by CCW | 5 September 2019 16:42
And so it begins. It has become a tradition to have the Head Boy and Head Girl read the two lessons which have become a special feature of the first two Chapel services. The two readings are Genesis 1. 1-5 and John 1. 1-5; two of the most profound texts that belong to intellectual thought and reflection. The reading from John is most clearly and obviously a kind of complement and commentary on the passage from Genesis. These readings from the Jewish Scriptures, and the Christian New Testament are also complemented by a wonderful passage from the Islamic Scriptures, the Qur’an. The “Originator (Badi) of heaven and earth. When He decrees a thing, He says only ‘Be!’ And it is.”
We begin with the radical concept of God and in a way which challenges our contemporary culture. These readings show the intimate and necessary relationship between power and wisdom. Power without wisdom, I think we know, is deadly, destructive, and dangerous. God speaks reality into being. God as Word (Logos) is an essential feature of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These passages are poetic and philosophical. They are not ‘science’ in its modern sense though they are precisely what science in all its forms presupposes, namely the world as being in principle intelligible. They also belong to an older sense of scientia as an inward habit or virtue, a way of thinking and living.
In principle. En arche, In principia – for ‘beginning’ means principle as well. The idea of Creation is set before us in a much more radical way than is commonly understood or rather misunderstood. God does not make the world like a clock-maker to use a famous early modern image. Creation is about the animating principle which creates and sustains what is created. Creation is always about a relation to a Creator who by definition is not any one of the things of creation. Thomas Aquinas makes the point beautifully that God is “the beginning and end of all things, and especially of rational creatures.” In the Qur’an, eight of the ninety-nine names of God, of Allah, refer to Allah as the source of all that is: al-Badi (Absolute Cause), al-Bari (Producer), al-Khaliq (Creator), al-Mubdi (Beginner), al-Muqtadir (All-Determiner), al-Musawwir (Fashioner), al-Qadir (All-Powerful), and al-Qahhar (Dominator). Such expressions emphasize that God is none of the things which God makes. In short, ‘there is no God but God’ understood as the principle of the being and the intelligibility of things.
Only so can we make a beginning. We enter into something which is necessarily prior to us – the created order and the school, for instance. There can be no learning, no knowing unless things are intelligible or knowable, which is not to say that we know everything. At issue is whether we are willing to learn and especially to learn about principles and ideas that are intellectual, spiritual, and ethical. Such is Chapel. There is no area of study that is not profoundly influenced by the cultures of religious philosophy.
Chapel is an integral part of the life of the School. Regardless of the backgrounds of the students and faculty in terms of their own faith or non-faith commitments (whatever such things might mean), we enter into the educational programme of the School. The four pillars of the School are amply represented in Chapel: academics, since we sit and listen, read and think; athletics – kneeling to pray, sitting to listen, standing to praise, a kind of spiritual and physical work-out, as it were; the arts – singing, seeing and hearing the beauty of words, of music and architecture; and leadership – signalled in the leadership of the Chapel prefects, the servers, the readers, as well as the participation of all in the service.
Faithful to the School’s faith tradition – Christian and Anglican – the Chaplain is an Anglican Priest. The service is unabashedly Christian but speaks to our international and intercultural world, endeavouring to make connections to the philosophical teachings of the world’s religions and cultures whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, as well as the legacies of Confucianism and Daoism and to the various forms of atheism and agnosticism. The point is really about the exposure of students and faculty alike to some of the great and formative concepts found in the Scriptures that engage our minds and souls, intellectually and spiritually. Chapel reminds us of something greater than ourselves through which we might learn to live beyond ourselves.
I began this year with the word with which we ended last year – metanoia. It means repentance in the sense of turning back from the one from whom we have turned away; hence, confession, but it also refers to our thinking after the things that are before us and prior to us: God, the created order, and the things that belong to our life together. Chapel is a device free zone where we learn to be quiet within ourselves, to be present to and with one another, to respect and honour the holy space and those who have gone before us, and to be open to things which are greater than ourselves.
God speaks the world into being, the great traditions suggest, already showing the intimate connection between power and wisdom. That alone is a great counter and challenge to our world and day. A beginning to be sure and one in which I pray we continue to grow in understanding and compassion.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2019/09/05/kes-chapel-reflection-week-of-4-september-2/
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