Category: KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

Thy word is a lantern unto my feet

The Psalms are the songs of the Hebrew Scriptures but also shape the hymnody and song traditions of the Christian Church. We may not be allowed to sing in Chapel but we can say the psalms which provide such a rich commentary and reflection upon the powerful ethical teachings presented to us in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures and which connect as well to the wisdom and understanding of other philosophical and religious traditions. That is especially the case, it seems to me, with Psalm 119 in relation to the profound wisdom of the Ten Commandments; in short, the Law.

Psalm 119 is the longest psalm and indeed the longest chapter in the whole of the scriptures. It is made up of twenty-two stanzas of eight verses each for a total of one hundred and seventy-six verses. The first word in each stanza begins in order with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet which consists of twenty-two letters. Every verse contains words which signify the Law – the various synonyms in the King James version are word, precepts, commandments, statutes, testimonies, judgements. The whole psalm is an extended meditation on God as Word in whose Law we find our delight and our freedom; in other words, our good.

This meditation on God’s Word or Law looks back to the Torah, the first five books or scrolls of the Hebrew Scriptures, at the center of which are the Ten Commandments delivered by God to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai. Israel in the wilderness is the theme of the Book of Exodus, a going out of slavery in Egypt and into the freedom of service to God. Something is learned in the wilderness journeyings of the people of Israel, all their murmuring, complaining, (or kvetching to use a wonderful Yiddish word) notwithstanding. The freedom is the Law, the will of God for our humanity. The Ten Commandments are light and freedom.

This challenges our negative view of law as restraint and limitation and the assumption that freedom means doing just whatever you want or think you want to do. The very idea of the Ten Commandments counters the childish and adolescent commonplace of ‘you’re not the boss of me’ kind of attitude. To the contrary, the Ten Commandments are our freedom and truth. They are not a random  list of proscriptions or prescriptions; they embody a comprehensive understanding of the nature of our obligations and duties towards God and one another and as such articulate the truth of ourselves as responsible and rational agents. There are ten – no more no less. There is nothing to be taken away from nor added to them. They are complete, comprehensive, and compelling in their logic and form.

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Greater love  hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends

The sacred feast of All Saints informs and shapes the secular observances known as Remembrance Day. The Octave of All Saints includes the Solemnity of All Souls. On the one hand, we are reminded of the spiritual community of our common humanity; on the other hand, we remember our common mortality. In particular, we try to remember those who gave their lives in the great and defining events of the 19th and 20th century. It is a serious and sombre kind of remembering. And difficult.

Why is it difficult? Partly because our human memories are so feeble and fragile, finite and incomplete. At best, as the Octave of All Saints so profoundly teaches, they are joined to God’s eternal remembering and loving of all saints and all souls. In the time of scattered leaves and in the culture of scattered souls, there is a gathering, a remembering which is nothing less than the return to God of all that has gone forth from God. That return is about fellowship, about a kind of community in which together we live for what is greater than ourselves without which we cannot be a self. As such the remembering too is about character.

The transition from the sacred to the secular is complementary not oppositional. The great text read on Monday and Tuesday of this week complements and intensifies the readings we heard last week. In a powerful passage from John’s Gospel, Jesus, who has identified himself as the vine in whom we have our abiding in the love of God, tells us that “greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”. The phrase adorns a thousand cenotaphs in communities throughout our land. A cenotaph is an empty tomb, a poignant reminder that not even their bodies were able to be returned to their communities, homes, and families.

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They desire a better country

The readings in Chapel this week connect the sacred feast of All Saints with the secular observance of Remembrance Day upcoming next week. John’s vision of the redeemed community of our humanity in its essential unity expressed through diversity is further explicated precisely in the inner qualities of character that belong to an ethical understanding of the Summun Bonum, the highest good, found in the Beatitudes. The great ethical teaching of Christ grounds our happiness in God. We have seen how that ethical teaching about living for a principle that is greater than oneself is part of a long tradition that embraces the religious and philosophical traditions of ancient China, India, Greece and Rome as well as the traditions of moral philosophy that belong to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. We do well to remember such a community of spirit.

That vision and teaching encompasses the Solemnity of All Souls within the eight-day Octave of All Saints and catapults us into the stark and sombre remembering of those who gave their lives in the defining and devastating wars of the twentieth century. In the history of the School, that remembrance looks back even further to the conflicts of the nineteenth century with all of the ambiguities and complexities that are part of the idea of empire and colonialism. It is neither a pretty picture nor a single story.

The lessons read on Thursday and Friday prepare us for Remembrance Day, a secular event enfolded within a sacred or religious understanding. To deny this is to deny the obvious at the same time as to make religion the scapegoat for all our discontents. But such thinking will not withstand much in the way of careful scrutiny. The lesson from Hebrews read in the Octave of All Saints says that “these all died in faith,” reminding us that we are part of “a great cloud of witnesses”, witnesses to what is greater than ourselves. At the very least, the idea of something more and greater than ourselves informs political life but cannot be reduced to it. The idea of desiring a better country provides a way to understand the enormous sacrifices that thousands upon thousands from distant lands made in the morass of the battlefields of Europe in the First World War and then more globally in the Second World War. The School’s cenotaph bears eloquent witness to the supreme sacrifice that students from King’s made to those defining events of the twentieth century. To remember their sacrifice is not to engage in some sort of anglo-philia or empire worship.

The desire for a better country requires serious reflection upon the ethical, upon the Summum Bonum. It is the great question for our disordered world. For whatever it means to desire a better country it cannot mean what benefits the cultural and corporate elites at the expense of everybody else. At issue is the commitment to the civic or mediating institutions such as family, school and church that temper and humanise the destructive, levelling, and totalising tendencies of the global world.

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These are they which came out of great tribulation

Chapel undertakes to provide a programme of instruction in the principles of ethics particularly as those are represented in and through religion and philosophy and as they pertain to the ordered life of the School community. At the very least, it should be clear that these questions are of central importance for an education which is serious about character. For character implies a story, “a story about living for a purpose which is greater than the self” as James Davison Hunter notes in The Death of Character.

In Chapel the great story of the Fall was followed by the classic story of Cain killing Abel, the first murder, read on Thursday and Friday of last week, and on Monday and Tuesday of this week. Both stories concern the awakening to self-consciousness. They are about how we are called to account albeit through contradiction and denial, but nonetheless, called to account, to the idea of responsibilities and duties. This is the positive in these stories, we might say. They raise the important question in our own times about what it means to be a self which, they suggest, has altogether to do with our relation with one another and with God. The Cain and Abel story, for instance, is really the negative form of the central ethical teaching of the Judeo-Christian traditions about the inseparable nature of the love of God and the love of neighbour illustrated most movingly in the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

Self-knowledge and the knowledge of God are inseparable as the wonderful words of God to Cain indicate. “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.” As such the story of Cain and Abel provides a critique of reason not unlike Sophocles’ tragedy, Oedipus Rex. Oedipus is driven into contradiction with himself, discovers the negation of his knowing, and as such awakens to the greater truth of himself in the city and for the city. Powerful stories about an ethical understanding.

These stories are the counter to what I like to call the ‘Manichean Moralizing’ of our contemporary world: being told what to think, say and do by the cultural elites of our day. The Manichees were an ancient phenomenon associated with gnosticism, an extreme form of dualism which reduces the world to them and us, to the opposition of good and evil, not unlike the demonization of the other in our polarized political culture of endless division and animosity which proscribes and denies discourse and discussion which is the essence of academic life. The counter is to think more deeply about the nature of our humanity in community.

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The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground

Somehow the morning miracle of Chapel continues albeit under the constraints of these ‘covidious’ times. Many thanks to the Chapel Prefects under the leadership of Sarah Hilborn for helping to get readers and servers organized and ready to go all in the flurry of ten minutes before we actually begin. The challenges are particularly great for the Junior School in having at present only one service a week and for the Grade Tens caught in the transition from Junior School to Senior School and needing to be with more than just their own peer cohort.  The whole experience reveals the importance of what was one of the special features of the School, namely, the degree of interaction and connection between students not only of different cultures and languages but of different ages.

The challenges are about the teaching of a programme that focuses, through the lenses of Scripture and in the context of worship, on matters intellectual, spiritual and, especially, ethical. Chapel provides a counter to the mere moralizing of contemporary culture by grounding us in the traditions of spiritual reflection about the human condition. Such is the significance of thinking about the concept of creation and about sin and evil. I have taken the time to ponder the kinds of questions that the proverbial story of the Fall raises since it speaks so profoundly to the questions about what it means to be a self; in short, to be self-aware. That has meant reading Genesis 3 in all four of the Chapel services for the 11s, 12s, 10s and Juniors though with different points of emphasis.

