Sermon for Encaenia 2024
“What is written? How readest thou?”
“The end of the matter?” Can it be? Is it really all over? Certainly, there is a kind of ending, the ending of your high school career certainly. This is the last Chapel service for you as students, to be sure. Tears of sorrow; tears of joy. Or both! We are both glad and sad to see you go and, perhaps, it is the same for you. In a short while, you will step up and step out of King’s-Edgehill, no longer students but alumni! You have made the grade, gradus, to being graduates. On this day, you are the pride and joy of the School, of your parents and grandparents, guardians and friends, family and neighbours, teachers and staff, and I hope, of one another. An end, indeed, it would seem.
Yet there is a different sense of ending signalled in this service and the events of this day. Encaenia is a Greek word that refers to renewal of purpose and dedication, to end as purpose and meaning, telos, we might say. Originally an annual dedication of sacred shrines and holy places, it has become associated with “the annual commemoration of founders and benefactors at Oxford University in June” (O.E.D) and extends to those academic institutions which derive their origin and raison d’être from the mediaeval universities of Oxford and Cambridge throughout the English speaking world, including King’s-Edgehill. Thus “the end of the matter” recalls us to our beginnings, to the foundational principles and ideas that belong to education. At the very least, the word suggests the necessary connection between religion and education that is certainly an integral part of the history and life of the School.
Encaenia marks a redire ad principia, a return to a principle, a kind of circling back and around and into the ideas that belong to the educational project. In that sense, it is an ending that has no end. The mottoes of King’s and Edgehill remind us of an education that is about character and service: Deo Legi Regi Gregi – for God, for the Law, for the King, for the People – and fideliter – faithfulness in the life-long pursuit of learning.
We may wonder whether education is even possible in our technocratic culture. This is not new. There is no wisdom in techné, in the various skills and arts of human life, as Plato taught, and likewise so for technology. There is an abundance of knowing how to do but perhaps not so much of knowing what is. “Where is the life we have lost in living?” T.S. Eliot asked ninety years ago in his verse pageant “Choruses from the Rock.” He was not referring to Newfoundland. He notes the modern loss of the vital connection between living and wisdom. “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” Data or information is neither knowledge nor wisdom. This is an ancient commonplace.
