Sermon: Transfigured Love

St Valentine's Day, and a gift to the preacher, for our thoughts turn to love: love given, love received, love longed for and love unrequited, love disappointed and love fulfilled; the memory of love and the hope of love; love's endeavour, love's expense, immortal love for ever full, the love that moves the sun and the other stars, God's love.  And as I speak like this I ask myself whether I want to add to the millions of words spoken about love down the centuries, whether I can add anything.  Well, perhaps I should try.  For today is not only St Valentine's Day, but the Sunday before Lent, Quinquagesima.  In the Book of Common Prayer, love is today's word in the epistle reading and the collect that is based on it, one of the most beautiful in our liturgy.  The reading is Paul's great hymn to love in the 13^th chapter of the First Letter to the Corinthians: ‘now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity'.  The collect prays: ‘send thy Holy Ghost and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity, the very bond of peace and of all virtues without which whosoever liveth is counted dead before thee'.  ‘Charity', caritas, the love that never fails because it is divine.

This theme of love made the perfect portal for Lent and I miss the Prayer Book on this day more than any other.  If Lent is to mean anything, it should surely be that our love for God is re-awakened, or rather, our awareness of how God so loves us.  Lent should be a journey in love, a new discovery of it each day as we walk towards the cross and resurrection of Jesus.  It should be a daily transfiguration, a life-changing encounter with the beloved Son whose voice we have heard and whom we love because he first loved us.  Without love we are nothing says St Paul.  But once touched by it we glimpse glory, we see into the face of the divine.  Life is not the same after that.  What we once thought it was worth burning out for we are learning to see in a different way.  Like the journey of the magi and their return home, we are no longer at ease with these old gods.  The epiphany we have glimpsed has lit up something within us, made us see the world in a new way.  We feel and know that we want to turn away from dead things to seek after the living God.  It is disquieting and disturbing; but it is transfiguring too. 

Among many guides to the landscape of love profane and love divine, let me draw on just one.  He was one of the most fervent lovers in history, and also one of the profoundest interpreters of love's meaning.  That man wrote: ‘Give me a lover, he will feel that of which I speak; give me one who longs, who hungers, who is a thirsty pilgrim in this wilderness, sighing for the springs of his eternal homeland; give me such a man: he will know what I mean.'  He is depicted in a stained glass window in the north transept of this Cathedral as one of the four doctors of the church: St. Augustine, Bishop of the North African city of Hippo Regius at the turn of the 5^th century.  Augustine is usually blamed for the church's obsession with sex.  As an Augustinian, I want to defend him.  Yes, he crusaded against the degrading lusts he saw all around him in the dying Roman empire in thrall to violence and bloodshed as well as to sex, and this led him to think that all humanity was locked into a system that was fundamentally disordered and from which it could never save itself.  This is what we call original sin and my own experience of life and what I know of myself does not lead me to question it. 

Yet this is precisely where Augustine's awareness of the beauty of God shines as a transfiguring vision.  We find in Augustine's writings a spirituality of love that is joyful, celebratory and rich.  His conversion in 386 and the part played in it by his mother Monica's prayers is perhaps as important a story for western Christianity as the conversion of St Paul, for these two were in many ways its theological architects.  But Augustine's Confessions was not written for theologians but for fellow-travellers on the journey of faith.  This is what makes it one of the greatest classics of spiritual autobiography.  In it, he probes to the depths of his experience, trying to make sense of it in the light of his discovery of God's grace, and of how even the most disordered of human loves can be a pointer to the eternal love of the Creator and Redeemer. 

For Augustine, erotic attraction was an intoxicating addiction that possessed him.  Yet this craving was married to other hungers: for human companionship and love, for beauty, truth and goodness; for God. He longed to be happy, to find rest for his conflicted soul.  He longed for a homecoming.  It all sounds very contemporary.  ‘Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new, late have I loved you.  And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made.  You were with me and I was not with you.  The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they would have no existence at all.  You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness.  You were radiant and resplendent, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you.  I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you.  You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace with is yours.'  Agape and eros married at last. 

In the Confessions, we touch a human being in the vale of soul-making, like us: a man who is on the way to becoming an individual. That means not only knowing who you are but also how you came to be who you are.  Kierkegaard said that life has to be lived forward but understood backward.  Jung, who often quoted that remark, said that things which lay hidden in shadow in the first half of life as the sun rises are lit up from a different perspective as the sun begins to set in the second half of life.  This is Augustine reading his early life in the light of what he now knows to be God's loving purposes.  For we carry our past within us like geological layers, like the rings in a tree. How we remember and the story we tell of our memories is a necessary part of understanding who we are and who God is and how to love. ‘And then he thinks he knows / the hills where his life rose and the sea where it goes' wrote Matthew Arnold.  To see, to know, to understand, and then to love: these are the only things in life that ultimately matter.

Augustine looks back on the intense experience he and his mother shared as they gazed out of the window that far-off day at Ostia. ‘At that moment we extended our reach and in a flash of mental energy attained the eternal wisdom which abides beyond all things.  If only it could last!... Is not this what it means to say ‘Enter into the joy of your Lord'?  If only it could last! - just what the disciples sighed on the mountain of transfiguration as they looked out of their narrow window on to heaven itself, when in a flash of glory eternal wisdom and purpose were disclosed and they looked upon the face of God.  And then the window is shut again and the glory fades, and all that is left is its memory - but no, not all, for in remembered glory is a new impetus of hope and joy and love.  For Augustine this ravishing moment was the clue to understanding his chaotic needs and longings.  It was the marvellous discovery of gospel simplicity and purity of heart when love finds its true destiny in God alone.  ‘You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.'  

Happiness, homecoming, rest: Lent could be all these things, and God knows we long for them.  But maybe they are not far from any of us.  The tasks of Lent are love's work: prayer and fasting and acts of charity, a yearly door that is open to us so that we can simplify our lives, turn away from sin, learn once more to be faithful to Christ.  For Easter is beckoning, the sunrise when love's redeeming work is done, where with unveiled faces we see the glory of the risen Lord and know it is good to be here.