Christ Church

Where shall wisdom be found?

Job’s words speak wonderfully to the whole meaning of the Advent season. They embrace and comprehend the other two readings in Chapel this week from the Prophet Micah and from the first Chapter of John’s Gospel. Our School Prayer begins with these words: “Almighty God, of whose only gift cometh wisdom and understanding”. As I write this I am listening to William Boyce’s lovely motet on this passage. The main point of the passage goes to the very nature of religious philosophy. All wisdom is of God.

The Genesis stories of creation and the fall provide the foundational and formative features of classical spirituality. There is nothing outside of the Word and Will of God, no reality not comprehended by God’s speaking all things into being and as such upholding them in their truth and meaning. This is why the tradition of the early Church theologians in preaching on the work of the six days to those preparing for Holy Baptism is so crucial; there are sermons and treatises from both eastern and western thinkers and a host of later commentaries on Genesis. Everything is embraced in the loving wisdom of God including the wilderness, the wilderness that is really us in our turning away from paradise. We are the wilderness but Paradise is always there. We cannot unmake it or make it for ourselves. It is folly to think that we can, though there is no end to the utopian attempts to do so over many, many centuries, including our own . But to know ourselves in the wilderness is to be recalled to paradise yet only “to know the place for the first time”, as T.S. Eliot put it in Little Gidding, Four Quartets. And that means that it is no longer simply a beginning but our end in God.

Advent season is one of the loveliest seasons of the Christian year. It signals the profound theme of God coming to us in Word and Light and, ultimately, in the Christian understanding as “the Word made flesh”, Jesus Christ, true God and true man. God’s Word comes in Law and Prophecy and Gospel. That word comes as love, the love which is the fulfilling of the Law not its extinguishment. Love is its perfection that marks the shift from the wilderness, the place of law, to the paradise of love. Advent presents us with a whole host of images about our lives as “strangers and pilgrims” in the wilderness and in the via, the way, to our patria, the homeland of spirit, of paradise. It offers the vision and hope of wilderness transformed into paradise.

In Chapel we are preparing ourselves for the great pageant of the Advent Christmas Service of Nine Lessons & Carols at Christ Church, 3:00 pm on December 6th. It will mark the first time in decades that the whole school has been together for this pageant of word and song, of music and prayer. The readings are especially arresting and seek to awaken us to the themes of hope and joy, of love and peace. The service was established in 1918 just after the First World War in an effort to provide spiritual strength and comfort to a world utterly devastated and destroyed by War.

Complementing some of those passages are the three readings this week in Chapel: the one from Micah about turning “swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks”; the second from John about Jesus turning to us and asking what do we truly seek or desire?; the third from Job about the wisdom of God which embraces and holds together all things.

The passage from Micah illustrates the remarkable idea of the transformation of the instruments of war into the instruments of peace and cultivation. I often think of this in contrast to the image in Homer’s Iliad of the making of Achilles’ shield. Fashioned by the ancient ‘techno God’, Hephaestus, it depicts the city at war and the city at peace but they stand opposed. Micah, on the other hand, offers a vision of the transformation of the wilderness of war into the paradise of peace. “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more … but every one shall sit under vine and under his fig tree, and none shall make them afraid”. Why or how? Because “the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken”.

All these passages counter the confusions of our times in the constant calling attention to ourselves and our interests as if we could remake the world ourselves and in our image. We can’t. Here is the pageant of God’s Word coming to us in the darkness of the year and in the darkness of our world bringing words of hope and joy and speaking to the greater dignity of our humanity as found in the light of God’s Word and Truth. It is not ‘look at me looking at you looking at me’, the narcissism and self-absorption that pits one group against another, a kind of adolescent groupism. This has led to “the politics of social guilt with designated victims”, as Paul Gottfried puts it. Another political philosopher, Eric Kaufmann, provides one of the more trenchant analyses of our contemporary world in his book, Taboo. He chronicles the shift from “cultural liberalism”, somewhat relativist but at least tolerant, to “cultural socialism”, absolutist and intolerant.

Chapel is about “the dignity of difference”, in Jonathan Sacks’ phrase, which means a new form of toleration: each religion holding each other accountable to their own essential teachings. That requires an understanding of each religion objectively considered, namely an understanding of their essential principles. That alone provides ways of interacting in peace and with respect. In this sense, Chapel is neither about sectarian religion nor sectarian secularism, nor can it be. ‘Anglicanism’ for all its faults and failings is not sectarian but understands itself to be “an integral portion of the One Body of Christ … in the fellowship of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, hold[ing] the One Faith revealed in Holy Writ, and defined in the Creeds.” This sense of ‘The Faith’ acts as a corrective to the confusions of personal faith and opinions which always less than the fullness of the Christian understanding and to the nature of its engagement with other religions and philosophies. Wisdom belongs to God!

(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy