JAMES MCCHESNEY AT SALAMANCA,
OR, UNIVERSAL LOVE:
a sermon praught by the Rev’d Dr Richard Major
in Ascension and St Agnes, Washington D.C.,
at Solemn High Mass for Pentecost VIII, 22nd July, 2012.
© Richard Major 2012
richard@richardmajor.com
Jeremiah xxiii1-6; Psalm xxiii; Ephesians ii11-22; Mark vi30-34, 53-56.
From the Gospel:
JESUS, when He came out, saw much people,
and was moved with compassion toward them,
because they were as sheep not having a shepherd:
and He began to teach them many things.
In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost:
Amen.
Salamanca / Ascension & St Agnes, Washington / Pentecost VIII / 22vii12
2
‘S MAGNIFICENT to be back here, back in
Washington, back at Ascension and St Agnes,
back in this pulpit. As always, it feels like
coming home. I’m grateful to Fr Lane for the
privilege of standing here.
I’m also grateful to you. And I’m about to be
even more grateful, because for a few minutes I’d like you to indulge me,
and let me tell you a bit of my family history.
Indulge me by sending your imagination back in time, from 2012 to
1812. Picture the world as it was exactly two centuries ago.
The greatest war mankind had ever known was raging, was at its
zenith of violence. The tyrant Napoleon had overrun the whole continent
of Europe. England alone went on resisting him – England, and Portugal,
and a few brave rebels in Spain, with a British army backing them up.
The year 1812 was a turning-point in history. It was rather like 1941:
the year the great European war became a world war, with Russia and
America drawn into the fray. In June 1812 that very foolish man, James
Madison, persuaded Congress to declare war on Britain, and a few weeks
later Napoleon launched his great attack on the Russians.
But the future of mankind was not to be decided at the edges of the
world, where Moscow and Washington were soon to be in flames. History
was shaped in the centre of Europe: on the brown, scrub-covered plateau
that covers the heart of Spain.* And the pivotal moment was precisely two
hundred years ago. I mean absolutely precisely. It’s two centuries to the
day, almost to the hour.
On 22 July 1812 the French Imperial army was locked in battle with
the British and their allies just outside the ancient city of Salamanca. The
Battle of Salamanca was fierce and hard-fought. It could have gone either
*
Here is a contemporary engraving of the city; a satellite image of the battlefield; a
panorama. (The underlined terms are hyperlinks; right click, then push OPEN.)
Salamanca / Ascension & St Agnes, Washington / Pentecost VIII / 22vii12
3
way, Around four the French counter-attacked down the ridge called
Arapile Grande, and seemed to prevail. But at half-past-five in the
afternoon – that is, half-past-twelve East Coast time – the Sixth Division of
the British Army, numbering five thousand men, pushed back up Arapile,
and the battle reached its climax.†
I want you to keep your eye on just one of those five thousand men, a
young fellow named James McChesney. He’s 23 years old; he’s a
wheelwright from Ulster. He has brown hair, grey eyes, a pale complexion;
he’s unusually tall, six foot two, so it’s easy for us to spot him towering
over the rest of the redcoats. Like everyone else, he was soaked to the skin
last night in a terrible thunderstorm;‡ like everyone else, he is now being
baked by the afternoon heat; like everyone else, he is sweaty with terror.
Up the ridge he goes with his fellow soldiers, straight into the fire of seven
French battalions, ranged up the steep slope so that the men at the back can
fire over the heads of ones in front. Blast! bang! – scores of red-coated
infantrymen are going down – the Sixth Division pauses, loads its muskets
and fires – the French fire back – the British fire again.
“It was like”, says Bernard Cornwell, in his fictional account of
Salamanca,
a hundred children dragging sticks along park railings, the sound of the
volleys that the Sixth Division were slamming into the column’s head….
They had approached the great column in small columns and then, in the
enemy’s face, they swing into line and waited for the French to come into
musket range….
The men fought like automatons, biting the cartridges, loading,
ramming, firing on command so that they volleys’ flames ran down the
Ian Fletcher, Salamanca 1812: Wellington Crushes Marmont (Oxford: Osprey, 1997), pp. 6667; Fletcher has a photograph of the slope.
‡ See another genealogical account.
†
Salamanca / Ascension & St Agnes, Washington / Pentecost VIII / 22vii12
4
face of the line, again and again, and the bullets twitched at the fog of
powder smoke and hammered the French. The British volleys made the
column’s head into a pile of dead and wounded men. Frenchmen who
had thought themselves safe in the fourth or fifth rank suddenly had to
cock their muskets and fire desperately into the smoke bank…. The
bravest died, the others shrank back from the British fire, and the column
heaved and jerked like some giant snared animal.
There as a pause in the British volleys. It was filled with a new
sound, a scraping and clicking as the hundreds of long bayonets were
taken from belt-scabbards and fixed on the muskets. Then a cheer, a
British cheer, and the long line came forward with their blades level and
the great column, that had so nearly turned the battle, turned instead
into a panicked crowd. They ran….
The valley floor was thick with the remains of battle. Bodies,
guns, canteens, pouches, haversacks, spent cannon balls, dead horses, the
wounded. Everywhere the wounded. The French column was a running
mass of fugitives, fleeing the steady line of the Sixth Division …
The sun was sinking into a cushion of gold and scarlet, it
touched the killing ground with crimson and it promised to give enough
light for a little time more. Time enough for more blood to be spilt on an
earth that already reeked with the stench of it.§
Bernard Cornwell, Sharpe's Sword: Richard Sharpe and the Salamanca Campaign, June and
July 1812 (Harper, 1983), pp. 260-2. Cornwell’s account of Salamanca covers pp. 245-265 of
this novel, and he also includes a useful note on the battlefield, pp. 317-381 – I’ve also
marked the spot with a red circle on this map. Here is a lurid painting of another
element of the Sixth Division, the 11th (North Devonshire) Foot, earning their nickname
‘The Bloody’ on the slopes of Arapile Grande.
The thing to remember is that Richard Sharpe is creditted by Cornwell with
winning the battle single-handed; in fact it was James McChesney who won it; and thus
we can regard Sharpe as McChesney’s fictional counterpart. At least, I can.
§
Salamanca / Ascension & St Agnes, Washington / Pentecost VIII / 22vii12
5
Above is the sunset, all about the ghastly red of burning shrub, lit by
the Sixth Division’s cartridge papers.** In this uncertain light we spy, lying
among the wounded, James McChesney, shot through the right arm. He’s
no doubt the tallest and most conspicuous man in the Division. Had he
turned and run, perhaps the Division would have broken. But he stood,
and his Division stood with him. It’s the French who are streaming away
now, fleeing panic-struck, vanishing into the dark forest to the south-east
of the battlefield.The battle is over. The tide of history has turned.
Madrid was liberated by the Allies a few weeks after Salamanca. The
Emperor never again had a chance of crushing the resistance of Europe. He
retreated from Moscow; the Continent rose against him; Wellington
crossed the Pyrénées; the despot abdicated; mankind was free of the
Napoleonic nightmare. Horrible things have continued to happen, and no
doubt will happen; but at least we are free of that tyranny.††
So that’s the Battle of Salamanca. I’m telling you about it happened
two hundred years ago today, and because the fortitude of young men who
were very frightened is always worth commemorating, especially in
church. I’m telling you about it because the liberty of mankind is worth
remembering, especially in church. I’m telling you about it for the silly and
Sharpe's Sword was dramatised for television in 1995, and you can view the
hundred-minute episode here (or in parts, I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII; or
uploaded here, I, II, III, IV, V). Be warned, great liberties have been taken with
Cornwell’s novel: the ever-glorious Battle of Salamanca vanishes from the story.
** Fletcher, pp. 68-69.
†† Miguel Ángel Martín Mas, Los Arapiles 1812. La campaña de Salamanca (Almena
Ediciones, 2005), describes the Sixth Division’s hour of grandeur pp. 90-92. See also his
useful map, p. 46, and the paintings: what McChesney and his fellows carried into battle
(p. 33), and the aftermath, with the wounded (p. 39). Of course he was lucky enough;
some did much worse (open this hyperlink only if you have a strong stomach).
There are various elaborate bicentenary events culminating today; I imagine
they’ll get onto YouTube in due course.
Salamanca / Ascension & St Agnes, Washington / Pentecost VIII / 22vii12
6
selfish reason that James McChesney, who in a way won the battle and
freed Europe, is my great-great-great-grandfather.‡‡
And I’m also telling you about it because all human life is a sort of
battle.
I took this two-century-old battle as an excuse to praise my own
ancestor, of whom I am inordinately proud. §§
‡‡
James McChesney was a 19 year-old wheelwright from Downpatrick, County Down,
who in 1810 signed on as a private in the 2nd (The Queen’s Royal) Regiment of Foot
(according to the research of Jock and Shirley McChesney pages 3 and 4).
The 2nd Foot was shipped to the Peninsula, where it fought at Fuentes de Oñoro (3–6
May 1811); at the second Siege of Ciudad Rodrigo (7 to 20 January 1812), which ended
with the British bloodily storming the walls; and at Salamanca (22 July 1812). By the
winter of 1812 the regiment had lost so many men that some companies were
amalgamated into a temporary battalion, and the rest shipped to England to reform.
McChesney had already been sent back. He lay in the Royal Chelsea Hospital,
presumably in John Soane’s recently finished infirmary, doomed to be destroyed in the
Blitz. But the wound he got to his right arm at Salamanca did not heal. In April 1815 he
was declared unfit for further Service, and discharged from the army with a pension.
Salamanca thus became the cause of me. If the firefight on Arapile Garnde hadn’t
ocurred, James McChesney would have returned to Ulster and pursued the family trade
of wheelwrighting. But he couldn’t make wheels with a ruined right arm. Instead, he
took his pension off to Ayrshire in the Scottish Lowlands, worked as a sawyer (using
his left arm, I presume), married a local girl, and begot children. His tall oldest son John
took up weaving, a lucrative business and the dominant work of Ayrshire. But then
mechanisation wiped out the handloom, and John had to emigrate to New Zealand.
There his own oldest son, Thomas, a grocer and policeman, grew up hideously tall – six
foot six or seven – and intensely wicked. He impregnated one of his housemaids while
his wife lay dying. He later married the maid and legitimised their daughter, his only
child; and this daughter’s oldest son’s oldest son is myself.
More about the McChesneys on my uncle Laurence’s excellent family site.
§§ The valour of the 2nd Foot at Salamanca are easy to visualise, because, as it happens to
be the senior English line infantry regiment, it has enthusiastic reenactors, especially of
its Peninsular War heydey. They often meet to act out the regiment’s Napoleonic
battles, they run a fine website, and they are frequently hired as extras in historical
Salamanca / Ascension & St Agnes, Washington / Pentecost VIII / 22vii12
7
But I could have taken any scene at all, from history or from
everyday experience. We humans are forever fighting each other. We fight
each other in wars, but we also fight each in our offices, in our homes, in
our parishes, inside our own brains. Division and conflict is the theme of
human history, and a theme of every human life. There is, as this
morning’s Epistle says, a middle wall of partition between us: every man is a
potential enemy of every other man. One way and another, we often
confront each other as angrily as the two armies confronted each other at
Salamanca, two hundred years ago today.
.
dramas. You can see them, for instance, in Sharpe’s Regiment (Tom Clegg, 1996). At 4’06’’
you’ll find a scene of recruitment, no doubt much like the scene in Downpatrick when
McChesney joined up; at 4’02’’ you can see the raw recruits being armed.
In 1847 Britain got round to bestowing the Military General Service Medal on all
veterans of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars who were still alive, and bothered
applying for it. McChesney evidently applied, for here is name on the roll. His medal
has one clasp, SALAMANCA, to commemorate the glory of 22nd July 1812. It looks like this;
on the reverse, under the motto TO THE BRITISH ARMY, Queen Victoria lays a victor’s
crown on the craggy head of the Duke of Wellington, representative of James
McChesney and the rest of the men he led.
Not that the sneering, aristocratic Wellington would have thought of it like that.
Some months after Salamanca, Wellington declared “We have in the service the scum of
the earth as common soldiers” (X, 496), although he later added that, if they were “the
scum of the earth; it is really wonderful that we should have made them to be the fine
fellows they are”.
