KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 8 September
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.
