Sermon for Encaenia 2013
“I am the vine; ye are the branches … abide in me.”
Somewhere, in the past year, a man or a woman stepped out of the countryside and slipped into one of the world’s cities and, with that one step, the demographics of the world changed from being mostly rural to being predominantly urban. How strange, then, to hear in the Scripture readings about the agrarian themes of seedtime and harvest, of vines and branches, the images of humanity’s engagement with the natural and created world. How strange, too, on this day of leaving to hear about abiding. Yet, we meet this morning in the beauty of the rural landscape of Nova Scotia for your graduation from this School from which you go to into an inescapably urban world.
You made it! In just a few hours you will no longer be students of King’s-Edgehill School but graduates, literally those who have made the grade and now step up and step out as alumni of the School. On this day, you are the pride of the School and the pride of your parents, guardians, grandparents and friends. Today marks a significant milestone in your lives. I suspect, however, that if parents and grandparents, and even you, were honest, it could be said that we hardly recognize you, so much have you changed, and I am not referring to guys in skirts!
We meet in the 225th year of the founding of this school. You are part of something far greater than yourselves which is now part of you. This School, set in the rural idylls of Nova Scotia, a kind of paradise, you might almost say (forget the bleak mid-winter, at least for the moment!), has been your place of cultivation and learning, your place of abiding. You step out, glad to be free and yet so much of who you are has been shaped by all that you have been a part of here whether for seven years or one. If it has any meaning at all, something abides in you from your time spent here.
These have been some of the most critical years of your formation. Education is nothing if it is not about the formation of character. Nothing could be more counter-culture, yet nothing could be more classical. As soon as education is turned into a means rather than an end it ceases to be education. At issue is what it means to be human. It is a pressing contemporary question. The Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor, points out that our question is not simply about what it is that is right to do but about what it is that is good to be. Morality and metaphysics are inseparable; the ethical is also the philosophical.