Category: KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

Everyone is seeking for you

This text from St. Mark complements the story of Christ’s going up to Jerusalem and his encounter with the blind man which we read last week. Such things belong to the nature of the educational journey. It is, in the proper sense, counter-culture because it challenges the assumptions of our age. Education is actually subversive in the sense that it questions the dominant assumptions of those in authority. It confronts them with the idea of the author, the root of the word authority. It calls us to account, in short, to  God, the author and ultimate good.

This has very much to do with the love of learning. Here the disciples seek out Jesus who has retreated into a solitary place to pray. So often we think of religion and prayer as simply individual and private matters. We forget the ethical demands that compel us into relation with one another. The retreat into solitude is about communion with God through which we have communion with one another.

As the poet, T.S. Eliot puts it:

What life have you if you have not life together?
There is no life that is not in community,
And no community not lived in praise of God.
Even the anchorite who meditates alone,
For whom the days and nights repeat the praise of God,
Prays for the Church, the Body of Christ incarnate.  (Choruses from the Rock)

The story shows Jesus as the healer of “all that were diseased” but also as the healer of “them that were possessed with devils.” This speaks to the idea of the healing of the whole of our being, body and soul, but also to the desire to be healed. The statement of the disciples speaks to a universal desire. “Everyone is seeking for thee.” Such is the desire to know which, like the blind man, implies that something is already known, namely, that we don’t know, we don’t see, yet in seeking we know that we lack something which we need. We confront our lack, an insufficiency in and of ourselves.

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That I may receive my sight

It is an intriguing story and one which speaks to the nature of education, especially in conjunction with Paul’s great hymn of praise to love which was read last week in Chapel. We see “in a glass darkly,” yet we see, albeit imperfectly and unclearly. “We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus says, expressing in a metaphor what belongs to the universal journey of our souls into an understanding of reality. Going up to Jerusalem is at once about the spiritual practices of ancient Israel but also extends to the concentration of that journey into the span of the  forty days of Lent in the Christian understanding.

The story concentrates for us some of the essential features of our lives in terms of desire. What do we seek? To seek is to want, to desire. But what? Somehow something of what we seek has to be known in some way or another. To desire is to have some sense of what we want. And there is the greater question about wanting what is right and good without which “all loving [is] mere folly,” as Shakespeare puts it (‘As You Like It’). There is a necessary and crucial interplay between our willing and our knowing present in this story.

Jesus tells the disciples about what going up to Jerusalem will mean. It will mean all of the terrors of his passion and death; in short, the sufferings of Christ which reveal the sin and evil of our humanity. Such things show us the radical disorders of our humanity; not just the incompleteness of our loves, but their destructive capacity as well. Jesus tells us these things but, as Luke says about the disciples (and us), “they understood none of these things … neither knew they the things which were spoken.” Such is the reality of the educational experience. Things are spoken and taught but are they learned? What does it take to learn? It requires the journey of education in which we confront over and over again our ignorance and not-knowing. Education never ends. It is not a finite product, a thing to be possessed. It is life-long.

What it takes to learn is seen in the figure of the blind man in this story sitting as a beggar by the way-side near Jericho, the image biblically speaking of the earthly city in contrast to Jerusalem, the symbol of the heavenly city. “Hearing the multitude pass by, he asked what it meant.” That is significant. It shows that he wants to know what is going on. In discovering “that Jesus of Nazareth passeth by,” he cries out incessantly and will not be silenced even by the disciples who rebuke him. “Jesus, thou Son of David, have mercy on me,” he cries.

We are like the blind man on the road in this story which is the reason why it is read on the Sunday just before the Ash Wednesday beginning of Lent. He is blind and yet he sees; like us, perhaps, “in a glass darkly.” That is to say, he knows something. He knows three things which we, in turn, need to know, paradoxically in order to come to know more fully; in short, to know even as we are known, as Paul puts it in his great hymn to love which accompanies this Gospel story. He knows, first, that he is blind; secondly, he knows that he wants to see, to know more fully; and, thirdly, he knows that the power of healing and sight belong to God which he ‘knows’ is in Jesus.

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If I have not love, I am nothing.

Love is in the air and snow is on the ground. It is hard to know of which there is more – love or snow? Paul’s great hymn to love in 1st Corinthians 13 has been the traditional scripture passage for the week of winter carnival and the attendant Valentine’s Day celebrations at King’s-Edgehill School. It is one of the great literary classics and perhaps one of the more familiar passages of Scripture even in our spiritual-lite and religious adverse age.

What is love? It is the question of Plato’s Symposium and belongs to a serious reflection upon the understanding of our humanity in its desires and drives that concern our relation with one another. Love is a big little word. Paul uses the word ‘love’ explicitly ten times and refers to it another seven times. In other words, love is emphatically front and center in 1st Corinthians seventeen times in seventeen verses. What does he mean by love?

As with Plato, love means more than simply the romantic and the sensual even as it shapes and informs those aspects of our humanity. As with Plato, Paul is not arguing for the idea of love as an object, a thing, even love as the beloved, but as an activity of the soul. There are a great number of words for love that the ancient Greeks have bequeathed to us and which have carried over into a variety of Latin terms as well. Ordinarily in English we have to make do with the big little word love to cover a whole range of meanings.

In Greek, there is eros, for instance, from which we get the idea of the erotic and the sensual; there is philos, or friendship love, we might say, and which extends to a whole host of words like philosophy, the love of wisdom, or philanthropy, the love of our humanity associated with generosity; there is storge, the love of family or nation or community; and there is agape, the social and communal love which extends to matters spiritual. That is the word which Paul uses but which is translated as caritas in the Latin with its connotations about grace, and rendered rather beautifully in the King James version as charity. But it would be a mistake to place these different terms for love in tight little boxes, sequestered and isolated from one another. Plato deliberately, it seems to me, uses the word eros with all of its sensual connotations to embark upon the journey of love which is spiritual and intellectual but as such embraces all the forms of love, from the lowest to the highest.

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For now we see through a glass darkly

But we see, however dimly, and that is the important insight. It belongs to the awareness of the limitations of our knowing that counters human presumption and arrogance. It is good to be reminded of this in the bleak midwinter.

A winter storm with snow and wind has given place to the not altogether unusual midwinter thaw. There is an almost spring-like feel to things in the return to School after the late January break. That spring-like feel is warranted from the perspective of the turn towards spring signaled by Candelmas observed on February 2nd. It marks the transition from light to life, from Christmas to Easter in the Christian understanding. Literally forty days after Christmas, it points us to Jerusalem, to the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection at Easter, which follows immediately upon the spring equinox.

It celebrates the intersection of what will become the Old and the New Testaments. It is at once a feast of Christ and of Mary. Its proper name for Eastern Orthodox Christians is hypapante, meaning meeting: the meeting of Old and New, of young and old, of men and women, of aged Simeon and old Anna, of the child with Mary and Joseph, of prophecy and fulfillment, of suffering and revelation. There is a wonderful complexity to the images of this feast, a blaze of light in the bleak midwinter signalling life and joy.

Yet the meeting of themes all happens in the temple in Jerusalem. “The Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple,” as Malachi prophesies. “They found him in the temple,” as we heard in the story of the child Christ. Here at the age of forty days is Christ’s first journey to the temple in Jerusalem and, like the childhood journey it, too, is in accord with the customs of the Law, the ritual practices of ancient Israel. These are not simply superseded but transmuted or transformed. In a way, Candlemas, like the Conversion of St. Paul, highlights the vocation of Israel in the universality of its mission. It is signaled here in Simeon’s words, quoting Isaiah, but with a startling emphasis upon the infant Christ as the embodiment of those words: “a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel,” words which become the Church’s evening canticle, the Nunc Dimittis.

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“Wist ye not?”

“Did you not know?” Jesus asks Mary, his anxious mother, in what is the only story in the Christian New Testament about the childhood of Jesus. He is twelve years old. He is found in the Temple at Jerusalem among the doctors of the Law “listening and asking questions”, and “all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers”.

