Christ Church

Imago Dei!

The first chapters of Genesis are especially foundational and formative for our thinking. They belong to a long tradition of reflection about the world and about what it means to be human; questions that are always with us and which challenge our thinking about our relation to nature and to our lives with one another. As such it touches upon a common question for students, especially new students at KES: “Where do I fit in?” That in turn is part of a greater question: “What is the place of our humanity in the givenness of creation?” After all, we find ourselves in a world which exists prior to us and in institutions such as schools which have a tradition and life shaped and formed by principles which are also prior to us.

The challenge of education is learning not so much what to think as how to think. It means at the very least an exposure to principles and ideas which require reflection and thought. Teaching is not mere technique. It is really about the passing on of things which have been learned and thus making them part of ourselves in one way or another. Genesis raises some of the great questions that become the foundational basis for many subsequent quests of the mind.

It begins, as we have seen, with a principle, God. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” But what is meant by God? The philosophical and theological traditions offer a number of suggestions. Thomas Aquinas, in a kind of summary statement about ancient Greek wisdom complemented by Jewish, Christian, and Islamic understandings, simply says that “God is the beginning and end of all creatures, especially rational creatures,” referring to angels and our humanity. This alludes in some fashion to one of the great insights of the Genesis story of creation. ‘Adam, an inclusive term and not yet a personal name (and “functionally gender-indifferent” ), refers to our humanity in general which is said to be made in the image of God. “In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”

At least three things are emphasized in that statement: first, our humanity comes at the end of the litany of creation which distinguishes one thing from another thing within a unity of order. But are we, as in the ancient Sumerian view, simply an after-thought of the gods and thus insignificant beings? No. Because, secondly, ‘adam as the work of the sixth day is not only connected to every other created thing but alone of the things of creation is said to be made in God’s image. What does that mean? All that we can say about God is that God the Uncreated is the creative and ordering principle who speaks things into being and sustains them in their being. This underscores the idea of the world as intelligible (without which ‘science’ would be impossible). Our humanity understood in relation to God informs our role and place in the created order. Creation is order and not chaos; something significant is being suggested about us in terms of responsibilities and care. Thirdly, we are much like everything else in the created order as ‘beings in the world’ in terms of the basic categories of male and female.

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Paying attention: the one thing necessary

One thing is needful, necessary. It is a famous closing line to one of the most remarkable chapters in the Gospel according to St. Luke. It belongs to the end of the story of Martha and Mary which bookends the Parable of the Good Samaritan. That parable shows us the radical meaning of the love of God and the love of neighbour. But the one thing necessary has to do with the qualities of attention. Building on our first Chapels, the challenge is about attending to creation in the very ways in which things are named and numbered, understood as one thing rather than another within an order.

Simone Weil, the remarkable 20th century philosopher and activist, observes that “prayer consists of attention,” and, indeed, attention of the highest order, namely, “the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God”. This complements the observation of the 16th century theologian Richard Hooker that prayer signifies “all the service that ever we do unto God”. For him, as for Simone Weil, the connection between learning and prayer was ever so obvious. They belong to our relation to God’s truth and goodness.

As teaching bringeth us to know that God is our supreme truth; so prayer testifieth that we acknowledge him our sovereign good.

There is no greater contrast than between ‘being distracted’ and ‘being collected’, being attentive, as it were. “The faculty of attention, directed toward God,” Simone Weil says, “is the very substance of prayer.” She connects this to studies because seeking to learn means a commitment to ‘truth’ in all of its various forms in accord with our varying capacities and situations. Yet no genuine effort of attention is ever wasted. “It always has its effect on the spiritual plane and in consequence on the lower one of the intelligence, for all spiritual light lightens the mind.” For “there is real desire when there is an effort of attention” even if “our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result.”

But attention is equally important in terms of the love of neighbour. “Not only does the love of God have attention for its substance,” she writes, “the love of neighbour, which we know to be the same love, is made of this same substance.” As she explains, “the capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle.” She recalls the medieval story of the Grail where the Grail – a reference to Christ’s Passion and Last Supper – belongs to the first comer who asks “what are you going through?” “The love of neighbour in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: ‘What are you going through?’” As Miranda in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest poignantly says “I have suffered with those that I saw suffer” in reference to the shipwreck that Prospero, her father, has conjured up.

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Chapel beginnings ( and endings)!

