Category: KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

Out of Egypt have I called my Son

Fuga in Aegyptum. The flight into Egypt of the Holy Family belongs to one of the most disturbing stories in the Scriptures, the slaughter of the Holy Innocents. That it should be part of the Christmas mystery and of the Epiphany, too, indicates the deeper meaning of God’s engagement with our humanity. “Out of Egypt have I called my Son”. It is a most challenging story.

The flight into Egypt belongs to the exodus, a going forth, the idea of a journey. It is part of the break-out from Bethlehem, not the journey to but the journey from Bethlehem. Like the Magi, it, too, is a journey of the understanding and as such needs to be pondered and weighed. It speaks to some of our current confusions and contradictions.

The flight into Egypt is emphatically not a flight from the world either in the manner of the technocratic adventures of the rich elite such as Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, or in the manner of a flight from the body, what Mary Harrington calls bio-libertarianism, an aspect of identity politics in our times.

Some argue that such elite space ventures pave the way for space travel for us all just as the airplane has transformed our sense of the world and ourselves; perhaps, but we can hardly overlook how modern travel comes with enormous costs environmentally, socially, and economically. Not all can afford to travel. It is impossible to think about the current COVID-19 pandemic apart from the increased forms of mobility in our global world, for instance. In terms of the flight from the body, it is enough to say that while we are biological and embodied beings, constrained to some extent or another by place and culture, we are not just that. We are more though not less than our embodied being. As such there are social constructs that belong to the varieties of expression about ourselves as persons. But it doesn’t mean that we are simply what we claim to be or think we are in our minds. The danger in all of these instances is that we reduce the world and our bodies to objects to be manipulated. It is a flight from reality.

The flight into Egypt is not a flight from the world but from the evil of the world in terms of the abuse and misuse of power itself. Herod seeks to annihilate a child-king whom he thinks is a potential rival to his throne. He embarks upon a policy of infanticide – such are the cruelties and the savagery of the overreach of authority – killing all the little ones “at Bethlem in his fury” as the carol, Puer Nobis Nascitur, puts it. The story is a retelling of the story in the Book of Exodus of Pharaoh, at once god and king in the Egyptian view, who initiated a policy of infanticide to control the Hebrews. Out of that comes the birth of Moses and the Exodus, the deliverance of Israel from slavery in Egypt. “Out of Egypt have I called my Son”. The Exodus is a journey of the understanding which locates human freedom in the Law of God. Israel is in this view not just freed from oppression but freed to a principle which articulates and embodies human dignity and freedom.

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They presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.

Epiphany marks the end of Christmas, in one way, and the further extension of its mystery and meaning, in another way. The word, epiphany, means manifestation. It signals the idea of what is made known to us. In the Christian understanding, Epiphany celebrates the making known of the essential divinity of Christ. It is made known through the humanity of Christ.

It is difficult to know which is harder to understand: the things of God or the things of our humanity? The Christian view is that both are bound up in each other; we cannot know God apart from our relation to one another and the world, and we cannot know ourselves, our world, and one another apart from God. Epiphany, meaning the feast which culminates the festival of Christmas, and the doctrine and season which it inaugurates, illuminates the dialectic of the human and the divine but with a focus on the divine attributes of Christ as made known through his humanity.

The Magi are the magoi, the wise ones from Anatolia, from the East as Matthew tells us. It is a strong reminder to the West of how much is owed to the East. As such something universal is opened to view. Classically speaking, Epiphany proclaims that Christ’s holy birth is omni populo, for all people, a point made, to be sure, in the Christmas readings but here more than amply and strongly emphasized in the coming and going of the wise men. The Magi, after all, are the proverbial ‘come-from-aways’ and in our rather disturbed times which manifests a certain amount of allophobia (fear of the other) and or xenophobia (fear of the stranger), a kind of misanthropy, their coming is a welcome antidote to our preoccupations and concerns about ourselves in relation to the omicron variant of COVID-19. How? Because Epiphany makes manifest what is for all regardless of times and places, regardless of circumstances and events, and despite our fears and anxieties about ‘others’. It opens us out to a deeper insight into human dignity and purpose universally considered.

