I recently wrote an article about a C4SO church that admitted “Side A Christians”—Christians who are openly affirming and/or have no intention of repenting of a same-sex relationship they are in, as they disagree with the stance of the Church—to the Lord’s Table. A Bishop contacted me and exhorted me that I should have sourced my piece better. I did not, for instance, call the Church to ensure they still held the stance. It seems, since the time of writing, they have taken down a podcast that reiterated the stance given in the archival papers quoted. He also exhorted me to focus on underlying pastoral issues of virtue that afflict all of us.
I think these are both salutary exhortations. I ought to have called Trinity Anglican in Atlanta to ensure this critique was salient. Further, it is indeed salutary to write on the underlying issue of virtue and fencing the Table that animated my earlier piece. I thought I might do so here.
The last piece I wrote might raise questions as such from those who do keep the Table open to Side A Christians (affirming and practicing alike): would we say the same about communing open racists? What about communing those who are abusive towards their spouse? What about—and multiply issues here.
The underlying question underneath all of this is: what does it mean to have a firm purpose of amendment of life?
Jesus Christ: The Brightness of our Very Souls
To understand the nature of amendment of life, I will enlist the help of two Anglican Priests and Poets: Fr. George Herbert and Fr. Thomas Traherne.
In his great poem Love (II), Fr. Herbert writes,
Immortall Heat, O let thy greater flame
Attract the lesser to it: Let those fires,
Which shall consume the world, first make it tame;
And kindle in our hearts such true desires,
As may consume our lusts, and make thee way.
Then shall our hearts pant thee; then shall our brain
All her invention on thine Altar lay,
And there in hymnes send back thy fire again:
Our eies shall see thee, which before saw dust;
Dust blown by wit, till that they both were blinde:
Thou shalt recover all thy goods in kinde,
Who wert disseized by usurping lust:
All knees shall bow to thee; all wits shall rise,
And praise him who did make and mend our eies.
Holiness is not primarily borne from the sheer effort to do good. It involves this, of course. But true holiness is a participation in the divine nature—the brightness of God’s own life shining in the soul.[1] But since God’s life is lived in the immortal radiance of triune love (in which all treasures, all beauty, all goodness, all loveliness whatsoever has its basis!), holiness is the shining forth of God’s life of love in the soul.
Holiness, as Fr. Herbert reminds us, is the entrance of the Immortal Heat of Triune Love in our souls—attracting the lesser fire of our life to his own. When that Love consumes our hearts, it makes us tame; the fires of judgment that will sweep over the world are aimed at all who despoil the radiance of Love in God’s world. Therefore, those fires are aimed at our sin. When Love consumes our sinful desires, our hearts are rendered into altars upon which we send back up to God the brightness of Love he breathes into us. He lights his Fire in us, and we transpose it into melodies of praise back to Him.
Sin dulls our sight. It dulls our ability to see God’s good world as the revelation of the radiant contours of his own life of Love. What Plotinus grasped in thinking that beauty was the porch of the good that evokes love; what Plato understood in framing beauty as that in which love begets goodness; what the whole classical tradition understood in correlating beauty to love is made plain in Christ.[2] Love is the movement by which the world is drawn into God’s own life; Christ, the Beloved Son, is the means through which creation returns back to God the Father in the Holy Spirit. Where sin blinds us to the movement of creation back to God, repentance opens our eyes to see the cosmic drama: in and through lilies and starlight, through grass and open sky, through water and fire, through bread and wine, Love bids us welcome. Love mends our wits to make our eyes see all reality as a transposition—to use that great term from C.S. Lewis!—of the infinite riches of triune love.
Wonder of wonders: God would have us be a part of the communication of his infinite riches. Fr. Traherne’s poem “Amendment” is too long to reproduce in full, but I will comment on several key stanzas.
I
That all things should be mine,
This makes His bounty most divine:
But that they all more rich should be,
And far more brightly shine,
As used by me;
It ravisheth my soul to see the end,
To which this work so wonderful doth tend.
II
That we should make the skies
More glorious far before Thine eyes
Than Thou didst make them, and even Thee
Far more Thy works to prize,
As used they be
Than as they’re made, is a stupendous work,
Wherein Thy wisdom mightily doth lurk.
If creation is a transposition into creaturely reality of the great eternal procession of divine love in which the Father begets the Son in the bond of love of the Spirit, then in all things our hearts may feast on the images, types, shadows, and effects of that Love. But as it turns out, we ourselves are part of the great symphony. Christ refracted in the soul of his people is meant to make his refraction in the world that much brighter.
In a lovely scene from Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis gives this description of Psyche, the protagonist Orual’s sister,
Of Psyche’s beauty—at every age the beauty proper to that age—there is only this to be said, that there were no two opinions about it, from man or woman, once she had been seen. It was beauty that did not astonish you till afterwards when you had gone out of sight of her and reflected on it. While she was with you, you were not astonished. It seemed the most natural thing in the world. As the Fox delighted to say, she was ‘according to nature’; what every woman, or even every thing, ought to have been and meant to be, but had missed by some trip of chance. Indeed, when you looked at her you believed, for a moment, that they had not missed it. She made beauty all round her. When she trod on mud, the mud was beautiful; when she ran in the rain, the rain was silver. When she picked up a toad—she had the strangest and, I thought, unchanciest love for all manner of brutes—the toad became beautiful.
The beauty of her sister—both outward and inward—ennoble the landscape itself. The world is somehow better on account of her beauty. The toad itself is elevated by Psyche’s beauty.
