Year: 2017

All shall be well

“All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well,” the 14^th 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.

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What are these?

Halloween. Sigh. Or is it ‘hooray’? How do we think about Halloween and the customs and activities that surround it in contemporary culture? Can we even think about it? The gentle reminder to students at Yale to be mindful about their costumes while acknowledging the inherently transgressive nature of mask and costumes at Halloween created a student uproar in which staff actually lost their jobs for not insisting on proscriptions about things which might be deemed offensive.

Halloween in the secular and popular culture is equally about something quite ancient. It is the idea of boundaries. The transgressive feature of Halloween is all about crossing over or fudging boundaries, not the least of which are things about death and evil, about gender and culture. The important point, perhaps, is to recognize that there are boundaries. In Chapel on Halloween, I looked out upon a rather strange collection of costumed students – a pirate, a pink unicorn from the Ukraine, pussycats from Deutschland and Asia, what I thought was a marshmallow from Beijing which turned out to be sushi (my bad!), two Franciscan monks, various princesses, a bottle of spicy mustard, a ninja warrior, various versions of zombies and different animals, several boys wearing school girl uniforms, two playing cards, and the Headmaster as a Sasquatch or so I thought, wrong again – it was really an Ewok! And so on and so on.

It seems to me worth thinking about these things. Masks, after all, both reveal and conceal and how are we to know? Taking a risk, I asked the Senior Chapel what would it mean for someone to dress up as Hitler, as Stalin, as Mao? Would that mean an endorsement of those figures and their programmes (and pogroms!) or would it be a satirical take on the monstrosity of their evil and depravity? They are certainly among the monsters of evil in the twentieth century. There is an inherent ambiguity that belongs to masks and costumes especially at Halloween.

But perhaps the best way if not the proper way to think about Halloween is to recall what it means spiritually and intellectually. I have in mind not just the ancient Celtic festivities of Samhain and other things, which reflect on the post-harvest death of the year and, by extension, death and the after-life, but its explicitly Christian meaning. Halloween is All Hallows’ Eve. The eve of All the Saints, the hallowed ones. The word is familiar from the Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father who are in Heaven, Hallowed by thy name.” Hallowed means the holy. In the lesson from Revelation read in Chapel, we are reminded of a multitude which no one can number of all peoples and nations. They are “those who have made their robes white in the blood of the lamb,” a reference to Christ in the Christian understanding. We are being reminded actually of the human vocation to holiness – to a sense of the perfection and truth of our humanity which is found in the spiritual community of All Saints. That calling is a calling to be better people, a calling which cannot be achieved simply on our own strength, hence the reference to the Lamb.

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