Reflections for the Cadet Church Service at Christ Church
May 16th, 2014
Readers: Nandini Mishra, Tristan Kimball, Miranda Walsh, Primrose Chareka, Brayden Graves, Michael Dennis
I. “Arise my love, my fair one and come away, for lo, the winter is past”
The winter is past and spring, at least in its mythic Maritime guise, is upon us. We have survived the tempests of the winter and pause to look back upon the year and, even more, upon the miracle of 225 years.
“How came we ashore?” Miranda asks her father, Prospero, in Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest. He answers, “By Providence divine”. It is, perhaps, by Providence divine that we gather in the 225th year of the School.
It is May. The year is 1789. We come to the near end of the first year of King’s Collegiate School, now King’s-Edgehill. What kind of a year has it been? A gathering of a few students, merely seventeen in this first year, now swollen to hundreds, huddled against the winter winds and snows, have embarked upon the beginnings of a journey and a venture in education that continues to this day. What kind of education?
Gentleness, learning and manhood, humanitas, as it were. These are the qualities that are literally written on the walls. You can find them in the Chapel. They are there to be written in our hearts. These are principles and ideals that shape character and inform our common life. We neglect them at our peril. They are as important now as they were 225 years ago. They contribute to an education that is about public service and commitment to others, an education that is about being part of an intellectual and spiritual community. It is captured in the mottoes of the School. Fideliter – faithfulness – is the motto of Edgehill. Deo Legi Regi Gregi – for God, the Law, the King and the People – is the motto of King’s.
To come to the end of the first year is to be returned to the principles that define a culture of learning and service. It is about learning to think and live beyond ourselves.
II. “What seest thou else/In the dark backward and abyss of time?”
It is Prospero’s question to Miranda about what she remembers of her past. What do we see and remember, celebrate and know?
We were founded formally on November 1st, 1788. This is the first year of the School and it marks our entry into the many and great and momentous events of the year 1789. What was happening in 1789?
Just a few weeks ago, on April 30th, 1789, George Washington was inaugurated as the first President of the United States of America.
Just four days ago, on May 12th, 1789, William Wilberforce gave his first major speech in the British House of Commons arguing for the Abolition of Slavery.
In the summer of 1789, Alexander MacKenzie embarked upon his explorations of the Canadian northwest and discovered a river which will be called in his name, the Mackenzie River.
In the summer of 1789, the story of the Mutiny of the Bounty was unfolding far away on the waters of the Pacific Ocean.
In the summer of 1789, stirrings and rumblings in France led to the storming of the Bastille in Paris and to the beginnings of the French Revolution.
And, perhaps, most importantly of all, Mrs. Alexander Hamilton, the wife of one of the founding fathers of the United States, the first Secretary of the Treasury under George Washington, served ice cream as dessert in Washington.
They had dessert in 1789. They had ice cream.
“What seest thou else in the dark backward and abyss of time?”
They had dessert! They had ice cream!
Okay, okay! But what else do you see?
In the Fall of 1789, the University of King’s College was formally instituted here in Windsor. It would not be until 1791 that the foundation stone would be placed for the first building on what would be the Campus of the School and College, our campus with its fields and buildings. The founding ideas are more than the buildings. The buildings are but the expression of those ideas.
1788 and 1789 mark the years of the founding of two interrelated institutions, a School and a College, institutions which would contribute to public life in the post-revolutionary world of British North America. The story begins; our story, the story of which we are all a part.
III. “In my beginning is my end”
We celebrated our beginnings on the actual day of the 225th anniversary of the founding of the School, November 1st. In attendance for that special celebration were the President of the University of King’s College, Dr. George Cooper, an old-boy of the School; Mr. Kevin Lynch, Chancellor of King’s College; Bishop Sue Moxley of the Anglican Diocese of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island; Mr. Trevor Hughes, Chairman of the Board of Governors of King’s-Edgehill School, and an old boy; His Worship, Mr. Paul Beazley, the Mayor of Windsor; the Honourable Chuck Porter, MLA for West Hants; and, of course, our Headmaster, Mr. Joe Seagram. Also in attendance at the church service on this occasion was the Honourable Scott Brison, Member of Parliament, along with a whole array of alumni and friends and supporters of the School. The celebrations concentrated on the ideals and principles that define and govern the life and vision of the School. Our speakers highlighted the special role and place of the School in the story of education in Canada.
IV. “O brave new world that has such creatures in it”
Miranda’s words have a powerful if not an ironic, almost hypnotic effect. A brave new world indeed was underway in 1788 and 1789 here in Windsor. But the creatures in it? Well, they are always a bit of a mixed bag, you might say, both then and now. Miranda’s vision is the vision of charity; “a brave new world,” she says, though that world is full of more scoundrels than saints. Yet the idea of “a brave new world” signals the constant effort to give expression to what ennobles and dignifies our humanity rather than making us less than ourselves.
Gentleness, learning and humanitas are the counters to mediocrity, to denial and despair, the counters to the violence and brutality that defines so much of our world and day. There can be no ignoring of such realities; the question is how they are faced and overcome.
It was not all rosy and cheery. There were many years when the School was not in session, when it existed more as a notional idea than a functioning reality, when the question, quite literally, was “to be or not to be.” And yet the School has persevered, at times flourishing and at times surviving. And it has played a role in the shaping of a country and a nation. And all because of the ideals it embodies.
V. “But let us not burden our remembrance with a heaviness that is gone”
What has this year been for us? A year of many achievements, of things learned and accomplished athletically, academically and artistically. A year of pumpkins, pucks and parades. A year of “IB busy,” to be sure, academically. A year of a variety of athletic accomplishments, of championships won and lost. A year of theatrical performances and successes, of concerts and outstanding musical performances. A year of discipline and duty, of leadership and responsibility that is all part of the unique and special quality of education at KES.
