Category: KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

I ascend to my Father and your Father

Homecoming is a powerful theme which has a certain resonance for us in the face of the current forms of ‘The Age of Anxiety’, to use W. H. Auden’s phrase (and title) in which we find ourselves. We are coming in one way or another to the end of the School year, a year marked by all manner of ups and downs that have required considerable flexibility and agility and much patience and forbearance for everyone connected to King’s-Edgehill School. There is much for which to be quietly and prayerfully thankful, much that has to do with commitment and working together. The headmaster, administration, staff and faculty and especially the students are rightly to be commended. Let us press on in the same spirit right to the end, whatever that end looks like!

The idea of homecoming is an ancient theme that reverberates down throughout the ages. It informs, for instance, the logic of Homer’s Odyssey, the story of his return from Troy to Ithaca by way of the idea of learning through suffering that such a journey entails. One of the graphic and telling illustrations of that theme is the story of Menelaus wrestling with Proteus (ToK students will no doubt recall this, whether fondly or not, I forebear to say!). At issue is the idea of homecoming in terms of truth and self-knowledge, of knowing where you belong in the order of things, the so-called cosmos. One of the telling features of that endeavour is the idea of a struggle to get to the underlying reality of things rather than being simply stranded on the surface appearance of things. Proteus is described as “the ever-truthful old man of the sea” but to get to him and the truth which he holds is a struggle. It doesn’t come easily. You have to work for it. You literally have to hold on in and through the changing circumstances and appearances of things until the truth presents itself to the questing mind. In this case, after changing in and through a whirlwind of natural forms, Proteus is only and truly himself when he finally speaks. It is an intriguing concept which goes to the idea of logos, word as reason, which concerns both the world and ourselves in it.

What he has to say concerns what is missing in Menelaus’ homeward journey, namely a respect for the various principles that govern the world. So too with us. Without an understanding and an honouring of the various components that make up the phenomenal world, we ourselves remain incomplete and homeless, bereft of the place of our belonging, at lost in our world of uncertainties. Yet home is where we belong in some sense, the place of our abiding in truth and in the truth of ourselves. It is a powerful image not so much about our uncertainties but about our awareness of our uncertainties which paradoxically give us a sense of certainty. Our unknowing is not without our knowing (and vice versa).

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When you pray, say Our Father

It is known as the Lord’s Prayer at once distinctively Christian and yet profoundly connected to the thinking that is the essence of all prayer. “Prayer signifies all the service that ever we do unto God,” as the theologian Richard Hooker puts it. It signifies an orientation, an outlook and an attitude, a perspective that is unitive and comprehensive. It is about our participation in the essential life of God. As Origen, the great 3rd century theologian of Alexandria observes, “the whole of our life says Our Father.” Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, suggests that all prayer is about “letting Jesus pray in us.” The essential life of God in us is prayer.

We say this prayer at every Chapel service. It is, in that sense, a familiar prayer, even in a post-Christian age, but like so many things that are familiar their real significance is often overlooked. Why the Lord’s Prayer? Because it is the prayer which Jesus himself gives us to pray: “When you pray, say Our Father”. This reminds us of Jesus’ words to Mary, “I ascend to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God,” essentially quoting Ruth. As Aquinas says “God himself taught us this prayer,” thus establishing the connection between God and Christ, and arguing that this prayer is “the most perfect” and “the most preeminent” of all prayers, the prayer that underlies and informs all prayer. Simone Weil, the 20th century philosopher of attention, builds on this concept. She notes that “the Our Father contains all possible petitions; we cannot conceive of any prayer which is not already contained in it. It is to prayer what Christ is to humanity. It is impossible to say it once through, giving the fullest possible attention to each word, without a change … taking place in the soul.”

Origen, Augustine, and Aquinas, to name but a few, all note the special character of the Lord’s Prayer in terms of its structure and its unique form of address. We do not find in the Jewish or Hebrew Scriptures the practice of praying to God as Father. “Nowhere is there found a precept for the people of Israel,” Augustine states, “that they should say ‘Our Father,’ or that they should pray to God as a Father, but as Lord He was made known to them.” Few indeed are the references in the Hebrew Scriptures to God as Father and even fewer, to God as Mother. Such terms are metaphors for our relation to God.

Lancelot Andrewes, a 17th century Anglican preacher and theologian, offers a helpful explanation. The Lord’s Prayer begins with “a Father, not a Lord/ One being a name of love./ The other of dignity … One being, a name of Goodness, Comfortable … the other of Power, Terrible” (in the sense of awe and wonder) and grounds its daring use in Christ’s command to us. His Father is Our Father. A powerful and poignant intimacy.