It is found in worship of which the gifts of the Magi are themselves the stellar expression. Here are “sacred gifts of mystic meaning”, gifts which teach and signify the meaning of Christ as King, as God, and as, well, what else? That is the question about the gift of myrrh. Gold and frankincense are foretold and forementioned by Isaiah, but myrrh? What are we to make of that?

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Light in Darkness

The Advent Christmas Services of Lessons & Carols brought us to the end of the Michaelmas term in fine fashion and led us into the last few days of classes and the beginning of exams which are another way of concluding the term! I am most grateful for the enthusiasm, commitment, and seriousness with which readers, singers, instrumentalists, servers, and students conducted themselves.

The Junior School Advent Christmas Service has a rather special quality and feel to it. The Grade Six class under the direction of Mr. Kevin Simonar performed an intriguing and sweet version of ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ by Tom Race, a contrast to the more familiar tune by Gustav Holst. Anne MacQuarrie played a lovely version of ‘Angels We Have Heard on High’ on violin. The students who read in a dignified and serious way the scripture readings were Ruby Wheelock, Vincent Armstrong, Laila Violante Munoz, Dami Adeniji, Sofia Ning, Drew Zettler, and Will Larder. The eighth lesson was read by Mrs. Taya Shield, the Director of the Junior School. Hand candles were lit for the ninth lesson, sung by the Chaplain, and for the singing of ‘Silent Night’. The servers were the wonderful cadre of Jacob Fines-Belcham, Kelsey Griffith, Ryan MacDougall, and Dulce Upton. The service ended with Mr. Pat LePoidevin and Chaz Faucher playing ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ on bagpipes and leading the Junior School and Faculty out of the Chapel. A memorable event. Many thanks to Mr. Kevin Lakes for his help and assistance.

On Sunday night, the Grade 12s had their special Advent Christmas Service of Lessons & Carols, special because it is the last such service for them in their time at King’s-Edgehill School. Emma Toupe and the Choir, under the direction of Stephanie Fillman, contributed to the Matins’ Responsory of Palestrina which bracketed the entire service. The Choir played a leading role in the singing of the Carols and, especially,  in the verses of the Veni Emmanuel which were interspersed among the readings. The Choir members were Maya Faucher, Lucy Goddard, Emma Toope, Dakota Bagshaw, Lennon Rutledge, Evey Kennedy, Jessica Etou, Hannah Stillwell and Gabby Strickey.

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A Pageant of Chapels

The last Chapel services this term are three Advent Christmas Services of Lessons & Carols. They are a pageant of word and song, of music and light, coming to us in the darkness of the year both literally and metaphorically. In a way, the Services of Nine Lessons and Carols sum up the intellectual and spiritual journey of Chapel this term.

It is impossible to imagine the impact of this service when it was originally devised for Advent in 1918 at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. “The war to end all wars” was finally over but the sombre realities of the immensity of the destruction and devastation of the First World War were only beginning to be felt. T.S. Eliot’s celebrated poem, The Waste Land (1922), captured something of the ambiguities of modernity and the sense of the catastrophic collapse of European civilization. All that remained were “fragments that I have shored up against my ruin”, he says, having observed by way of Dante’s vision of the vestibule of Hell, that “I had not thought death had undone so many”. The Advent service of Nine Lessons and Carols undertook to speak to this sense of overwhelming loss and sorrow.

The readings and the carols proclaim hope and peace. They form a tableaux of scriptural revelation and weave a tapestry of spiritual understanding but perhaps the stronger metaphor is that of a pageant of word and song in which we are not simply spectators but actors engaged with what is being heard and said. The readings offer hope and peace to a fearful and dark world of uncertainty and despair.

The first lesson from Genesis 3 highlights the four questions of God to our wayward humanity but ends on the note of the proto-evangelium, the idea of the overcoming of sin and evil through the seed of the new Eve, Mary, later understood by Christians to refer to Christ. Yet the emphasis is on the questions of God which call us all to account. “What hast thou done?” The question reverberates down through the ages and speaks to human conscience then and now. The second lesson, also from Genesis, offers the promise of God which, through the seed of Abraham, grants a blessing for the nations of the earth. The context, alluded to in the reading, is Abraham’s intended sacrifice of Isaac preempted by God providing himself the sacrifice. (For Islam the story will be reimaged as the intended sacrifice of Ishmael.) But the idea of a universal blessing for all humanity is particularly moving and reminds us of the significant connections between religious and spiritual cultures in and through their differences.

