KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 4 June
Take with you words
Last Chapel services. Yay, God! To be sure, but such endings recall us to a kind of reflection about how Chapel matters and in what ways. At the very least, we confront the questions that never go away, the questions that stay with us. As the philosopher Heraclitus notes, “the way up and the way down are the same.”It is really all about our being with the principle of accountability and truth both in our movement towards such a principle and our going from it. Such is the power of ideas. They matter. Such encounters with the ideas that matter belongs to an education that is worthy of the name, education. We confront things that are bigger than ourselves that challenge our thoughts and actions.
That ideas actually matter belongs to the subversive nature of an education which challenges all of the attempts to control and confine, to conform and comply on the part of the various authorities of our world and day. Instead, we are opened out to the riches of a poetic and philosophical literature that belong to the religions of the world philosophically considered and that speak to the freedom and dignity of our humanity.
Times of ending are poignant and powerful. The poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox reminds us that “it isn’t the bold things … that count the most in the summing up of life at the end of the day./ But it is the doing of old things, / Small acts that are just and right; /And doing them over and over again, no matter what others say; / …. Of walking with feet faith-shod; /And loving, loving through all, no matter how things go / wrong.” And so it has been with Chapel.
Hosea is the great love-prophet of the Jewish Scriptures. His story is itself an image of his understanding of God in relation to Israel. It is about the powerful idea of forgiveness, that there is something more than our follies and foolishnesses, more than our failings and shortcomings. There is the transforming love of God who loves us in spite of our unloveliness. In being open to such ideas, we become learners, discerning and understanding something of what is shown to us.