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Your people shall be my people, and your God my God

Ruth’s magnificent words to Naomi reverberate down through the ages and are echoed in Christ’s words to Mary Magdalene in the stories of the Resurrection. They speak to a deeper sense of our humanity and to the ways in which we are connected to one another, especially in these times when we seem most isolated, more disconnected, and, perhaps, more fearful. It has been an unusual week and in some ways unprecedented.

The latest upsurge in Covid-19 contagions in Nova Scotia has resulted in a two-week lockdown but as a boarding school we have to find ways to carry on carefully and responsibly which is what we are endeavouring to do. There is a life-lesson in all of this. It is altogether about how we face difficult and challenging things which conflict with our expectations, desires, and demands. It means discovering an inner strength and life rather than being defined by events and circumstances over which you have no control.

We have heard the mantra that we are all in this together which has at once the truth and the meaninglessness of a cliché. How things play out vary considerably from one person, one family, one institution, and another, illustrated most clearly in the arbitrary nature of restrictions and permissions. Yet that becomes the territory in which we reclaim responsibility and exercise a proper sense of compassion. It means looking inwards in order to look outwards.

Mary Magdalene comes to the empty tomb expecting a corpse. She comes in grief and sorrow. What she encounters is what she is not expecting. She even mistakes Jesus for a gardener! There is a wonderful irony in her mistake. For the Resurrection is in the garden, as it were, and recalls us to Paradise, to creation itself, and thus to the new creation which is the Resurrection. It may be that she “comes to the garden alone,” as the old hymn puts it, but she is set in motion to the others by Jesus. Her sorrow is turned into joy. She is set in motion, literally sent on a mission. “Go and tell my brethren, I ascend to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” She is apostle apostolorum, an apostle to the Apostles, as the early Fathers of the Church note with a sense of wonder. His words take up Ruth’s words to Naomi about going with her to Bethlehem, to her people and to her God. It offers one of the senses of the universality of our humanity that the Scriptures present. “Your people shall be my people, and your God my God” (Ruth 1.16, 17). Wonderful words. The Book of Ruth is a little book tucked in between Judges and 1st Samuel in the ordering of texts in the Christian traditions of the Greek Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate and by extension into the vernacular translations.  Its reflective tone and feel contrasts with the stories of war and conflict.

Human individuality does not mean isolation and separation. It means instead a deeper sense of our connection and care for one another. Perhaps we learn that best in trying circumstances and in the paradoxes of our time where being apart from one another is the necessity for our being together. The challenge is to discover the greater bonds that connect us to one another rather than being opposed and fearful about one another. Being an individual, after all, is not about being an idiot. We can only be truly individuals through our commitment to the forms of common life in a community.

Such is the real meaning of a school. It is a community of learning where respect for ideas and truth are held sacred. That is the point and purpose of Chapel even at a time when we are not able to be together physically. We are together spiritually.

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

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I lay down my life for the sheep

It is a familiar image and one which has entered into contemporary culture in its claims about care and compassion, yet the image of Christ the Good Shepherd is not only taken for granted but often greatly misunderstood. It is not about comfort and coziness as if God is a teddy bear. It is about the far more radical teaching of the Passion and the Resurrection. We forget this in our folly and at our peril.

A year ago, only the Headmaster and I were here for Zoom Chapel, as it were, in the early stages of the Covid-19 lockdown. Like everyone else in Nova Scotia we were in “the valley of the shadow of death” owing to the mad rampage of evil in Portapique that resulted in the worst mass shooting in Canada’s history. The question in Chapel over the last several weeks has been “how do we face dark and difficult things like suffering and death, like sin and evil”? Then and now. And that is very much about how we face ourselves and one another.

The image of Christ the Good Shepherd is located within a tradition of reflection in the Jewish Scriptures and in the cultures of the Middle East, as we now term them, but also connects to a philosophical tradition about the ethical. In a way, the image has become for us quite paradoxical. The paradox is that the image of the good shepherd is comforting only because it is challenging. It opens out to us the essential life of God which is greater than all sin and evil, greater than all suffering and death. Such is the Passion and the Resurrection.

Care and compassion easily become the kindness that kills which is the very opposite of what Psalm 23 teaches and what Christ means by identifying himself as the good shepherd. The image is about sacrificial love, the love which gives of itself and is never exhausted. In relation to the image, we are not merely passive beings. The image challenges us about what moves in our hearts and minds in relation to our commitments and responsibilities towards one another. It is in that sense profoundly ethical.

