KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 14 November
Heart’s sorrow, and a clear life ensuing.
“But remember – for that’s my business to you”, Ariel says in a famous scene in Shakespeare’s The Tempest which is intended to convict the consciences of “You three men of sin”: Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian. They are meant to remember and face what they have done in seeking the harm of Prospero and Miranda. Yet that remembering is “nothing but heart’s sorrow”, meaning repentance, “and a clear life ensuing”.
Remembering has been all our business this week commencing with Remembrance Day on Monday when the whole School as a Corps marched down to the Windsor Cenotaph and then back to the School’s where we remembered by name those who went forth in the defining wars of the 19th and 20th centuries and didn’t return. Many of them sat in the same pews where you sit in Chapel.
Remembering is an essential faculty of the human soul. It makes us human because it recalls us to the larger company of our humanity, what Hebrews in the lesson read this week calls “so great a cloud of witnesses” that surrounds us and of which we are all a part. Remembrance Day is a reminder of our common mortality, on the one hand, and a reminder of the unspeakable horror of war, on the other hand. Yet our remembering is a way of facing the evils of our hearts and world without being reduced to sorrow and grief. That we try to remember the fallen by name is profoundly humanizing and touching.
If something is worth doing, it is worth doing well. That is the challenge for all of us. That requires our mindfulness about what we are doing. The Corps conducted itself with great attention and decorum, not simply because they were told to but out of a sense of the solemnity and special character of what we were doing together. It means paying attention to one another within a corporate activity of doing things together. It is about being part of something greater than ourselves.
“All these died in faith”, the lesson from Hebrew tells us referring to a great litany of figures all from the Hebrew Scriptures, what Christians came to call the Old Testament: Abel and Cain, Noah, Abraham and Sarah, and Issac, Jacob and Esau and Joseph, Moses, Rahab the Harlot, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, and David. “They desired a better country, that is, an heavenly,” a true patria or homeland of the spirit. They desire a better country is actually the motto of the Order of Canada, the highest civilian honour in the country. It is referred to in a different Latin translation than Jerome’s translation. “Desiderantes meliorem patriam” is the official motto. Jerome’s translation is “Nunc autem meliorem appetunt”.