Reflections for King’s-Edgehill School Cadet Church Parade, 2018
Reflections: Cadet Church Parade. May 2018
‘Teach us to care and not to care’
I. Teach us to care and not to care
Icons are images that belong to the understanding. They point us to ideas and ways of thinking that shape our ways of doing and being.
The dominant and central icon in the School Chapel is the image of Christ the Good Shepherd. The dominant and central icon in the Chapel at the University of King’s College in Halifax, our sister institution, is an image of the boy Christ as Teacher among the Doctors of the Law. The dominant and central icon here at Christ Church is the image of Christ Crucified. These three images are interrelated and speak to the culture and life of the School.
They contribute to another icon, the images of Christ Pantocrator that are present and visible in the Chapel and here at Christ Church. Pantocrator means the ruler of all, a biblical and philosophical reference to God as the intellectual and spiritual principle of all reality. “God is the king of all creation” as the Psalmist proclaims. In the Christian understanding that is concentrated in the figure of Christ and powerfully so in the icon of Christ Pantocrator. A central aspect of the spiritual imagination of the churches of Eastern Orthodoxy, icons are increasingly found in the churches of western Christianity as well. They help us to think about our life and our world as gathered to God.
As such these icons challenge the ways in which we use and abuse one another and our world through a kind of instrumental or technocratic reason, a reasoning which is about power and action but without regard to an ethical understanding. This is the “new barbarism,” as the French philosopher, Michel Henry terms it, a certain type of knowledge which is destructive of culture and humanity. These icons recall us to the transcendent principle of our knowing and our being that redeems all our doings and all our actions.
As the Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor has noted, the question for our contemporary world is less about the idea of what it is that is right to do and more about what it is that is good to be. This focuses upon a sense of ourselves in relation to the world and to one another that is not simply about using the world and one another which so often leads to abuse and destruction such as the last hundred years have shown in the devastations of war and the degradations of nature.