Twenty-sixth Sunday after Pentecost - November 17, 2024
Father Vincent Pizzuto, Ph.D.
St. Columba's Episcopal Church
Daniel 12:1-3 + Ps. 16 + Hebrews 10:11-25 + Mark 13:1-8
Grace to you, and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. + I speak to you in the Name of the Three-in-One and One-in-Three. Amen!
There is hardly an age or generation that has not conjured for its people epic myths where two near-universal human intuitions co-mingle and come alive for us: That of a wistful longing for an ideal past, and at the same time a charter, a map, to guide our enduring hope for a better future. And in between these two longings erupts the endless struggle between Good and Evil.
Whether we find it among the ancient pagan myths of the Norse or Celtic peoples. In the epic narratives of Beowulf or the Legend of King Arthur, something of this universal struggle lay at the heart of all our mythologies. There is something in each of them that is as timeless as it is ageless, no less so than in the modern mythologies of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, The Star Wars franchise of George Lucas, or J.K. Rowlings’ Adventures of Harry Potter. In each of these we discover something of this wistfulness of a faraway place in a long-ago time; a longing, perhaps even a romanticization, of worlds in which we know magic is real, good and evil are unambiguously defined, and where, despite all odds, the truly miraculous happens. A world in which despite its dragons and dark lords and sorcerers, in the end, hope endures and joy is to be had even in the midst of the world’s darkness not because we have ‘things’ (as the crass materialism of the modern world would make us believe) but because we have each other: our friendship, our love, our loyalty.
Our great mythologies tap deeply into this endless struggle, matched only by enduring hope and tenacious joy because, despite impossible odds, it is the little people – the hobbits of the world – who ultimately prevail, and we are allowed to believe that maybe, just maybe, the meek really do inherit the Earth.
As nearly 35 of us gathered together over the course of this weekend to explore Celtic Christian Spirituality: Ever Ancient, Ever New, I had to confess surprise that this had turned out to be our single largest directed retreat of the year. I had assumed people by now had heard enough, read enough, explored enough of this theme that we would not have garnered such a sizable group. Yet here we were, to my delight and amazement, gathered around sacred fires under a full moon, discerning in our conversations and prayer what is ever ancient and ever new about this mythical, almost magical tradition, with its own collection of ancient chants and prayers and incantations.
And I realized it was just that. Whatever we think of Celtic Christian spirituality its enduring appeal seems to touch upon that same collective consciousness that all our timeless mythologies do. Our insatiable fascination with this uniquely mystical expression of Christian spirituality seems to evoke in us the same romantic wistfulness, the same desire for a past moment that was above all somehow beautiful, when the sacredness of Earth was yet unspoiled by modernity, industrialization, and the cruel weapons of war. A time when we felt more tethered to God not as a distant overseer but as an intimate Anam Cara…a soul friend; a palpable presence who could be seen and known and felt in the elemental beauty of the Earth; who could be celebrated through song and chant; and in the telling of ancient stories around hearth and home in the midst of intimate community where we knew the hand of Providence would guide us as surely as in Brendan’s own mystical voyage across the sea.
Indeed, there is something in the archetype of the Celts that seems to evoke this sense of longing for an ideal past, but in doing so, no less inspires in us a way of reclaiming that kind of intimacy with God, with Creation, and with community in the present and no less into the future. In contrast to the ancient world held out for us by our myths and the Celtic Christian traditions that continue to fascinate us, our world can seem not only dull and bereft of meaning, but stripped of its beauty, devoid of an immediate and intimate connection to the Divine. Each of us wandering like lost children of a forgotten lineage we long to rediscover, with the hope that in knowing something of our own indigenous past, we too might be guided toward the fulfillment of our destiny. Like the discovery of a secret deep within each of us that we have long since forgotten.
In a society where empiricism reigns supreme, where novelty is everything and the speed of obsoletism continues to increase at an alarming pace; where social media continues to seduce entire generations into the non-places of the web, there is no room to simply wonder at what is directly before me: to ponder the leaf or stone or flower beneath my feet, nor the full moon and stars overhead. There is no room for enchantment. Where “old” has come to mean nothing more than passé, and the revered ‘elder’ – as wisdom bearer – has been all but banished from our vernacular. We have made no place in society for the stories of the bard or song of the crone, the magic of druids, or the benedictions of our priests.
