by CCW | 9 August 2009 18:05
Welcome back! And welcome back to the Chapel! And at an hour that at least must seem much more civilized than what you were once used to!
There is something quite special about reunions, a strange mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous, particularly with respect to our outlooks and memories about that most curious of all stages and states of our lives, namely, adolescence. Do we really want to remember those days of awkwardness and embarrassment, of promise and potential, of dreams and ambitions? And yet, somehow you do for here you are! Or is it the frisson of excitement about being able to do at least legally what you weren’t allowed to do when you were here? I heard about some of that last night. Reunions as the final liberation from the chains of adolescence? Or the return, some twenty-odd years later (or more), to what time has bathed in golden sheen as being somehow idyllic? Blessed it was to be young in those days? But I digress.
It strikes me as altogether remarkable and special that after so many years and decades you have returned to King’s-Edgehill. And, it seems to me, that perhaps, just perhaps, it is because what belongs to your experiences and the memories of those experiences has, well, to put in the language of the lesson which Jennifer read for us (John 6. 35-40[1]), truly fed and sustained you. It is all part and parcel of who you are, part and parcel of your life, part and parcel of your spiritual and intellectual identity. How wonderful that you have made the effort to honour one of the most important things that you are given the freedom to honour, namely, to honour your derivations! In other words, to honour in your reunion the times, memories, associations, principles and people which have contributed, in some fashion or other, to who you are. And, importantly, to honour who you are in the sight of God.
Such is the purpose of this holy place, a place which has been a special part of your experience and where, perhaps, just perhaps, various seeds of holy learning and holy love have been planted in you and continue to bring forth fruit in your lives “to the glory of God and to the good of his church and people”, to use a beautiful expression. It is really a bit more than mere nostalgia, you see. Your gathering belongs to a mature recognition and celebration of the things that truly matter.
In 1974, in the decade before those crucial and formative years of your being here at King’s-Edgehill, George Steiner, writer and scholar, delivered the celebrated Massey Lectures. It was entitled “Nostalgia for the Absolute”. In it he graphically and powerfully described the moral and spiritual emptiness of a world that has discovered that all of the false gods substituted for traditional religion are indeed false and empty. Those false gods, which he wonderfully shows are the counterfeit forms of true religion, were the ‘mythologies’ of Marxism, Freudian Psychoanalysis, and Levi-Straussian anthropology, in other words, the grand ideological narratives of the political, the psychological and the sociological which attempted to explain everything and failed. In their collapse and failure (and remember that he was writing before the end of the Cold War) and in the wake of an endless parade of superstitious fads, the new-age fads and fantasies which show no signs of going away, he argues for the kind of serious questioning that really belongs to serious and thoughtful religion.
It remains the task for our age. It is captured in what the Rabbi of Great Britain, Jonathan Sacks, has wonderfully called “The Dignity of Difference” with respect to the great religions of the world that shape cultures and souls. It means taking seriously each of the great religions in all of their complexity. It means, he argues, for Jews and Moslems to hold Christians accountable to Christian principles and vice versa, honouring the differences, as it were, honouring, it seems to me, our true derivations and origins in their spiritual integrity. Precisely against the destructive and crude naïveté of those reductionist narratives of contemporary culture, the need and the demand is to appreciate the complexity of human life and the complexity of the natural world and to comprehend the intellectual principles that inform the life of institutions, such institutions as the family, the religious, the political and, of course, the educational. That can only happen through the honouring of those spiritual ways of life that give bread to the hungering soul and impel us to thoughtful and reflective action. It is the necessary place of religion in education.
In the King’s-Edgehill experience of education, the Chapel continues to be the place where the Scriptures are proclaimed, where prayers are offered and praises given to God the Blessed Trinity, the place, too, where the great questions about spiritual identity and purpose continue to be raised, examined and explored in ways that respect the pluralities of religious and non-religious sensibilities. It happens, and can only happen, it seems to me, by the grace of God in honouring the spiritual and intellectual principles of this holy place, honouring the derivations of the School itself in its Christian and Anglican expression. It all belongs to the unique experience of education at King’s-Edgehill School. It is captured, too, in the architecture and the windows of the Chapel as well as in the School’s morning services. It is about a kind of faithfulness, fideliter, to those foundational ideals, Deo Legi Regi Gregi.
I hope that your time of reunion has stirred up some of those seeds of holy desire and holy learning, recalling you to the roots of your being spiritually and renewing your soul in the things that are truly life-giving and sustaining. Such things are the very bread of life for the soul. In the Christian understanding of things, Jesus is that very bread of life which has come down from heaven to weary and empty world. May you continue to be fed from “the bread of life” and compelled to the service of the one who “came to do the will of him who sent [him]”.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, King’s-Edgehill School
Reunion of the 80s
August 9th, 2009
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2009/08/09/sermon-for-reunion-of-the-80s-kings-edgehill-school/
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