Journeys
Exams end the school term, or so it seems. Yet they are really a feature of the continuing and, we hope, never-ending journey of learning; in short, they are a basic feature of education and life.
In the Christian understanding, Christmas brings us to Bethlehem. But it is not just a destination, an ending. The pageant of Lessons and Carols as well as the Christmas crèche scenes concentrate a great crowd of images in Bethlehem: shepherds and kings, men and angels, a man and a woman, a woman and a child, God and Man, heaven and earth, and, at the very least in the biblical accounts, sheep, to which holy imagination has added a whole menagerie of animals! Bethlehem is paradise restored, we might say, with the idea of the harmony and unity of the objective diversities of creation. “High and low, rich and poor, one with another”, as the Advent Matin Responsory suggests. This contrasts with the subjective categories of radical indeterminacy in our contemporary confusions.
But Bethlehem is not an end-point but the beginning of a greater journey that encompasses within the Christmas mystery the flight into Egypt and then the journeys to Jerusalem. Bethlehem and Jerusalem are the twin poles of the Christian imaginary around which everything moves as in an ellipse. They are inseparably connected. As the poet/preacher John Donne nicely notes: Christ’s “Christmas-day and his Good Friday are but the evening and the morning of one and the same day”.
As has been noted on occasion in Chapel, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all religions of the logos, of the Word, albeit in different registers of understanding. For Judaism that is captured in the TANAKH, an acronym of Hebrew consonants representative of the Torah (Lawa), the Prophets (Nevi’im) and the Writings (Ketuvim) emphasizing the centrality of the Word as Law; for Islam, the Word is concentrated in the recitation of Allah to Muhammed, the Qur’an, the Word as Will; for Christians, it is the Scriptures of the Old Testament and the New Testament understood as witnessing to the concept of the Word made Flesh. Along with other world religions and philosophies there is an abiding focus on things written, on texts. One of the meanings of the word, religion, is re-reading (re-legere). The other is the idea of a bond (re-ligare) between God and humanity.
Bethlehem in both these senses marks the beginning of the longer journey of the understanding. The metaphysical light which comes into the darkness of the world in Advent becomes the light of God within the world which teaches and illuminates our understanding in the midst of the complexities and confusions of human experience. Like exams, it is all part of the journey of education that belongs to a deepening of the understanding of our humanity.
A blessed Christmas break to all.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, Head of English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy