“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.
You have changed over these years, and, no doubt, that will continue in various ways. No doubt, Jill will run faster and score even more goals in soccer; no doubt, Devan and Josh will go on to more razzle and dazzle whether on basketball courts or rugby pitches; no doubt, Emily will sing and act on other stages; no doubt, Taylor will spike more balls on future volleyball courts; no doubt, Debby will continue to play in musicals; no doubt, the twins, Zack and Christian, will attain to greater heights in basketball and biathalon – not that they will grow any taller, though, I have to say, I can’t remember whether they were ever shorter than me, which, I know, isn’t saying very much! No doubt, “Notty” will be his own irrepressible self, only more so. Others of you, too, will pursue your various careers and advocations in business and in the professions: Nick in the military, Sid in Design, Curtis, Fritzie and Redina in Medicine, Madison in the Sciences and Tony in physics. Only ‘William’ (the rugby mascot) will remain, I suppose.
My point, however, is that along with those aspects of your character, you have grown and matured and have become a little more wise. And that is what really matters. “The purpose of human knowledge,” John Lukacs observes, “- indeed, of human life itself – is not accuracy, and not even certainty; it is understanding.” You are part of a community of understanding, for education is not simply the mastery of skills and techniques but of ways of thinking and being.
Nothing matters more in a complex and uncertain world: a global world which separates us from one another as much as it unites – emptying out into the shallows of utility the rich seams of culture and history; a digital world which threatens more jobs than it promises; a post-secular world where religion can no longer be merely derided and dismissed; a commercial world which in a kind of alchemy turns everything into things, into commodities, including ourselves. Only education is the counter and the corrective, the moderating force necessary for the understanding.
Michael Sandel, Professor of Government at Harvard and the celebrity figure of MOOCs – massive open on-line courses – addresses some of these realities in What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. It may come as a surprise and a shock but education is one of those things that money can’t buy. It isn’t a commodity. The commodification and marketization of society, he argues, results in the corruption of civic life, the corruption of what it means to be human. We have forgotten that there are some things money can’t buy, like slaves, for instance. Slavery as a form of commerce rather than an outcome of conquest was part of the brave new world of modernity yet one which we learned to abolish, learning, you might say, that there are things money can’t buy and shouldn’t.
Such things are there to be remembered and learned again because they go to the underlying philosophical and religious question about what constitutes the good life. Disenchanted with the idea of economics as a science, Sandel reminds us that in its modern origins with Adam Smith, it is really a branch of moral and political philosophy, and rightly so. What is good for the individual and what is good for the community are necessarily reciprocal and complementary. The challenge is to reclaim an older wisdom which speaks directly to our present uncertainties and which offers at least the beginnings of a way of understanding. And with respect to his celebrated on-line courses, Sandel is quick to emphasise that they can’t “replace the experience of students and teachers gathered in person and deliberating together as part of an academic community,” what I would call the humanity of learning of which the ethical is altogether primary. It is not always easy.
After attending a conference on professional ethics, four psychiatrists walked out together. One said, “You know, people are always coming to us with their guilt and fears, but we have no one to go to with our problems. So why don’t we take some time right now to hear each other out?” The other three agreed.
The first psychiatrist confessed, “I have an almost uncontrollable desire to kill my patients.”
The second psychiatrist said, “I find ways to cheat my patients out of their money whenever I can.”
The third followed with, “I’m involved in selling drugs and often get my patients to sell them for me.”
The fourth psychiatrist then confessed, “You know, no matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to keep a secret.”
The greater secret, perhaps, is about learning what it means to be human. In that sense, what we face is really a new twist on an old theme. “Machines may make people’s physical lives easier, but they do not make their thinking easier” (Lukacs). But if we let our thinking be like the mechanical causality of machines, then we become machines; we cease to be the masters and become the tools. In 1749, the year Cornwallis founded Halifax, a French rationalist, Julien Offray de La Mettrie, wrote Man a Machine, celebrating man not as a soul or spirit but as just a complicated machine. Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein, signaled the romantic reaction against such mechanical reasoning; Frankenstein is the scientist who creates the creature. The monster is really us. As the poet, philosopher, literary critic and Kentucky Farmer, Wendell Berry remarks, “the next great division of the world [may well] be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” You know there is a problem when Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, tells a graduating class: “Turn off your computer. You’re actually going to have to turn off your phone and discover all that is human around us.”
Institutions such as churches, schools, government, and family, are only as strong as their commitment to the principles and ideals that define them without which they are nothing worth, not even as romantic ruins. Thirty-nine years after the founding of Halifax and the writing of Man a Machine, this school was founded here in Windsor, not in Halifax, already an urban center of sorts, but here in the rich farmland of what was formerly Acadia. It may seem paradoxical that the purpose of the school, captured in the Motto of the School and College, Deo Legi Regi Gregi, was about public service – For God, For the Law, For the King, For the People – all of which would entail some sort of involvement with urban life. But that requires a place of cultivation; education that envisions the formation of character seeks the cultivation of such qualities as “gentleness, humanitas and learning.” In the 225th year of the School we are reminded in the words of the Edgehill motto, fideliter, of our faithfulness and commitment to those principles which dignify and ennoble our humanity. They make us more not less than ourselves.
You are more than just your actions, more than just what you do, for otherwise we would be only victims or worse, victimizers. Countering the idea that “what I do is me,” the poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins argues, “I say more. The just man justices” – does what is right – “keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;/Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is/ – Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,/Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his/ To the Father through the features of men’s faces.” He speaks of a larger view of our humanity, individually, collectively and, above all, spiritually. Against the fatalisms of our age, it allows for learning from your mistakes, for grace and forgiveness, for transformation and change in you.
It is the wisdom of the Scriptures. The lesson from Isaiah which Debby read recalls us to the grandeur of God whose “thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” the counter to all and every form of idolatry and yet whose word gives order and meaning to the created world and to human lives; only so can we “go out in joy.” In the lesson which Christian read from John’s Gospel we hear the last of the so-called ‘I am’ sayings of Jesus in which he identifies himself with the God of the Burning Bush, ‘I am who I am,’ and establishes a wonderful metaphor for our abiding in that transcendent truth and life – the images of vine and branches.
You go forth, it may seem, into a disordered and uncertain world, a “bent world,” as Hopkins puts it, where “all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared/with toil; /and wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell,” a world where we seem disconnected and out of touch with nature, “the soil/ Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.” And yet in the simple wisdom of the things that abide, “there lives the dearest freshness deep down things,” and the hope of morning springs. Why? “Because the Holy Ghost over the bent /World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright /wings.” Such is God’s care and it makes all the difference.
Several years ago on a lovely June day during exams, I was alone in here, no doubt fussing with preparations for the Encaenia service, when Ben and Jennings and MacKenzie stepped in, having finished their exams. “We just wanted to remember the atmosphere,” Ben said waving his arms as if to waft into his soul the Chapel air. The school is a place of care and cultivation. I hope that is what you will remember, recalling the atmosphere of all that is part of who you are.
We have laughed and cried, danced and sung together. And if we have been in your face at times, it is because we cared enough to scold, shout, cajole, and encourage you. IB or not, IB ready to get out of here, no doubt, but, without doubt, too, something abides in you. These times, as Debby remarked the other day, are bittersweet. They are for all of us. We are both glad and sad to see you go. Adios, amigos; Grüß Gott; Auf Wiedersehen; Adieu; in short, Go with God. Take with you the things that abide and let them live in you.
“I am the vine; ye are the branches … abide in me.”
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain
Encaenia 2013