And precisely because of this, perhaps there is never more a time when we must delve again into these ancient myths, give a new hearing to whatever the ancient Celts might yet have to teach us, not by simply mimicking them as so much of the popular literature would seem to suggest, but rather by doing what they did in our own time and culture: to reclaim again what is ever ancient and ever new. To discern again what the Spirit is bringing forward from the store room in a new way.
Perhaps we might begin by understanding what the Lutheran liturgist Gordon Lathrop tells us about the power of the Christian liturgy to evoke the kind of mythical world we secretly long for. As he muses in his book, Holy Things, he writes this:
We come into church and find water for washing, bread, and wine for a meal, and a book yielding powerful words, words used as a story and chant, as name and ‘good-spell.’ We may rightly so unfold the powerful Old English word used to translate euangelion, “gospel,” the New Testament name both for preaching and for the books that served as the basis for preaching since, the words used in church seem to be intended to function as something like spells.
When the book is carried into the assembly, a symbol is carried in. [But] the book we carry is not just any Rune book: it is the Bible, or the Bible organized as Lectionary or as word-book for the assembly. Our book of life that grants life when it calls out the hearer’s name, our source for words and spells that work is the collection of texts from Israel’s life, and from the witness to the resurrection of Christ.
Lathrop concludes, “Jesus Christ is the “good-spell,” the word of God. That is, the hope for words that do what they say, for a spell that genuinely works good, and also is refocused in him. Indeed, the hopes that all these symbols awaken, find both confirmation and surprising realignment in him. The experience of the transformation of these symbols is the primary theology of the liturgy.” [Gordon Lathrop: Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 99-101].
Today in our Holy Book, the book of “good spells” as it were, we are confronted yet again with an ancient genre of literature that speaks no less to the present day; which perceives in history the same primordial struggle between the cosmic forces of good and evil, and holds out the same promise of hope that lay beneath all of our ancient myths. Both the book of Daniel and the Gospel of Mark reflect this “genre” known as “apocalyptic” a name which means “a lifting of the veil.”
Daniel foretells of the rise of a new power, now ancient, when Michael the great archangel and defender of humanity against the forces of darkness, will usher in a time of great anguish as the cosmic battle between Good and Evil escalates to new heights. Yet Daniel promises that the wise and righteous will shine like the brightness of the stars forever. And in Mark, Jesus admonishes us to remain calm, trusting, even hopeful in the midst of new eras of social upheaval, when wars and rumors of wars abound, and climate catastrophes signal the birth pangs of a new age yet to be born.
We would need only alter but a few scant references in either of these texts to wonder whether we were reading from the pages of Tolkien, the biblical apocalypse, or the front page of this morning’s newspaper. But precisely therein lies the power of our mythologies and our own book of the Gospels, that is, the Good-spells. They speak, not merely to an ancient time in the past but in ever new ways from the past to our own present moment. It would seem indeed that the tumult and crises faced by the hobbits of Middle Earth no less than the warring Celts, whether by the first Christians oppressed, as they were, by the imperial Power of Rome, than those of us who live in the Empire of America, the perennial message endures across all times and places: Even when goodness doesn’t triumph, hope can still prevail. Even when shadows lengthen and darkness falls, we can, indeed must, still hold out for one another the light of the Secret Fire we carry deep within ourselves. Even when the sun sets with the promise of a long, dark night ahead, if we harken to our ancients and the stories they told, we too will find our way by the light of the moon and stars overhead.
And when in the face of insurmountable crises, in the midst of wars and rumors of wars, when Earth itself revolts against the abuses we have inflicted upon her; when words of comfort are hard to find in a world where a new Dark Lord has claimed the throne; when the comforts and security we once thought assured now crumble around us; let us then, if never before, entrust ourselves to the hope and power and promise of our myths. Let us turn again to our own Holy Book, the Gospel, to trust again in the mystery of the “good-spell” whose words hold real power to transform hearts, even if invoked not by a kindly wizard but a fumbling priest.
Let us listen to its assurance, that we must become like children, trusting again in the power of Providence unfolding in the little people, the meek of the earth; to trust that we are summoned here around hearth and table, to eat the Bread the gives life, to drink the Cup that restores wholeness, to tell the ancient stories and sing the sacred songs, not only that we might discover hope, but that we might become hope for a world so desperately in need of it; a hope that will endure until the promised day for which we all secretly long when the dawn from on high shall break upon us (Lk. 1:78-79), with all the restored innocence we know ourselves to be, and with a beauty that is indeed ever ancient and ever new.
+ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen!