Category: KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

In the beginning God … Word

Two of the most foundational and formative intellectual and spiritual texts are before us at the first two Chapels of this first week of school. They challenge us and strengthen us in wonderful ways even in these uncertain times. It is not that they offer certainty but rather a certain way to think about the world and ourselves. They provide an important counter to the negativity of our times. To put it simply, if you see the world as something evil materially and physically speaking, it is not a big step to see one another as evil, as enemies. In short, how we think about the world around us shapes our thinking about our relations with one another. To see the world as evil leads to a discourse of division among ourselves.

I want to begin with where we left off in the bleakness of March last spring in the time of lockdown and isolation. ‘Be careful but be not fearful’, I suggested. How is that possible? In part because of the power and the wisdom of these complementary and interconnected readings from the beginning of Genesis and the beginning of the Gospel according to St. John. They are familiar passages yet we often misconstrue their meaning. What do we mean by ‘beginning’? In truth, at least as the rich and profound philosophical and theological traditions understand these passages, beginning here really means principle, an ????, a principia. We begin with a principle – God as Word – from which all else proceeds and as we shall see to which all returns because all is contained within this principle upon which the being and knowing of all things depends. Such a view unites what we so easily divide. Such a view begins with the Good and the goodness of creation itself without which we misunderstand evil.

I also want to make the related point stated at Encaenia to the graduates only a few weeks ago. It is this. Do not think of yourselves as Covid-19 victims. To think of yourself as a victim is to be a victim twice over. It is to rest in a discourse of division and can only lead to the dangerous demonization of one another and to the disturbing debilitating fear of the other, allophobia and its twin, xenophobia. It leads, in other words, to separation and division in place of unity and community. Schools are “cloisters of learning,” places where a certain kind of intellectual and spiritual intent binds us together. It counters the simplistic narratives of division that see the world as evil and threatening. The word cloister derives from the Persian word, “paradise”, meaning a closed park or garden. It has migrated into the various cultures of the euro-mediterranean world, into the monasteries and to Schools and colleges where it suggests the idea of being part of an intentional culture of learning.

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God is gone up with a merry noise

You can feel the sense of joy and exultation in Psalm 47 which the Headmaster read on Thursday. A psalm is a song. The Psalms are the hymn book of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures and help illuminate our understanding of the major themes of God’s engagement with our humanity. Thursday, May 21st, is the fortieth day after Easter this year in the western Christian tradition and known as Ascension Day. It marks the culmination of the Resurrection in the homecoming of the Son to the Father. “Because I go to the Father” is the recurring refrain of Eastertide.

Home is where you belong, the place from which you come and to which you go. The idea of home speaks to the understanding of our humanity, to the sense of our place in the world and with God. The Ascension of Christ is the gathering up of all things to their source and end in God. In the comings and goings of God we learn about our abiding with God. The School is also your home, your intellectual and spiritual home and it is wonderful to be able to think about the possibilities of returning to this home in the Fall. For the ancient Greeks, gnothi seauton, “know thyself”, means knowing your place in the cosmos, the world as an ordered whole. For our humanity that means the polis, the city-state. But the concept of homecoming also relates to our schools as institutions of learning and living. Our schools and universities are your alma mater, your nursing mother, the places of intellectual and spiritual growth and maturity.

We are embodied beings and one of the constant emphasis in Chapel has been to eschew the false dichotomies of spirit and matter, of body and soul, and to consider their necessary interrelation. Christ’s Ascension shows that our humanity has its end in God. The Ascension celebrates the homecoming of the Son to the Father who is now Our Father. His homecoming is our homecoming in the realization that we have a place with God. The body is made adequate to the life of the Spirit. The truth and being of the Son is in his being with the Father and that embraces our humanity. This week we explored the deeper meaning of the Lord’s Prayer, better described as the ‘Our Father’, because, as Simone Weil in the 20th century and Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century both observe, it contains all that we desire and orders our desires in the right way.

Origen, Augustine, Aquinas, and a host of other theologians note that nowhere in the Hebrew Scriptures is there any direction to pray to God as Father. There are a few references that speak about God as father and a few about God as mother, but those are metaphors for God’s relation to us. The ‘Our Father’ is different. Why? Because it concerns God himself. It is Jesus who teaches us the most about God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. It is the distinctive Christian way of speaking about the divine self-relation that is the basis of God’s relation to all else. Such is the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.

