by CCW | 23 May 2015 05:54
Prologue: Where is home? Our homes are from all over the world. Yet our home is here, too.
Section 1
Home is Australia, Barbados, and Bahamas; Home is Bermuda, China, and Germany; Home is Ghana, Japan, and Kazakhstan;
Home is Korea, Luxembourg, and Mali; Home is Mexico, Russia, and Saint Kitts and Nevis; Home is Saudi Arabia, Senegal, and Spain;
Home is Taiwan; Home is Uganda; Home is United States; Home is Canada.
Section 2 (Dialogue)
You forgot Antarctica.
Antarctica? Who is from Antarctica?
Well, Jack O’Flaherty is always drawing penguins. He must be from Antarctica!
No. He’s from Newfoundland.
Then why doesn’t he draw seals? They’re cuter.
Section 3
Home is great cities, small towns, and villages; Great cities of the world like Beijing, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Taipei, Shanghai, Barcelona, Dubai, Kampala, Mexico City, Moscow, Toronto, Montreal, and Windsor – not!
Home is other cities, great and small, like Accra, Almaty, Dakar, Bamako, Cancun, Krefeld, Shenzhen, Nassau, Jinan, St. John’s, Nanjing, Cornerbrook, Mississauga, Campeche, Burlington, Monterrey, Duncan, Hamilton, Mainz, Halifax, and Windsor – not!
Home is any number of small towns like Landau in Germany; Basseterre in St. Kitts; Smithers in British Columbia; Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Kippens, and Labrador City in Newfoundland; and in Nova Scotia, towns like Lunenburg, Kentville, Berwick, Wolfville, Antigonish, New Glasgow, Hantsport, Pictou, Mahone Bay, Truro, Parrsboro, and Windsor – yes!
Home is a myriad of villages and communities like Wohltorf and Friedelsheim, Germany; Far Hills, New Jersey; Upper Kingsclear and Charters Settlement, New Brunswick; Miscouche and Cardigan, Prince Edward Island.
Home is a host of scattered villages and communities in Nova Scotia: Aylesford, Bible Hill, Heatherton, Kingston, Springfield, Upper Tantallon, Granville Ferry, Eastern Passage, Merigomish, Brooklyn, Chester, Conquerall Mills, Londonderry, Centreville, New Minas, Fall River, Hammonds Plains, Hubbards, New Ross, Newport, Port Williams, Falmouth, Mount Uniacke, and, last but not least, Hants Border.
And for some, home is Mabou by way of Saudi Arabia, and Lower Sackville by way of Dubai.
Section 4
Home is global yet local. For all of us home is King’s-Edgehill School. Schools and Colleges have often been called alma mater, meaning ‘nourishing’ or ‘nursing mother’, places of education and learning, places where we mature and grow in understanding; in short, a home where we learn what it means to be human, where we grow up into who we are.
Such things are learned in a community with one another. Schools are moral, intellectual and spiritual communities that connect us to the great enterprises of learning about our humanity. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, friendship is the counter to tyranny. It is a most important feature of our humanity and one which contributes to Gilgamesh’s great quest for wisdom. Homer’s Odyssey is about the homeward journey which means nothing less than knowing your place in the order of things; it means wisdom and understanding. In The Bhagavad Gita, home is found in following your dharma, the law or principle of your being. In The Book of Exodus, home is about learning the Law of God for our humanity while wandering in the wilderness. In all of these works we find our homecoming in our being together wisely and purposefully.
The Greek word for house or home is oikos. It is the root word for ecology. It concerns the world as a habitable place and speaks to our care for the world as our home. Yet the word also extends to God’s actions with and in the world, to the divine economy, to our home with God.
Section 5
Home is more than a place on a map. It is about ourselves and others within an intelligible world. It is about learning together as friends within a community committed to learning. And it is about learning how to care for ourselves and for one another and for our world. Home is where we begin to learn to have “an affection for place” and for one another. Home is where we begin to learn what it might mean to do good for the land and for one another.
It is not simply about winning debates and arguments. It is more like what Plato calls learning in “a talk-it-through-kind of way,” which belongs to a community of friends. It embraces the whole gamut of the educational experience of our School from the classroom to the dining hall, from the Chapel to the Gym, from the Cadet Corps to the Library, from the fields of the School to the streets of Windsor. Home is where we are together whether it is shoveling snow upon snow in the snows of this winter or mucking about in the ruck of the scrum in rugby, whether it is pondering quantum physics or the intricacies of sonnets in the classrooms of the School, whether it is singing on stage or building robots.
Home at King’s-Edgehill, at least in May, is suddenly to find ourselves in a garden. “O you who dwell in the gardens, my companions are listening for your voice; let me hear it,” as The Song of Songs puts it. The love-song of the Jewish Scriptures, it reminds us that school as home is about the love of learning and about our learning together in a community, as companions and friends listening to the voice of truth and love.
