Souls are God's jewels
Sermon for the First Sunday after Trinity
“Souls are God’s jewels, every one of which is worth many worlds.”
These words come from the book which C.S. Lewis considered the greatest in the English language: Centuries of Meditation, by the 17th century Anglican priest and poet, Thomas Traherne. Since every human mind is a microcosmic replica of God’s, our imagination is literally more expansive than everything in existence – much bigger than the brain! – because, like God, we can imagine worlds, as many as we please; we can fit them into our minds. Each human soul is more important than any number of worlds because each imagination contains everything.
When “the world is aright,” and everything is “in its proper place,” we can see this. We can see that the sun, clouds, stars, air and sea are here to serve us, gifts of God’s goodness ordered to make the human soul possible. But as it is, Traherne quotes the psalms, All the foundations of the Earth are out of course. Consequently, our vision is blurred and dimmed. We see the world not as gift for receiving and gateway to heaven, but as a resource for taking in competition which enslaves us and drives us to violence. We drive slaves to mine diamonds, gold and silicon for our consumption, when we can enjoy the stars and sun which shine so much brighter for free. Traherne says:
“You never enjoy the world aright, till the sea floweth in your veins, till your are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so,because men are in it who are as every one sole heirs as well as you.”
That last phrase is important. You are an heir to the whole world; so is the person next to you, and the indentured child miner in Africa, and the person in the bomb shelter, and the drug addicted beggar.
And the person dying in the hospice bed.
And the infant in the womb, days from birth.
Their souls too contain entire universes in potential. To snuff out one soul is to destroy worlds.
Omnia vincit amor?
“God is Love, and you are His object. You are created to be His Love: and He is yours.”
More from Traherne, this time riffing on St John, with a rather different idea of love from the Members of Parliament who, in the past week, have voted both for the decriminalisation of abortion up to full term – that is, up to the very last minute before birth – and for assisted dying.
If they were pushed to define their decision in terms of love, I suspect that they would see it in terms of compassion for women and for the suffering who wish to die, which are both important – but from the perspective of the Church, insufficient.
Moderns ideas of love echo across the airwaves in pop songs, love is invoked in fast food adverts, and in June we are bombarded with the mantra "love wins," as though that settles everything. Omnia vincit amor, the Roman poet Ovid could write in a similar vein: "love conquers all things." But to him, and to the ancients, it was not at all clear that love's victory was always to be celebrated. One can be driven mad by love, as every poet knows: driven even to misery and death by it, if forbidden or unrequited. One can fall in love against one's will, and love what, in the cold sobriety of reason when the heat has subsided, one truly hates.
Might it not be better to live without the fire of love, in a state of cool, calm control over one's body and desires? There are schools of philosophy and spirituality which favour this approach. After all, if you love something, it suggests that it has control over you. Love is the want and desire for another. You love because you lack something in yourself. You find fulfilment only in the object of your love.
And that is why ancient philosophers found the Christian claim so absurd. "God is love?" Surely not. We must love God, they would agree, because God is the very pinnacle of all things, the ultimately desirable, the source of all beauty. Everything that we lack, desire and need can be found in God. But God needs nothing from us. God lacks nothing. God wants nothing. We must love God, but the idea that God loves us was preposterous.
So, Socrates once claimed that to be like God is to need nothing and so desire nothing. Likewise, the Buddha said that "he who has a thousand loves has a thousand sufferings." For the Christian, this is not so. We exist because God wants us to; He desires our existence; in short, He loves us. And that is true of everything in creation, not just humans. God wants it all.
The genius of Traherne is his insight that for us to be Godlike, we must want it all, too. Thousands of loves are not enough; our loves must be infinite. But our sufferings are not infinite as a result, as the Buddha thought –– because God fulfils those infinite wants, even as He supplies them. In Traherne’s word, “infinite Wants satisfied produce infinite Joys.”
Love conquers only when we love as God loves, which is to love all people and all things as repositories of infinite joy. Even the ones in wombs.
Deus vult
God is love; God loves us. Those are the two propositions that most fully separate Christianity from the ancient and modern pagan philosophies of the world. And those are the propositions which the Christian year, from Advent up to Trinity, to has been fleshing out until now.
That we dwell in God, "in whom we live, and move, and have our being," and that we long for unity with Him, was a point agreed by Jews and Greeks. That there is a guiding principle, a Logos or Word, which orders the cosmos and leads us to God, was also uncontroversial. But – in the crisp articulation of St John – that "the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us": this, as St Augustine said, is where the pagan philosophy cannot follow. To say that God "so loved us" that He "sent his only-begotten Son into the world," that this Son and Word of God should die at human hands, and rise from the dead only to lift us to heaven by the cords of His Love: this exploded the limits of their philosophy.
Compassion towards women making hard decisions is vital, but at some point, one has to draw a line between a foetus and a human. Wherever one stands on abortion in general, it is hard to accept that an infant just weeks, days or hours before birth is just a “bundle of cells.” So I would say that last Tuesday's vote is about more than decriminalising the indiscriminate abortion of late-term, viable babies. It is the removal of one of the final Christian fig leaves from the naked paganism of modern Britain. It pushes us closer to the likeness of those pagan gods of independence and detachment than the Christian God who embraces the infinite possibilities of love. It aids the powerful, because adults are always more powerful than children, and it will aid men in their abuse of women, especially those in the sex trade. It will aid those fathers and husbands who command women to abort children either because they are girls or are disabled, two of the chief reasons for abortion. And so it is one more step towards the modernist horror of a world where the value of human life is subordinated to economic decisions, facilitated by a technocratic state: a world in which a human soul is seen not as a fellow-heir to infinite joy and source thereof, but as a burden to be cast off at will, a mere resource. It will lead to guilt and almost ineradicable shame, and take earth one step closer to Hell, where like the Rich Man in Jesus’ parable, we see the joys that God offers, but can never reach them.
The root of happiness and the gate of Heaven
What might all this mean as we come to the altar?
First, that while it is good to love God in the Sacrament, it is not enough. "If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar." We who see God in the bread and wine of the Eucharist must see Him also in the face of our neighbour: including both the pregnant woman and the unborn child.
Second, that even Lazarus, who had nothing, let the dogs lick his sores. However little we may think we have, we have in our souls and infinite well of love. It is in fact far easier and more pleasant to love than to hate. God gives us far more than crumbs. In the Sacrament, He gives us everything.
But third, God is merciful. Even the crumbs that fall from our table are enough to spare us from eternal damnation. Those who keep every last crumb condemn themselves, and will be no happier for it, for a life without love is hell already. And while we must not excuse Parliament’s decision or those who avail themselves of it, we must continue to offer the hope of repentance and salvation. Far greater than the threat of Hell is the joy of true love, revealed on the Cross, which Traherne calls:
“…the abyss of wonders, the centre of desires, the school of virtues, the house of wisdom, the throne of love, the theatre of joys, and the place of sorrows; …the root of happiness, and the gate of Heaven.”