by CCW | 8 November 2017 05:32
“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.
Such ideals and principles easily become clichés but the point about clichés is that they are true. The challenge for students and faculty alike is to grow into them but that can only happen if we attend to them and to the vast and rich reservoir of teaching to which they belong. That tradition is about principles and virtues that make us more truly ourselves. Paradoxically, it can only be through losing oneself which means service and sacrifice through commitment to others. The religious language is about dying to oneself in order to live for God and for one another.
Such ways of thinking depend upon the powerful idea of God’s providential care which is the ultimate goodness of God which underlies everything and provides a way through trials and tribulations to the discovery of “the good in everything.” Only the good can be know in the same way that a lie has no power apart from the truth upon which it utterly depends. Evil is nothing without the Good; it is a perversion of the Good.
In Chapel this week we have had the outstanding story of the revelation of God to Moses as “I Am Who I Am” and the teaching of Christ that “greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”. The latter is a phrase that adorns a thousand cenotaphs in countless towns and villages throughout the world in memory of the horrible devastations of the most destructive century in the history of the world.
It is commonly said that it gets harder and harder every year to observe Remembrance Day in part because there are fewer and fewer veterans; none from the First War and a declining number from the Second. But it seems to me that it is only now becoming more and more necessary to remember. We are perhaps only just beginning to confront the horrors of our own making and the arrogance of our own devising, things which we ignore and forget at our peril. Remembrance Day is not about glorifying war; it is a sombre reminder about the evil of our humanity and the difficult nature of the struggle for the good. We can’t afford not to think this for if we do not think about it we will only become more dangerous. The point I think is to confront something of oneself in the remembrances of those who sacrificed themselves and to ask ourselves, if ever we will, what life is worth living for.
The revelation of God to Moses is a powerful story about the goodness of God, the God who reveals himself by name as a universal principle, “I AM WHO I AM,” the holy name which is not to be bandied about casually and carelessly, so much so that we are not exactly sure how it was actually pronounced. It is “the name above every name” but it signals the important idea that there is an intelligible and spiritual principle that is the cause of the thinking and being of all things; in short, a world which is not random and arbitrary but one in which we are each called to account and called to holiness, to dignity and respect for one another. To reclaim some sense of these ideas is to discover what dignifies and ennobles our humanity. It is found in and through these principles and ideals.
And so we march on Remembrance Day because we cannot not think and not care about the past which shapes our present and our future. In a way, we are only beginning to learn how what we are asked to ‘remember’ has very much to do with us. Julien of Norwich observes that “the greatest honour we can ever do to Almighty God is to live gladly in the knowledge of his love.” I would like to think that carries over into the sombre greyness of Remembrance Day for students and the School. March gladly not sadly.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy
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