Let that be James McChesney’s epitaph. He’s the only ancestor in whom my
family can take pleasure; indeed the only ancestor of whom we need not be positively
ashamed. He’s nearly forgotten: his medal, which is lost or sold or stolen (it should
have come to me, as his heir), is the only memorial he has on earth – apart from this
sermon. I hope some rumour of it is allowed to reach the the fine fellow in his lowly
corner of Valhalla, or mild nook of purgatory. Requiem æternam dona ei, Domine, et lux
perpetua luceat ei. Te decet hymnus, Deus, in Sion, et tibi reddetur votum in Ierusalem.
8
Salamanca / Ascension & St Agnes, Washington / Pentecost VIII / 22vii12
E’VE
the
battlefield of Salamanca from the
perspective of the men who
fought there: from the perspective
of
my
great-great-greatgrandfather, looking up hill into
the muskets of the French.
But
there’s
another
perspective: the perspective of God. He looks down, as it were, on the
spectacle of the these two great armiers, in tunics of scarlet and blue,
clashing against each other.
And what does He think if it all? What does He make of human
history? We know, because today’s Gospel tells us.
BEEN
REGARDING
BVIOUSLY, IT WAS A CORKER OF A GOSPEL.
To begin with, it’s a curiously tender passage.
Christ suddenly tells His followers ‘Come away, come
away, come with Me to a silent place: we’re so busy we
have no leisure so much as to eat. Come away with Me.’
And it’s a curiously comic passage – I mean Christ
and His friends go to all this trouble to slip across the
lake secretly by boat, and they find that everyone’s
simply run round to the other side. So He abandons His
holiday with a sigh, and goes back to work.
Salamanca / Ascension & St Agnes, Washington / Pentecost VIII / 22vii12
9
And it’s a curiously insightful passage, too. For it’s the only point in
the four Gospels (I think) when we are unambiguously inside JESUS’ head.***
*
Normally in the Gospels we are told what Christ said, or what He did.
What He said was usually unexpected, what He did was always
unexpected. Christ was an enigma and a shock – a shock which never
wears off. His first followers never stopped being bewildered, and we too
are never quite sure how to picture Him. He’s always a bit beyond us, He
escapes our imagination. We fail to formulate Him. We hear the four
Gospels read to us all our lives, and yet they still have the power to make
us jump: suddenly we notice Christ saying and doing what we could not
have expected. He breaks up our ideas, He keeps making us recast our
lives. And this morning we’re startled, not but what Christ does, nor what
He says, but what He thinks.
*
The Gospel sweeps low over Lake Galilee, as in a helicopter shot in a film.
We see Christ and the Twelve scudding across the smooth, sunlit surface in
their little boat. We see the mob of excited villagers dashing round the
shore, flickering in and out of the palm trees. The boat runs ashore on a
beach; the camera closes in on Christ’s face as He steps out of the boat; and
suddenly we are inside His thoughts. JESUS, when He came out, saw much
people, and was moved with compassion toward them, because –
John sometimes (xiii3, xviii4, xix28) reminds us that Christ does drastic things – such as
washing His followers’ feet – knowing all the time Who He was and where He is going.
But I think this is the only time we are given actual information about His interior life.
***
Salamanca / Ascension & St Agnes, Washington / Pentecost VIII / 22vii12
10
Well, because what? How does He think of us all? How do we look to
Him? How do we move Him? Why do we move Him? Because we look
rebellious? Because we look sinister? Because we look interesting? No. He
pities us, because we look lost. He sees us as children who have been
orphaned, children who fall to scratching and biting each other because
there’s no one looking after them. We strike Him as lost sheep, wandering
and scattered. He sees the people, and is moved with compassion toward them,
because they were as sheep not having a shepherd: and He began to teach them
many things.
*
Now, it’s a blow to human ego to discover how we looked to God, when
God became a Man. The most striking thing about us was not our menace,
nor our brilliance, but our loneliness. Christ saw us, and sighed, and began
to teach us many things about what it is to be human.
For He saw that we are born lost. We stay lost, we die lost. We have
no idea what to do, because no one tells us. And the result is that we
scatter. Like sheep we wander off, each sheep ending up alone. We don’t
quite know we’re meant to do with our lives, no one seems to explain, and
we are therefore disturbed and distrustful. Each sheep keeps its distance. It
gazes balefully on strange sheep when it comes across them. What are they
up to? What do they know? It’s pitiful, really – sheep shivering in the cold,
underfed, afraid of their own shadows. And that’s what we’re like.
