KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 27 March
Be it unto me
Chapel and classes resumed after the March break on Monday, March 25th, an auspicious occasion in the Christian calendar and yet one with a considerable resonance with other religions and philosophies. One can’t help but observe that it is exactly nine months to Christmas! At once ‘hooray’, and ‘oh, no’, I suppose! It marks the Feast of the Annunciation, the annunciation of the Angel Gabriel to Mary that she is to be the mother of God, the mother of Jesus, a story which we ordinarily hear in Advent and at Christmas. Yet the feast of the Annunciation marks the conception of Christ in the womb of Mary, not by way of biological and sexual intercourse, but intellectually and spiritually and in ways that redeem and sanctify the physical and the natural; hence the significance of the symbolism of nine months to Christmas, to the birth of Christ. “Grace does not destroy nature but perfects it” as Medieval wisdom puts it. Mary plays a significant role in the Christian understanding of Christ and who Christ is for us. As such she is a central figure in the question which all the great religions and philosophies wrestle with, the question about what it means to be human.
Many of you have just returned from various adventures and travels, journeys to far off places and climes, journeys to Africa and Europe and elsewhere, journeys that are global; others of you have travelled in other ways, through books and thoughts, through dreams and the power of imagination. Yet the one important and interesting thing about all the journeys of our lives is that while we talk about getting away from things, the one thing we cannot get away from and the one thing that we always take with us wherever we go and however we go, is ourselves. You. And so there is the critical necessity of thinking about what it means to be a ‘you’, a self. Mary plays a crucial and critical role in that kind of thinking.
We cannot think of Mary without looking back into such figures as Hannah and Miriam in the Old Testament as well as host of other figures and images such as Deborah “who arose as a mother in Israel” and Jael, “most blessed among women”, whom the Song of Deborah in the Book of Judges celebrates, a book which we will be exploring over the next little while. Mary, too, as the mother of Jesus, is present in the Qur’an; she is actually mentioned there more times than in the Christian New Testament. But far from being merely a role model for women, Mary is the great exemplar of what it truly means to be human. She is part of our current quest to think about what it means to be a ‘self’ or whether that is simply an illusion. Perhaps, there is no ‘you’; perhaps, as Yuval Noah Harari suggests, you are merely an “organic algorithm”, and, whatever that means, it means that there is no ‘you’. Your March break journey was, perhaps, merely a fantasy!