KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 13 February
A Still More Excellent Way
In the bleak cold of the mid-winter, we all need a touch of love. Such is the purpose of spirit week at the School. Thus in Chapel, we always read in this week St. Paul’s great hymn to love, 1 Corinthians 13. It is not specifically about Valentine’s Day, if by that one means a focus on the romantic or the erotic, not to mention the commercial. The love which Paul celebrates, however, includes and informs all and every form of love for it speaks about the true nature of love which seeks the good and the perfection of our humanity.
The power of this passage of Scripture in our world and day is intriguing. Often times a couple will want it read at a wedding, even though it is by no means specific to marriage. Yet it seems to speak to a deep sense of the power of the transcendent, of a love which is not simply of us but speaks to the deeper yearnings of the soul. Love, literally and properly, moves us towards one another. Years and years ago, I was particularly struck by how moved a very bright and outstanding student from China was by this passage which he read in Chapel. It moved him to tears and made him see things in an entirely new way.
The word for ‘love’ in the King James’ Version derived from Tyndale is charity which comes from the Latin caritas. The word, charity, has been somewhat cheapened in our own culture by limiting it to the forms of our outreach and care for the poor and the destitute. While such things are most important and belong to charity, they are only a part of its meaning and range. Paul is actually talking about grace, about what comes from God to us precisely in the realization of our own incompleteness and failings, including our failures to love one another as ourselves. He is opening us out to the transcendent power of the divine love which moves in us, if we will be open to it.
The three theological virtues of “faith, hope and charity” are the forms of grace that complement and perfect the four cardinal virtues of temperance, courage, prudence and justice. Those ancient qualities of excellence speak to the nature of human character and form a critical part of the ethical understanding of the ancient Greeks and Romans, as well as becoming part of the moral discourse of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic worlds. But without love, such virtues are radically incomplete. Augustine captures that sensibility in saying that without love, divine love, the virtues are splendida vitia, splendid vices.