What We Inherit

A spiritual comment and prayer to start the day with the Reverend Canon Dr Mark Clavier.

Good morning.

Today the Church commemorates Richard Hooker, one of the great Anglican thinkers—in some ways, our Luther or Calvin. His five-volume Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity presented a theological vision that deeply influenced the English constitution. A friend described reading it as like trying to chew wool. Hooker loved long sentences.

He argued that society isn’t a blank page. Its laws and customs carry the accumulated wisdom of those who came before us. We’re more dependent on that wisdom than we care to acknowledge. Hooker didn’t deny the need for radical reforms, but believed they required weighty reasons, because inherited wisdom binds us across time in ways no abstract theory can.

The letter to the Hebrews knows this. After naming the faithful of the past, it pictures them as “a great cloud of witnesses” surrounding us and speaks of a strange mutuality: they “would not be made perfect” without us (Hebrews 11:40; 12:1). Christians have read this as a vision of one people across generations, each dependent on the other. Those who went before made sacrifices for a future they never saw. We’re their future. In time, we’ll be the ones whose fidelity others build upon.

To belong to a society is to be in debt: to our forebears who built it, and to the descendants who will inherit it from us. We’re stewards before we are engineers. Perhaps humility and gratitude are the first virtues of citizenship.

Let us pray.
God of our ancestors and generations yet unborn, give us gratitude for what we have received, wisdom to mend what is broken, and care for those who will inherit what we do. Amen.