Sermon for Encaenia 2023
“Abide in my love.”
And so, at last it ends! And yet, begins. Today you are the pride and joy of the School, of your parents and grandparents, friends and peers. Today, at last, you step up and step out of the School. In a few hours you will have been transformed from being high school students to becoming alumni. There is, I am sure, a tremendous sense of accomplishment and, no doubt, some great sighs of relief. Yet parting is such sweet sorrow, too, for you, perhaps, and for all of us. We are at once both glad and sad to see you go. Why? Because of the intensity of our abiding together in the pursuits and challenges of education. That, I hope, is something that never ends.
This is the paradox of the Encaenia service: An ending that is a beginning. “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds,” as Paul says. Encaenia is the renewing of our minds upon the principles that belong to our abiding and being together as a School. Such is the paradox of truth itself. The coming together of opposites, as the great 20th-century physicist Niels Bohr noted, signifies the approach to a deeper level of truth. We “give voice to our opinions,” Augustine remarked more than fifteen hundred years ago, “but they are only opinions, like so many puffs of wind that waft the soul hither and thither and make it veer and turn. The light is clouded over and the truth cannot be seen, although it is there before our eyes” (Conf. IV. 14). Yet the truth is there, “before our very eyes.” We are not simply left with the muddle of endlessly conflicting opinions. Perhaps there is a way to think through the divisions and conflicts of our divided world of partial truths and competing assertions.
Encaenia is a Greek word (εν καινος) that refers to renewal, the re-dedication to certain ideas and principles that define institutions. Originating in the dedication of holy places, such as ancient temples and churches, it became associated with “the annual commemoration of founders and benefactors at Oxford University, held in June” (OED), and has extended to Schools and Universities which derive their origins from the medieval universities of Oxford and Cambridge, such as King’s-Edgehill. It reminds us that we are part of something larger than ourselves and recalls us to the foundational principles, to the telos, the end or purpose, of the institutions which in some sense shape our thoughts and actions.
Encaenia in this sense complements what has been an abiding feature of Chapel, namely, a form of critical self-reflection about the ethical principles that belong to our thinking. It is about “interrogating the writings of the wise,” as the poet Horace puts it, by way of the intellectual and spiritual traditions of our humanity, what C.S. Lewis called the Tao, the path of ethical wisdom, conceived “in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike”. This was in a series of lectures delivered in Durham, England, in 1943; in other words, at a time of conflict and division, of great fear and uncertainty. How do we face the difficult things that belong to the divisions and conflicts of our divided world?