“In the beginning God … In the beginning was the Word.” These are two of the greatest opening lines in all literature; the one from the beginning of the Hebrew Book of Genesis, the other from the Prologue which marks the beginning of The Gospel according to St. John. For quite a few years, it has become a tradition at King’s-Edgehill School for the Head Boy and Head Girl (Spencer Johnson & Ava Shearer) to read Genesis 1.1-5 and John 1.1-5 at the first Chapel services of the School year. Why?

Because they are such powerful foundational and formative passages which place us within the spiritual understanding of education which speaks to the whole person. Thus they provide a ground of unity and purpose to all four pillars of the School in its educational philosophy: the academic, the artistic, the athletic, and the idea of service in leadership. These are not merely a list of things, like boxes to be checked off. They are all interrelated. What gives them a deeper sense of connection and unity of purpose is the spiritual experience of Chapel. It recalls us to the idea and reality of how we are all part of something greater than ourselves and to the idea of an education which constantly calls us out of ourselves.

There is something quite wonderful and quite challenging about the first Chapels. Each year we have a whole lot of new students, many of whom have never been in a sacred space and have never encountered religion – itself a challenging word – as something that is to be thought about as belonging to education. There is no subject or discipline in our schools which does not have in some way or another a connection to the religions of the world. The greater challenge, perhaps, lies in addressing the most prevalent misconception about religion in contemporary culture: the idea that religion is, first and foremost, a private or personal matter.

Chapel is not about an affirmation of the various and indeterminate forms of personal identity and/or personal faith or non-faith that are part of our current culture. Like education, religion cannot be coerced or forced. It is more a question about ideas and questions that cannot be ignored or denied; at best, my task is to offer and to point out the ways in which religious traditions in their richness and philosophical truth address questions about the world and about our humanity. It is all about the questions. Students and faculty come from all sorts of different ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and ideological backgrounds with a whole host of assumptions and opinions. Regardless of our claims to identity and personal faith, we all enter into the life of the School which is prior to us all. Chapel is simply an integral part of the history and life of the School, an integral part of the educational project and experience.

The School’s origins and history are Christian and Anglican. The Chapel service is not ‘non-denominational’ but neither is it something narrowly sectarian. A simplified version of Mattins or Morning Prayer, it belongs very much within the orbit of the forms of worship common to a great number of religious traditions both Christian and non-Christian: two hymns, a Scripture sentence, confession and absolution, the Lord’s Prayer, a Scripture reading, a homily, intercessory prayers, the School prayer, and a blessing. All pretty basic. My challenge is to speak out of the Christian understanding but with a view towards the forms of its connection and engagement with other religious and philosophical traditions regardless of the faith or non-faith claims of students and faculty.

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The end of the ending

The last of the last Chapels happened Monday and Tuesday for the Junior School and for Grade Tens. As with the conclusion of the parable of the Prodigal or Lost Sons last week, so, too, it seems fitting to conclude the Chapel programme with the reading of the story of the Good Samaritan, paying particular attention to the setting of this powerful teaching about the ethic of compassion.

It begins with a lawyer who seeks to put Jesus to the test; in short, to a situation of hostility and conflict. “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?”, he asks. Jesus turns the question back on him. “What is written in the law? How do you read?” I love this because it goes to an important feature of Chapel, the constant challenge about how to understand things in the face of hardships and difficulties. Ideas are set before us in the Scriptures and in relation to a host of other philosophical, theological, historical and literary considerations. At issue is how do we read? The lawyer is compelled – by truth itself it seems – to state what is sometimes known as ‘the Summary of the Law’: to love God with the whole of your being and your neighbour as yourself.

This unites passages from Deuteronomy and from Leviticus. It is an important ethical statement in itself that challenges us about ourselves in relation to one another and to God and the world. It belongs to what C.S. Lewis called “The Tao, what others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality,” the ethical way of thinking and living as found in the religions and philosophies of the world. It is, he says, “not one among a series of possible values. It is the sole source of all value judgments,” the principle upon which our ethical thinking and doing depend (The Abolition of Man).

