The Very Reverend Michael J. Pitts

Dear Friends,

Ash Wednesday came upon us quickly this year. Just the week before, we had celebrated the last of the feasts of the incarnation, the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. As we blessed the candles and carried them round the Cathedral, we remembered again the birth of Christ as light in the world. Eight days later we were receiving the cross of ash on our foreheads, a sign of death. But is it possible that the liturgical calendar, based as it is in the gospel account of the life of Jesus, may be misleading us? At Christmas we celebrate, not just the historical birth of the historical person Jesus of Nazareth, but the eternal birth of the risen Christ in our hearts and lives, in the life of the world and the church. Jesus, however, is not the risen Christ before he has died. So death precedes life in this understanding. Life arising from death, of course, is what we celebrate at Easter, and so the secular Calendar, with Christmas following Easter in the twelve month cycle could be more helpful in understanding the relationship between the two cardinal festivals of our faith.

But it is not merely a question of calendars. Death giving way to life is also a central feature of spiritual experience. Lent is a time of year when we reflect on this theme. In the Sunday liturgy of the Cathedral we shall focus on death in a way both real, horrifying and political, as we study together the disaster being wrought by HIV/AIDS in Africa. The questions at the back of our minds in this will be, where, in all this death and suffering, is new life to be found, and in what ways can we be bearers and agents of new life?

In a different way we see death around us in the church. Across Canada and Europe congregations are declining, churches are closing and there is a generation of younger people with practically no knowledge about the Christian faith. But in many ways this is a less intractable problem than many of the social and political problems of Africa and the secular world in general. It seems to me that there is plenty of evidence new life in the Christian faith. What is dying, and needs to die is an older form of the church. This is a version of the church in which, at the larger level the church is tied in with the state, with society and its culture, and is simply the religious arm of a secular world outlook, a church in which there is no critique and no prophetic voice. At the parish level it is a version of the church serving as a social club catering to the needs of its members, who are generally like-minded and homogeneous in demographic background. But as this church dies, I believe the new is already visible. This new life for the church, however, seems to be happening in two rather different forms. One form seeks to engage with the past and to maintain the essential teachings as they have been received, the Bible as the words and instruction of God, Christ as a supernatural being, faith, essentially, as believing in the propositions of the tradition. Another form (and this is the form which is becoming visible in the life and preaching of the Cathedral), seeks to engage with the post-modern future. It sees tradition as flow of information from past to future, the world, society and the church as a process of becoming, in which the living Christ makes himself known in current and flow. It sees faith as relationship with other people, with the ecosphere and with the ground of all being. It sees scripture as a particular and normative phase of the tradition, but as a witness to the God who speaks through the living Christ in our midst. At the present time these two emerging versions of the church are in conflict with each other. It is my hope that we can find ways of understanding that both may be the work of the spirit breathing new life into the church. (1)

New life in the in the world and in the church: behind this Lent speaks about the need for something else, death and new life in our inner being. As in the gospel story, the resurrection to new life can only occur after the death. This death is experienced in different ways by different people. For some it is an experience not of their own choosing, a serious illness, the death of someone loved, the breakdown of a marriage or of a career. For others it is a path chosen and undertaken, a deep spiritual self analysis, undertaken often with the help of a spiritual director or psychological counselor. Or it is a review at the level of though and intellect about the personal meaning of faith. Even at the level of body, it can be a determination to take personal health and fitness in hand. The period of lent asks us to reflect that unless there is a real experience of death in our lives, there will be no real experience of resurrection and new birth. But it also asks to reflect that new birth in our inner being is the start of new life in the church and new life for our world.

I wish you a holy Lent and a happy Easter.

Michael J. Pitts,
Dean and Rector

(1) Many of the ideas and terms of this paragraph are drawn from The Heart of Christianity, by Marcus J. Borg, Harper Collins 2003.

Yours sincerely,