I mean, that’s exactly what we’re not like. That’s human existence
without Christ; it’s exactly not Christian existence. Everything has changed
for us. The universe has been remade.
The great difficulty in being a Christian is remembering how grand it
all is. We don’t always recall how free we are, how happy we are, how
strong we are. Normal existence stopped for us at baptism, when we
became immortal, godlike and perfectly safe. Our lives are supernatural
Salamanca / Ascension & St Agnes, Washington / Pentecost VIII / 22vii12
11
now: they are shot through with the energy and liberty that lies beyond
nature.
We heard a few minutes ago what mankind looked like to Christ.
That’s exactly how we don’t look, now that He has re-created us.
Separation and conflict is the theme of human history, separation and
conflict is a theme in every human life. There is, as this morning’s Epistle
says, a middle wall of partition between us: every man is a potential enemy of
every other man. One way and another, we are cut-off.
But Christ has broken down the wall. He has abolished in His flesh the
enmity, He has made peace: not just peace between mankind and God, but
what follows from that, peace between every person and every other
person. Christ has brought us all home, all to the same home. He made us
one family again.
*
Christ restores human solidarity. But that sounds boring. Solidarity
happens to be a shopsoiled word – the politicians have ruined it. Social
solidarity is a stale slogan of the political Left, and national solidarity is a stale
slogan of the political Right. Like all overworked words, the word solidarity
wearies us, it leaves us slightly nauseous.
So let’s try to express the idea with a different word. Let’s try to
praise, not solidarity, but enfoldedness.
Is enfoldedness a better word? This is what I mean by it. Humanity
was a flock sheep without a shepherd. We were wandering from the fold.
Our natural mode was anxious solitude. In the Old Testament reading this
morning, we heard God promise: when I come as your Messiah, I will
gather the remnant of My flock out of all countries whither I have driven them, and
will bring them again to their folds. And that’s precisely what’s happened. We
have been enfolded. We have been gathered into the same impregnable
Salamanca / Ascension & St Agnes, Washington / Pentecost VIII / 22vii12
12
sheep-fold, the same happy enclosure. We are never, as it were, outside.
We are always at home, everywhere.
We are enfolded. It’s a revolutionary change that comes with Christ,
and it does not strike us most when we’re in church. Of course we can feel
comfortable in church: a church is by definition a closed space, a room. The
revolutionary change comes because we feel at home in the street. For our
sheepfold is as big as the world.
*
Jean-Paul Satre, that horrible man, famously (or infamously) wrote these
words: L’infer, c’est les autres. Hell is other people.††† It’s not a particularly
witty saying. Anyway it’s revolting blasphemy, and pitiable nonsense.
Heaven is other people. In paradise our incomparable joy will be the
sight of God. But that primal joy will run outward, just as the light of the
sun runs outward and bounces off every object in the world, flooding our
minds with disparate colour and disparate beauty. God made you as a
partial self-portrait: He fashioned in you some aspect of Himself that exists
nowhere else. In eternity we will all be in ecstasy, because we will be able
to see you as you really are. And you will be in rapture because you will be
able to see all of us as we are: and everywhere we look, from every angle,
from every disparate human soul, the uncreated glory will blaze back into
The notorious line is from Huis Clos, produced in Paris just before the Nazis left. This
play is literally set in hell: three of the damned are punished by being locked in a room
together forever. The premise is almost orthodox. But Sartre could not conceive of
redemption: the possibility that human company might open up horizons of joy, and
not shut them down.
If you are feeling strong, watch the magnificent production of Stuart Gilbert’s
translation of the play, In Camera, directed by Philip Saville, starring the creepy Sir
Harold Pinter, broadcast as The Wednesday Play on 4th November 1964, in the days
when television – television! – was meant for adults.
†††
Salamanca / Ascension & St Agnes, Washington / Pentecost VIII / 22vii12
13
our minds, refracted a hundred billion ways by a hundred billion human
creatures.‡‡‡
That is our fate, in paradise. But it’s not merely a future prospect.
What will increase forever in eternity has already begun. Already heaven is
other people. Other people are heaven. Already the glimpse of every other
immortal human being is bliss, because every one of us bears the promise
of unending delight: the delight of seeing us as we are.
