All our Holy Week and Easter services were, I think, both beautiful and moving in their different ways and our thanks are due to all who made them possible and all who decorated the church for Easter.
There was, however, one thing missing. A few years ago we changed the Easter Vigil service because so few people attended it and because we had initiated children’s activities for Holy Saturday afternoon which culminated in a shorter service in which we still light the Easter candle outside and process into church.
This new service contains a hymn whose words are very loosely based on an ancient chant called the Exultet, which in English begins with the words ‘Rejoice heavenly powers’. The chant may even, according to one Benedictine scholar, be related to chants in the Jerusalem temple. The words go back at least to the 7th century and probably earlier. Traditionally the deacon sings the Exultet when the paschal candle has been placed on its stand. The chant is perhaps most interesting in the section which deals with Adam’s sin and the redemption wrought by Christ:
‘O truly necessary sin of Adam,
which by the Death of Christ was done away!
O happy fault,
which was counted worthy to have such and so great a Redeemer.’
The words ‘happy fault’ translate the Latin ‘felix culpa’ and can also be translated as ‘the fortunate fall’. The idea of the happy fault is derived from the theology of St Augustine: “For God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist.” We find a similar idea in Thomas Aquinas: “God allows evils to happen in order to bring a greater good there from.”
This is indeed a truly challenging idea, which deserves reflection. What is being suggested is that human happiness would not have been greater had human beings never known the meaning of sin and evil. We cannot of course imagine what such a life might be like – a life uninterrupted by suffering or despair or sin’. On the other hand people often find it hard to retain a faith in God in the face of suffering brought on by human fault whether accidental or deliberate. How could a good God have created human beings capable of this? Confronted by the suggestion that such suffering will make us happier in the end we might be tempted to give up faith altogether.
So does the notion of the felix culpa have anything to commend further reflection? Does it reflect anything profound about our human situation?
We find another version of this idea in Edwin Muir’s poem, ‘One Foot in Eden’:
One foot in Eden still, I stand
And look across the other land.
The world’s great day is growing late,
Yet strange these fields that we have planted
So long with crops of love and hate.
Time’s handiworks by time are haunted,
And nothing now can separate
The corn and tares compactly grown.
The armorial weed in stillness bound
About the stalk; these are our own.
Evil and good stand thick around
In fields of charity and sin
Where we shall lead our harvest in.
Yet still from Eden springs the root
As clean as on the starting day.
Time takes the foliage and the fruit
And burns the archetypal leaf
To shapes of terror and of grief
Scattered along the winter way.
But famished field and blackened tree
Bear flowers in Eden never known.
Blossoms of grief and charity
Bloom in these darkened fields alone.
What had Eden ever to say
Of hope and faith and pity and love
Until was buried all its day
And memory found its treasure trove?
Strange blessings never in Paradise
Fall from these beclouded skies.
What the poem points to is a sense that somehow we feel our humanity to be enhanced by our struggles with sin and suffering, which produce ‘flowers in Eden never known.’ However much we may wish that our world and its inhabitants had been created without the capacity for sin and suffering, we also recognize that our victories over the darker angels of our nature somehow enable us to discover ever deeper aspects of our humanity, greater triumphs of grace.
But then the question comes sneaking back, what of those who are seemingly defeated by suffering, what of those who lose the struggle with their darker angels? What of their humanity – wasn’t the bar set too high for them? But then we might also ask, whether in all our struggles we need help, and whether the question should not be about the height of the bar but the inadequacy of the help provided.
The life, death and resurrection of Christ provides the means for our redemption; the Church exists to be the channel of that redemption. In Christ God enables the victory to be won, and sin and suffering to be overcome. God does not leave us without the means to bring good out of evil, but we are the means and if our neighbour fails then we fail. As St Anthony dramatically expressed it, ‘Our life and death are with our neighbour.’ We are the means grace uses to bring greater good out of suffering for one another in this life. In the life beyond all things are handed over to God.
What then are we to do? In the novel being looked at by the Study Centre Reading Group, Susan Hill’s ‘In the Springtime of the Year’, there is a teenager named Jo, who supports Ruth the young widow of his older brother. His wisdom lies in his patience and his rootedness in everyday reality. He does not assume he knows what Ruth is feeling, he does not tell her what she should do, he does not seek to explain what has happened, he does not speak of himself unless she asks, he continues to share his enthusiasms with her when it is appropriate. Above all he helps her to wait for the grace he trusts will come.
The Christian faith is this; that sin, evil and suffering are real and have fully to be faced; but they can only be faced with a full confidence in the victorious goodness and love of God. We have a tendency when confronted with our own pain and weakness to assume that we must overcome it, that there is a solution that we can find, there is something we can do. That may in the end be true but we shall never discover what it is, unless we can on a daily basis practice the prayer of giving ourselves and our neighbours over into the goodness and love of God. Only in that way will we discover the patience to be simply available to others; and so wait for the blooming of ‘flowers in Eden never known.’
A holy and blessed Easter to you all,
The Vicar Writes
Stephen Tucker