A Community Committed to Bear the Truth in Love

This last Sunday we celebrated the Feast of St Michael and All Angels, which has traditionally marked the return of the full choir and the full panoply of parish activities after the end of Summer. The uniquely rousing strains of Parry’s setting of “I was glad” were eloquent of just how important music is to our mission! We were also blessed to have with us as preacher Dr. George Westhaver, the Principal of Pusey House in Oxford, who had only the day before joined Dr. Drew Nathaniel Keane as a presenter at our Colloquium on the Anglo-Catholic understanding of the sources of authority in Anglicanism.  

All of this spoke to key themes that I identified in my brief remarks at last Sunday’s special reception, as central to the vocation of this parish. The Church of the Advent is here, first and foremost, to meet the spiritual needs of all in this parish. Yet it has also been called, from the time of its foundation in the 1840’s, to be a beacon for the Anglo-Catholic vision of Anglicanism—in all its richness—to the whole of the North American Church and beyond. 

Dr. Westhaver articulated very movingly the Augustinian vision that informs our commitment to the aesthetic. This brings together not only the good the true and the beautiful, in the manner of Plato, but has at its heart the uniquely Christian quest to understand ever more fully the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. 

This was further set out in the Wednesday evening lecture that explored the profundity of the apse mosaic in San Clemente Rome, in which the whole story of salvation from the crucifixion itself on to the life of paradise to come, is rooted in the vine that symbolizes the church of the ages. That vine grows out of the tree at the base of the cross, from which flow the four rivers of the Garden of Eden, while the two stags shown drinking from the waters allude to Psalm 42:1, “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.”

We are a diverse community of faith and we are so in a deeper sense than that of the mere externals which so much preoccupy our wider society and culture. Nonetheless, we are also committed to bear the truth in love to that wider world. As such, we shall of course have our disagreements, but we must seek to disagree well and never let them obscure our shared commitment to understanding, upholding and teaching the fundamental truths of our faith.

This wide vision was well articulated in the motet we heard last Sunday, composed by Eric Harding Thiman (1900-1975) and setting words by the Anglican Priest and Professor of Music, Greville Vaughan Turner Cooke (1894-1989).

Here beauty dwells, and holiness,

here reigns thy God to charm and bless….

Lift up thine eyes to heav’n above,

think on its wonder, grace, and love;

doth not the beauty that around thee lies

lend thee a glimpse of Paradise?

Calm be thy soul, and still thy heart,

say thou a pray’r ere thou depart,

then from this earthly Eden of delight,

go forth in peace, by day or night.

The Rev. Canon Alistair Macdonald-Radcliff
Rector