“O where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?”
At last! An Encaenia in June, not August! Who can believe it? And here in the Chapel. Today marks the last time that you are in Chapel as students. In just a few hours you will have stepped up and out into the world as graduates and alumni. Congratulations! You are the class that has suffered through the sturm und drang of the pandemic and, now, at last, you have been able to have exams! What’s not to like?! You have persevered quite well and, I hope, quite wisely. How? By that constant renewing of our minds upon the principles that animate and shape our lives together. An ending that is at once a beginning.
Encaenia is a Greek word that refers to renewal of purpose and identity, a dedication service (εν καινος) with respect to the spiritual and intellectual principles that belong to the founding of institutions. From its ancient origins in the dedications of holy places, Encaenia became associated with “the annual commemoration of founders and benefactors at Oxford University in June” (O.E.D), and extends to the academic institutions which derive from the medieval universities of Oxford and Cambridge in the English-speaking world, even to King’s-Edgehill. It reminds us that we are part of something greater than ourselves.
One hundred years ago in 1922, T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land. Written shortly after the devastations of the First World War, the poem reflects profoundly upon the wilderness of modernity imaged as a wasteland, a world in ruins. Images of death and decay are drawn from Ezekiel, the poet-prophet of the exile, and from the poet-philosopher of the Hebrew Scriptures, Qoheleth or Ecclesiastes. Our humanity, ben adam, “Son of Man”, knows only “a heap of broken images” and cannot say what lives and grows “out of this stony rubbish” of a world in ruins. The image is from Ezekiel: “Your altars shall be desolate, and your images shall be broken” (Ez. 6.4). His world, too, was a world of ruin and fragmentation, of loss and exile on Babylon’s strand.
Yet the poem offers far more than darkness and dystopian despair, far more than fear and death. It suggests that wisdom may be found even in the ruins of our times. “Only There is shadow under this red rock.” The Rock is the dominant image of God in the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy: “the Rock that begot you … the God who gave you birth”(Dt. 32.18). “(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),/And I will show you something different from either/Your shadow at morning striding behind you,/Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;/ I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
“Fear in a handful of dust”? How is that happy making? Yet it is about hope and life. It refers to the custom of throwing earth on the casket or urn of the dead but doing so “in the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life” (BCP, p. 602). Fear is more than the fear of death or the fear of Covid or the fear that haunts our broken and fragmented world of economic, social, political, and environmental uncertainties – our world, your world.
How do we face difficult things? Through the renewing of our minds upon the wisdom of the ethical. What is the Good and how does it live in us? That has been the challenge of Chapel in the opening of our souls and minds to “the fear” or wonder “of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom,” as Job puts it in the lesson which Will read. This is equally about our being open to the epekeina of Plato, the Beyond, the Good which is beyond the being and the knowing of things as their ground in which the soul participates even in its suffering; this, too, is the insight of Job. It is ancient wisdom. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, as some of you may recall, the death of Enkidu moves Gilgamesh to embark upon the greater journey, the quest for wisdom.
These reminders counter the spectre of “endism” which hangs over us and paralyzes us in our contemporary fears about our world and one another. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” Eliot says near the end of The Waste Land. It is an allusion to Christ’s words to us in the wilderness: “Gather up the fragments that nothing be lost.” Such, too, is education; wisdom is found among the fragments even in the ruins. The Waste Land ends with the Sanskrit words which mark the ending to the Upanishads in the Hindu spiritual tradition. Shantih. Shantih. Shantih. As Eliot explains in his notes, this is equivalent to “the peace that passeth understanding.”
How to be thoughtful in a thoughtless world? How to be careful in a fearful world? To ask such questions is the beginning of wisdom. It is the one thing necessary. It has to do very much with the interrelation between thinking and doing; in short, what is meant by the ethical as wisdom. Such is philosophy as a way of life. This is seen in the story of Mary and Martha which Gabby read. The story bookends the parable of the Good Samaritan, the Christian ethic of compassion par excellence. The parable is framed by the idea of the quest for wisdom; first, by the lawyer’s question “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” which is a question about ‘what is the good as something to be done’, and by Jesus’ response. “What is written in the Law? How readest thou?” and, then, at the end by the story of Mary and Martha. In between is the parable given as illustration and answer to the cynical and dismissive second question of the Lawyer: “And who is my neighbour?”
