KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 21 May
God is gone up with a merry noise
You can feel the sense of joy and exultation in Psalm 47 which the Headmaster read on Thursday. A psalm is a song. The Psalms are the hymn book of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures and help illuminate our understanding of the major themes of God’s engagement with our humanity. Thursday, May 21st, is the fortieth day after Easter this year in the western Christian tradition and known as Ascension Day. It marks the culmination of the Resurrection in the homecoming of the Son to the Father. “Because I go to the Father” is the recurring refrain of Eastertide.
Home is where you belong, the place from which you come and to which you go. The idea of home speaks to the understanding of our humanity, to the sense of our place in the world and with God. The Ascension of Christ is the gathering up of all things to their source and end in God. In the comings and goings of God we learn about our abiding with God. The School is also your home, your intellectual and spiritual home and it is wonderful to be able to think about the possibilities of returning to this home in the Fall. For the ancient Greeks, gnothi seauton, “know thyself”, means knowing your place in the cosmos, the world as an ordered whole. For our humanity that means the polis, the city-state. But the concept of homecoming also relates to our schools as institutions of learning and living. Our schools and universities are your alma mater, your nursing mother, the places of intellectual and spiritual growth and maturity.
We are embodied beings and one of the constant emphasis in Chapel has been to eschew the false dichotomies of spirit and matter, of body and soul, and to consider their necessary interrelation. Christ’s Ascension shows that our humanity has its end in God. The Ascension celebrates the homecoming of the Son to the Father who is now Our Father. His homecoming is our homecoming in the realization that we have a place with God. The body is made adequate to the life of the Spirit. The truth and being of the Son is in his being with the Father and that embraces our humanity. This week we explored the deeper meaning of the Lord’s Prayer, better described as the ‘Our Father’, because, as Simone Weil in the 20th century and Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century both observe, it contains all that we desire and orders our desires in the right way.
Origen, Augustine, Aquinas, and a host of other theologians note that nowhere in the Hebrew Scriptures is there any direction to pray to God as Father. There are a few references that speak about God as father and a few about God as mother, but those are metaphors for God’s relation to us. The ‘Our Father’ is different. Why? Because it concerns God himself. It is Jesus who teaches us the most about God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. It is the distinctive Christian way of speaking about the divine self-relation that is the basis of God’s relation to all else. Such is the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.
