KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 22 January
Have courage, you who are human beings: Jesus, he is born.
It is a wonderful line from the first Canadian Christmas carol (c. 1643), St. Jean de Brébeuf’s Jesous Ahatonhia. I was asked to do something in Chapel on Monday that would relate to School’s day of honouring and celebrating ‘indigenous learning and culture’ and asked if would be appropriate to sing the Huron Carol. It was and we did. This led me to look more closely into the carol largely by way of the famous Canadian folk-singer, Bruce Cockburn’s, 1993 Christmas album which highlights the Huron Carol. He performs it in the original Ouwendat or Huron language. The liner notes and other research revealed a number of intriguing features of the carol which help us to think more deeply about the intersection and interplay of cultures within the Christian concept of the Epiphany.
The Epiphany season focuses on what is manifest about God in and through the humanity of Jesus Christ. The stories of the Epiphany are all about teaching and learning both within the Christian understanding of the essential divinity of Christ and in terms of “the infinite power, wisdom and goodness” of God which belong, it seems to me, to a universal and philosophical sensibility within the cultures of the world, including the cultures of the native peoples of Canada.
As the Canadian poet and philosopher Jan Zwicky notes, our contemporary technocratic culture provides no meaning for human life; it is meaningless and in our technological obsessions there is a profound disconnect from the created order. Thinking seriously about the history and character of the indigenous cultures is very much needed in order to reclaim philosophically what we have lost, forgotten, and ignored in our technocratic culture, that is to say, a world dominated by technology which is of our making and our unmaking.