Of course we’re different from each other, and in a sense, inexplicable
to each other. But that only heightens the promise of relish, relish that can
never end, in the exploration of each other. Our mutual strangeness is a
promise of joy.
For there is no anxiety left in us. We are secure in our togetherness.
That’s what we mean by being enfolded.
Myself, I like the word. Love is battered about so much, in religious
discussion and elsewhere, that it turns to pulp. But enfoldedness makes us
grasp this concrete fact: one consequence of being baptised into Christ’s
fold is being folded into each other. We can’t escape that.
Christians are the only true humanists. We’re the only people who
really are bound to find all humanity fascinating. We can’t get enough of it.
And that’s what universal love really means.
*
But frankly: how do you find crowds? Sometimes they present themselves
as enemies, as the French did to Grandfather James. But even if they are not
hostile, they are difficult. Do you always enjoy them? What’s your
‡‡‡
Not a random statistic.
Salamanca / Ascension & St Agnes, Washington / Pentecost VIII / 22vii12
14
impression of the millions strolling past you on the Mall, or the thousands
standing around you on the Metro?
Most of the time, I suppose, we’re simply too tired to take each other
in. Even the human face, in its extraordinary variety, is too much to
appreciate – and as for the human soul! Our present life is still too small to
endure the glory of our brothers and sisters.
We will be made great in death: then at last we will be capacious
enough to endure the ecstasy of being alive. But meanwhile we can still
rejoice. Enfoldedness is not a sentiment, it’s a fact. As many as touched Him,
says today’s Gospel, were made whole. It’s as definite as that. If we come to
Christ, He will take us into the fold. We will be open to love.
Because our enfoldedness a fact, because we know it to be true, it
doesn’t matter so much if we happen to feel it or not. I know that the world
is a globe, so it doesn’t matter if it feels globular. I know that matter is
made of atoms; I don’t need to see them. I know that the mass of humanity
is enfolded into me – destined to be united with me forever in rapture and
intimacy. However exhausted or puzzled or vexed we feel by other people
now, we know that they will in the end be ours forever, as we shall be
theirs; and the joy of that possession is more than we can imagine now, and
more than we could endure if we imagined it.
*
A
ND YOU KNOW, ALREADY
we are given hints of what we’ll be like when
we are entirely perfected, and utterly united with each other.
You’ll have noticed that look of settled amazement on the face of a
newborn baby, especially when you bend down to look at him. He has
never, never, in all his born days – all thirty or sixty of them – guessed at
your existence. He gazes at you flabbergasted. He can’t find a thing to say.
And he is wise.
Salamanca / Ascension & St Agnes, Washington / Pentecost VIII / 22vii12
15
You’ll have noticed the look on the face of a
lover when she rakes her eyes through a crowd and
then, there, sees her beloved. She can’t look away,
she can’t speak. She is astounded by him all over
again. Well, she is wise too.
Finally, there is art. Go to the National Gallery
and you’ll fimd the blessed in heaven with their
halos so crowded together that you see almost
nothing but a happy blaze of gold. Or read Thomas
Traherne, that great and gentle Anglican priest born
with an unusual sense of paradise on earth. The dust
and stones of the street were as precious as gold, he says,
the trees transported and ravished me, their sweetness
and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost
mad with ecstasy; and as for The Men! O what
venerable and reverend creatures …! young men
glittering and sparkling Angels, and maids strange
seraphic pieces of life …! Boys and girls tumbling in the
street, and playing, were moving jewels…. I realise this
isn’t how we perceive each other when we’re
crammed together on a ’bus, with a headache, and a
baby bawling. But intellect and imagination bounce
us above the present; and art is always there to help.
Finally, ponder Miranda’s cry:
O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!§§§
§§§
The Tempest, V, i.
Salamanca / Ascension & St Agnes, Washington / Pentecost VIII / 22vii12
16
“'Tis new to thee”, her father remarks, sardonically; and yet that is not a
refutation. She is naïve, but she, like the baby and the mystic and the lover,
sees an essential truth which grim old Prospero has forgotten.
*
E
VEN NOW, EVEN NOW, WALK DOWn
a street in Washington. Almost
everyone you see has been baptised into Christ, has been fed the divine
food, has been gathered into the one sheepfold. In any case, every single
person you see is a self-portrait of God. Then feel it stir within you: the
inexhaustible glory of human unity.
It’s too splendid to take it now, but we will take it one day. Beneath
the business and weariness of life, this secret joy has already kindled in our
minds. We are free of final loneliness. We are reconciled with everyone
else. We are enfolded. We are enthralled. Week by week we taste Christ’s
Flesh, in which all human enmity is abolished. We have touched the
human God, and been made whole. There is nothing human that is not
charged with the divine glory, there is no human being who does not
resemble Christ. There is no one we meet not destined to flood us with
wondering elation, an ecstasy beyond any ecstasy, except the sight of God
Himself.
To Him, therefore,
Father, Son  and the Holy Ghost, ever one,
be honour and glory now, and in the ages of ages: Amen.
© 2012 The Rev’d Dr Richard Major,
Nansough Manor near Ladock, Cornwall TR2 4PB
3526 S Street, Georgetown, D.C. 20007
24B Jurčkova cesta, Ljubljana, Slovenija
major@richardmajor.com
www.richardmajor.com/sermons/2012.html
Salamanca / Ascension & St Agnes, Washington / Pentecost VIII / 22vii12
17
Lections
The Lesson
W
that destroy and scatter the sheep of My pasture! saith
the LORD. Therefore thus saith the LORD God of Israel against the pastors that
feed My people; Ye have scattered My flock, and driven them away, and have not
visited them: behold, I will visit upon you the evil of your doings, saith the LORD. And I
will gather the remnant of My flock out of all countries whither I have driven them, and
will bring them again to their folds; and they shall be fruitful and increase. And I will
set up shepherds over them which shall feed them: and they shall fear no more, nor be
dismayed, neither shall they be lacking, saith the LORD.
Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will raise unto David a righteous
Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in
the earth. In His days Judah shall be saved, and Israel shall dwell safely: and this is His
name whereby He shall be called, THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS.
OE BE UNTO THE PASTORS
The Psalm
Dominus regit me
HE LORD IS MY SHEPHERD :
therefore can I lack nothing.
He shall feed me in a green pasture :
and lead me forth beside the waters of comfort.
He shall convert my soul :
and bring me forth in the paths of righteousness, for His Name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil :
for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff comfort me.
Thou shalt prepare a table before me against them that trouble me :
Thou hast anointed my head with oil, and my cup shall be full.
But Thy loving-kindness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life :
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.
T
Salamanca / Ascension & St Agnes, Washington / Pentecost VIII / 22vii12
18
The Epistle
W
HEREFORE REMEMBER,
that ye being in time past Gentiles in the flesh, who are
called Uncircumcision by that which is called the Circumcision in the flesh made
by hands; That at that time ye were without Christ, being aliens from the
commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope,
and without God in the world: But now in Christ JESUS ye who sometimes were far off
are made nigh by the blood of Christ. For He is our peace, who hath made both one,
and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us; Having abolished in
His flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances; for to
make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace; And that he might reconcile
both unto God in one body by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby: And came and
preached peace to you which were afar off, and to them that were nigh. For through
Him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father. Now therefore ye are no more
strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of
God; And are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, JESUS Christ Himself being
the chief corner stone; In whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple
in the Lord: In whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.
The Holy Gospel
A
unto JESUS, and told Him
all things, both what they had done, and what they had taught. And He
said unto them, Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a
while: for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so
much as to eat. And they departed into a desert place by ship privately.
And the people saw them departing, and many knew Him, and ran afoot thither
out of all cities, and outwent them, and came together unto Him. And JESUS, when He
came out, saw much people, and was moved with compassion toward them, because
they were as sheep not having a shepherd: and He began to teach them many things.
And when they had passed over, they came into the land of Gennesaret, and
drew to the shore. And when they were come out of the ship, straightway they knew
Him, And ran through that whole region round about, and began to carry about in beds
those that were sick, where they heard He was. And whithersoever He entered, into
villages, or cities, or country, they laid the sick in the streets, and besought Him that
they might touch if it were but the border of His garment: and as many as touched Him
were made whole.
ND THE APOSTLES GATHERED THEMSELVES TOGETHER
Salamanca / Ascension & St Agnes, Washington / Pentecost VIII / 22vii12
19
Further reading
CHESTERTON
F WE WERE TO-MORROW MORNING snowed up in the street in which we live, we should
step suddenly into a much larger and much wilder world than we have ever known.
