A Sundry Church

It’s funny.

We are currently reading The Canterbury Tales in The Homeschool, and as I surveyed, scanned and perused it, I thought….

…everyone in the Church should read this.

Remember how, just a few years ago, we had that “Everybody Reads” in which an entire community or state was encouraged to read a single book, and there would be discussions and events and such? And it would be unifying and revelatory?

As I read the Tales, I thought of that. And I thought – there is just something beautiful and real about what Chaucer is doing here, something that so many of us need to hear and reflect on.

And lo and behold, in my search for resources, I found this:

 If we are looking for a guide to our pilgrimage through these muddled times in a Church so clearly a mixture of saints and sinners, we should turn to another medieval poet: Geoffrey Chaucer.

Chaucer may not save our lives, but he can entertain and humble us. And, in a time of scandal, polarization, and ideological isolation, he reminds us that the muddle and mixture of the Church is its strength. For Chaucer, the Church is ever the place of “Aprill with his shoures soote,” which inspires sinners and saints “to longen . . . to goon on pilgrimages.”  He is the great poetic ecclesiologist of a Church marked by sin and so repentance. He is a voice for our times because he can act as a guide to living together, confessing our sins, telling our tales, and sometimes laughing on our way through the vale of tears towards Jerusalem.

Yes!

I do appreciate his contrast of Chaucer with Dante – because, you know it’s the Year of Dante, and we should all be reading him. But….

And yet, I think it is to Chaucer we must turn. We do not live in the Inferno, Purgatorio, or Paradiso (at least not yet); instead, we live on the way with each other. Dante so brilliantly gives us a vision of the places we do not yet inhabit. This provides us the inspiration to reconsider our lives in the face of the question: do we want to end up with God or without? What Dante does not give is the sense of the Christian life in via. We live here in the mixed-up spaces between finding and losing our way. The temptation of Dante is the temptation of the Donatists long ago—to try to separate the wheat from the chaff prior to God’s judgement. In this life, we never get to know who is wheat and who chaff and we must not pretend that we do. We should perhaps pause at Dante’s willingness to damn some and sanctify others. Is he providing an edifying discourse or the pleasures of imagining our enemies having their brains chewed on for eternity?

I’m going to share a few more passages from this piece, because Sweeney says it all far better than I can. Just know…I concur. The culture that social media and American, atomized ways of living has fostered has encouraged our desires to create ghettos, to excommunicate, to live in an ultimately deadly comfort zone, even in a church context. To sit around the table, sharing some wine or some mead or some tea and laughing, arguing and pondering over these tales of other divers pilgrims, part of this sundry company?

It might be just what we need.

More:

In contrast, Chaucer writes about the way to heaven and the company we keep on the way. Looking to the church on pilgrimage, he describes the “compaignye /of sondry folk, by aventure [sheer chance] yfalle /In felaweshipe, and pilgrims were they alle.” Chaucer, the translator of Boethius, knew that this is “chance” only from a human perspective. From the divine perspective (a position we can never hold), the times and places and the difficult people in them are providentially provided for us.

At the origin, these sundry folks gather at the Taberd in Southwerk, a pub in a notoriously debauched neighborhood. They are sundry not only because various socio-economic classes are represented but because among them are a mixture of moderately moral, moderately immoral, and monstrously immoral individuals. They do not look holy, but they do look a lot like the Church. For Chaucer, we do not get to pick those who surround us. At the very least, we have very little say about the matter. We are thrown together in this life with noble knights, vain squires, venial friars, and pious plowmen. This is what it means to live in a human world and in a Christianity that is piebald—full of saintly sinners and sinful saints. If you do not believe Chaucer on this, trust Augustine. For Augustine, no one should “abandon the threshing-floor [the Church] before the time of winnowing, tired of putting up with sinners.” Life on this side of the eschaton is a tangle and we are not supposed to untangle it ourselves. We are too ignorant, too proud, too desirous of power to do the untangling. If we try to untangle this, we would be in danger of being “caught outside the threshing-floor and snapped up by birds before ever reaching the granary.”

…..

But Chaucer is also not frivolous. His tales are confessions, and his journey a penance. This is why he places the Parson’s tale last. The Parson—in contrast to too many priests—knew that “If gold ruste, what shal iren do?” and so “Cristes lore [teaching] and his apostles twelve /He taught, but first he folwed it hymselve.” It is the Parson who reveals that The Canterbury Tales are not just about a journey to Thomas á Beckett’s bones but a pilgrimage to the Kingdom. At the end, he promises to “telle a myrie tale in prose to knytte up al this feeste and make an ende.” What is his merry tale? It is a sermon on penance, confession, and Divine forgiveness. His is the merriest tale because it makes our sordid but comical tales a part of a true comedy. This pilgrimage is a journey in which we set aside our sins because “Oure sweete Lord God of hevene” wills “that no men will perish but we will come all to knowledge of him and to the blissful life.” Our sins may be a source of entertainment in the hands of a writer like Chaucer, but Chaucer knew that life is only a comedy because God will bring us to the Host’s banquet by wiping away these sins. We can laugh at our sins for “our sweet Lord Jesus Christ has graciously spared us from our follies” but these would not be follies “if he had not pitied human souls” for then “a sorry song, we must all sing.”  Our failings are follies because Christ graciously transforms what should be tragedies into comedies. What should be mourning, Christ turns into laughing.

What is needed from us is our confessions, our partaking of Communion, our waking to the summons of the Rooster, and our willingness to stick together with our neighbors on pilgrimage. We must confess our tales truly, never settle on the way, and travel with this sundry company so that we may join the “blisful compaignye that rejoysen hem everemo, everich of otheres joy.” Chaucer is the poet for a Pilgrim Church, marked by sin but also the expectation of rejoicing in Christ, rich in each other’s joy. Our shared goal may be like Dante’s Paradiso, but our shared journey is Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. We travel to paradise together as diverse folk; we will enter as a redeemed people. We go there as sundry; we get there as blissful. We journey as a pilgrim Church; we arrive as the heavenly Church. Although we are still sinners slowly becoming saints, both the sundry and blissful are ever one merry company. And a merry company we shall ever be from here to Canterbury.

Benedicimus domino!