by CCW | 13 June 2015 17:57
“How came we ashore?” Miranda asks her father, Prospero, in Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest. And perhaps, you and your parents, grandparents and guardians, too, are asking yourselves that very same question. How did you get here? How did you do it? For you have done it! Today you step up and step out. In a short while you will be no longer students but graduates and alumni!
You have done it, to be sure, but how? Simply on your own? Because it’s just you? Think again. Prospero answers Miranda’s question with a wonderfully profound phrase. “By Providence divine.” Something good and wonderful, “a sea-change into something rich and strange,” has happened in spite of the vagaries of time and experience, in spite of our own follies and mistakes, even, as the play reveals, in spite of human wickedness and sin, of betrayal and deceit. And that is the wonder. Miranda is a wonder – both our Miranda, to be sure – but all of you are the wonder on this day. Not just because of each of you by yourselves but because of the wonder of all of you together in the purpose of this place, in the wonder of the education that belongs to the School. “By Providence divine,” indeed.
The events of this day might seem to suggest an ending but the term for this service is Encaenia from a Greek word signifying something new and fresh, a kind of beginning (εγκαινια: εν & καινος). The term is used for festivals of dedication in which there is a renewal of devotion, commitment and consecration to the defining principles and ideas that belong to institutions in their truth and integrity. Originally used for the anniversary dedication of temples and churches, it is associated with “the annual commemoration of founders and benefactors at Oxford University in June” (O.E.D), and by extension to schools and colleges, such as King’s-Edgehill, founded upon those traditions of learning. Sometimes known as Commencement, it means that something begins, not just ends. That, too, is all part of the wonder of this day.
“How readest thou?” In some way or other the wonder has entirely do with our reading and understanding. Ideas have been presented before you, not altogether unlike the story of Ezra reading from a newly discovered book of the Law, probably, Deuteronomy, in the lesson from Nehemiah which Cooper read. That sense of being gathered around words proclaimed and ideas presented is a feature of Judaism, Christianity, and of course, Islam, not to mention the schools of ancient philosophy. There is a sense of awe and wonder. All the people stood and listened attentively to the proclamation of the Word and to its interpretation. I am not going to ask you when was the last time you heard a lesson from The Book of Nehemiah! Suffice to say this is probably the only encaenia service in the world where such a text has been read! Yet how profoundly it captures the wonder of your education. The challenge is about your understanding, about the way in which you have made what has been presented to you your own.
“How readest thou?” This spring, the YouTube Phenom, Jenna Marbles, presented her two hundredth YouTube Video. She has fifteen million YouTube channel subscribers. It is probably her last YouTube Video. Apparently there are things that she wants to say to her YouTube fan world, yet she cannot really say them. Ironically, you actually have to read what she wants to say. A script runs along the bottom of her 4 minute YouTube Video while shots of her and a music track are played. What do we read?
That she “wants to share some thoughts” with us. But what are those thoughts? A cluster of clichés and a parade of platitudes. “Because to me, I’m just Jenna. That’s all I am,” she says. But there are questions. What are they? Our questions to her, she thinks. “What are you going to do next? Where is this all leading? What about your future?” To which she replies with disarming honesty and sincerity, “the truth is, I don’t know.”
There are the pressures about having plans and goals. But as she says, “what if your goals are vague? Like mine.” What are they? “To be happy. To laugh every day. To experience life. To find love and loss. To just feel what it feels like to be a human being. To feel alive.” All rather sentimental and, no doubt, undeniable commonplaces. We are likely all suckers for them. Yet, as she says, “where do you go with goals like that?”
“People associate being lost as something bad. Fear is bad. Confusion is bad. But it’s not,” she claims, “It’s life. Because the way I see it, no one knows what they’re doing. Ever.” True enough, I suppose. Yet our confusions can be the beginning of learning and living; so too, with fear, especially, “the fear of the Lord” which “is the beginning of wisdom.” If people think they know what they are doing, they’re lying, she says. “No one knows what life has in store. You can take some steps towards what you want. But you can’t control where the cards fall.” True enough, too, I suppose. So then what? With respect to drive and ambition, “people focus on how to get somewhere they’re not right now,” she observes only to add, “what’s wrong with the step you’re on?”
And, then, like the platitudes of a thousand graduation addresses she says, “Look around you. Don’t miss what you have today. Your friends. Your family. People you love.” Okay. But then what? The sad recognition that her time in the limelight is coming to an end. “The novelty of me has worn off,” she says, rationalizing that “we get tired of people every day.” Putting a brave face on it, she says, “that’s okay,” but clearly wrestling with the transitory nature of fame and glory. Sic transit gloria mundi, she might have said, had she read, as some of you have, Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business. The point is that it’s not just Jenna any more. So passes the glory of the world. Fame is fleeting.
Especially so with the internet. As she observes, “with the internet we are always looking for something quick. A quick laugh. A quick idea. A quick solution.” It is the closest she comes to even the beginnings of the possibilities of a moment of thoughtfulness, of reflective wisdom.