And it is the whole effort of the typically modern person to escape from the street in
which he lives.… He is forced to flee … from the too stimulating society of his equals –
of free men, perverse, personal, deliberately different from himself. The street … is too
glowing and overpowering.…
The complaint we commonly have to make of our neighbours is that they will
not, as we express it, mind their own business.… What we really mean when we say
that they cannot mind their own business is something much deeper. We do not dislike
them because they have so little force and fire that they cannot be interested in
themselves. We dislike them because they have so much force and fire that they can be
interested in us as well. What we dread about our neighbours, in short, is not the
narrowness of their horizon, but their superb tendency to broaden it. And all aversions
to ordinary humanity have this general character. They are not aversions to its
feebleness (as is pretended), but to its energy. The misanthropes pretend that they
despise humanity for its weakness. As a matter of fact, they hate it for its strength.
Of course, this shrinking from the brutal vivacity and brutal variety of common
men is a perfectly reasonable and excusable thing as long as it does not pretend to any
point of superiority. It is when it calls itself aristocracy or æstheticism or a superiority to
the bourgeoisie that its inherent weakness has in justice to be pointed out.
Fastidiousness is the most pardonable of vices; but it is the most unpardonable of
I
Salamanca / Ascension & St Agnes, Washington / Pentecost VIII / 22vii12
20
virtues. Nietzsche, who represents most prominently this pretentious claim of the
fastidious, has a description somewhere – a very powerful description in the purely
literary sense – of the disgust and disdain which consume him at the sight of the
common people with their common faces, their common voices, and their common
minds. As I have said, this attitude is almost beautiful if we may regard it as pathetic.
Nietzsche’s aristocracy has about it all the sacredness that belongs to the weak. When
he makes us feel that he cannot endure the innumerable faces, the incessant voices, the
overpowering omnipresence which belongs to the mob, he will have the sympathy of
anybody who has ever been sick on a steamer or tired in a crowded omnibus. Every
man has hated mankind when he was less than a man. Every man has had humanity in
his eyes like a blinding fog, humanity in his nostrils like a suffocating smell. But when
Nietzsche has the incredible lack of humour and lack of imagination to ask us to believe
that his aristocracy is an aristocracy of strong muscles or an aristocracy of strong wills,
it is necessary to point out the truth. It is an aristocracy of weak nerves.
We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door
neighbour. Hence he comes to us clad in all the careless terrors of nature; he is as
strange as the stars, as reckless and indifferent as the rain. He is Man, the most terrible
of the beasts. That is why the old religions and the old scriptural language showed so
sharp a wisdom when they spoke, not of one’s duty towards humanity, but one’s duty
towards one’s neighbour.
from chapter XIV
(‘On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family’)
of G.K. Chesterton’s Heretics (1905)
Salamanca / Ascension & St Agnes, Washington / Pentecost VIII / 22vii12
21
TRAHERNE
C
ERTAINLY ADAM IN PARADISE
had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of the
world, than I when I was a child….
All appeared new, and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful and
beautiful. I was a little stranger, which at my entrance into the world was saluted and
surrounded with innumerable joys…. All Time was Eternity, and a perpetual
Sabbath.…
The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was
ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of
the street were as precious as gold: the gates were at first the end of the world. The
green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished
me, their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with
ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things: The Men! O what venerable and
reverend creatures did the aged seem! Immortal Cherubims! And young men glittering
and sparkling Angels, and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty! Boys and
girls tumbling in the street, and playing, were moving jewels. I knew not that they were
born or should die; But all things abided eternally as they were in their proper places….
The city seemed to stand in Eden, or to be built in Heaven. The streets were mine, the
temple was mine, the people were mine, their clothes and gold and silver were mine, as
much as their sparkling eyes, fair skins and ruddy faces.
Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations,
edited by Bertram Dobell, III, 1-3
Paintings:
Tom Croft’s 61st Foot (South Gloucestershire) The Battle of Salamanca;
Fra Angelico’s Last Judgement;
Tintoretto’s Paradise in the Ducal Palace of Venice (74 by 30 feet, the largest painting
ever done upon canvas);
a detail of William Powell Frith’s Railway Station.