The famous American Essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson writes,
The presence of a higher, namely, of the spiritual element is essential to its perfection. The high and divine beauty which can be loved without effeminacy, is that which is found in combination with the human will. Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue. Every natural action is graceful. Every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine. We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it. Every rational creature has all nature for his dowry and estate. It is his, if he will. He may divest himself of it; he may creep into a corner, and abdicate his kingdom, as most men do, but he is entitled to the world by his constitution. In proportion to the energy of his thought and will, he takes up the world into himself. “All those things for which men plough, build, or sail, obey virtue,” said Sallust. “The winds and waves,” said Gibbon, “are always on the side of the ablest navigators.” So are the sun and moon and all the stars of heaven. When a noble act is done—perchance in a scene of great natural beauty; when Leonidas and his three hundred martyrs consume one day in dying and the sun and moon come each and look at them once in the steep defile of Thermopylae; when Arnold Winkelried, in the high Alps, under the shadow of the avalanche, gathers in his side a sheaf of Austrian spears to break the line for his comrades; are not these heroes entitled to add the beauty of the scene to the beauty of the deed?[3]
The presence of a King charging in with an army from a sunlit horizon makes the horizon better. It is in this sense that we may ennoble the world around us; we reveal it to be a fitting home for the beauty of the deed.
And so the skies themselves shine brighter with the beauty of the deed added to the beauty of the scene before the eyes of the God who sings himself in both deed and scene. Holiness—the life of true virtue—is that whereby we habitually render the world a fitting offering back to the God who offered it to us. And so Traherne writes,
Thy Soul, O God, doth prize
The seas, the earth, our souls, the skies;
As we return the same to Thee
They more delight Thine eyes,
And sweeter be
As unto thee we offer up the same,
Than as to us from Thee at first they came.
A firm purpose of amendment (the title of Traherne’s poem!) is nothing other than this: the purpose by which will to be conformed to Christ—to share the beams of his life, to have him dwell in the heart, to bear increasingly his very life in our own, to shine his radiance into the world—so as to participate in the wider work of beaming the light of God’s love in the world back to God. Immediately, this means renouncing every way we can see in which we distort the radiance of God in his world. Is God a glutton? Then I must renounce gluttony. Is God a tyrant? Then I must renounce all impulses to tyranny. Is God’s face shown in the Joel Webbons of the world who fantasize over starving the liberal feminist women? Then I must turn my face to behold—to be held by—the gaze of Christ, in which all secrets of Beauty are truly and fully contained.
This is precisely why we cannot make peace with sin. A man or woman who does not aim to amend their lives—to make their lives a more comely offering to God of the music by which he refracts his life into creation—is not fit for the Table. They are not ready to receive Christ in the Supper, in whom that Music became flesh and by whom we are configured to God’s life. God will not dwell in hypocrisy, but he will only show himself in judgment to hypocrites. On the other hand, God will bind up the one who weekly comes to the Table, aching for amendment of life and willing it but feeling weak. There, such a wounded sheep might find healing, medicine, and strengthening for the journey.
We fence the Table, then, as an act of protection and love. Christ will judge the one who has no intention of amending their life; they come to a gift they only intend to disgrace. But he will dwell in the broken and contrite heart that seeks the strength to strive for his life over and against whatever sinful disposition or tendency they struggle with.
Apart from a firm purpose of amendment, we turn the Music of his Body and Blood into a disharmony and distortion. With a firm purpose of amendment, we intend to sing back that Life he gives to us that God may be all in all. The summons of the latter path is the path we must intend to walk if we want to come to the Table. In that intention, we will find Christ making us more fit instruments of disclosing the divine excellencies of triune love.
So whether it is racism or sexual sin, gluttony or greed, caprice or self-pity, renounce it all. Aim at the perfect radiance of Christ’s life. Ask today, “what can I do now to take steps towards building virtues against my sin?” And then, when you have a purpose to walk that path, come to the Eucharist and receive the most precious food of the Body and Blood; then, your soul will glow in the image of your King.
This blood causes the image of our King to be fresh within us, produces beauty unspeakable, permits not the nobleness of our souls to waste away, watering it continually and nourishing it. The blood derived from our food becomes not at once blood, but something else; while this does not so, but straightway waters our souls and works in them some mighty power. This blood, if rightly taken, drives away devils and keeps them afar off from us, while it calls to us Angels and the Lord of Angels. For wherever they see the Lord’s blood, devils flee and Angels run together. This blood poured forth washed clean all the world; many wise sayings did the blessed Paul utter concerning it in the Epistle to the Hebrews. This blood cleansed the secret place and the Holy of Holies. And if the type of it had such great power in the temple of the Hebrews, and in the midst of Egypt when smeared on the door-posts, much more the reality.
This blood sanctified the golden altar; without it the high priest dared not enter into the secret place. This blood consecrated priests; this, in types, cleansed sins. But if it had such power in the types, if death so shuddered at the shadow, tell me, how would it not have dreaded the very reality? This blood is the salvation of our souls. By this the soul is washed; by this it is made beautiful; by this it is inflamed. This causes our understanding to be more bright than fire and our soul more beaming than gold. This blood was poured forth and made heaven accessible.
—St. John Chrysostom, Homily 46 on the Gospel of John
NOTES
- Henry Scougal, The Life of God in the Soul of Man (Foreword by Joel Beeke), ed. Robin Taylor, Crossway Short Classics Ser (Crossway, 2022). ↑
- Sean Luke, “Beauty Is the Gravitas Amoris: A Trinitarian Correlation of Beauty and Love,” Religions 15, no. 9 (2024): 1044, https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15091044. ↑
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Tremaine McDowell (Modern Library, 1940), 11–12. ↑