Jesus commends the lawyer on the rightness of his answer but rightly bids him, “this do, and thou shalt live.” With knowledge comes responsibility. But then the lawyer “willing to justify himself,” asks in a cynical way, “and who is my neighbour?” This is to remove himself from any real sense of responsibility. This launches the parable of the Good Samaritan, though the term “good” is never used. We are meant to see ourselves in this parable and be convicted of our own neglect of one another, on the one hand, and be convinced of something greater, namely grace itself, on the other hand. “A certain man on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho,” symbols of the heavenly and the earthly city respectively, who “fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment,” leaving him wounded and half dead, is an image of our humanity wounded and broken. But we, too, are like the Priest and Levite, religious officers in the Jewish world, who see the one who is wounded and half dead but “pass by on the other side.” We are meant to convict ourselves of how we, too, at times have looked upon the distress of others and have simply passed by and done nothing.

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The beginning of the end

There is a certain intensity and a frisson of excitement about the last weeks of the School year. In Chapel this week we have had the penultimate services for the Junior School and the Grade Tens and the last Chapels for the Grade 11s and the Grade 12s. On Monday and Tuesday, we read the last part of the parable of the Prodigal Son and on Thursday and Friday, the story of the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Both are powerful stories that speak to an understanding of ourselves as individuals and as members of the human community but in intriguing and challenging ways.

The second half of Luke’s parable might equally be called the parable of the lost sons. It is not just the return of the younger son to the father but also the exchange between the elder son and the father. It is not just the one who goes into a far country who is lost and dead to the love of the father, it seems. We can be close at hand and yet be far removed from that same love. What remains remarkable in the parable is the father’s love which runs out to greet the returning younger son and also goes out to the elder son who is angry and hurt about the special treatment the younger son has received. Such is the destructive power of envy. The elder son can’t even acknowledge his brother as brother; he complains about “this son of yours”. It is his own brother!

This is sibling rivalry – a major theme in Genesis, for instance, that is about separation and animosity through resentment and the desire for exclusive attention. I often think about this in relation to graduation and prize day. Will you resent the accomplishments and awards of others or will you rejoice and be glad in what others have achieved? The first is destructive and harmful both to ourselves and to one another and to the community of which we are a part. Why? Because it is a refusal to see the good in others which is equally the good for us; a refusal of the good which unites us. “It was fitting,” the father says to the elder son, “to make merry and be glad for this your brother was dead and is alive, was lost and is found.” There is joy not only for the younger son in returning to the truth of his being in the father’s love which he had rejected; there is the joy of the whole community. This, too, is an important feature of the three related parables that Luke tells in chapter 15: the parable of the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost sons. It is not just rejoicing over the finding of the one lost sheep, the one lost coin, and the lost son; there is the rejoicing of the whole community which is not complete without them. We are part of something greater than ourselves. Will we be able to rejoice in that and find the good for ourselves?

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“Have you condemned a daughter of Israel without examination
and without learning the facts?”

The conclusion to the outstanding short story of Susanna and the elders read in the two senior Chapels this week following the May long weekend is dramatic and powerful. Daniel speaks up and identifies the problem: the arbitrary misuse and miscarriage of justice not only by the judges in their wickedness but by the assembly itself. The assembly has condemned Susanna simply on the authority of the judges without an examination of the case. Such is injustice and a betrayal of Israel itself in ignoring the Law.

This complements the famous ‘myth of Gyges’ in Plato’s Republic which launches the inquiry into the nature of justice. Instead of just one ring of invisibility, we are asked to imagine two rings, one in the possession of someone who is just and one who is unjust. Show us, Socrates, Glaucon asks, why justice is better than injustice in all cases. The idea of the ring of invisibility raises the perennial question: wouldn’t we all cheat and lie if we could get away with it? In other words, power without wisdom, without virtue, leads to injustice in the individual and in the community. “The state is the soul writ large” is Plato’s equally famous analogy.

The assembly allows Daniel to examine the judges who have falsely accused Susanna. The approach is classic. He separates them from each other and asks them under which tree did they see Susanna and the purported young man she was supposed to be with. There is a wonderful ironic wordplay in the Greek about the two trees, perhaps best rendered in English as a clove tree and a yew tree, suggesting the verbs ‘cutting’ or ‘cleaving’, and ‘sawing’ or ‘hewing’ apart. The point is that they are caught out in a lie and in so doing become subject to the very same penalty which they had wrongly sought to inflict upon Susanna. We might call it poetic justice. They have betrayed Israel and themselves in seeking to harm Susanna.

We might note, too, how the argument brings out the significance of empirical evidence in the way the wicked judges are caught out. This kind of tree, says the one; that kind of tree, says the other. The empirical – what belongs to sense perception – goes together with the rational. Their own words convict them.