“You have infinite paths to take,” she proclaims, “and one weird time you took a path that led you to me.” Why? Because “I’m silly and fun because that’s just how I choose to see the world.” And apparently fifteen million others. “Because,” I suppose, “I’m just Jenna.”
Yet nothing lasts, it seems. Those that live by the image must die by the image. Sadly, instead of wisdom and learning that might begin to ask deeper questions about life and purpose, about goodness and truth, she ends by giving us all the finger – quite literally – along with a nihilistic ‘f –you’ about her life and ours! So much for “look around you” when ‘look at me looking at you looking at me’ just doesn’t cut it any longer, when we confront the emptiness of ourselves, the narcissism that leads to nihilism, to an angry nothingness.
I have troubled you with this because it concentrates wonderfully the narcissism and the nihilism of contemporary culture, the very things that any education worthy of the name confronts. Education counters what the Headmaster calls “the natural narcissism of teenagers”; it counters as well the emptiness and despair that accompanies such forms of self-obsession. The task is to open you to ideas that challenge and shape you and which set you in motion towards others in gentleness and learning and with dignity and respect. The essential ‘you’ is found in such challenges without which our lives are easily ship-wrecked and lost.
Gregory asked me on Ash Wednesday what is Christianity for. We had been studying some of the world religions like Hinduism and Buddhism. He had gotten the point about service and care for others, the moral imperatives that belong to religious thought and to the Christian understanding. But I took him to be wondering about something deeper. The answer is communion, our communion with God which compels us towards the care of one another. This is the teaching of the lesson which Primrose read, the familiar story or parable of the Good Samaritan, as it is commonly known. The phrase, Good Samaritan, actually does not appear anywhere in the text, only “a certain Samaritan” yet the word ‘good’ belongs to how the story has been read and interpreted, and rightly so, it seems to me.
Usually the interpretation focuses on the moral and ethical imperative to “go and do thou likewise,” as the Samaritan has done. Rather than looking and passing by, rather than giving you the finger, “a certain Samaritan” has come to where “a certain man” lies wounded and half-dead on the road-side. “And when he saw him, he had compassion on him.” But why? Why trouble yourself? For what reason or benefit? Because of the question about the law. “How readest thou?” Jesus provides a way of thinking about our reading and understanding that compels our action. The parable enacts the very teaching about the inseparable union of the love of God and the love of neighbour. Compassion – love – not for yourself but for others. And therein lies eternal life. The very truth of ourselves is found in our love and service, in our communion with God and Man. The action of the certain Samaritan reveals the truth of our humanity. It is found in our care for one another born out of the love of God.
At once a Jewish insight – the love of God and neighbour are drawn out of the Law – it carries over into Christianity. It also has its parallels, in one way or another (mutatis mutandis) in the interplay of thought and action in the other great religions of the world such as the relation between jnana yoga, the path of knowing, and bhakti yoga, the path of devotion, with karma yoga, the path of action, in the Hindu classic, The Bhagavad Gita, or in Buddhism’s eightfold path in its balance of action and reflection. We act out of what we have been given to see, out of what we have read and understood, out of our education and in the ways in which we make those things our own. Only so have you come ashore, only so is there “a sea-change into something rich and strange” in you.
It begins with the question, how do you read? A question which ultimately convicts us that you cannot just “go and do likewise,” that you can’t and haven’t done it all yourself, that ultimately it is about something greater that moves and shapes you so that when the novelty of you wears off instead of anger and despair there will be love and wisdom. How? “By Providence divine” which, as Gonzalo says in a wonderful phrase that suggests reading and writing, even a blackboard, has “chalked forth the way which brought us thither” in which we find “all of us ourselves/when no man was his own.”
Whether it has been one year or seven, you have been a part of something bigger than yourself through which you are becoming more truly yourself. At least that is our prayer and our intent. No doubt it happens in mysterious ways. It happens because of the quality of our life together in all of the things that we have done together. We have cried and laughed together. We have danced and sung together. We have wrestled with great matters, and pondered great mysteries whether it was ‘IB undone’ in TOK or in Chapel, or in the classroom, or in the muck of the rugby pitch or on the ice of the hockey arena or on the basketball court or on stage playing a hundred instruments or marching step by step in Cadets. You have been challenged to do a host of things you wouldn’t have done otherwise. And if we have been in your face at times, and I don’t mean on facebook, it is because we have cared about you in the context of the principles and ideals that matter, the ideas and principles which define an intellectual and spiritual institution; in short, this School, this crazy, crazy, busy, busy place.
You go forth today but it is not only you who leave. We say good-by to the commanding officer, Major Tom Peet, of the King’s-Edgehill School 254 Cadet Corps with much thanks and gratitude for his leadership of the Corps over the last five years.
There is something bittersweet and emotional about Encaenia. We are both glad and sad to see you go. You have all become quite dear to us. You go forth into a crazy and busy world but it is my prayer that you go out a little more thoughtful and a little wiser than when you first came in and that that will make all the difference. It all depends on how you read.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Encaenia 2015
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