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Touch me not … Touch and see

The twentieth chapter of John’s Gospel contributes greatly to our understanding and thinking about the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. It complements the idea of the interplay between ontology and epistemology that we talked about last week in the story of the Road to Emmaus. We learn about the reality of essential life through words and deeds, through different forms of knowing. That, too, is highlighted in this remarkable chapter.

The first part of the chapter is read as the Gospel on Easter Day and continues on the Evening of Easter Day; then the story of the Risen Christ appearing to the disciples (minus Thomas) behind closed doors is read on the following Sunday, the Octave Day of Easter, with the scene of his appearing again behind closed doors to the disciples (now with ‘doubting’ Thomas) read on the Evening of the Octave Day of Easter.

How do we deal with disappointment, with sorrow and loss, with fears and anxieties, with suffering and death? This is especially important in a week that concerns the death of Prince Philip, The Duke of Edinburgh, as well as a former chaplain, Rev’d James Small, and, very sadly, Josh Baker (Class of 2013). Do we run away like the disciples on the Road to Emmaus? Do we go and hide in the bathroom? Or do we face things honestly and thoughtfully? This chapter speaks precisely to such concerns and in ways that belong to the educational project of the School. In Chapel on Monday and Tuesday, we heard part of the beginning of Chapter Twenty. It is the powerful and, dare I say, ‘touching’ story of Mary Magdalene coming in her early morning grief and sorrow to the tomb of Christ a second time. On Thursday and Friday, we read the second half of the Chapter about Jesus appearing twice to the disciples huddled in fear behind closed doors. In the first part, Jesus tells Mary Magdalene, noli me tangere, touch me not. In the second part, Jesus shows the disciples his hands and his sides and later tells Thomas to touch and to see and believe. Don’t touch and then touch! Two completely contrary commands in the same chapter.

In both cases we are being made aware of the Resurrection as belonging to the being of things, to reality. It is all about essential life, the essential life of God which is the principle of all life. Such is ontology, our knowing about being. But we come to that in different ways each accord to the capacity of the knower to know, we might say with Augustine; in short, by various forms of epistemology, the different ways of knowing

There are things that are known to us through the operation of our minds independent of things outside our minds which becomes known as rationalism. But there are things that are made known to us through our sense perception of the world which is empiricism. It is not simply a matter of one over and against the other but a matter of recognising both ways of knowing as belonging to our grasp, albeit in a glass darkly, of reality.

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Then opened he their understanding

The simple truth is that the accounts of the Passion of Christ in the four Gospels could only have  been written in the light of the Resurrection. Sorrow and joy are not simply opposites. Each intensifies the other: the sorrows of the Passion intensify the joys of the Resurrection and vice versa. Passion and Resurrection go together. Yet this Christian understanding belongs to the great ethical teachings of other religions and philosophies in making known the idea of essential life which is greater than suffering and death. Life is greater than death. Thus Easter challenges our culture of death and fear. The Easter message is about the triumph of life over death and the counter to fear. “Be not afraid.” This has a certain resonance in our own fearful times.

Having immersed ourselves in the sorrows of the Passion we now immerse ourselves in the wonders and joys of the Resurrection. What we are given to see is particularly profound and speaks to an important aspect of education. The accounts of the Resurrection are really about the process of understanding. They present to us a certain critique of reason and open us out to a larger understanding of reality. They show us the necessary interplay between ontology and epistemology, between thinking about being (reality), and thinking about thinking, about our various ways of knowing.

Mary Magdalene and the other women come to the tomb expecting a body only to find the empty tomb. This marks the first moment of the beginnings of a change. The women are told by a young man – an angel – that the one whom they seek, “Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified,” is not here. “He is risen. Behold the place where they laid him.” In our cynical world of conspiracy theories and false truths, we might assume that this must lead to the fabrication of a tale. But the evidence of absence is not the same thing as the absence of evidence. The Resurrection accounts all turn on the presence of God, of the life and light that is greater than death and darkness. That is what is “made known” through the encounters with Christ, encounters which open our understanding.

The phrase is Luke’s and belongs to his extraordinary accounts of the making known of the idea of the Resurrection especially in the wonderful story of the Road to Emmaus. Two broken-hearted disciples are fleeing from Jerusalem, perplexed and confused about the events of the Crucifixion. Jesus runs out after them, as it were, but “their eyes were holden,” as Luke puts it. After all, they had no expectation of seeing him having seen him die on the Cross. But the amazing thing about this scene is how Jesus draws out of them their confusion and perplexity. Only then does he provide them with a way of understanding which is based entirely on a way of reading the Jewish Scriptures about the sufferings of Christ. Here Jesus speaks in third person narrative about himself. He teaches by providing them with a way of understanding. In this case, a way of understanding texts, things written.