Guys in skirts and gals with rifles – it is almost Shakespearean! Most appropriately in this the 225th year of the School, new colours will be blessed and presented to the Cadet Corps this evening. The military is an essential feature of the educational programme of the School and an integral part of its history.
A year, in short, that speaks to every aspect of ourselves and to the well-rounded nature of our education that makes us more than one-trick ponies either in sports or the arts or academics. It means learning how to win and how to lose; it means learning from our mistakes and our follies; it means learning about ourselves and about caring for one another. It means, as Prospero suggests, learning about forgiveness.
VI. “I’ll be wise hereafter and seek for grace”
In The Tempest, Caliban represents the aboriginal cultures encountered by the Europeans in their journeys of discovery to the so-called new world. That encounter brings out the ambiguities of exploitation and the significance of education.
Caliban’s final words speak to the awakening of ourselves to ourselves, to the whole matter of self-awareness and self-responsibility. He epitomizes the entire educational programme. He has been taught to speak and so knows how to curse and yet he eventually comes to realize that there is a greater point and purpose to our self-awareness. He is awakened to his own folly and so to truth. There can be no going back to a time before.
“Grace is the foundation,” says one of the great nursing fathers of the spiritual tradition, “which alone can rule our unruly wills and illuminate our darkened minds” (St. Bonaventure, freely translated). Grace is that Providence divine which checks our unruly wills and lightens our darkened minds. It is part of the vision of a liberal education that concerns the whole person; an education that calls us out of ourselves. Through the tempests of time and history, through disappointment and loss, “when no man was his own,” we awaken to wonder and to a knowledge of ourselves.
The love of wisdom and a commitment to purpose alone counter the nihilisms of our age either in the sense of empty despair or the wilful destruction of our institutions and our culture. The struggle is to commit to the principles and ideals that give life and purpose.
For, as Prospero puts it, “my ending is despair/ unless I be relieved by prayer,/ which pierces so that it assaults/ Mercy itself and frees all faults.”
VII. “O, I have suffered with those that I saw suffer!”
Miranda expresses beautifully the true meaning of compassion and care towards those that suffer. Her words recall the dominant icons belonging to the educational programme of our School and College. In the School Chapel, the dominant icon is the image of Christ the Good Shepherd just as here, at Christ Church, the dominant icon is the image of Christ Crucified. At the College Chapel in Halifax, the dominant icon is the image of the Child Christ teaching in the Temple at the age of twelve.
These images teach us about the transition from darkness to light and the transition from death to life. God’s engagement with our humanity is about such transitions and transformations. Education seeks “a sea-change into something rich and strange.” We are involved in such sea-changes through our life in the School: doing things we could never have imagined; learning things we could never have known; and committing ourselves to others beyond ourselves in ways we could never have realized.
In contemplating the image of Christ Crucified, we contemplate the idea of God’s deep love for our humanity and the realization that the power of the Good is always greater than all and every evil. Out of sorrow and disappointment, we are awakened to joy and delight. It shows us the love of the God who cares, an idea that is further expressed in the Chapel images, first, at the School, of Christ the Good Shepherd, and, secondly, at the College, the image of Christ as student and teacher. Teaching is about compassionate care. We learn through the sea-storms and tempests of our lives.
VIII. We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
The lesson which Jacob read is taken from the great love-song of the Jewish Scriptures, The Song of Songs. It places us in a garden. The lesson which Jenna read also places us in a garden. But what kind of garden?
Joni Mitchell’s song, Woodstock, is really a ballad in the country music tradition. Her version of it, recorded after the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival which defined a generation, is really a kind of elegy and a lament for what was longed for but unachieved. It signals a profound sense of disappointment.
A wanderer meets a traveler, “a child of God walking along the road” who tells his story in answer to the question “where are you going”? The question echoes God’s question to our humanity in the Garden of Eden. It speaks to every age.
“I am going on down to Yasgar’s farm/ I am going to join in a rock n’ roll band/ I am going to camp out on the land/ and try to get my soul free,” free from the constraints of an oppressive society that seems to destroy the environment and our humanity. It signals a kind of longing, a longing for paradise, captured in the refrain about getting “back to the garden.”
The refrain twice repeated undergoes a change the third time at the end of the song.
We are stardust
million-year-old carbon
We are golden
caught in the devil’s bargain
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
Yasgar’s farm is “the hippie reworking of Yahweh’s garden,” paradise (Camille Paglia). Yet the message of Easter is not about a return to paradise because that would mean the loss of ourselves, of our self-awareness and our awareness of one another; in short, a loss of meaning and memory. We only know the garden in our separation from it. There can be no going back.
We meet instead in the garden of divine love which makes all loves lovely, the garden of the Resurrection, the garden of creation renewed. And that is something more and greater. It is about redemption through the divine love which makes all things new despite the follies and the madnesses of our humanity in all of its disorder and disarray. Human reason need not be constrained to “the devil’s bargain,” the Faustian claim to knowledge as power for that is ultimately a betrayal of reason. We cannot go back but that needn’t mean that we are defined by a technocratic reason for that is a reason which destroys ourselves and nature.
We are more than million-year-old carbon; we are more, too, than the disappointments of our wayward reason. We arise from all the winters of our discontent to be renewed in the principles and ideals that define us and our hopes.
Gentleness, learning and humanitas. These set us in motion to love and to serve. We arise from grief and disappointment and like Mary Magdalene we are set in motion to learn, to love and to serve.
“Arise my love, my fair one and come away, for lo, the winter is past”
(Rev’d) David Curry
KES Cadet Corps Church Parade
Christ Church, Windsor, NS
May 16th, 2014