Section 6
That is the character of our School in its history and foundation. From its origins in pre-revolutionary America, what was envisioned was a liberal education that concerns all aspects of our humanity from religion to the arts and the sciences and which seeks to serve others for God, for the Law, for the King and for the People. Such is the significance of the motto of the School and College: Deo Legi Regi Gregi. It is not about what we can get for ourselves to get ahead in the world but what we will give to others and to our world. It is also about what we will do for the good of the land, the world. Fideliter, meaning faithfulness, is the Edgehill motto. Being faithful to the principles of our School as the home of our learning is the constant challenge.
From its early days, students and graduates of King’s and later Edgehill went out into the global world of the late eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and, now, early twenty-first centuries. Just as we now come to the School from all over the world, so too we go out into that world.
Section 7
Our school is more than the sum of its parts. There are those special times when we come together as a whole and where we are together not just in one place but also in a common purpose. Today we are together as the 254 King’s-Edgehill Cadet Corps. It is the School as one body. We are on parade but it is not about ‘selfies’. It is not about ‘look at me looking at you looking at me,’ the contemporary parades of narcissism. It is about our identity as a School. This is a kind of homecoming in which the defining principles of the School are on parade. Each of us has a part and a place within it. It is about belonging to something bigger than ourselves.
Anything worth doing is worth doing well. It is a matter of dignity and respect, a matter of gentleness and learning. These are the principles that contribute to the discovery of our humanity as opposed to the loss of our humanity in selfishness and greed, in pride and envy, to name but a few of the things that make us less than human. To march in the Corps is to be aware of one another as united in a common task. It takes real leadership and real responsibility on the part of everyone. It means being at home with one another.
It just doesn’t get any better, does it? Guys in skirts and girls with guns! Go figure! And yet our parade is about the School’s history and the character of its educational programme. It is about learning together and being at home with one another. Celebrate the moment. We are never more ourselves than when we are together.
Section 8
This Cadet Day marks the last parade under the leadership of our commanding officer, Major Tom Peet. We are most grateful for his direction and service to the School and to its Cadet Corps. This is the first Church Parade with our new colours commissioned and blessed at last year’s inspection under his leadership. We welcome as our new commanding officer Major Warrant Officer Keith Hynes.
The Cadet programme is about more than playing war games. It is about discipline and order, individually and collectively. It is about leadership and care. It is about honour and duty. It relates to military service as one of the forms of public service belonging to the educational ideals of the School right from the beginning. Alumni of the School were involved in many of the great and defining military enterprises of the late 18th and 19th centuries, from the Battle of Waterloo to the Siege at Lucknow, as well as the defining military events of the 20th century, from the First World War to the Vietnam War; military ventures that encompassed much of our world. The grandson of Bishop Charles Inglis, for instance, was one of the heroes of Lucknow in India. We are challenged to remember a great cloud of witnesses who served and died for King and Country, for Queen and Commonwealth; notwithstanding the questions and the problems with colonialism and imperialism.
Section 9
We have been at home with one another in a myriad of other ways: in sports such as soccer, cross-country running, volleyball, basketball, hockey, biathlon, table-tennis, rugby, track and field, yoga and dance; in arts performances, such as the School Musicals, Urinetown and The Music Man, and in Art displays such as the IB Art Show. We have been at home with one another in our educational pursuits, even if that means ‘IB undone by exams’. We have been at home in our social times together at Coffee Houses and dances, rapping with the rappers, twerking with the twerkers, swinging with the swingers. Tonight will be the Cadet Ball. We have been together on journeys to mountains in Peru and to Turkey, Greece and Rome. Why together? Because each of us is part of the School as a whole. What happens to one or some affects us all.
And there are those more reflective times that punctuate the busyness of our times together and open us out to the lessons of love and wisdom. Such is Chapel.
Epilogue
The lesson from Ecclesiasticus or The Wisdom of Jesu Ben Sirach, which Primrose read, captures the idea which lies at the heart of all learning, namely, the desire to learn, the life-long pursuit of learning. It means living “according to wisdom” as the text puts it, which affirms the moral dimensions of learning. Resolved to live according to wisdom equally means a commitment to doing good. “I was zealous for the good,” the thinker says. It happens when we “lodge” together in a School. It belongs to our abiding in a place of learning. The lesson from John’s Gospel, which Cooper read, suggests that our abiding is about our attention to the truth and about learning to let it live in us. It speaks too about friendship with truth and about sacrifice for the good.
In the Christian understanding, we meet in Ascensiontide. It is the celebration of the Son’s homecoming to the Father having accomplished all that belongs to human redemption. Christ’s homecoming signals our home with God, “that where [he is], there [we] may be also” wherever we are in the world, for the world, too, is redeemed to God. The poet, Thomas Traherne, captures the cosmic dimension of the Ascension: “you never love the world aright until you learn to love it in God.” The Ascension signals the joy of our abiding in the love of learning.
All these are the strong and great lessons that belong to our School as our home. They belong to our life together at King’s-Edgehill School, our alma mater. This is our home.
(Rev’d) David Curry
King’s-Edgehill School Cadet Corps Church Parade
May 22nd, 2015
Readers: Katrena Thomas, Luke Fleming, Christina Andreas, Emma Belliveau, Elizabeth Smith, Carla du Toit, Emma Dufour, Anthony Canete
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