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Jesus wept

It has the distinction of being the shortest verse in the New Testament, at least in English translations. It also has the distinction of being one of three passages in the Gospels where Jesus meets us mourners in the presence of the deaths of those who are dear to us, and as such, it seems, dear to God.

The Gospels only come to be written in the light of the resurrection and reveal the power of that idea at work on human minds. It changes us and changes how we face hard and difficult things such as sorrow and loss, such as suffering and death. Thus these three passages read in Chapel show us something of the pattern of death and resurrection as it pertains to human experience. In this way, these passages connect to other powerful works of literature and religious philosophy that equally concern how we look upon suffering and death.

Jesus raises the twelve year old daughter of Jairus, the ruler of the synagogue, who has just died. Mark gives us the word in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke: Talitha cumi – “little girl, I say unto thee, arise”. Jesus raises the only son of the widow of Nain as he is being carried to the grave. “When the Lord saw her”, the widow, “he had compassion on her and said, ‘do not weep’”. It is an amazing and touching scene. Do not always be weeping, he is saying. Compassion is an exceptionally strong and significant word in the New Testament. At a time when we are worried about things on the surface, about contagion through touch and by way of proximity with one another, this word refers to the inner core of someone’s being, to the heart, lungs, liver, bowels, or the womb.

It is in the heart of Jesus that he holds converse with the Father and gathers us into that eternal love. Compassion is the deep care and concern which we have for one another. The conjunction of seeing and having compassion appears in several places. Jesus sees the multitude in the wilderness and has compassion on them. Jesus sees the crowd and has compassion on them for they are like sheep without a shepherd. In the great parable of the Good Samaritan, “a certain Samaritan” sees the man who was wounded and lying half dead and has compassion on him.

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Peace and forgiveness and love

Peace and forgiveness flow out of the Resurrection. Such is the love which reconstitutes us out of the chaos of sin and betrayal, out of the malaise of suffering and sorrow. Like all of us, the disciples were huddled in fear behind closed doors. “Then Jesus came and stood in the midst.” It is a wonderful phrase which goes to the heart of the Passion and the Resurrection. God is in the midst of our suffering world, a world broken and in disarray, in fear and uncertainty.

Christ appears behind closed doors twice in John’s Gospel; once on the evening of Easter Day, and then eight days later when Thomas, whom we have come to call “doubting Thomas” was also there. He had heard about the first appearance of the Risen Christ but said that he wouldn’t believe until he could not only see but touch the wounds of the Crucified. Seeing and believing, reaching out and touching, and so believing. The point is that those are important though not the only forms of knowing.

And three times Jesus says “peace be unto you.” He bestows the power of absolution, of forgiveness upon the disciples whom he sends in his name even as the Father has sent him. And he tells Thomas to reach out and touch, to be not faithless but believing. As another Thomas remarks some thirteen centuries later, Thomas’s doubting provides for us the greater certainty of faith (Aquinas).

But the greater marvel, perhaps, is that these scenes belong to the same chapter as the encounter between Christ and Mary Magdalene where he tells her not to touch him while also sending her on a mission, a mission to the other brethren that is grounded in the eternal mission of his going to “my Father and your Father, my God and your God,” wonderful words which complement Thomas’ exclamation upon encountering the Risen Christ, “My Lord, and my God.” To the one, do not touch; to the other touch and see. Both are gathered into the love which restores and redeems, the love which is resurrection.

One of the great literary and philosophical works of our humanity was written behind closed doors, in a prison, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy (6th century). He was awaiting execution on trumped-up charges of treason. He was in grief and sorrow, in fear and dismay. Lady Philosophy appears to him and, like Christ the Good Shepherd, undertakes to return him to his true self, banishing like so many false comforters, all the appeals to emotion and self-pity in which he has buried himself. She recalls him to learning, to the things which abide and are eternal. A remarkable treatise, the work has shaped the imaginary of the intellectual culture of Europe and beyond. It was mirabile dictu translated by Alfred the Great in the ninth century, by Chaucer in the fourteenth, and by Queen Elizabeth the First in the sixteenth, to give some sense of its range and importance.

