to the disciples that after he has left them, the Father will send them the Counsellor, the Holy Spirit. Though we do not hear specifically about the Holy Spirit in the verses from the Gospel read this Sunday, St John does speak of the Spirit in his first Letter, which gives us today’s Epistle. There, we are told that it is because of the gift of the Holy Spirit that we can be sure that Christ dwells – abides is that key Johannine term – in us, and we in Him. In the lections appointed and the prayers set for these coming weeks in Eastertide, the Church prepares us for the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost, the Spirit whose gentle but persistent action in our lives does make it possible for us to cultivate those supernatural virtues which allow us even to be divinised. As the Holy Spirit guides us, so God Himself moves within us, inclining us to the exercise of faith, hope and love. No wonder the liturgy of the Church exhorts us to ‘Pray earnestly for the gifts of the Holy Spirit.’
And such we must do: pray that the Spirit will inspire us in our thinking and our acting, in every aspect of our lives; pray that we might be fitting vessels for the Spirit to dwell in, our soul’s ‘sweetest guest,’ the dulcis hospes animae of the Church’s Whitsun hymn. I wonder how many of us here do make such a prayer? As lovers of dignity and regularity in worship and order in ecclesial life more generally – and rightly so – we might well be rather shy of asking for the Holy Spirit to come and make His home in our hearts and souls. We need not be afraid. As the Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna has remarked, the Holy Spirit ‘loves discretion and hiddenness.’ He works patiently, without spectacle, wearing away, like the action of running water upon a stone, all that might prevent the growth of those seeds of supernatural virtue, all that might choke off frail shoots of faith, hope and love – and of these, above all, love. It is love which wears the crown among the Spirit’s gifts: love which is the synthesis and perfection of all other virtues, without which – as S Thomas teaches – prudence might become mere calculating cleverness, and justice threaten to become unmerciful. It is love which ensures that the exercise of all the other virtues – both those which are ‘natural’ and even those (faith and hope) which are ‘supernatural’ – is orientated towards our true end, which is nothing less than union with God in eternity.
So we pray that God will stir up God’s own gifts in us. We pray that the Spirit will enable the seeds of faith, hope, and charity planted in us at our baptism to bear fruit, to the glory of the Father. In a little book of essays inspired by the works of Dorothy L. Sayers, one Anglican writer writes this, making just this point in a slightly different manner: ‘God reveals his inner self to us: the Father sends the Son. But the divine plan and action is not complete until we respond; and our response is God, effective in and through us, the Holy Spirit.’ Docile to that same Spirit, may we grow in love, the perfection of all human virtues, and the means whereby we all may come to offer back to God, reflected even in the faces of us his creatures, something of His glory.
The Principal