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And the Lord turned, and looked upon Peter

There is an incredible intensity to this week which in the churches of the Western Christian world is known as Holy Week. It is the intensity of the Passion of Christ. We immerse ourselves in the Passion. Why? To confront the painful reality of our own unknowing of ourselves and to discover the radical meaning of the ethical idea of sacrificial service.

A feature of the Anglican liturgical tradition is the reading of the Passion from all four of the Gospels beginning on Palm Sunday with Matthew’s account, and followed by Mark on Monday and Tuesday, Luke on Wednesday and Maundy Thursday, and John on Good Friday. Each of the Gospels offers not only a different perspective but a different voice, a different focus or emphasis that together contribute to the mystery of human redemption but only if we are willing to confront the contradictions in our souls and our world. Such is the challenge. We are meant to be the community of the broken-hearted precisely through the awareness of how we are in these stories. We find ourselves in the crowd that swirls around Christ. Quite literally, we are those who cry “Hosanna to the King” and then immediately turn around and shout, “Crucify, Crucify”. Such is a graphic illustration on the fickle and contradictory nature of our humanity in disarray.

There is a remarkable power to the accounts of the Passion. We look upon him whom we have pierced so that we might be pierced with sorrow is the theological point. But we also hear Christ from the Cross in what becomes the tradition of the Seven Last Words. Matthew and Mark give us what has become known as the Fourth Word of the Cross – the cry of desolation, the cry of the God-forsaken. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me.” Christ gives voice to the radical meaning of all sin. Sin is how we deny and forsake the reality of God in our parody of God. We presume to be God which we are not. God wills in Christ to place himself in our hands. Crucifixion is what we do in our parody of God. But God makes something greater out of our parody of his way through the pageant of his Passion. Such is Resurrection.

Luke gives us the first, second, and seventh Words of the Crucified, John the third, fifth, and the sixth. Luke’s words frame the whole pattern of devotion on the Seven Last Words, a devotional tradition that has shaped the imaginary of modern Protestant and Catholic churches. The practice of preaching on the Seven Last Words of Christ actually originated in the Americas, in Lima, Peru, just after a devastating series of earthquakes in 1678 and 1687. Devised by the Jesuit missionary, Fr. Alonso Messia Bedoya, the devotion inspired eighteenth century composers such as Haydn.

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“What do you want?”

Between Jesus’s statement about going up to Jerusalem and the story of the blind man sitting by the wayside and calling out for mercy, which we heard from Luke several weeks ago near the beginning of Lent, is this story from Matthew about a mother and her two sons coming to Jesus “desiring a certain thing of him.” It is an intriguing and compelling scene and one which speaks directly to the assumptions of our own culture about education and success. Parents and children are in this story precisely in terms of what we think we want for ourselves and for our children.

Jesus draws out of the mother of Zebedee’s children what she wants. What she says reveals what many parents seek for their children, essentially places of privilege, prestige, and prominence. We want our children to get ahead in the world. What that means is getting ahead of others. Putting ourselves ahead of others means putting others down. What is good for us is at the expense of others. It is an old story and yet a present reality manifest in the ways in which parents scheme and plan to influence and manipulate universities and schools to give special consideration to their children; witness the university admissions scandals in the States. Augustine’s parents, too, saw education, as he says, as means to get ahead in the world. He came to think differently.

Jesus asks the mother what she wants but then turns to the sons themselves. What your parents might want for you may not be what you want. Their ambition for your life and future is one thing and may say more about their own ambitions and dreams. The problem is that it is your life and future. What do you want? That may not be the same thing as what your parents want for you. Their hopes and dreams, however well intentioned, may not be your hopes and dreams. And there is the further problem about our own uncertainties. Do we really know what we want? This is the significance of Jesus’s statement to the mother: “Ye know not what ye ask.” We think we know what is best for ourselves and one another but we don’t. He means, I think, that we have not properly examined our thoughts and our desires. He is questioning the idea of gaining advantage over others. The idea of getting ahead implies the domination over others, of putting others down in order for oneself to get ahead. It assumes a dog-eat-dog kind of world, a world of endless competition, a world of conflict and division.

