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KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 26 September

Dust from the Ground and War in Heaven

You are dirt! And so am I. It is not meant to be an insult! Instead it complements the idea of the dignity of our humanity through the necessary corrective of humility. We are “of dust from the ground,” the dust into which God has breathed the breath of life and “so ‘adam’ became a living being.” From the dignity of our humanity to the dust of the ground, such is the shift in perspective in what are clearly two distinct creation stories set side by side in Genesis.

The challenge is to appreciate and evaluate each of them, first, in their own integrity and, only secondly, to consider in what ways they might complement and correct each other. Genesis 2 offers a very different and much more mythological account which focuses primarily on the nature and place of our humanity as distinct from the cosmic perspective of creation as an orderly and intellectual affair in Genesis 1. Genesis 2 is undeniably anthropomorphic in its descriptions of the Lord God forming adam out of the dust from the ground much like a potter shapes his clay. Yet the passage complements the idea of our being made in the image of God at the same time as it offers a kind of corrective.

There is always the danger of over-emphasizing and misconstruing exactly what our dignity really means, the problem of getting too ‘puffed-up’ about ourselves and losing sight of the real nature of our connection to everything else in the created order. We are formed of dust from the ground. The very word for man here, meaning humankind is adam which is not yet a proper name. It is etymologically connected to the word for ground, adamah.

Just as Genesis 1 counters the idea of the divinization of our humanity emphasizing that our dignity is God-given rather than man-made, so too, Genesis 2 connects us intimately both to the dust and the ground and to God. There is, we might say, ‘the dignified dust of our humanity’. It provides a kind of corrective to Genesis 1, we might say, by emphasizing our connection to the dust and the ground. It counters our tendency to think more highly of ourselves and our relation to others than we should. It humbles us and thus suggests that the true dignity and worth of our humanity is found through humility. Humility incidentally come from the Latin and has as its root, humus,which also refers to the ground. In a way these lessons ground our humanity in relation to God and the created order wonderfully.

We are placed in the mythological garden of Eden where we hear of the tree of life as well as the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Four rivers are understood to flow out of this mythical place of goodness and harmony. A Persian word, paradise, will be added to the picture. Together the images of the Edenic garden and Paradise will shape every form of utopian idealism in our cultural traditions. But along with these descriptive aspects there is something else which is profoundly significant.

Alone of all the creatures adam, meaning humankind, is made in the image of God and adamis the dust into which God has breathed his spirit, but also it is only to adam that God gives a commandment not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. What does that signify? At the very least, the potential for rationality. We are made in the image of Creator and the Maker, in the image of an ordering and intellectual principle. Thus we are potentially rational as well. Only as such can we be given a commandment.

We go from Genesis to Revelation, from the Book of Beginnings to the last book of the Christian Scriptures, the Revelation of St. John the Divine, with its great lesson for Michaelmas, the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels, from which the first term takes its proper name. This is Michaelmas term as derived from the great medieval universities, particularly Oxford and Cambridge, and which is part of the School’s history. “There was war in heaven,” we read, a daunting prospect, to be sure, and one which illumines the cosmic perspective yet again but here in terms of good and evil. “There was,” not there is, “war in heaven” and, as the lesson points out, Michael and his Angels prevail over the devil, Satan, that ancient serpent – all images of what opposes the truth and goodness of God. In Christian terms, the cosmic victory of good over evil is through the blood of the Lamb, a reference to Jesus Christ.

With Michaelmas we are reminded of the question and problem about good and evil and yet the readings this week have provided the necessary counter to all and any form of dualism, both moral and cosmic. We are being asked to think about the goodness of God, first, in creation and, then, in redemption and in that thinking to grasp in humility the real dignity of our humanity. In thinking such things, Michaelmas suggests, we are in the company of those purely intellectual and spiritual beings, the angels, being reminded that we are with them in the intellectual and moral activities that belong to the real truth and dignity of our humanity. As the great Angelic Doctor, Thomas Aquinas, reminds us, the angels “mov[e] the imagination and strength[en] the light of understanding.” They are the fitting guardians of all our intellectual inquiries.

Chapel is where we dance with the angels and learn to transcend the forms of dichotomous thinking that divides the world into “them and us.” Such is what Rabbi Jonathan Sacks calls the “pathological dualism which sees humanity itself as radically divided into the unimpeachably good and the irredeemably bad.” As if “you are either one or the other.” Dancing with the angels recalls us to the true dignity of our humanity. We are at once humbled and raised up.

(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy