“Lord, in this holy Myst’ry we give our love to you. / Offering our lives completely, humbly in gratitude.” — Byzantine Catholic communion hymn
For the second year in a row, I am spending a little time every day reading from “The Sunday Sermons of the Great Fathers.” When, after years of searching for a copy, I first acquired this four-volume set just before Advent 2023, I was looking forward to diving back into the thought of the early Church Fathers, a particular interest of mine going back to graduate school. The volumes are arranged by season and by Sunday, with excerpts from a remarkable range of Church Fathers on each Sunday’s Gospel (as it appeared in the traditional liturgical calendar up until 1970). And then, for each Gospel, there are three to six full-length sermons.
In Advent and Lent, especially, those Gospel readings still mostly correspond to the ones in the current liturgical calendar, but even when they do not, they are readings with which every Catholic is familiar from other parts of the year. So the effort to find a copy in a used bookstore or your local library will be greatly rewarded.
One thing that I was not expecting when I began my reading of “The Sunday Sermons of the Great Fathers” was the extent to which their words would create within me a new experience of the Gospels rather than just provide a deeper intellectual explanation of each passage. In retrospect, I should have expected that because that very experience was what first drew me to the study of the Fathers 35 years ago. But in the years in between, I had largely forgotten the excitement of experiencing Christ through the eyes and words of men who saw the world very differently from our modern materialistic mindset.
One of the realities of the modern world, as both Owen Barfield and Walker Percy pointed out, is that words have been deprived of their meanings, stripped down to their skeletons, fossilized, incapable of reproducing in us the experience they were once formed to express.
Part of the reason for this phenomenon is the loss, in the modern world, of a poetic imagination. As Barfield wrote in an essay on the nature of meaning, tautologies — statements that are obviously true, in a logical sense — are essentially meaningless. The words “The sky is blue” evoke nothing in us, while John Keats’ lines “Ethereal, flush’d, and like a throbbing star / Seen mid the sapphire heaven’s deep repose” fill our mind with wonder and make the sky come to life in our eyes.
The new experience that is evoked as I read the Church Fathers comes from a similar, unexpected use of words. The first time you encounter (for instance) the word “mystery” in the writings of the Fathers, it’s very clear that it does not signify a puzzle to be solved or, alternatively, an insoluble problem — the two main ways in which we use the word today.
Rather, when the Fathers use the phrase “the mystery of Christ’s death” or “the mystery of our baptism,” we recognize immediately that there is something deeper being signified. A mystery is an experience to be entered into, one that we may never fully comprehend intellectually but one that will change our lives and the way we look at the world as often as we bring it to mind, enter into it, and contemplate it.
With our eyes reopened by the Fathers, we can now see that meaning hidden in plain sight in “the mysteries of the Rosary” and in “the mystery of Faith” in the eucharistic prayer in the Mass. And if you grew up, as I did (I was born in 1968), with the original ICEL translation of the Novus Ordo, which literally stripped all references to mystery out of the text of the liturgy, we may now find a greater meaning in the more recent translations of the Novus Ordo, which use mystery or mysteries to refer to the sacramental reality of the Eucharist.
Barfield’s friend C.S. Lewis decried the “chronological snobbery” of those who only read new books. The good news for Catholics in the modern age is that, if Barfield is correct about meaning arising from the unexpected use of words, we can start to breathe meaning back into the mysteries of our faith by simply picking up the writings of the great Christians who have gone before us.
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