KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 5 November
All shall be well
“All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well,” the 14th century mystic, Julien of Norwich, famously said at a dark and difficult time of plagues and pestilences, of sorrows and deaths. How can we think about wellness without recourse to (or at least a recognition of) the rich wisdom of the religious and philosophical traditions which speak profoundly and constantly about wholeness and completeness? Such things as The Beatitudes, which we heard last week in Chapel, belong to the rich tradition of consolation literature. We are reminded of the spiritual qualities that contribute to the formation of character. The Beatitudes are about those qualities in us in the face of darkness and evil. We ignore such lessons at our peril.
The deeper lessons of the spiritual and intellectual traditions of which we have either forgotten or remain profoundly ignorant have very much to do with the care of the self as understood through the care of God. The lessons are about principles which shape character within a community of souls. They are not about individual projects and aims so much as objective goods which belong to our life together through an awareness of the essential goodness of existence. They counter the tendencies in our age to focus endlessly on the self and which reveal a terrible fragility of the self, its radical instability, because without the ideas of truth, beauty and goodness, to use Plato’s terms, we discover only our own emptiness. The consequences are one or other of the forms of nihilism: passive or active, self-destructive or destructive of others. There is nothing to live for.
It is here that the principles of the School itself come more fully into play. I have in mind not so much the School’s marketing slogan “Be More” but rather the ideals of “Deo, Legi, Regi, Gregi” and “Fideliter”. They are the mottoes of King’s and Edgehill respectively which signal the educational purpose of the School and which counter and correct the obsessive and dangerous over-emphasis on the self in contemporary culture. The educational project of King’s-Edgehill is about a life lived in service and sacrifice for others: “for God, for the Law, for the King, for the people” and lived “faithfully” to those principles which dignify and ennoble our humanity. They temper and transform our narcissism and selfishness, our blindness and arrogance, by making us more thoughtful and more careful both of ourselves and others. Gentleness and learning are de rigueur if there is to be dignity and respect, a proper care and concern for one another through a commitment to the ideals which crown and adorn our being.