Saturday, December 19, 2015
Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent
Year C ~ December
20, 2015
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Holy Trinity & St.
Anskar
Purify our conscience.
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
Purify our
conscience. What is our conscience? My conscience. I understand. Your conscience and my conscience, but what is OUR conscience? Purify our conscience. This is a strange request. Strange because
we usually think of our conscience as
something individual – something we each possess separately from one another.
The ability to tell right from wrong. One’s conscience
makes one human. But today we refer to our
conscience, not our consciences, and it
won’t do to say that this is just a kind of poetic license to make the phrase
flow better. We also pray that we may be a mansion, not several, separate
mansions. No: we have to take this more seriously, and I intend to make a GREAT
DEAL of this collective use of conscience, Our
conscience. Purify our conscience.
First of all, there is an argument to be made from the contrasting
fact that often we do pray in common
for ourselves in our individual capacities: cleanse
the thoughts of our hearts, for example,
in the Collect for Purity at the beginning of every Mass. It’s plural there: Not
cleanse our heart, but cleanse our hearts. So purify our conscience
instead of purify our consciences is
trying deliberately to get at something, I think. What is it? What could our conscience refer to?
I think it undoubtedly refers to the fact that salvation is
corporate and communal, not individual. Salvation is liberation from the prison
of individuality, and entry into the lar-ger life of the Divine Community. Our conscience
in that sense refers to the life we share together with one another and with
God. Our conscience, perhaps, is the shared
awareness of that life. The scholastics defined conscience as a faculty – an organ of understanding – by which we
know God and God knows us. Meister Eckhart expressed it in his famous mystical paradox:
the eye with which I see God is the same eye
with which God sees me.
This eye may be what Meister Eckhart’s scholastic contemporaries
called the human conscience. The word
itself, after all, means co-knowing
or knowing-with. Perhaps, like me, you have not heard the whole quotation:
If my eye is to discern color,
it must itself be free from all color. The eye with which I see God is
the same with which God sees me. My eye and God's eye is one eye, and one sight,
and one knowledge, and one love.
One
knowledge – con-science. And one
love. For conscience is also where we love God and one another, for to know God
is to love God and to love God is to know God. When we enter that closet,
however, we are not alone with God in our co-knowing We enter not into a solitary
closet, but into a much larger vessel, crammed full of angels and saints and
just men and women made perfect, and creatures of love and reason beyond
imagining. My conscience is not mine alone, but ours. Our conscience.
The word is related to consciousness.
The roots are identical. Maybe Conscience
is the highest level of consciousness. The medieval scholastics thought so. They
discerned levels of consciousness: the lower faculty (rationality – the ability to see that 2 + 2 = 4 ) and the higher
faculty of understanding (intellect –
the ability to “read between” or “read into” the meaning of unseen reality). The
modern world forgot this distinction, and reduced intellect to a synonym for rationality. The intellect, in the
medieval sense, is the ability to enter into the conscience, where we see God
and God sees us.
The point of using the singular – our conscience – is to note that this highest human faculty is something
larger, in which we participate, not something which we possess as separate individuals.
I propose that it is analogous to Jung’s collective
unconscious, except that it is not unconscious, but rather a higher awareness, a collective consciousness, into which we enter
together, as we advance in the spiritual life. Perhaps our conscience, is a level at which our individual consciousness
flows together with the consciousness of others and encounters God.
I am tempted to offer spooky-sounding examples of the kind
that fascinate the superstitious and infuriate the materialistic: twins feeling
each other’s sensations, spouses knowing when the other is in trouble, and so
on. Science cannot explain it yet, and so tends to ignore or ridicule it;
superstition, which is ego in its indecent attempt to explain more than it really
can, interprets it magically. (Magic is the ape of science.) But who can sincerely deny the phenomenon? We
are intuitive, we are telepathic, we are clairvoyant. Our consciousness does seem to flow together,
and the shared consciousness is startlingly acute in some great saints,
recognized by the Church. Moreover, the Gospel explicitly attributes it to Jesus
in the stories of His calling of Nathaniel and His deliberate delay upon learning
of the mortal illness of His friend, Lazarus. We usually think of Jesus’
abilities as pertaining to His Divinity but I suggest that they are faculties
of His perfect humanity, human consciousness at its highest level.
So, when we pray that God may purify our conscience, perhaps we refer to this higher confluence of consciousness.
Why does it need purification? If my eye
is to discern color, it must itself be free from all color. If we are
to see together clearly, we must be free of illusion and disfiguration and distortion
– free of ego, which our tradition
calls flesh. For that, we need God’s
grace to purify our conscience.
The Bl. Virgin Mary – La
Purissima – is the type and model of
this purified conscience, after Mass
we will invoke her aid under various ecstatic appellations among them Seat of Wisdom and Mirror of Justice, which refer to consciousness and conscience. Furthermore, our Lady represents the place of
meeting between God and creation Tower of
Ivory, House of Gold, Ark of the Covenant. She represents creation made
ready to receive God. She is creation, aware of itself, conscious and perfectly
purified by God’s grace to be a mansion fit for Himself. Let me note here again,
the Collect speaks of a single
mansion – not that we become several
mansions for His dwelling, but that our purified conscience become one mansion. This is a figure of the
Church, which the Bl. Virgin Mary also typifies.
The purification of our conscience prepares a mansion for God
to dwell in. Echoing the ancient Fathers, Meister Eckhart also observed that every
Christian who receives God’s Word participates in Mary’s birthgiving. Our
conscience is our ability to share in receiving God, and bringing forth God’s
Son in the world. As Eckhart said,
We are all meant to be mothers of God...for God is
always needing to be born.
And:
God brings forth His Son
in you, whether you like it or not, whether you sleep or wake; God works His
own will.
O higher than the cherubim,
incomparably more
glorious
than the seraphim,
who without spot bore
God the Word,
true Mother of God we
glorify you.
