5/16/2023 0 Comments Agony in the garden storyThis might be one of the hardest and most important aspects of Holy Week. The more we dwell on Christ’s passion, the more it will work its way into us, opening us to see and feel and grasp, as far as we can, the significance of it. It’s the time for remembering and being moved by Christ’s suffering. Newman goes on to say that Holy Week is the time for bringing these two elements together. The depth of our emotion-and the struggles that come when we don’t experience that depth-is part of what marks us as uniquely human and uniquely spiritual beings. We are left only with Charles Ryder’s chill bonds of law and duty. But without deep feelings, we have an imperfect religion. Our feelings about Christ are not enough on their own, he says we must also follow him. St John Henry Newman pointed to this when he said, in a sermon on the crucifixion, ‘True love both feels right, and acts right.’ Newman resists the tendency to separate the two. Feelings alone burn out duty alone is painfully cold. The truth is that love, experienced in its fullness, is a coming together of both deep affection and the will, and they both need to be nurtured. While there might be some truth in that, the claim that love is primarily about the will-about what we do-doesn’t tell the whole story either. It’s sometimes said that the meaning of love has been diluted in our day, rendering it little more than a matter of feelings. This opening passage continues to haunt my imagination, years after first reading the novel, not least because of what it suggests about the nature of love. He compares his relationship with the military, rather vividly, to a marriage in which all affection has died, where ‘nothing remained to us except the chill bonds of law and duty and custom.’ There is a feeling of an enchantment fading. ‘Here love had died between me and the Army,’ he writes. Leaving camp with his regiment, he reflects that whatever lies ahead, nothing could compare with the brutality of what they were leaving, that place of no happy memories. At the beginning of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, the main character, Charles Ryder, expresses the depths of his disillusionment with the military.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |