Christ Church

Why are ye so fearful?

Sturm und drang. I always associate February with this wonderful German phrase which belongs to a literary work but which in turn gives the name to a cultural phenomenon that was the precursor to the rich traditions of German romanticism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Sturm und drang means storm and stress. How do we deal with the storms and stresses of our world and day?

There are, to be sure, no end of the storms of nature that beset us in the bleak midwinter of February, the stresses that belong to travel and even survival in the rather harsh winter conditions of the Maritimes, not to mention the winter bruising and beating that Newfoundland has endured. It is a wonderful part of the consolation literature to be reminded that things could be worse and that sometimes for others they are far worse than what we have to endure. It is a way of helping us to face the rigours of winter.

But there is something far greater and far more challenging than simply the storms of nature, the winter storms of snow and ice, of wind and cold. Beyond such storms of nature, there are the endless and never-ending storms of the human heart. How do we deal with those storms and stresses? They are the storms of anxiety and fear within us. In a way, they are far greater than the storms of nature.

In Chapel this week, we read a wonderful story about Jesus in the midst of a storm at sea and about his response to our fearfulness and anxiety. The story has influenced the tradition of consolation literature. Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, draws upon this image in suggesting that out of the tempest, out of the sturm und drang of human life in all its disarray, there can be “sea-change into something rich and strange.” There is something that can be learned in and  through the storms of life, whatever they may be, ranging from our fears and worries about the coronavirus 2019 outbreak, now mercifully shortened to CoVid19, to our worries and anxieties about the climate, the economy, about the interrelation of nations and peoples or the lack thereof, and of course, the endless anxiety of parents about their children which only adds to anxiety upon anxiety.  Lots of sturm und drang, we might say!

But that is to miss the more fundamental question which is not that there is storm and stress but how we face such things. That is where this Gospel story fits in so beautifully and complements the other reading this week about the parable of the sower and the seed. These readings speak profoundly to our current distresses, to our fears and worries, and offer a wonderful corrective. Christ, in the Christian understanding, is God with us, by definition the Lord of all creation, and, by extension, the Lord of the human heart. Here is a story in which Christ speaks to those in a storm at sea and to the storm in our hearts of fear. He awakens us to an essential truth about what it means to be human. It means that we don’t have to be defined by the storms and stresses of our lives. We are more than such things. Why are ye so fearful? His question means that we don’t need to be so fearful!

This is so simple and yet profoundly freeing. It is very much part and parcel of what education is about because it is about the seeds of learning and understanding that are sown in our hearts. The question is about what kind of ground we are, an image which suggests something about our own sense of accountability and agency. To be the good ground is to be active with respect to our learning, actively taking a hold of ideas so that they can live in us. In our fearfulness, we remove ourselves from accountability and agency and default to despair. No wonder that conspiracy theories proliferate and abound in our modern digital dystopia. It is all part and parcel of an intellectual despair and a denial of what belongs to the truth and dignity of our humanity, the very thing Jesus points us towards in the story about the storm at sea and in the parable.

The parable of the sower and the seed goes to the heart of any education worthy of the name because it goes beyond story and image to interpretation. The parable is told and explained. In a way, the parable and its explication belong to the educational project. It is about planting the seeds of understanding in the hopes that they will produce the fruits of knowledge and service. It is about being able to withstand the storms of life, both of nature and of the human heart, and learn from them.

Such things are the invisible and almost intangible realities of education. They have very much to do with the questions of character and its formation. What kind of ground we are relates to how we face the storms of life in whatever form they present themselves. The seed is the word of God, the interpretation of the parable informs us. Jesus is the Word made flesh who rebukes the wind and bids the sea be calm, and then challenges us. “Why are ye so fearful? Have ye no faith?” Faith, we might say, is about the possibilities of learning, the faith that things can be known and that we can act upon what we learn and know. It is the counter to the passive nihilism that belongs to the ‘whatever’ culture of our current unease, the culture of ‘who cares?’.

Such questions go to the heart of the educational project. Why are we so fearful? Have we no faith in learning, in thinking, and in acting ethically upon what we think and know? Have we succumbed to the passive and deadly emptiness that belongs to a culture of despair? A despair of learning and yet, learning and the desire to learn are the only and great counters to our fears and worries, to our despair and anxiety. They recall us to who we are in the sight of God. That is more than enough, perhaps, to face the sturm und drang of our world and day.

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