This Gospel story, read in the context of Passiontide, challenges that outlook. In the encounter with her sons, Jesus refers to his Passion and to our participation in its meaning in terms of “drinking the cup that I shall drink of” and being “baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with”. That idea of suffering contrasts with privilege and prestige. This is the point of the reading. We are being taught and shown the idea of service as grounded in sacrifice, the idea of living not simply for ourselves at the expense of one another but of living for and with one another. It counters all of our assumptions about trying to get ahead of others.

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“Even the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table”

Long before there was the felt need for International Women’s Day in our ever expanding advocacy culture, there was this story. It is the story of the Canaanite or Syro-Phoencian woman. It is the story of a very remarkable and strong woman and yet a most disturbing and troubling story. Crises bring out the best and the worst in people, it is sometimes said, but it is not ‘either/or’ so much as ‘both/and’. Sometimes the best and the worst are on display whether or not in equal measure is another matter.

This remarkable and strong woman is not an Israelite, that is to say, she is from outside of Israel, a non-Jew. And yet she shows what it means to be a true Israelite indeed, namely, one who wrestles or strives with God. Just so Jacob was renamed Israel. Part of what makes the exchange between this woman and Jesus so compelling is that it is really a form of self-criticism, a feature of the intellectual and ethical teachings of the religions and philosophies of the world. The story involves a critique of Israel and by extension to all and any who think that truth is something which they possess to the exclusion of others; in short, a denial of its universality. The modern version is the deconstructionist notion that there is only ‘your truth’ and ‘my truth’ which is really no truth. The idea of being self-critical is an important feature of the Christian journey of Lent but it is equally an important feature of ethical reflection in many other traditions.

This woman undertakes a journey in seeking out Jesus not for herself but for the healing of her daughter who is “grievously vexed with a devil.” That, too, is a contemporary concern in our culture of addiction, namely, the way in which we become dependent upon substances or digital devices and lose any proper sense of agency and responsibility. This strong woman has a hold of something which she knows and which she will not let go. This is her strength. It is a kind of prophetic insight or intellectus into the intellectual and spiritual principle of reality. It is not a kind of discursive reason, moving from one thing to another, but a simple and profound grasp of the truth itself as glimpsed and seen in Jesus.

That alone is wonderful but is almost eclipsed by the strange and troubling exchange. She asks for mercy for her daughter only to be greeted first with silence, then with dismissal and contempt by the disciples who complain to Jesus that she is bothering them. Jesus’ first response is really to them to state what in fact seems to be their thinking: “I am not sent, but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” thus dismissing her as well, it seems. To this she kneels and simply says, “Lord, help me.”

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Out of the deep

De Profundis is the Latin title for Psalm 130, one of the seven Penitential Psalms in the Christian understanding, and one which has influenced poets and writers such as Christina Rossetti in a poem with that title. “I strain my heart, I stretch my hands, and catch at hope.” In lieu of hymns which have been curtailed by the restrictions of COVID-19, we have used the Psalms on occasion to complement the Scripture readings. The Psalms are the prayer book and hymn book for both Jews and Christians.

The various voices of the Psalms contribute to our ethical thinking about our life together as a community of learners. This week Psalm 130 complemented the two Gospel stories that were read in Chapel, the one for Junior Chapel and the Grade 10s on Monday and Tuesday respectively, and the other for the Grade 11s and the Grade 12s respectively. Together they help in the task of facing honestly, responsibly, and maturely the stresses of our times.

On Monday and Tuesday, the story of Jesus stilling the sea-storm was read. It speaks to our world and day as captured in the opening line of Psalm 130. “Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord.” On Thursday and Friday, that opening phrase of the Psalm also connects to the deep distress of suffering and the crying out for healing, not altogether unlike the cries for vaccines in our country and world. In this case, there is the wonder of a double healing which reveals the nature of the ethical: it is at once near to us and also reaches out to us from afar. Such is the healing touch and the healing word of Christ in the midst of the sea-storms of our hearts. Such is the nature of the Good which cannot be constrained.

How do we face the sturm und drang of our world and day? Sturm und drang is an intriguing German term for a literary movement in the late 18th century that contributed to German and English Romanticism. Taken from the title of a literary work, it literally means ‘storm and stress’. The point is that storm and stress are not just about the sea-storms of the natural world, including such storms as the current pandemic, but perhaps, more crucially, the sea-storms of our hearts. We confront such storms in terms of matters of personal health and well-being, like the leper from within Israel, or in terms of the concern of the Centurion for his servant who is sick. In both cases, Jesus wills to heal, reaching out and touching the leper; and healing the Centurion’s servant from afar. And in both cases with a word spoken.

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