Contra Pelagius

Thanks to the willing availability of my two excellent priest-colleagues, I have had a very light day of duties today.  Indeed, I sung the main Mass at 10.00am, and that was it!  I didn't even have to give a homily, or celebrate the early Mass, or take the Blessed Sacrament to the sick and housebound.  I got back home after the Sung Mass, put on my recording of yesterday's FA Cup First Round highlights and then had a light lunch.

After lunch, Karen and I then went out in the car for a drive.  Even when we stopped at Greenlands Farm to look at all the middle class frippery they sell, along with the various Christmas gift options, I was engaged and relaxed and would like to go back on another occasion and get some of the stuff.  After this, we went on up to Windermere, where I got towed around the big Lakeland shop they have there, where we looked at kitchen knives and bought a cheese box for the fridge.  It was all very relaxing, refreshing and renewing, though I'm not sure I'd have set off had I known that we would be effectively shopping all afternoon.

The we went off to Morland church, in the middle of nowhere (well, near Penrith) for a choral evensong.  There was a large assembled choir which had rehearsed all afternoon for this celebration to mark the centenary of the birth of the recently departed Canon Gervase Markham, the founder of the annual Morland Choristers' Camp.  In spite of one or two minor anomalies, this was pretty tolerable even if it wasn't something I'd normally trek miles for.  Then, on the way home, we called in at the Raj takeaway in Milnthorpe.  I now feel ultra relaxed, after a very agreeable day, and fully prepared for the rather full week's work that lies ahead.

Back at the end of the fourth/beginning of the fifth century, there was a lay theologian called Pelagius who propagated the belief that human beings can achieve personal salvation by their own efforts.  This teaching effectively rendered God's grace redundant, and was condemned as erroneous and heretical by the Church.  If there is an established religion in Britain, it is arguable that it is Pelagianism.  People speak to me regularly, at visits prior to funerals, about the virtues of the deceased person; how they would help anyone and all the rest.  Others tell me that 'you don't have to go to church to be a Christian', or that 'Christians are no better than anyone else' (has anyone said they were?).  Behind all these expressions is the idea that we can somehow justify ourselves before God by being good and especially by doing good works, with the implication that we can deserve or earn our eternal salvation.  As if.

In spite of Pelagianism having the status of heresy, we priests often go about our business like good Pelagians.  Priests often feel guilty about having time off, or setting aside time for reading or for our hobbies and interests, as if we really should be doing something, and as if everything depends upon us.  But, of course, the Christian life is about being - it's about standing consciously in a particular relationship to God.  Anything we do, as Christians, springs from this relationship of being, from this ontology of Being to being, Creator to creature, self-subsistent Being to contingent being.

Scripture tells us that Christ came to give us abundant life, not to enslave us in guilt or to flog us so hard that we never take time for ourselves and those near and dear to us.  I would never have guessed that I could be reminded of this though a visit to a farm shop, a Lakeland shop and a visit to a village church for evensong.