KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 7 May
Why stand ye gazing up into heaven?
The question raises a certain contemporary attitude towards religion. Isn’t religion, after all, utterly useless and of no earthly good? “Don’t just stand there, do something?” Isn’t that the familiar mantra of the culture of busyness? This presupposes the fatal separation between doing and thinking. It might be better and truer to say, “don’t just do something but sit and think”!
It is, to be sure, a post-Christian world and one in which there appears to be no end of suspicion and disdain for all forms of religion. But the triumph of secularism is itself an illusion. Our post-Christian culture is also a “post-secular age,” a point which has been well known for several decades, notably expressed by the self-described metaphysical atheist, Jurgen Habermas. He pointed out the demise of ‘secularisation theory’ in the phenomenon of the modern return of religion. That return is ‘the good, the bad and the ugly,’ perhaps, but it means, at the very least, that religion has to be thought about seriously. The gaping hole in our systems of public education is the place (or non-place) of religion.
There is no area of knowledge, no subject or discipline in the academic world, that does not have some sort of connection to religion as philosophy. The terms ‘science’ and ‘religion’ are themselves very modern constructs which presuppose a conflict narrative perpetuated on both sides. The term, scientia, knowledge, was for more than two millennia about an inner disposition of the mind, about the discipline of thinking ethically with respect to any number of different areas of knowledge and interest. It was only in the 19th century that the term was reduced to a body of knowledge and a way of thinking, mostly empirical, about the natural world and, sadly, without a sense of the ethical. Ironically, it is easily conflated with a body of knowledge at the expense of us as knowers. The term, religio, religion, too, is at once ambiguous and uncertain and does not easily map onto the earlier forms of philosophical discourse. Religion, historically, was more about philosophy as a way of life; our knowing as knowing and living ethically.
These observations simply go to the important question about how we read and think, speak and act, something which often gets addressed in Chapel. This week brought us to the Christian mystery of the Ascension of Christ. The question about gazing up into heaven is not about the uselessness of all things religious and spiritual but more about how Christ’s Ascension is the fullest possible affirmation of our humanity, soul and body, and of human individuality. The Ascension celebrates the homecoming of the Son to the Father. At once cosmic in scope, it says something profound about the dignity of our humanity; “the exultation of our humanity,” as the Fathers spoke about it. It highlights the spiritual insight that our bodies and the world of nature are not nothing; they belong and have their place and truth with God. The Ascension is the culmination of the Resurrection. It points us to a profound view about our humanity, about who we are in the sight of God.
