Heart’s sorrow, and a clear life ensuing.

“But remember – for that’s my business to you”, Ariel says in a famous scene in Shakespeare’s The Tempest which is intended to convict the consciences of “You three men of sin”: Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian. They are meant to remember and face what they have done in seeking the harm of Prospero and Miranda. Yet that remembering is “nothing but heart’s sorrow”, meaning repentance, “and a clear life ensuing”.

Remembering has been all our business this week commencing with Remembrance Day on Monday when the whole School as a Corps marched down to the Windsor Cenotaph and then back to the School’s where we remembered by name those who went forth in the defining wars of the 19th and 20th centuries and didn’t return. Many of them sat in the same pews where you sit in Chapel. 

Remembering is an essential faculty of the human soul. It makes us human because it recalls us to the larger company of our humanity, what Hebrews in the lesson read this week calls “so great a cloud of witnesses” that surrounds us and of which we are all a part. Remembrance Day is a reminder of our common mortality, on the one hand, and a reminder of the unspeakable horror of war, on the other hand. Yet our remembering is a way of facing the evils of our hearts and world without being reduced to sorrow and grief. That we try to remember the fallen by name is profoundly humanizing and touching.

If something is worth doing, it is worth doing well. That is the challenge for all of us. That requires our mindfulness about what we are doing. The Corps conducted itself with great attention and decorum, not simply because they were told to but out of a sense of the solemnity and special character of what we were doing together. It means paying attention to one another within a corporate activity of doing things together. It is about being part of something greater than ourselves.

“All these died in faith”, the lesson from Hebrew tells us referring to a great litany of figures all from the Hebrew Scriptures, what Christians came to call the Old Testament: Abel and Cain, Noah, Abraham and Sarah, and Issac, Jacob and Esau and Joseph, Moses, Rahab the Harlot, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, and David. “They desired a better country, that is, an heavenly,” a true patria or homeland of the spirit. They desire a better country is actually the motto of the Order of Canada, the highest civilian honour in the country. It is referred to in a different Latin translation than Jerome’s translation. “Desiderantes meliorem patriam” is the official motto. Jerome’s translation is “Nunc autem meliorem appetunt”.  

That desire for a better country or for doing well whatever we are doing is admirable but without the accompanying phrase it is incomplete. That better country is “an heavenly”; something greater that belongs to God and our engagement with God. It is not a flight from the world into some imaginary fantasy of our minds which so often turns what we desire as better into something worse. The point of Hebrews is to recall us to the primacy of ourselves as spiritual creatures defined not simply by human aspiration and desire but by the divine will which seeks the perfection of our desires and thus redeems them.  We are, in the view of Hebrews, already a part of that heavenly community.

The litany of figures, all from the Old Testament, makes clear that what we seek is what we are called to and that it is for all humanity. Hebrews 11 begins with the powerful definition of faith which challenges our personal claims to knowing and identity. Faith cannot be reduced to the personal and the individual. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” This is to speak of an intellectual and spiritual reality and of faith as an activity in the soul that seeks understanding. Fides quaerens intellectum, as Anselm famously put it, and which is engraved in the glass of the chapel window commemorating him.

This draws on Plato’s insight that faith or opinion - they are the same word in Greek - is neither ignorance nor knowledge but intermediate between them. As such it gives greater poignancy and meaning to this passage in Hebrews about two essential aspects of our humanity: faith and memory. What we seek as belonging to the betterment of our humanity is something substantial and eternal, not ephemeral and passing, not personal and merely subjective. As such faith redeems us from ourselves and our desires. It belongs to the redemption of our desires by ordering them to an end that is everlasting, “that is, a heavenly” country. Our remembering is, as Ariel suggests, all part of repentance and new life. It is about our being able to face the horrors of war and of the disorders in ourselves without being destroyed and overwhelmed but instead freed by forgiveness and mercy. The very things which we seek for ourselves we must seek for one another. “Nothing but heart’s sorrow, and a clear life ensuing.” It is “something understood” that belongs to prayer itself as the poet George Herbert reminds us in a sonnet that ends with those words but begins with “Prayer the Churches banquet, Angels age,/ Gods breath in man returning to his birth,/ the soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage”.