KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 12 February

by CCW | 13 February 2020 10:36

If I have not love, I am nothing

Love, it seems, is in the air, whatever that means. ‘Spirit Week’ at King’s-Edgehill School brings us to Valentine’s Day following upon the Headmaster’s Valentine Dinner and Dance on Thursday night. The challenge in Chapel has been to place the events of this week upon the foundation of divine love which seeks the perfection of all our human loves. This suggests that there is something radically incomplete about our human loves and that, no doubt, is a challenging concept to students and faculty alike.

On Monday and Tuesday, the reading in Chapel was St. Paul’s great encomium or praise of love from 1st Corinthians 13. “If I have not love, I am nothing.” Caritas. Charity, as the King James Version puts it, is love. In English the little word, love, has to bear a great weight of meaning. For the Greeks and the Latins, there are a host of words that express a sense of the different kinds of love, love as defined by its relation to the object of love. Therein lies the problem as Plato intuited in using, provocatively and deliberately, the word eros to speak about the movement of our souls to the truth. Eros which we associate with sexual passion and desire is used intentionally to highlight  “the passionate desire to know.” Brilliant.

So what do we mean by love? How do we think about love? For our culture, I suspect that the demand to think about love is exactly the problem whereas for earlier times not to think about love was precisely the problem. St. Paul’s great and profound praise of love is about the divine love which perfects our human loves. This recognizes the painful truth that our human loves are incomplete and even destructive. We often hurt those whom we love the most. So what Paul is saying here is quite important about the qualities of love. “Love is not boastful … love seeketh not her own …thinketh no evil … Love rejoices in the truth,” and so on. It is a powerful hymn of praise about the power of love which perfects our humanity and belongs to the building up of a community of love. 1st Corinthians 13 is “the still more excellent way” for the understanding of our lives together as a body, as a school, and for our self-understanding as well. “We see in a glass darkly; but then face to face.” Faith, hope, charity are the theological virtues which perfect the cardinal virtues or qualities of human excellence, the ancient virtues of temperance, courage, prudence and justice. Charity or love is the greatest of the three.

Is love simply a feeling, an emotion, an impulse, a force? Is love simply romantic or erotic? The point is not that these are not aspects of love but that they are incomplete and partial forms of love. Ultimately, Paul is talking about the  divine love which sets our human loves in order. The Song of Songs uses the phrase, “set love in order in me.” It too is about the divine love which seeks the greater good of our humanity which is found in God.

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet (# 29) alludes perhaps to the idea of love as grounded upon something greater. “Thy sweet love remembered” in its larger sense is the counter to despair and and to the ups and downs of fame and fortune. As a famous fragment from Euripides puts it, “never that which is shall die.” These are some of the ways in which we are opened out to the divine love which seeks the perfection of our human loves and which contributes to the building up of a community of love.

There is another little word which I often hear bruited about and used loosely and carelessly and, I think, wrongly. It is the ugly word, racism. Properly speaking, it is the nasty concept, largely fabricated in the 19th century, that claims that one group or culture or race is inherently superior to others which are regarded as inherently inferior. It is not about the recognition of differences between and among cultures, communities, and peoples. We all have our likes and dislikes, our prejudices and biases but such things are not the same things as racism. The misuse or loose use of the word shuts down discussion and interaction; it creates divisions and tensions. It divides rather than unites.

The School’s cultural fair this week is not about saying that your culture is better than the culture of others. Of course you should have pride in your culture and want to share your culture with others but that cannot mean putting down the cultures of others as being inferior to yours. The building up of a community of love means respect for the different cultures and a willingness to engage and interact. That results in a deeper sense of connection, a deeper understanding of the unity of our humanity in and through different cultures and their expression. Taewoo Kim, one of the MCs for the cultural fair grasped this point and expressed it very well. The cultural fair was a wonderful showcase of talent and the sharing of cultures in which you could feel the love. But that is to think it, too. Such is the power and the truth of love. It builds up a community of respect, a community of love without which we are nothing.

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

Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2020/02/13/kes-chapel-reflection-week-of-12-february-2/

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