It is an epiphany, a making known of the idea that there are things that are wanted to be known. It is captured wonderfully in this somewhat rhetorical question by Jesus. “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” or as the King James version wonderfully puts it, following Tyndale, “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” The Old English word, “wist” echoes the Germanic influences on English (gewissen) and remains with us in such words as wit, wise, and wisdom. In the Christian understanding, the story reveals Jesus as the Divine Teacher and the Human Student. In other words, this story is an essential feature of the epiphany and shows us the radical idea of epiphany as education. It is about our response to what is presented to us to be known.

We are in this story as teachers and students, as learners all really. Teachers are not teachers if they are not also learners. Something profound is being shown to us about our humanity and in intriguing ways and which ultimately pertains to education. Education is about the making known of certain ideas which we only grasp by the activity of knowing in us. “Knowledge is intermediate between the knower and the known, because it is the activity of the knowner concerning the known”, as was anciently understood. I want to emphasize the idea of learning as activity and I want to focus on the necessity of education.

For thousands of years of human civilisation, once you learned to speak you entered into the adult world as a little adult. No longer an infant, one who is unable to speak, you were part of the adult world through speech. What this story reminds us of is another development at once ancient and also modern. It is the idea of another intermediary stage of human development through learning, specifically through learning how to read. In this case, reading is about reading the Law, the Torah. This story is about the transition from childhood to adulthood in the spiritual culture of Israel. In Jewish terms it correlates with the traditions of bar mitzvah signalling that transition to adult duties and responsibilities as grounded in an understanding of the Law given to Israel by God through Moses. It marks maturity, a growing up through learning and accepting responsibility with respect to what you know.

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Rachel weeping for her children

The aggressive atheist and neo-Darwinist, Richard Dawkins, claims that the God of the Old Testament is “the most unpleasant character in all fiction” and goes on to list a whole raft of vituperative adjectives that are most unpleasant. The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks replied, much to Dawkins discomfort, “Ah, I see you are a Christian atheist.” The Old Testament, in reference to the Hebrew or Jewish Scriptures, is a Christian term.

Dawkins’ view is not new and belongs to a common misconception of the relation between the Old and New Testament which overstates the contrast. This is seen, for instance, in the idea of Law versus Grace, forgetting that the Law as given by God is therefore also grace; or the similar idea of justice versus mercy or love, forgetting that mercy is just as intrinsic to the Hebrew Scriptures as it is to the New Testament. Overstating the contrasts between the two testaments belongs to a conflict narrative which pits Jew against Christian. In turn, the aggressive and naive atheism of Dawkins assumes the same conflict narrative between modern science and religion. Such is a profound distortion and misconception.

Dawkins has his precursors, ranging from Marcion in the 2nd century to Thomas Jefferson in the late 18th century. Marcion could not reconcile the God of the Old Testament with the God of the New Testament and so conveniently edited out large swaths of the Old Testament and as well great chunks of the New Testament. For him the contrast was between love and judgement. In the case of the third President of America, Thomas Jefferson, the concern was about reason versus revelation, particularly the miracle stories of the Christian Gospels. Jefferson took his scissors to the New Testament to excise all such things leaving merely the husk of a kind of moralizing Jesus accommodated to the precepts (and presumptions) of human reason.

Such things reveal an attitude and a set of assumptions about God and human good. But surely, Dawkins could just have easily found the ‘Christian’ God of the New Testament equally “unpleasant” simply in terms of this disturbing and disquieting story that belongs to the mystery of Christmas. It is the shocking story of the slaughter of the little ones of Bethlehem. It challenges our sentimental views of Christmas.

It is shocking and while there are many shocking stories in the Scriptures, the real question is what are these stories doing? Why are they part of these Scriptures? In other words, what do they teach? It is easy to piece together a packet of awful stories in both Scriptures that contribute to the idea of a vengeful, hateful God who arbitrarily chooses some and rejects others. This ignores the interpretative traditions which have wrestled with these passages for centuries and the simple point that these stories are always an indictment of some aspect or other of the human condition in its fallenness and evil.

