Evensong: St. Mary’s: 27.07.08: Saint Dominic: Revd. Dr. Alan Winton, Rector of Welwyn
 
I Corinthians 1.18-25 and Matthew 10.5-13

Our sermons in this series of summer evensongs are going to focus on the lives of the saints, both the major saints of whom we may well have heard, but about whom we may not know a great deal if we’re honest; and the lesser saints, people who lived distinguished Christian lives, but who would perhaps be surprised were they to see the prefix saint in front of their names.

Mostly we have tried to follow the calendar of saints’ days over these couple of months – often the anniversary of the death of the person in question - but we have allowed a little license here and there to accommodate the preferences of the preachers. Tonight we begin with Dominic, my choice, partly because of a personal connection that I’ll mention later on.

But I want to start with a great piece of trivia. Do you remember the song Dominique, performed by the Singing Nun from Belgium in 1963? Maybe Coralie will sing it for us afterwards! It’s a French song about the life of Dominic and it is still the only Belgium number one hit single ever in the American charts. That’s a fact to store away for future reference.

To be a little more serious, Dominic was born in the late twelfth century in Spain and died at the age of just 51 in the year 1221. Time doesn’t permit me to paint a full picture, but there are two aspects of his life and story that I want to focus on this evening.

The first sets him in his historical context and is the reason he came to prominence. Dominic was charged with the mission to oppose what was called the Albigensian heresy in southern France. You may or may not know the Albigensians by their other name, which was the Cathars. They were prominent in the region of Langeudoc and flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

This group believed that there are two principles at work in the world, one good, one evil: in fact, it's sometimes said that they actually believed in two gods. The good principle was responsible for the spiritual realm and the evil principle for the material world. In fact, the Albigensians believed that everything physical was evil, so they saw human beings as souls imprisoned within bodies. The earth is a place of punishment, quite literally hell, and so it is only in death that our divine souls can be released from this torment.

Seeing the physical world as evil, you won’t be surprised to learn that they had a pretty low view of sex and favoured complete chastity, although various other sexual practices were considered preferable to being married since they didn’t produce children, that is more trapped, suffering souls. Suffice it to say that the Albigensians probably wouldn’t have been welcomed with open arms at GAFCOM, or even at the Lambeth Conference. They also practised very harsh forms of fasting to suppress the flesh.

There have been quite a few moments in the history of the church when people have been tempted to go down this path of viewing the world dualistically; that is by setting up this opposition between what is spiritual and therefore good and what is physical and therefore bad. It’s a temptation that can find itself into our own way of speaking about our faith today, and sometimes the language that we have inherited doesn’t really help us get these things right.

Recent theology has tended to try to avoid talking about human beings as souls with bodies, because of the problems it can lead to, and has tried rather to talk about human beings in more wholistic ways. I am a person and it isn’t helpful to try to separate off my body and my soul: it is much better theology and faith to see people as single entities, to speak neither of bodies nor souls but of persons.

And of course, orthodox faith believes that Jesus came in the flesh, suggesting that there need be no tension between the divine and the physical world. And the Bible talks about the Christian hope, not as escape from the world but as the resurrection of the body. The Christian hope is not about separating the good soul from the evil body, it is about a new creation in which there is continuity with what has gone before.

Of course, all of this becomes important when you think about practical questions, like for example, the needs of the poor in our world. If we believe that the physical world is evil, then why would we try to feed the hungry and help the poor to prosper. Orthodox faith says that the spiritual and physical aspects of our lives are both important: we need to feed the hungry and also to pray for them to find faith – we can’t separate these two demands, we can’t say that one is more important than the other. I was interested to read that twelfth and thirteenth century Languedoc was a prosperous and wealthy region. In some ways, this comes as no surprise – you can see why it is more likely that a rich person would come up with the view that the material world is of no ultimate significance; a poor person might really want to believe that God cares about the hunger of their children.

Back in the early thirteenth century, the opposition to the Albigensian heresy led to violence and persecution, but Dominic distanced himself from this, and continued to see his task as to preach and teach the truth, and he did this by adopting the simple itinerant lifestyle favoured by the heretics. He travelled round on foot, without funds or retinue, begging bread from door to door and hoping in this way to preach the Gospel effectively.  And it was this way of life that led to Dominic’s permanent legacy, the founding of the order of preachers, the Dominicans or Black Friars.

It is interesting that the Dominicans came into being around the same time that Francis of Assisi founded his order. Both Francis and Dominic were influenced by the passage we heard as our second reading, Matthew chapter 10’s vision of the apostles being sent out in the name of Christ. I realise that I may be on shaky ground here making any comments about the Franciscan approach since there are many experts and practitioners in these parts. But what is sometimes said by way of comparing and contrasting the two movements, is that the Franciscan way developed a strong sense of personal spirituality, whereas the Dominican way was less concerned about the spiritual needs or desires of its members and much more task oriented. Dominic was concerned to set up a movement that would be defined by its job. And the job was preaching and teaching, everything else was secondary, including the conventional practices of monastic and personal piety. One early master of the order said that those who have the grace to be preachers should prefer preaching to all other spiritual exercises, including prayer, reading, liturgy and the sacraments.

And whilst Dominic was known to have a personal love of poverty, the order recognised that poverty should be secondary to the task of preaching: Dominicans should neither be so rich that managing their wealth was a distraction, but neither should they be so poor that this also kept them from their main task.

The Dominicans had a pragmatic attitude to piety: poverty, chastity and obedience are means to an end, not values in their own right. St. Thomas Aquinas, the Dominican’s greatest theologian, held that prowess in prayer should never be regarded as the touchstone of spiritual progress. He also said that nothing is to be gained by forcing ourselves to pray for long periods when we are simply getting bored – although what he might have said about prayer to our busy generation, not noted for spending long periods in prayer, might well have had a different emphasis.

Contemplation was seen by Thomas Aquinas as the goal of human life, in that our final fulfilment will be the vision of God. But the Dominican perspective says that in this life, however, the most perfect occupation is not that of contemplation, but that of the preacher who communicates to others what he or she has learnt in their contemplation.  Dominican spirituality is dominated by concern for what might be useful to the souls of our neighbours.
 
I hope that has given you a flavour of Dominic and maybe spurred you to think about why you disagree with him or encouraged you to seek out a little reading of your own on the founder of the order of preachers. Do you agree with that Dominican emphasis that would question whether in our church life or in our personal journey we fall into the trap of elevating things that are really secondary, above the central task of the life of faith?

My own connection with Dominic is that when we lived in France, in Strasbourg, some twenty years ago, the Anglican chaplaincy where we worshipped, did so in the beautiful and yet simple chapel of a Dominican Community. We got to know some of the Dominicans and made friends with one in particular. Joseph was from Portugal and we became good friends partly because he loved to be around our children, perhaps missing the large family from which he came. He was a gentle and holy young man and it was a great privilege to be with him as his guests at his ordination as a deacon. It was a moving service, but what also made a lasting impression on me was the way that the ordination was celebrated. This being France, we were used to coming out of church for a glass of wine after the morning service, but after Joseph’s ordination there was not just wine, but a wonderful selection of spirits, cognacs and some very fine whisky. What better way to honour the spirit of Dominic who opposed the Albigensian heresy than by affirming the essential goodness of the material world with a glass of whisky! There may not be whisky after this service but there is wine, and we can use it to celebrate the essential goodness of the material and spiritual world that God has given us.

Let us pray:

Merciful God, who gave such grace to your servant Dominic that he served you with singleness of heart and loved you above all things. Help us who gather in your name to worship you, to forsake all that holds us back from following Christ and to grow into his likeness from glory to glory, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.