Month: September 2022

What is man, that thou art mindful of him?

The question of the Psalmist (Ps. 8.4), the biblical hymn writer, looks back to the story of creation in Genesis. The question reflects what we see before us in the work of the sixth day. Creation, we have discovered, is an orderly affair that marks the distinction of one thing from another. It is poetic and philosophical and as such provides the ground for ‘science’ understood in its different forms over more than two millennia. Creation is about a relation to the Creator, to an intellectual principle upon which the being and knowing of things depends.

The radical nature of this way of thinking is often overlooked. To put it simply, it means that the world is, in principle, intelligible. Creation is sacred but not divine nor is the natural world something to be feared and frightening; in short, something evil. As Genesis 1 makes emphatically clear, it is good in its parts, indeed very good as a whole. That sense of good is intellectual but with ethical implications. It serves as an important counter to our culture of antagonism and fear.

Last Thursday was the first of the first Chapel services. It was also the last service in the Chapel under the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. It was only in the early afternoon of September 8th that we learned of her death at age 96. With this Thursday’s service, a week later, all of the services have entered into history as being now under the reign of King Charles III. I mention these things because the concept of sovereignty, whether diffused throughout the body politic in the manner of republicanism or concentrated in the person of the monarch, is so significant. Order is paramount. Political life in its truth is not simply about power for power’s sake; it is about truth and order, about dignity and respect, about duty and service. In the Christian understanding and as echoed in other religions, the souls of Kings and Queens, of those in authority, are in the hands of God. God is the ultimate author and creation in its varied forms is God’s poetry, God’s making. The Greek word for making or creating is poesis, poetry. God in the wonder of the creation story speaks the world into being.

(more…)

Print this entry

In the beginning God … in the beginning was the Word

It has become a tradition to have the Head Boy and Head Girl read the Scriptures lessons at the first Chapel services of the year. Thus, Lucy Goddard and Levi Spence read the first five verses of Genesis 1 and John 1. Nothing perhaps signals better what Chapel is about as an integral part of the educational programme of King’s-Edgehill School. Usually each little Chapel service features one lesson either from the Hebrew Scriptures or from the Christian Scriptures of the New Testament. At the first Chapel services we have two readings, one from each, and yet it is not too hard to see how these lessons complement one another and in ways that highlight things intellectual and spiritual.

Things intellectual and spiritual. That’s the point, the challenge, and the real place of Chapel at the School. It is about character, about the whole person, about ourselves as part of a whole, about something bigger than ourselves. This challenges the culture of outrage and antagonism that views everything – the world and others – in oppositional terms.

“They were tired of being afraid,” a character in Louise Penny’s post-pandemic novel, The Madness of Crowds, observes about a large gathering of people intensely divided in their emotions and commitments. Ça va bien aller. All will be well, it is said, echoing Julian of Norwich’s wisdom that “all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well”, words spoken to give comfort in a time of suffering. Her words, however, have been co-opted to a more sinister agenda. “All shall be well” but not for all. Only for the elite, for the few at the expense of the vulnerable. It is a question about the good, an ethical question.

Chapel is not about tradition for tradition’s sake. It is a strong reminder of the School’s history and tradition, to be sure, at the same time as providing a profound critique of the way in which institutions fall short of their ideals and principles and/or struggle to live up to them. That is the point of the prayer of confession, individually and corporately. The mottoes of King’s and Edgehill speak profoundly to the School’s character. Deo Legi Regi Gregi and Fideliter, “For God, for the Law, for the King, and for the People,” and “Faithfulness.” These are words with substance and meaning that speak to an education that is about public service and commitment to what is more than self-interest and narcissism. They give substance and meaning to the ethos of “be more”. Chapel reminds us constantly that we are part of a reality that is greater than ourselves and which is not reducible to our minds in a kind of solipsism – as if reality is simply mind-dependent. Nor is it, on the other hand, simply mind-independent. Instead there is the constant challenge to think our relation to the natural world, to creation in a biblical and as well an indigenous view, and to one another.

(more…)

Print this entry