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December Last Chapels

Last chapels, whether at the end of Michaelmas Term or at the end of the school year, are rather poignant times. This year our last chapel services seem somewhat anticlimactic coming after the Advent Christmas Services of Lessons and Psalms owing to the shift from exams to classes. Yet they provide an opportunity to think more deeply about the great Advent pageant of Word coming to us in the Service of Nine Lessons.

All of the readings were prefaced by introductory phrases that give an explicitly Christian meaning to the service. The two lessons from Genesis, the three lessons from Isaiah, and the lesson from Micah are all seen in terms of their fulfillment in the story of Christ illustrated by Luke’s account of the Annunciation, Matthew’s account of the birth in Bethlehem, and John’s prologue about the Word made flesh. The readings form a narrative arc going from the story of the Fall to the Word made flesh, from separation to restoration.

Though explicitly Christian, the readings are not exclusively so since they really belong to a long and profound tradition of reading and thinking about God as Word, logos. In other words, the service is logos-centric, something which Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have in common in terms of their indebtedness to logos, word or reason, as coming out of the Greek and Hellenic traditions of philosophical reflection. Advent is profoundly philosophical.

That is signified through the great questions of Advent which open us to the truth of God ever present and ever coming towards us in the ways of our endeavours to understand that which is greater than ourselves. In our last Chapel service for the 11s, we read the story of the Annunciation with Mary’s question, “How shall this be?”. It is a question of genuine intellectual interest belonging to the desire to know. It leads to her great response, “Be it unto me according to thy word,” a phrase which speaks to the educational project of being defined by ideas conveyed by words coming to us. We also read at the last Chapel service for the 12s the great Christmas Gospel, the last reading in the Pageant from John’s Prologue, about “the Word made flesh”. Augustine famously noted that he already knew about the Word which was “in the beginning”, the Word which “was God”, and the Word which “was God”, words that mark the beginning of that Gospel, from the libri platonici, the books of the Platonists. This looks back to Plato and forwards to his heirs in the Neoplatonisms of Augustine’s own time. The Word is the intellectual-principle, the principle of the being and knowing of all things in God. Thus the Advent Christmas Pageant of Word has a universal dimension and scope.

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How shall this be?

Advent is the season of holy questions that belong to the pageant of God’s Word coming to us as light opening us out to hope, joy, and peace. Nowhere is that concentrated more profoundly than in the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols, a service first instituted at King’s College, Cambridge, just after the devastations of the First World War. It spoke to a world in darkness and despair and in the agony of loss. So, too, it speaks to us at King’s-Edgehill in these challenging times. Like Mary’s question, it opens us out to a kind of miracle.

We were unable to have the ‘big’ service of Grades 6 through 11 at Christ Church this year or to be allowed to have congregational singing but we were able to find creative ways to have services for all the School within certain groupings; in short, four services involving a wonderful range of readers, musicians, and servers, and all in the Chapel. While not all together as one, we were nonetheless together in the hearing of the same powerful lessons of Scripture. The service was structured around the great Advent Matin Responsory (arranged by Palestrina, 16th century) and by way of the traditional verses of the Veni Emmanuel which is built around the Great ‘O’ Antiphons. Those antiphons highlight various scriptural names and titles associated with Jesus Christ such as O Emmanuel (God with us), O Sapientia (Wisdom), O Adonai(Lord), O Jesse Virgula (Rod of Jesse), O Clavis Davidica (Key of David), O Oriens (Day-spring or star), and O Rex Gentium (King of the Gentiles). The initial worlds of the antiphons more or less in their reverse order form an acrostic: O Emmanuel, O Rex, O Oriens, O Clavis, O Radix (‘virgula” in the hymn), O Adonai, O Sapientia, forming ERO CRASwhich can be loosely translated as “I will be there tomorrow”, in anticipation of the advent of Christ.

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And all the city was stirred, saying, Who is this?

