KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 2 December
A Pageant of Chapels
The last Chapel services this term are three Advent Christmas Services of Lessons & Carols. They are a pageant of word and song, of music and light, coming to us in the darkness of the year both literally and metaphorically. In a way, the Services of Nine Lessons and Carols sum up the intellectual and spiritual journey of Chapel this term.
It is impossible to imagine the impact of this service when it was originally devised for Advent in 1918 at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. “The war to end all wars” was finally over but the sombre realities of the immensity of the destruction and devastation of the First World War were only beginning to be felt. T.S. Eliot’s celebrated poem, The Waste Land (1922), captured something of the ambiguities of modernity and the sense of the catastrophic collapse of European civilization. All that remained were “fragments that I have shored up against my ruin”, he says, having observed by way of Dante’s vision of the vestibule of Hell, that “I had not thought death had undone so many”. The Advent service of Nine Lessons and Carols undertook to speak to this sense of overwhelming loss and sorrow.
The readings and the carols proclaim hope and peace. They form a tableaux of scriptural revelation and weave a tapestry of spiritual understanding but perhaps the stronger metaphor is that of a pageant of word and song in which we are not simply spectators but actors engaged with what is being heard and said. The readings offer hope and peace to a fearful and dark world of uncertainty and despair.
The first lesson from Genesis 3 highlights the four questions of God to our wayward humanity but ends on the note of the proto-evangelium, the idea of the overcoming of sin and evil through the seed of the new Eve, Mary, later understood by Christians to refer to Christ. Yet the emphasis is on the questions of God which call us all to account. “What hast thou done?” The question reverberates down through the ages and speaks to human conscience then and now. The second lesson, also from Genesis, offers the promise of God which, through the seed of Abraham, grants a blessing for the nations of the earth. The context, alluded to in the reading, is Abraham’s intended sacrifice of Isaac preempted by God providing himself the sacrifice. (For Islam the story will be reimaged as the intended sacrifice of Ishmael.) But the idea of a universal blessing for all humanity is particularly moving and reminds us of the significant connections between religious and spiritual cultures in and through their differences.