Day: September 22, 2022

KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 22 September

Dust

Genesis 2 complements rather than contradicts Genesis 1 but in an altogether different register. It offers a kind of check upon any notion of presumption about our humanity. In short, it humbles us by recalling us precisely to the dust of the ground and thus to our place within the order of creation. As such it complements, too, the efforts of the Indigenous peoples of Canada to recall our connection to creation and to honour and respect it rather than to presume to dominate and destroy it.

‘Adam, as yet not a proper name, refers to our humanity generically speaking. “The Lord God,” Genesis 2 tells us, “formed the ‘Adam of dust from the ground.” We are dust. Yet we are the dust into which God breathes his spirit and only so did “‘Adam became a living being.” Such is the dignified dust of our humanity, a complement to our being made in the image of God.

The passage read in Chapel this week serves as a further commentary on the question about who we are as human beings and about an educational programme which emphasizes character. ‘Adam is placed in a garden, the proverbial Garden of Eden, later known as paradise, drawing upon an ancient Persian word for a pleasure garden. “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it”. This garden in Genesis 2 is the source of four rivers Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, and Euphrates. But the commentary tradition from very early on sees the rivers as symbolic of the classical virtues that belong to human perfection and character, the virtues of temperance, courage, prudence and courage. This connects the Genesis accounts of creation to the poetic and philosophical teachings of ancient Greece and contributes to the idea of the education of the whole person and to the primacy of the ethical.

Genesis 2 introduces us to two important concepts by way of the imagery of trees: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Living and knowing are somehow closely connected with respect to what it means to be rational and spiritual creatures. Importantly and in relation to our being made in the image of God, ‘Adam is given a commandment in the garden not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil “for in the day that you eat of it you shall die”. Bearing in mind that creation in its parts and as a whole is good, indeed very good, then this commandment has to be taken as good for us as well. The underlying question is about how we come to the knowledge of good and evil. That will be the story of the Fall.

Why are things so bad if everything is so good? The problem can’t be with the world or with God in this view of things. It has more to do with the form of our relationship to God. This will launch us into the long, long story of human redemption understood in its different modalities, not the least of which is learning through suffering and hardship, learning about the good even in and through our separation from it in the experience of sin and death.

(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, Head of English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy

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King's-Edgehill School Sermons

Honouring Queen Elizabeth II

Honouring Queen Elizabeth II

On Monday, September 19th, a short memorial service to honour the passing of Queen Elizabeth II was held in the Chapel, as was fitting for a School whose history and life is grounded in the principles of constitutional monarchy which she so graciously embodied. That sensibility is captured in the School’s mottoes: Deo Legi Regi Gregi and Fideliter, For God, for the Law, for the King, for the People, and, Faithfulness, the latter being the motto brought to King’s-Edgehill School by Edgehill at the time of the amalgamation of the Schools in 1976. Faithfulness to her Office as Sovereign was one of the outstanding features of Elizabeth’s life and reign.

The service drew upon the spiritual riches of the Book of Common Prayer, especially from the Burial Office, used at the official services held at Westminster Abbey in London and at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor, England. Her long reign of seventy years was distinguished by her strong commitment to the Office of Sovereign and never about herself, by her Christian faith and devotion to duty and service in the divided and tumultuous times in which she reigned, and by the way in which she was a symbol of unity not only for England and for the nations of the Commonwealth but for the world.

One of the prayers, which is perhaps better known in England than in Canada, is taken from A Sermon Preached at White-hall, February 29, 1628 by the poet-preacher John Donne (1572-1631) as revised and edited by Dean Eric Milner-White (1884-1964). Milner-White was also largely responsible for the shaping and promotion of the great Advent Service of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge in December 1918 which offered hope and peace to a world devastated by the First World War. Donne’s words as shaped into prayer speak to the deeper spiritual truths of the human condition and to our prayers for Queen Elizabeth II.

Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening
Into the house and gate of heaven.
To enter that gate and dwell in that house,
Where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light;
No noise nor silence, but one equal music;
No fears nor hopes, but one equal possession;
No ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity;
In the habitation of thy glory and dominion,
World without end, Amen.

Governments come and go but the Sovereign as Head of State remains now with her son, Charles III, our King and Governor. Long live the King.

(Rev’d) David Curry
School Chaplain, Head of English, ToK Teacher

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