Year: 2023

Woman, why weepest thou?

There is all the difference in the world between education and indoctrination, the one opening us out to ways of understanding, the other compelling thought and expression. We live, it seems, in a world that looks more like George Orwell’s 1984 than Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Religion, like education, cannot be forced, a point which is constantly stressed in Chapel. Like classes, sports, and cadets, students are required to attend but no one can be compelled to believe, neither can Chapel affirm or confirm the various agendas and perspectives, personal beliefs or unbeliefs of students and faculty. It would be almost impossible to think how that could be.

The approach is rather that of the “dignity of difference” which has to do with a deeper sense of toleration. As Jonathan Sacks in a book written just after the events of 9-11 pointed it out, it means holding each form of religion accountable to its own principles. That requires having some understanding of different religions and the forms of their interaction.

Chapel belongs to the history and life of the School as an integral part of the educational project. While the service is Christian and derived from Anglican traditions that honour the School’s history, it is actually very generic and connects to the various practices in many other religious and philosophical cultures in terms of the reading of texts (scripture), of prayers and devotions and reflections, of ritual and symbol. There is not and cannot be any coercion of belief or thought, only the opening out of ideas and concepts that belong to questions that are perennial.

Religion or religions in their variety of expression have certainly been coercive and doctrinaire at times. Such is the sad and ugly truth of our brokenness and sin, our failures. And certainly, there are those who have very negative ideas about religion. Richard Dawkins regards the God of the Old Testament, as he puts it, as the most awful and vile figure in all literature. This prompted the former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Jonathan Sacks, to observe, “Oh, I see that you are a Christian atheist.” The term Old Testament is a Christian way of speaking about the Hebrew Scriptures. And while there are many difficult and challenging passages in the Scriptures, Dawkins overlooks the forms of interpretation that highlight the nature of human sin and evil in contrast to the idea of the Law and creation as intrinsically good.

The religions of the world also provide a constant corrective and a rebuke to all forms of self-righteousness, of presumption and indoctrination. Christopher Lasch notes that the spiritual discipline [of religion] is against self-righteousness and that while religion provides comfort, first and foremost, it challenges and confronts us with our short-comings. It is always self-critical. We confront the forms of our unknowing and the limits of our thinking. Only so are we opened out to what is greater than ourselves.

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The death of death is eternal life.

The “death of death” is radical new life. In the Christian understanding, it is the Resurrection. It belongs to the general philosophical and religious idea that life is greater than death and that good is greater than evil. It is not so much the ending of the story of the Passion as the beginning in the sense of being opened to God as eternal life and thus the source and principle of all life. In this sense, the Resurrection is a radical affirmation of life and not its negation since it is ‘the negation of the negation.’

It is the counter to our culture of fear and death. “Be not afraid,” is one of the first words of the Resurrection. Just as Holy Week witnesses to the intensity of the Passion and reveals all the horrors and cruelties of human sin, past, present, and to come, as visited upon Christ in his love for us, a love stronger than death and evil, so the Resurrection accounts witness in a remarkable way the dawning awareness of the idea and meaning of the Resurrection. It is not a flight from reality, from the world, or from the past. It is its recreation, its redemption and rebirth. God makes something out of the nothingness of human sin and folly. The various binaries of human experience, of good and evil, of spirit and matter, of body and soul, are transcended but not denied nor destroyed.

The Passion and the Resurrection challenge us about our illusions of control and power. They do so in profoundly moving ways. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” This is the first word of Christ from the Cross in Luke’s account and in what comes to be the Devotions on the Seven Last Words of Christ as developed by a Peruvian Jesuit priest in Lima, Peru, in the late seventeenth century. Out of the cacophony of the chaos and confusion of human sin in all its ugliness comes peace and joy and forgiveness; in short, life as love, the love of the good. It is transformative but the transformation is not about becoming other than who we are. It is about becoming who we truly are in God, the source and end of all life. The Resurrection belongs to the various ways of thinking about what it means to be human within the idea of creation and in the face of suffering and evil.

To my mind, the story of the encounter on the Road to Emmaus is the most dramatic and illuminating of the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection. It is about how we come to learn, about how ideas come to birth and are realized in us. It tells the story of two unnamed disciples fleeing from Jerusalem just after the Passion and Death of Christ. They are fleeing in fear and confusion and are going to a village called Emmaus. On the way they “talked together of all these things which had happened,” all the things of the Passion. Where there are two there is always a third, we might say, the truth that joins us together. Jesus draws near to them and joins their company but in their confusion they do not recognize him. They are not expecting him and all their expectations of him have been shattered. He draws out of them their confusions and uncertainties. They tell him what had happened including the finding of the empty tomb and the testimony of the angels to the women – the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. He draws out of them their confusion and unknowing; their fear and uncertainty.

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