KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 26 February
Speak what we feel
Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear, ends with the words “speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” Yet sometimes it is impossible to say what we feel, to put words to our feelings. And there may be times, too, when we what we feel should not be spoken.
In Chapel in these last two weeks of the bleak mid-winter, we have reading from the story of Joseph and his brothers in The Book of Genesis. An outstanding narrative, it comprises the last thirteen chapters of Genesis. All that we have been able to do is to focus on some of the highlights of this remarkable story. It is challenging, to be sure, and, yet, like all forms of great literature, such narratives speak to our hearts and minds. They teach us something about what it means to feel deeply and to think profoundly about ourselves and our dealings with one another.
The story of Joseph and his brothers, simply put, is a story of betrayal and forgiveness, of the triumph of love over sin and evil. That seems pretty commonplace and as such misses the real intensity of the story and the way in which we are drawn into the story such that there is the possibility of our feeling deeply and profoundly the nature of the contradictions in our own hearts and minds. The story too contributes to our appreciation and understanding of the Christian story of Christ’s betrayal and crucifixion.
The story plums the depths and the heights of our humanity. Joseph is the favoured son of Jacob, also known as Israel, “one who strives with God.” In a way, this story shows us something about what it means to strive with God such that goodness overcomes sin and evil. But that means confronting sin and evil in ourselves. In the story, the other brothers of Joseph, all the sons of Joseph albeit from different wives, resent him because he is the favourite son of their father. In other words, they are moved by the ugliest and most destructive of the seven deadly sins in the later Christian taxonomy of sin, the sin of envy.
Nothing is more destructive of life in community than envy. It embodies our fear of not having something which another says and wanting to have it for ourselves at their expense. Even more, it is our refusal to rejoice in the good of another. That leads to the will or desire to lash out and even destroy those whom we envy. It is a most insidious and destructive evil in our souls: to hate the good of another because we fear that we have been excluded.
