Sermon for Encaenia 2009

admin | 14 June 2009

“I am the vine, you are the branches … abide in me”

Wow! Here you are! Look at you! All dressed up – again – and everywhere to go! We salute you for your accomplishments. Today you are the pride of the school, the pride of your parents and grandparents, your relatives and friends, your cultures and communities. There is always something just a little overwhelming about these occasions; a day super-charged with so many emotions. We are both sad and glad to see you go!

You meet for the last time here this morning as students of King’s-Edgehill School. In a short while you will step up and step out as graduates. You have made the grade and are about to step into a whole new set of relationships. Such is graduation. You do so because of the things that have belonged to your time here whether it has been for one year or for six. It has been the place of your abiding, to strike the note in the lesson which Ashley read. This is the place where you have lived and learned – sometimes, no doubt, the hard way (let’s not go there!), sometimes not! And perhaps, some of the lessons have yet to take root, let alone to bear fruit, in you!

Together we have been through a lot. We have laughed and sung together – well, at least we’ve tried! We have cried and grieved together, known suffering and loss and sorrow together as well as joy and delight. We have experienced the agonies of defeat and the ecstasies of victory. It is almost as if you have already lived several lifetimes, so intense and busy everything has been. And there have been the quiet times of reflection and meditation, too; in sum, the hard lessons of thinking and acting beyond yourselves. All these things enter into the making of who you are. They are part of the formation of character; they belong to the shape of your being.

But only because you have embraced the challenges and the responsibilities that have been set before you. Not always willingly perhaps. After all, there are many things that we don’t like doing, many things that we kick against and rebel. It is called adolescence and it lives on in all of us, as arrested, atrophied or simply extended. It reaches back to the old, old story of humanity’s rebellion against the limits and the restraints that properly define freedom. We have rehearsed that story many times both in what has been read and heard but also in the awareness of what we have all done, “by thought, word and deed”, as it were. And yet, that is all part of the larger story of human redemption and the hope of transformation.

We look at you today and see how much and in how many ways you have changed. Not that you are different people. Rather that you are becoming more truly yourselves and, we hope, the best that you can be. For what end? Yourself? Is it all a grand make-over project? Is it all about you?

Perhaps, you know the little cartoon “Baby Blues” where the distraught parent says to the little child, “Just do what I say, okay? It’s not about you!” The parent walks away while the child stands staring with folded arms and then shouts out: “Is that even POSSIBLE??” It may just be possible that some parents have had that experience with you!

But no. What you have been a part of concerns certain ideals and principles, ideals and principles that shape character. There are the classical concepts that are so much a part of the School’s heritage, the concepts of “humanitas, gentleness and learning”, for instance, which capture the ideals of compassion and respect and contribute so much to leadership and service. These are concepts and principles that we hope will stay with you and become more fully part of you. Such ideals imply lives that are lived with purpose and care.

Compassion is not about the glib pretense of supposing that you know someone’s pain when we are really just looking in on the pain and suffering of others. That is really a kind of voyeurism with an added touch, the salt in the wound, as it were, of schadenfreude. No. True compassion is actually an act of the imagination that sees in the suffering of others what actually belongs to our common human experience; namely, that their suffering is yours, too. As one of the Desert Fathers put it, “our life and our death are with one another.”

Respect is about how we look at things, quite literally. It has entirely to do with our awareness of things outside ourselves and how we look at those things. As the poet R.S. Thomas puts it, “you who are not free to choose what you suffer can choose your response”. Our response is about how we look at ourselves and one another and, as this holy space reminds us, how we look at God is the pre-condition of how we look at ourselves and one another. It has been a recurring theme this year, the theme of transformation through the challenges of compassion and respect whereby we discover our humanity and the gentleness and learning that belong to the dignity of our humanity.

But we do not meet today in a desert, unless it is of our own making. No. Our readings direct us to the idea of creation and its redemption. We are recalled to the very landscape in which we live out our lives, to a garden, really, where the metaphors are about spiritual growth and life.

Omer’s reading from Isaiah signals the hope of peace and joy in the land. The images are those of paradise restored where there is harmony and peace. It belongs to a whole theology of the land as well as to the nature of our relation with God. But it means, I think, learning to live again within the limits of creation. That theology of the land has its culmination in the rich imagery of vine and branches, the suggestive imagery of learning as abiding in the truth which we cannot possess but which possesses us, captured in the lesson which Ashley read. We abide in the compassion of God for us in the land where we are placed. We abide in the respect of God for us and for our world which compels our respect for one another and for the created order.

These readings signal the idea that this is God’s world which exists for his purpose and will and not simply for our own manipulation and exploitation. The corollary of such an idea is that our humanity, too, has an end with God, an end in the sense of purpose and meaning. These are religious and spiritual perspectives, common to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and beyond, I might add, that challenge and confront our fearful anxieties and our dreadful presumptions about the environment, seen either as dead stuff that is simply there for our use or as the world which we only destroy.

It was Katherine Fountain, at one of our Wednesday assemblies, who touched upon the nature of a more mature and more thoughtful kind of approach. In speaking about the Kenyan initiative, she remarked that it can hardly be for her generation to presume to save the planet but that there was the need and the compulsion to do what one can and where one can, whether far away or near at hand. Her comment echoes Voltaire’s salutary advice, “we must cultivate our garden,” at the end of his novel Candide, meaning, I think, that we are called to do what we can for the good of others wherever we are. It has to do, as Voltaire argues, with thinking clearly in order to act responsibly. Forty years later, Bishop Inglis began the cultivation of this garden of learning here in the wilds of Nova Scotia; its purpose captured in the motto Deo Legi Regi Gregi – “for God, for the Law, for the King and for the People.” Compassion and respect are the qualities that shape leadership and service wherever you go.

It comes down to the wisdom that is discovered in learning to live within the limits of creation, the learning that has compassion and respect in it for the world and for one another. Wendell Berry, poet and environmental philosopher, comments on our present realities, the realities of the world which you are about to step into and assume.

He recalls us to what is really a kind of spiritual understanding, particularly in the face of our technocratic exuberances and anxieties, reminding us that “to have a lot of power should not make it impossible to use only a little” and that we need to learn again “to accept and live within limits; to resist changes that are merely novel or fashionable; to resist greed and pride; to resist the temptation to ‘solve’ problems by ignoring them; accepting them as ’trade-offs’ or bequeathing them to posterity.” “A good solution,” for our present dilemmas, he argues, “must be in harmony with good character, cultural value, and moral law.” They are the lessons that belong to our abiding.

You step out of this school and into a wider world of new ventures and challenges. I pray that wherever you go there will be the continuation of the cultivation of compassion and respect that has been a part of your life here. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God”, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins observes, and all because, in spite of ourselves, “there lives the dearest freshness deep down things” for “the Holy Spirit over the bent/ World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.” Go in peace and in the compassion and respect of God for our world and for our humanity.