The deeper ethical principle is that justice cannot be arbitrary. The deliberate misuse of justice for their immediate self-interest comes back upon them. They are caught in the web of their own deceit and evil. They have, as the text makes explicit, betrayed the idea of the love of neighbour which we learned about from the Book of Leviticus which goes together with the love of God.

We have read the conclusion to the story of Susanna in Ascensiontide. In the Christian understanding, the Ascension of Christ to the right hand of God the Father is the homecoming of the Son having accomplished all that belongs to human redemption. As the Fathers of the early church emphasize, this is “the exaltation of our humanity,” an image of the dignity and virtue of our humanity as found in God. The Ascension is not a flight from the world as if it were evil. It points us to the reconciliation of spirit and matter and reveals the greater truth of our humanity as found in communion with God.

Perhaps, just perhaps, the story of Susanna serves as a counter to our cynical despair about our institutions and political life. It recalls us to the principles that properly dignify and ennoble our lives, the principles that make us truly human.

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

The Lord heard her cry

In the Junior School Chapel and the Grade Ten Chapel this week we had the first part of the Parable of the Prodigal Son who, having wasted his inheritance, “came to himself” and remembers his father and the home which he had left to go into “a far country.” At Senior Chapel, we had the second installment of the story of Susanna and the Elders. At once powerful and disturbing, it, too, ends with a kind of awakening. Susanna’s cry to the Lord, we are told, was heard by the Lord. Just as she is being led off to be put to death on the strength of the false witness of the two wicked judges, Daniel is moved to protest, “I am innocent of the blood of this woman.” Pretty intense and quite telling. The judges accused her of what they themselves had intended. This story is part of the background to the Gospel story of the woman taken in adultery and to the problem of motives and hypocrisy. “Has no one condemned you,” Jesus said to the woman, “Neither do I, go and sin no more.” Here, however, Susanna is innocent.

But what was her cry? It is an insight into the nature of God who discerns what is secret, who is aware of all things, and thus knows that these men have borne false witness against her. The opening prayer of the liturgy of Holy Communion signals the same idea: “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.” This kind of ethical understanding belongs to the story, the idea that God sees all and everything, the idea of a principle of justice and truth that is greater than us and our evil.

We might be tempted to read the story through a feminist lens seeing it as essentially about the victimization of women by men. There is something to that approach, to be sure. After all, the beauty of Susanna is emphasized. The judges lust after her. In the trial, she is literally unveiled so that the wicked men “might feast upon her beauty.” One cannot ignore the “male gaze”, the way in which she is viewed as an object. It might also be said that a male, Daniel, is seen as coming to the rescue of the damsel in distress, as if Susanna is simply weak and helpless. But the story is more than this.

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Thou hypocrite

The readings in Chapel this week focus on an important ethical concern: the problem of hypocrisy which affects us all. The passage from Luke’s Sermon on the Plain contains the famous parable of “the blind learning the blind,” an account of hypocrisy. It means judging others while removing yourself from judgement. As Jesus says, we are quick to point out “the mote” – a mere speck of dust – in someone else’s eye while utterly oblivious of “the beam” – like a two-by-four – in our own eye.

The image of the blind leading the blind is by no means unique to Christianity. Siddhartha Gautama, for instance, uses the same image to criticise the Brahmin or priestly teaching caste of Hinduism. It belongs, in other words, to the emergence of Buddhism.

The passage from Luke is a strong reminder of the necessity of self-criticism and self-reflection as the counter to our judgmentalism and condemnation of others. The parable is told to highlight the need for mercy and compassion as distinct from judgement and condemnation. “Be ye merciful.” That belongs, as we saw last week, to the higher qualities of human character and life; it is God’s mercy at work in us. This draws us closer to one another as friends and equals rather than as enemies. The story from Luke is wonderfully complemented by the beginning of one of “the finest short stories in world literature” (New Annotated Oxford Bible with the Apocrypha, RSV), the story of Susanna and the Elders read in the Grade 11 and 12 Chapel services.

That story, too, is about the hypocrisy of those in leadership. From the outset, we are told that “iniquity came forth from Babylon, from elders who were judges, who were supposed to govern the people.” The whole story, so compactly and powerfully told, belongs to later additions to The Book of Daniel written in Greek sometime in the second or first century BC. It is simply told and yet there is a considerable degree of sophistication and depth to it. The two elders lust after the beautiful Susanna. They seek to seduce her by blackmailing her: give in to our lust or we will say that you were alone with a young man, caught in adultery, as it were. An obvious misuse of power, an abuse and a matter of utter hypocrisy, they are essentially accusing her of what they themselves intend. The famous story of the encounter between Jesus and the woman accused of adultery draws upon this story.

