Circa Visionem Beatificam

I upgraded to Google, which likely will provide all sorts of new features and wasn't particularly annoying. I've taken this opportunity to change my handle to use a more suitable cognomen.

Today is the feast of Thomas Bray, which I was quite happy to celebrate. Today, I also saw a trailer for a movie coming out next weekend, which you might want to see provided you're not giving up the cinema during Lent, which I've contemplated. It's a movie about William Wilberforce and the abolition of the slave trade called Amazing Grace . Both of these men and the organizations they helped to found, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and the Church Missionary Society, were powerhouses for the Gospel, but the organizations are not without ironies in their history. For instance, Bray was disgusted with the condition of the slaves of Maryland and yet the SPC ran a slave plantation in the West Indies as cruel and deadly as any other in the brutal islands. Modern history blames each organization for a variety of colonials evils, but the last few years have seen the strongest blame as the events of Lambeth 1998 and beyond are described as "the revenge of the CMS" ( see Pr. Aelred's second comment ).

Beyond the clobber passages about slavery, beyond the clobber passages about gender, beyond the clobber passages about homosexual intercourse, still stand the Scriptures, the icon of the Eternal Word of the Almighty Father delivered to us men by the Holy Ghost. Are they a pharmakon ? Will we poor patients die of our disease if we inwardly digest too little? Will we be poisoned by being too invested in them and confute the creature with the Creator? Will we poison others? Wilberforce had to answer in the affirmative to both these questions. Will his successors do likewise?

Somewhere there is a throne where Christ offers His Body, His Blood, and his prayers for us, bathing us in and feeding us with the fullness of humanity in Him. And around that throne, I pray that Thomas Bray and William Wilberforce add their prayers to mine that the Church of England scattered throughout the Earth might remain an intact chunk of Christ's Body broken and redeemed by His Blood and that all might name those eunuchs who keeps His sabbaths and statutes with the name He calls them, a name more everlasting than that carried by sons and daughters. Amen.