KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 13 May
I ascend to my Father and your Father
Homecoming is a powerful theme which has a certain resonance for us in the face of the current forms of ‘The Age of Anxiety’, to use W. H. Auden’s phrase (and title) in which we find ourselves. We are coming in one way or another to the end of the School year, a year marked by all manner of ups and downs that have required considerable flexibility and agility and much patience and forbearance for everyone connected to King’s-Edgehill School. There is much for which to be quietly and prayerfully thankful, much that has to do with commitment and working together. The headmaster, administration, staff and faculty and especially the students are rightly to be commended. Let us press on in the same spirit right to the end, whatever that end looks like!
The idea of homecoming is an ancient theme that reverberates down throughout the ages. It informs, for instance, the logic of Homer’s Odyssey, the story of his return from Troy to Ithaca by way of the idea of learning through suffering that such a journey entails. One of the graphic and telling illustrations of that theme is the story of Menelaus wrestling with Proteus (ToK students will no doubt recall this, whether fondly or not, I forebear to say!). At issue is the idea of homecoming in terms of truth and self-knowledge, of knowing where you belong in the order of things, the so-called cosmos. One of the telling features of that endeavour is the idea of a struggle to get to the underlying reality of things rather than being simply stranded on the surface appearance of things. Proteus is described as “the ever-truthful old man of the sea” but to get to him and the truth which he holds is a struggle. It doesn’t come easily. You have to work for it. You literally have to hold on in and through the changing circumstances and appearances of things until the truth presents itself to the questing mind. In this case, after changing in and through a whirlwind of natural forms, Proteus is only and truly himself when he finally speaks. It is an intriguing concept which goes to the idea of logos, word as reason, which concerns both the world and ourselves in it.
What he has to say concerns what is missing in Menelaus’ homeward journey, namely a respect for the various principles that govern the world. So too with us. Without an understanding and an honouring of the various components that make up the phenomenal world, we ourselves remain incomplete and homeless, bereft of the place of our belonging, at lost in our world of uncertainties. Yet home is where we belong in some sense, the place of our abiding in truth and in the truth of ourselves. It is a powerful image not so much about our uncertainties but about our awareness of our uncertainties which paradoxically give us a sense of certainty. Our unknowing is not without our knowing (and vice versa).