The parable illustrates what C.S. Lewis called the Tao, the path of wisdom, alluding to ancient Chinese philosophy, but seeing the primacy of the ethical as present in all the religions and philosophies of the world, “Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike”, as he says. It is about an openness to the good of our humanity which transcends all claims to particularity and subjective interest. The demand in the parable is to act with compassion towards the stranger, the other, regardless of who they are or what they claim to be or how we see them. Jesus deliberately uses “a certain Samaritan”, fully aware of the animosities within Israel about the Samaritans with respect to the reception of the Law. It is not as if Jesus agrees with the Samaritan understanding. He doesn’t. What is paramount is the ethical requirement of compassion despite such differences because of what belongs to our common humanity: the “certain man” who lies wounded and half-dead, is us. We are all in the story as the one who suffers, but also as those who look and pass by, or, more pointedly, as the one who is moved with compassion to care for the stranger who is neighbour. Which will you be?
The story of Mary and Martha anchors the parable by way of emphasizing the priority of knowing as the principle which informs action. Martha complains about Mary not helping her, but, as Luke makes clear, Martha is “distracted with much serving”, literally unable to focus to the point of a kind of manic distress and as such, as Jesus says, is “anxious and troubled about many things.” The King James Version memorably says “thou art careful”, meaning too full of cares. It speaks directly to our world. How to be careful in the right way about the right things? Such is wisdom. The one thing necessary is about our thinking about the Good so that it may move in us in spite of the differences of identities that divide us and separate us from one another. Wisdom transcends the binaries of our making. The theoretical and the practical, the active and the contemplative are not opposed but interconnected but only through our openness to the transcendent Good which shapes our thoughts and our actions.
Such an understanding goes to the question about wisdom as “the fear of the Lord” and about understanding as “depart[ing] from evil.” To be recalled to the principles of an ethical understanding provides the necessary ground for self-reflection and self-criticism about the ways in which institutions and individuals past and present have failed to live up to them. We are all implicated in the problems which beset our fragmented world. We have no privileged place of judgment over others to the exclusion of ourselves. Ethical principles call us to account and counter all forms of self-righteous pretension. They belong to an education that is about character.
Shakespeare’s The Tempest, for example, provides a critique of the European treatment of indigenous peoples in the figure of Caliban whom Prospero and Miranda encounter on the island. At first, the relation between them is harmonious. Caliban shows them the qualities of the island. He is treated as an equal, as human, but when he has sexual designs on Miranda, he is then treated as a slave and less than human, subject to the power of Prospero whose magic is really natural philosophy which in its early modern form implies a dominance over nature that very quickly extends to dominance over people. Yet Shakespeare gives Caliban one of the loveliest passages in the play about the beauty of the isle as “full of noises,/Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not;” in short, a philosophical openness to the Good (αγαθον) and the Beautiful (καλον). And in the resolution of the play’s conflict between Prospero who has been wronged and by Alonzo and Antonio who have wronged him, Caliban, too, is set free and in a wonderful phrase says “I’ll be wise hereafter and seek for grace,” now knowing better than to trust the antics of drunken sailors such as Trinculo and Stephano. In short, Shakespeare touches critically upon almost every aspect of the problematic of colonialism.
Encaenia is always an emotional time for us all. We are at once glad and sad to see you go. We have been through so many things together in the remarkable life of the School over the ups and downs of the past several years. And whether you have been here for one year or for six, this place has been part of your life and experience. You are not the victims of Covid; Covid is just the circumstance through which you have had to persevere and, I hope, to learn and grow in wisdom. I am deeply humbled by your respect and commitment to Chapel, and, especially, to Stanislav for his unrelenting passion for the logos, attending every Chapel service and for providing such engaged leadership as the Head Chapel Prefect, to Will who has been our student organist since Grade Seven, and the first to be also Head Boy, to all of the Chapel prefects who have made the morning miracle happen, and simply to all of you for our times together wrestling with these questions about the ethical in the early morning when you would rather be in bed. Me too.
You leave this day but others are leaving too: Mr. Glen Faucher and Ms. Monica Schaefer – graduating, we might say, along with Maya!, Mrs. Clara Cisneros and Mr. Frederico Cisneros, Ms. Sarah MacDonald, Ms. Katie Sheehan, Mr. Paul Baumann, and our librarian, dare I say, par excellence, Mrs. Marilyn Curry. We wish them Godspeed in all their future endeavours and thank them for their service and dedication to the School.
Out of the whirlwind, God speaks to Job, paradoxically quoting Job’s insights about wisdom. Out of the Tempest, there comes “a sea-change into something rich and strange” which is the very hope of education. Sitting and listening is the better part, the unum necessarium by which, just perhaps, we may learn wisdom and understanding and a way to act with compassion and care for one another. Go in peace. Shantih. Shantih. Shantih.
“O where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?”
Rev’d David Curry
Encaenia
June 11th, 2022