For instance, why do we wear clothes? “Their eyes were opened and they knew they were naked.” We become self-aware, self-conscious. We are made conscious of ourselves as selves through the awakening to sexual difference. These are remarkable images that speak to our current anxieties about the self and bring out the realization that we can only know ourselves as selves through our relation to one another within the created order and with God. We learn this negatively but God’s questions bring us to account. That is the great positive. It is found in the very idea that we are brought to account. It means that we are responsible for our thoughts and actions. This speaks to the idea of human agency and responsibility. It counters completely the idea of being a victim and blaming others.

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Now the serpent was more subtle

Perhaps you are familiar with the ‘rod of Ascelpius,’ the symbol for the healing arts of medicine and health care associated with the ancient Greek God of healing. The rod of Ascelpius is still used as the modern symbol for medicine. It depicts a rod which is entwined with a serpent, a snake. Here in Genesis 3 we have a snake, a most unusual snake, we might say, a talking snake, and a creature said to be “more subtle than any other creature which the Lord God had made”; in short, cunning or crafty, deceitful.

We have already encountered this story in its later development in the story of St. Michael and All Angels, the story of the cosmic battle between good and evil and the overcoming of evil by good. Why? Because sin and evil are nothing in themselves. They are entirely derivative and dependent upon that which they reject and deny. But in the Michaelmas story, allusion is made directly to this story, the originating story of human sin and evil which later takes on a cosmic dimension. Whence does evil arise? From rational creatures, men and angels, in their denial of the conditions of their very being.

And yet, there is paradoxically something positive in this story. What is it? It is about the awakening to self-consciousness albeit through deceit and disobedience. This account of the awakening to self-consciousness happens through the power of questions, five questions to be exact. First, there is the question of the serpent. “Did God say?” he asks ‘the Adam’, our humanity now distinguished in terms of man and woman, Adam and Eve. But we ‘know’ what God said. Do not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. To be given such a command belongs to the essential goodness of the created order in which we are placed as in a garden, a paradise, but conditional upon our relation to the Creator in whose image we are made. We have heard and read that but how do we become self-aware? This story provides a way of thinking about human self-consciousness, about ourselves as selves.

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One turned back … giving him thanks

The week of Thanksgiving is always a special time at the School. My thanks to the Junior School for decorating the Chapel with the fruits of creation gathered into the Chapel. The emphasis this week has been on the theme of thanksgiving as the logical extension of the idea of creation. Once you grasp that creation is a gift, the gift of life, it changes your attitude and approach to the world around you and to one another. The idea of creation as a gift moves in us in thanksgiving, a giving back to God what God has given to us. It is profoundly spiritual in the intellectual gathering back to God what has come from God. It is grace moving in us and in ways that belong to the truth and dignity of our humanity as made in the image of God.

The Junior Chapel service on Monday focused on the lovely and rich passage from the Book of Deuteronomy about the good land and its fruits given to us by God and yet grounds those material aspects of creation in the word of God. “Man cannot live by bread alone but from everything which proceeds from the mouth of God.” We enjoy the bounty of creation only through our working with the order of creation, honouring the word of God in creation through our labours. Gathering apples and zucchini into the Chapel remind us of our connection to the created order. They teach us that creation reveals God in his truth, and beauty and goodness to us. We learn even from zucchini! It is about thanksgiving not thanks getting. Such is our response and acknowledgement of creation as God’s gift.

In Canada, Thanksgiving is at once a national holiday and a celebration of the Harvest, a much more ancient concept that reminds us that we cannot take for granted the fruits of creation. By extension, as we have seen in our considerations of the pageants of creation in Genesis 1 and 2 along with Job and Wisdom, our reflection on the wisdom of God in creation teaches us our connection to everything else in the created order and to our relation to God as made in his image, the image of his ordering care for the world. This gives no warrant for our abuse and misuse of the natural world or of one another.

The Grade 10 Chapel service on Tuesday featured the classical Thanksgiving story of the healing of the ten lepers, one of whom turned back, glorifying God and giving him thanks. As Luke tells us he was a Samaritan, an outsider, a member of a sect despised within Judaism which Jesus sometimes uses to critique and correct Israel. Here Jesus calls the one who turned back a “stranger.” The point is that we learn from the stranger about the true nature of our humanity. It is in turning back and giving thanks that we are not merely healed but made whole. Our humanity is radically incomplete without God. Thanksgiving for creation in all of its splendour and riches is complemented by our thanksgiving for the healing and the redemption of our humanity in Christ. Thanksgiving is our turning to God who has turned to us.