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Law is freedom

The Ten Commandments read in Chapel this week present in a concise and clear way the universal moral code of our humanity and mark the climax of the Exodus, itself a journey of ethical education. They are the core teachings that underlie a multitude of laws and regulations that arise over time in various situations and circumstances. In this sense, the idea of the Law differs from regulations which bind and limit. The Law in contrast liberates. Regulations belong and apply to local conditions and are arbitrary and alterable, cultural and relative to context. The Law, on the other hand, transcends the cultural, ethnic, and linguistic, to speak to matters which are in principle universal.

Our reflection on the Ten Commandments follows logically upon the Revelation of God as “I AM WHO I AM” to Moses out of the burning bush and complements the idea of the interaction between the different forms of our knowing. Revelation engages our minds. Thus the Ten Commandments are grounded in the metaphysical revelation of God as the principle prior to all forms of knowing and being. They move us from that idea of God to the making known of the will of God for our humanity. They are revelation but they are equally a complete system of ethical thinking. They begin with the “I AM WHO I AM” who leads us out of what constrains and limits our humanity.

“I am the Lord thy God who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage”. This is the preface to the giving of the Ten Commandments which are not numbered per se in the text (there are two different traditions about the way they are numbered – more about that later). “I am the Lord thy God” is a circumlocution for saying in effect, “I am the I AM WHO I AM, thy God”. This follows upon the story of the burning bush where God says to Moses say to the people of Israel “I AM has sent me to you”. And why? Because God has seen the affliction of his people and undertakes their deliverance, in this case from Egyptian slavery.

Even more, the Ten Commandments are about a greater liberation that counters the limits of cultural relativism which denies any abiding truth to any law – all laws become merely regulations, arbitrary and alterable and as such subject to the misuse and abuse of power. The Law is not only liberation from what limits and enslaves but a liberation to a principle in which our humanity finds its truest expression, its dignity and freedom. With the Ten Commandments, the ideas of freedom and dignity have real content and are not merely slogans bandied about under the guise of coercion and social conformity.

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I am who I am

Does God exist? How do we know and how do we think about this question, if we even think about it at all? The story of the burning bush, read this week in Chapel, sets before us a profound image of Revelation. The bush is burning and yet is not consumed; out of it God speaks to Moses. It belongs to the ways in which things are made known to us, even things that go beyond human thinking and yet engage our minds.

An arresting scene, it gets Moses’ attention and, perhaps, ours, too, but it belongs to an understanding that is part of our world. Here the Judeo-Christian and Islamic understanding is at one with modern ‘science’ in denying the divinity of the natural world, despite the viewpoint of the English Romantics, though even Wordswoth admitted that “The world is too much with us; late and soon, /Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; – /Little we see in Nature that is ours; /We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!” Yet this was but a way of returning to nature as divine as something lost in the rationalism of the enlightenment and in the later material progress of the 19th century. It has its counterparts in various moments in the environmental movement, caught in the conflict between humanity and nature.

The story of the burning bush, burnt but not consumed or destroyed, is an image of Revelation, the idea of things made known to us which are not the constructs of our minds but which engage our minds. A bush that burns but is not consumed is not natural. Exactly. It is about what is beyond nature as that upon which the natural itself depends both for its being and its intelligibility. And yet communicated to us through the medium of the natural. In that way, it is sacramental.

Things are made known to us in various ways. The idea of Revelation does not override and contradict other ways of knowing; rather, it complements them and gathers them into the underlying premise of all our knowing. We can’t know without the assumption that things are knowable and that turns upon an intellectual principle. It is articulated here in the Moses story from Exodus.

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They desire a better country

The sacred remembering of All Saints and All Souls carries over into the secular observances of Remembrance Day. Students of the School have already been a part of the national programme of The Eleven Days of Remembrance. In Chapel this week, readings from John’s Gospel and from the Letter to the Hebrews bid us reflect more deeply upon the nature of our commitments and sacrifices for one another.

“Greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends.” A powerful phrase, it adorns a thousand cenotaphs across the world. “They desire a better country” complements it. It is the motto for the Order of Canada, just one example of the obvious, namely, the way in which Scripture informs culture and shapes the secular imaginary. It suggests the sense of the incompleteness of our humanity in itself and the need for an openness to what perfects and completes our humanity.

Friendship is a most powerful concept and idea and it may seem paradoxical to invoke the concept of friendship in the context of Remembrance Day. Yet it belongs very much to the experience of war in the way of being together and supporting one another. One of the deep pains and sorrows of war veterans is the loss of comrades, those with whom they fought and who died while they survived. They remember their friends with a special intensity and sometimes with a sense of guilt. They survived while others didn’t.

Friendship is a long standing theme in the literary and philosophical traditions. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, it is the friendship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu that contributes to the making of Gilgamesh as a hero, changing him from being a bad king, exploiting his people for his own interest, by making him aware of others. Enkidu is created to be his equal, his second self, a friend. The profound significance of this most ancient story is that through friendship we learn about the other in terms of respect, not dominance. And in that epic, Gilgamesh is profoundly moved by the death of his friend, Enkidu. It launches him upon the greatest journey, the quest for wisdom, for understanding and meaning. He confronts his own mortality in the death of Enkidu.

It marks the beginning of a long tradition about the power and nature of friendship as essential to what it means to be human. In the Jewish Scriptures, there is the tremendous story of the friendship of David and Jonathan. In the Iliad, there is the friendship of Achilleus and Patroclus, and so on. Philosophically, there is the idea of our friendship with the Good in our intellectual strivings captured in the ethical treatises of Plato and Aristotle, of Cicero and Aelred of Rievaulx, to name but a few. Aelred in the early 12th century goes so far as to articulate the radical idea that “God is friendship”, an remarkable adaptation of the idea that “God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him”, abiding in friendship and love. The reading from John’s Gospel is actually about our incorporation into the divine love which shapes our human loves, our  friendship with one another through the divine friendship.

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The Grey Month of our Remembering

“Golden October declin[es] into sombre November”, T.S. Eliot suggests in ‘Murder in the Cathedral’. Yet the Beatitudes of the Gospel of All Saints’ Day open us out to a profound form of thinking about the radical nature of human freedom and human nature. It is central to the Christian idea of the Communion of Saints which embraces the whole of humanity in the vision of its unity and perfection, a vision which is universal. “The great multitude whom no one could number” are those “who have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb”, an image of redemption that challenges and counters the various dystopias of our times.

The point is fairly simple: we are not defined simply by the things that happen to us in the ups and downs of human life, let alone the fickleness and chaos of human experience and the human heart. This is nothing new, of course, but how we think and face them is another matter. That is where the Beatitudes come so strongly to the fore. It is not just that they turn the world upon its head, which they do, but that they speak to the more radical idea of the perfection and redemption of our desires. In that sense, it is about a sense of homecoming, a sense of belonging that recalls us to who we are. The Greek word for truth is aletheia which literally means an unforgetting, in short, a remembering, albeit one which happens in and through the awareness of our forgetting. We forget who we are in the sight of God and that carries over into our forgetting of the nature of our companionship and communion with one another.

All Saints in both its sacred and secular forms is about a kind of homecoming of the spirit in which we rediscover the necessity and the significance of our commitments to one another. It is really all about the realization that we are part of a community that is far greater than we are. It is really all about the realization that we are more though not less than our bodies and worldly experiences. To recall who we are in the sight of God is to grasp the principle of freedom and purpose in our lives as agents, but only within the greater agency of God.

For that is the point about All Saints and All Souls. We are part of a community far greater than ourselves, a company no one could number, as John the Divine puts it in his marvelous vision of what we seek and to which we belong. Learning to act out of the vision of the Communion of Saints means being attentive to the primacy of the ethical, to the idea of the Good and the struggle to let that live and move in us. One of the great lessons of the Beatitudes has to do with the strength of inwardness that they highlight over and against outward things, the things that belong to circumstance, the things that happen to us. The Beatitudes highlight the fact that these spiritual qualities of soul are what define us rather than the events of our world and day.