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Mercy seasons justice

The story of the raising of the only son of the widow of Nain and the raising of Lazarus provided the context for reflection this week on the Coronation of King Charles III and its significance with respect to the history and life of the School. How? Because these stories contribute to our understanding of the Resurrection as the opening out of essential life. They do so by showing us mercy and compassion in action.

“When the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her, and said to her, weep not.” It is a powerful and poignant scene. Out of that look of compassion comes the raising of the young man and his being restored to his mother. We are not left in misery and grief; in short, to endless weeping. “Blessed are those that mourn for they shall be comforted.” And Jesus weeps with Mary and Martha, deeply moved at the loss of their brother Lazarus. He bids the company to take away the stone and says, “Lazarus, come out.” Literally, these are ‘resuscitations’ but they belong to the thinking about the Resurrection as revealing the underlying principle of essential life.

In every case there is a transformation from grief and sorrow, from ignorance and uncertainty, from sin and death to joy and life. God is essential life. In these stories we see the motions of compassion and mercy which are greater than the limits of our hearts and minds. “Lazarus, come out” speaks to the nature of education. It is about being led out of the prisons or tombs of our minds. These stories provide us with a way to face the difficult things of our world and day. They are not about a flight from reality. They are about the possibilities of mercy and compassion alive in us in our lives with one another.

The Coronation of King Charles III marks a significant and symbolic moment in the history and life of the School. He is the tenth monarch in the history of the School and the first King named Charles in its history. The School was born out of the American Revolution in its rejection of the English monarchy and was founded by a loyalist bishop, Charles Inglis. At issue were competing ideas about the nature of sovereignty: republican or monarchical? The idea of sovereignty refers to the fundamental principle of authority with respect to our lives in political communities. In a Republic, the principle of ultimate authority is diffused among the members of the community. In a Monarchy, it is concentrated in the person of the Monarch and its family dynasty. But it is not absolute monarchy. It is constitutional monarchy for England and the countries of the Commonwealth world-wide.

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Behind closed doors

The 20th chapter of John’s Gospel begins with the story of Mary Magdalene and ends with the story of so-called ‘doubting’ Thomas. In the midst is Jesus. To what end? That our hearts and minds might be opened out to the greater life of God, to the possibility of acknowledging what the American writer and theologian Marilynne Robinson calls “the miraculous privilege of existence as a conscious being,” a wonderful phrase.

The tomb becomes the womb of new life in spite of our griefs and sorrows. “Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted;” the words of the Beatitudes take on a fuller meaning in these stories. Jesus appears behind the closed doors where the disciples are huddled in fear and uncertainty. He shows them his hands and his side and speaks of peace and forgiveness, and of a kind of knowing, faith, that says there is more though not less to reality than what can be seen and experienced. The two stories are a powerful reminder that we are essentially spiritual and intellectual beings in and through the limits of our knowing and experience. They are not everything but neither are they nothing.

The resurrection belongs to the idea of things metaphysical as the underlying principle of all life. It is a breakthrough of the understanding that frees us from the closed doors of our minds. We see this in both Mary Magdalene and Thomas. They are changed and set in motion but not through the negation of what belongs to themselves and the truth of their individuality. They do not become other than themselves but more fully themselves precisely through the awareness of their unknowing and confusion. This is the possibility of the greater transformation. It is neither a flight from reality nor a denial of creation. It is, to put it theologically, about the redemption of creation and of our humanity, individually and corporately.

In our post-Christian and post-secular world, religion is largely regarded, if regarded at all, as a matter of personal faith and identity, a matter of various agendas and interests. What, then, is the role of Chapel at the School? It cannot be the affirmation of personal faiths or non-faiths, or of the particular claims and assertions of identity for that would be impossible. Neither is Chapel about proselytizing, about forcing or coercing an agenda. It is really more about what we see in these stories: the encounter with ideas that may change us through our being opened to what is greater than ourselves whatever your interests and agendas. Education is about the exposure to ideas. What you do with them is another matter. In this sense, Chapel is simply part of education; the opening out of ideas.

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