KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 5 November
They desire a better country
The readings in Chapel this week connect the sacred feast of All Saints with the secular observance of Remembrance Day upcoming next week. John’s vision of the redeemed community of our humanity in its essential unity expressed through diversity is further explicated precisely in the inner qualities of character that belong to an ethical understanding of the Summun Bonum, the highest good, found in the Beatitudes. The great ethical teaching of Christ grounds our happiness in God. We have seen how that ethical teaching about living for a principle that is greater than oneself is part of a long tradition that embraces the religious and philosophical traditions of ancient China, India, Greece and Rome as well as the traditions of moral philosophy that belong to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. We do well to remember such a community of spirit.
That vision and teaching encompasses the Solemnity of All Souls within the eight-day Octave of All Saints and catapults us into the stark and sombre remembering of those who gave their lives in the defining and devastating wars of the twentieth century. In the history of the School, that remembrance looks back even further to the conflicts of the nineteenth century with all of the ambiguities and complexities that are part of the idea of empire and colonialism. It is neither a pretty picture nor a single story.
The lessons read on Thursday and Friday prepare us for Remembrance Day, a secular event enfolded within a sacred or religious understanding. To deny this is to deny the obvious at the same time as to make religion the scapegoat for all our discontents. But such thinking will not withstand much in the way of careful scrutiny. The lesson from Hebrews read in the Octave of All Saints says that “these all died in faith,” reminding us that we are part of “a great cloud of witnesses”, witnesses to what is greater than ourselves. At the very least, the idea of something more and greater than ourselves informs political life but cannot be reduced to it. The idea of desiring a better country provides a way to understand the enormous sacrifices that thousands upon thousands from distant lands made in the morass of the battlefields of Europe in the First World War and then more globally in the Second World War. The School’s cenotaph bears eloquent witness to the supreme sacrifice that students from King’s made to those defining events of the twentieth century. To remember their sacrifice is not to engage in some sort of anglo-philia or empire worship.
The desire for a better country requires serious reflection upon the ethical, upon the Summum Bonum. It is the great question for our disordered world. For whatever it means to desire a better country it cannot mean what benefits the cultural and corporate elites at the expense of everybody else. At issue is the commitment to the civic or mediating institutions such as family, school and church that temper and humanise the destructive, levelling, and totalising tendencies of the global world.