Who is this who comes? Advent is about our awakening to Truth, at once ever present and yet ever coming towards us. As such it belongs to the philosophical insight that truth is primary and prior to us and to all our intellectual endeavours. Truth belongs to the Absolute Good which is God. It is ever coming towards us, we might say, in terms of our awareness (or lack thereof). It is high time to be awakened out of sleep, Paul tells us. Wachet auf, as Bach’s cantata so powerfully reminds us.

The readings in Chapel this week serve to prepare the School for the great pageant of God’s Word coming to us in the remarkable service of Nine Lessons and Carols. We may not be able to have congregational singing but we can be part of the great pageant of God’s Word coming to us and awakening us to what is greater than ourselves. Perhaps that is the great lesson for our day and the counter to all of the narcissisms and self-obsessions that surround us.

The reading from Matthew about Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem is not only read on Palm Sunday but on the First Sunday in Advent and has been for centuries upon centuries. It is a strong reminder to us about the serious nature of God’s turning to us and our turning to God. It signals at once a sense of joy and wonder but as well a sense of judgment. In short, we are being called to account about matters intellectual and ethical. In the 16th century, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer extended the reading to include what immediately follows in Matthew’s account, namely, the disturbing story of Christ’s anger in his cleansing of the temple of “all them that bought and sold therein”, a misuse of the sacred, of the things of God. We read as well from Psalm 85 which captures the twofold emphasis in the Gospel reading: the idea of God turning us and of his anger ceasing from us, on the one hand, and the idea of God turning us again and quickening or enlivening us so that “thy people may rejoice in thee”.

The anger of God? What does that mean? As the exegetical traditions understood, this is simply about how God speaks to us in human ways for the sake of our understanding. For us anger is usually a destructive and dangerous emotion though there is room for the phenomenon of righteous anger, such as in Juvenalian satire used by Voltaire to awaken us to the various forms of injustice in our world and day which cannot be ignored. In a deeper sense, God’s anger or wrath is the love of his own truth and righteousness against all that denies it.

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Turning again

“Because I do not hope to turn again.” So begins T.S. Eliot’s poem, Ash Wednesday. Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the penitential season of Lent leading to Easter, to new life, the Resurrection. Advent, too, is a penitential season leading to Christmas in the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ and to the renewing of our lives in the meaning of his nativity. Psalm 80 is one of the great psalms of Advent and in contrast to Eliot’s poem it is full of the hope of turning. Its recurring refrain calls out to God to “turn us again, … show the light of thy countenance, and we shall be whole.” The refrain is marked with increasing degrees of intensity in the fourfold invocation of God. “O God,’’ then twice, “O God of hosts,” and finally, “O Lord God of hosts.” It is about an increased awakening to the mystery of God.

The spiritual insight of Advent is profoundly philosophical. How can we find what we seek and desire without already in some sense knowing what we seek and desire? This is Meno’s dilemma in Plato’s dialogue by that name. It leads to the realization that God is at once prior and beyond as that upon which our knowing and being depend. Our turning is predicated upon God’s turning; our turning to God and God’s turning to us are really one and the same motion. Advent awakens us to the wonder of this twofold turning. “Then Jesus turned,” we heard in the reading in Chapel this week.

That turning leads to the beginning of the cascade of questions that define the Advent season. The questions of Advent stir up hope against despair. They awaken us to the desire for the Good, for what is always beyond and yet ever present. Such is the radical meaning of God’s turning to us and God’s turning us. “What do you seek?” Jesus asks in the moment of his turning to us. The disciples in turn ask, “where dwellest thou?” How do we abide with that which we most truly seek and which is most truly desired?

The reading of part of Psalm 80 along with the Gospel reading from the first chapter of John’s Gospel complements last week’s meditation upon the Law in Psalm 119 and in the Exodus story of the Ten Commandments. These readings all belong to the sense of endings and beginnings. As against a merely linear way of proceeding, of one thing after another after another, these readings recall us to the spiritual and philosophical insight of our constant circling around and into the mystery of God. That beginning again is our hope, our peace, and our joy.

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