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Wisdom taught me

Our Chapel reflections on Genesis 1 continue beyond that opening chapter in all its monumental grandeur to later considerations such as in the Book of Job and the Wisdom of Solomon. Genesis 1 has reminded us of the critical point that how we think about the created order ultimately shapes our thinking and acting towards one another especially in the light of our being made in the image of God. God as the ordering principle in creation counters and corrects our misuse of nature and one another as well as our mistaken views of ourselves. Education is about the mediation of ideas to us that are incorporated in us and shape our being and our understanding.

Far from being a one-off concern, the idea of creation is an underlying theme throughout the Hebrew Scriptures and shapes the later Jewish, Christian, and Islamic imaginary. Creation as the unfolding of the intellectual principle, God, means that how we think about ourselves and our world inevitably and necessarily centers on God. It is in that understanding that we truly begin to learn about ourselves. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” God says to Job in that great classic of human suffering and grace. The grace lies precisely in God’s speaking to Job, questioning him and calling him to account through his wisdom in creation. It is the counter to our attempts to make God accountable to us. Job will be at once humbled and exalted. God’s questions, rhetorical and arresting, remind us that wisdom belongs to God, first and foremost. That God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind emphasizes his power and nature as beyond nature and his wisdom as more than human reason. His questions recall both Job and us to God in whose image we are made.

Yet creation is revelation and so it speaks to the dignity of our humanity in terms of our relation to wisdom and truth. The Wisdom of Solomon reminds us that “both we and our words are in his hand, as are all understanding and skill.” We are taught by Wisdom, the Wisdom of God, and by that wisdom as manifest in creation. “She is a breath of the power of God, a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty … she renews all things; in every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends with God.” In a famous phrase, “she reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other, and she orders all things well,” suaviter et fortiter, sweetly and strongly. Creation is not static; God sustains its being in the wisdom through which all things are made.

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So God created man in his own image

Everything unfolds from the principia, the principle of the being and knowing of all things, including our humanity. Such is the wonder of creation in its truth, its relation to the Creator. “God is the beginning and end of all things, especially rational creatures,” Thomas Aquinas reminds us, revealing how the Genesis story belongs to an intellectual consideration of the world as something for thought. So where are we in this story?

This week in Chapel we have pondered Genesis 1, looking at the pageant of creation in the first so-called five days and, then, on Thursday and Friday, the work of the sixth day which brings us to the creation of the ‘adam’, our humanity, collectively or generically speaking. ‘Adam’ here is not yet the name of an individual but the collective name for human beings. The story of creation in Genesis 1 is an unpacking of what is contained in the opening phrase especially as seen through the lens of John 1 and the traditions of Hellenic philosophy. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Creation is about an activity of distinguishing one thing from another within the unity of the world as an ordered whole, a cosmos, we might say. It is the unfolding of what is in the principia, God.

The significance of the Genesis account of creation lies in part in the repeated refrain that “God saw that it was good,” With the work of the sixth day, the whole of creation is said to be “very good.” Creation is an explicitly ordered affair; the formlessness, void, and abyss are all contained within the principle, God. This counters an ancient and modern view that posits chaos as prior to order and not just in a temporal sense. There is always the lingering fear in some ancient cultures, such as the Sumerians, that chaos will overwhelm and destroy all forms and aspects of order. That view results in a state of fearful uncertainty. Genesis frees us from the fear of the forces of an arbitrary nature by its relation to an intellectual principle. And our humanity?

Is humanity simply an afterthought, a left-over in the pageant of creation? No. Something quite wonderful and amazing is said alone about the ‘adam,’ about our humanity. Alone of all of the works of creation, only about our humanity is it said explicitly that we are made in the image of God. What does that mean? Creation is revelation, to be sure, the revelation of an ordering principle in the pageant of creation itself. All that we can say is that we are made in the image of that principle. It provides a very high view of the dignity of our humanity. To be made in the image of God also belongs to the essential goodness of the created order, something which is said not just to be good in each of its parts but the whole of it “very good.” We are at once  connected to everything else in the created order and to God himself.

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