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Scattered leaves … that time of year

It is, as Shakespeare puts it, “that time of year … when yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang/ upon those boughs which shake against the cold,/ bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang” (Sonnet 73), the time of scattered leaves. More than an observation about the passing seasons of the natural world, the images are about ourselves in the passage of time. We behold in ourselves “that time of year”, seeing in ourselves “the twilight of such day as after sunset fadeth in the west”, seeing in ourselves “the glowing of such fire that on the ashes of his youth doth lie.” The dying of nature’s year reminds us of human mortality but also about growing in maturity of understanding and love. Perceiving such changes in ourselves, the poet suggests, “makes thy love more strong, to love that well which thou must leave ere long.”

The sonnet sounds a sombre yet reflective note that befits the spiritual meditations belonging to the end of October and the beginning of November with the Feast of All Saints in the Christian understanding. Halloween is the Eve of All Hallows. The saints are the holy ones not by their own presumption but as seen by God. All Saints’ signals the vocation of our humanity. It reminds us of the corporate nature of our lives together in communion with God and with one another. Such is the Communion of Saints.

We are neither cosmic orphans adrift in an indifferent universe, nor isolated individuals separated and apart from one another, alone in our aloneness. We are citizens of an heavenly city, “a great multitude, which no one could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues” united in the praise of God as Revelation envisions. This counters the loneliness and fearfulness that defines our current world.

Thus in the season of scattered leaves and in the culture of scattered souls, there is a gathering, a spiritual gathering. Dante, drawing upon the imagery of Vergil’s Aeneid, thinks about that gathering as the scattered leaves of ancient Sybil’s oracles being bound by love “into one volume”. Belit-Sheri’s “book of the dead” in Enkidu’s dream vision of the Sumerian underworld in The Epic of Gilgamesh has been transformed into the book of life inscribing the whole of our humanity. All Saints’ is a profound remembering of who we are and what we are called to be in the sight of God.

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God questions

There are questions and there are questions, different kinds of questions. There are questions about God but more significantly there are the questions of God. The grand narrative of the Fall, as we have seen, is about our questions of deceit and denial in contrast to God’s questions that call us to truth and awaken us to understanding. Thus the questions of God actually teach us a lot about the idea of God and about the nature of learning.

This week in Chapel we have had a barrage of questions, first, in the classic and foundational story of Cain and Abel, and, secondly, in the powerful questions of God to Job (and to us) in The Book of Job. The questions of God open us out to wisdom and understanding about creation and about ourselves.

It is always a bit of fun with the Junior School Chapel to ask students and faculty if they have any brothers and sisters and then to ask them if they have ever said to their brother or sister (and with a certain intensity), ‘I hate you!’ or ‘I’ll kill you!’ A fair number are honest enough in their response! The point is that we are all in the story of Cain and Abel, the story of the first murder, at least in terms of our thoughts and words. We hope not in terms of our deeds!

The story is part of the fall-out from the Fall and belongs to the transition from the purely mythological and poetical to the beginnings of something like history and civilization. Abel is a keeper of sheep and Cain a tiller of the ground. There is just a hint of criticism about our assumptions in our mastery of nature by way of agriculture over and against the more nomadic qualities of shepherding. At issue, perhaps, is a deeper sense of dependence upon God as opposed to the illusions of our control and management that contribute to exploitation, violence, and abuse. The image of keeping the sheep is the classical image of care and in a way that is transcultural. Genesis, along with much else in the Hebrew Scriptures, is quite sceptical of human presumption.

It is not by accident that the overarching icon in the Chapel is the image of Christ the Good Shepherd whose care is sacrificial love. In the story of Cain and Abel, there are, as with the story of the Fall, five questions of which four are God’s and one is Cain’s. His question echoes the same kind of question of denial as the serpent’s question, “Did God say?” God asks Cain, “why are you angry?” and “why has your countenance fallen?” and challenges him about the necessary control of his emotions, the need to master our desires.The division between our knowing and our willing is often so deadly and destructive. We so easily take offense at a perceived slight or sense of being ignored and lash out in anger sometimes because of envy and jealousy.

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