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“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil”

“April is the cruellest month,” T.S. Eliot says at the beginning of his poem, The Waste Land. He is playing on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales which invokes April as a time of pilgrimage, of rebirth and renewal.

We find ourselves, I am afraid, in a wasteland here in Nova Scotia after the rampage of madness in the mass shooting that has killed so many people in one of the rural parts of our province. It is heart-breaking and shocking, a reminder of the radical nature of evil. We confront dark and difficult things. How do we face them?

By being recalled to who we are in the sight of God. “The deepest longing of the soul is for that which is greater than itself,” the great Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus teaches (3rd. cent. AD). Such an idea has its roots in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle and carries over into the spiritual imaginary of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions of the Mediterranean cultures and from there into Europe and beyond. God “governs us as masters of ourselves,” Aquinas observes a thousand years later. It is when we forget or deny such ideas that we become empty. Such is nihilism out of which comes such mindless madness, desolation, death and destruction that has turned Nova Scotia into a wasteland.

Yet providentially, it seems, the lessons in Chapel this week speak to these dark and difficult times. Psalm 23, the so-called Shepherd’s Psalm, begins with the idea of God as Shepherd. “The Lord is my shepherd.” Jerome who translated the Hebrew Scriptures and the Greek New Testament into Latin (4th/5th cent. AD), actually provided two translations of the Psalms into Latin, one based on the Hebrew, the other on the Greek Septuagint resulting in “The Lord rules me” or “the Lord shepherds me.” Aquinas wisely notes that “He who shepherds, rules,” a profound image about the true exercise of power that is not about domination and destruction but about building up and caring for those whom you “rule” or better “shepherd.” A lesson for leaders everywhere.

The two Latin versions vary in another respect. One speaks about walking in the midst of the shadow of death, the other in the valley of death. Miles Coverdale’s 1535 translation of the Psalms became an English classic and has remained embedded in the classical Books of Common Prayer. With a wonderful poetic sensibility, Coverdale joined together valley and shadow to produce the memorable phrase, “the valley of the shadow of death.” We all walk through “the valley of the shadow of death,” to be sure. But the psalmist says “I will fear no evil.” Why? Because “thou art with me.” Who? God. The Lord. And that makes all the difference.

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They ran both together

Just as we buried ourselves in the Passion of Christ during Holy Week, so now we run in the Resurrection of Christ. The classic Easter Gospel is all about running. Mary Magdalene coming to the tomb in the early morning finds the stone taken away from the sepulchre and runs to Simon Peter and John. “They ran both together,” John tells us in his Gospel, to the tomb. The Resurrections sets us in motion.

The Resurrection is the fruit of the Passion, we might say, but there is the paradox that, in a way, the Passion comes out of the Resurrection. How? It is only in the light of the Resurrection that the Passion accounts come to be written. “Herein is love,” we must say about both the Passion and the Resurrection. “Never that which is shall die,” as Euripides says. Such is the love of God which now moves in us. Such is the radical nature of the Resurrection. It changes our perspectives. It changes our thinking about death and suffering; just, perhaps, it can speak to us in our current fears and worries.

I cannot think this Easter Gospel except in its juxtaposition with Mark’s account of the Marys coming to the empty tomb and encountering “a young man,” an angel, whose words to them and to us belong to the joy of the Easter Proclamation. “Be not afraid,” they are told. “Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth which was crucified: he is risen.” Christ is Risen. Alleluia! Alleluia! The Lord is Risen indeed. Alleluia! Alleluia! This is the ancient Christian greeting. Something has changed. Death is no longer the end of the road, the terminus ad quem of human life; it has become a means to an end, a transitus. Death itself is changed. Such is the great dynamic of the Resurrection. But in what is known as the shorter end of Mark’s Gospel, he says that “they fled from the tomb… for they were afraid.” Are we running away in fear or are we running in the path of learning and joy?

The stories of the Resurrection show the dawning awareness on the part of the disciples about the Resurrection. It is a process of learning, of seeing things in a new way, a way that does not deny the past of suffering, sorrow, sin, and death but instead shows us a way of thinking through those realities. We are learning the lessons of love. Love sets us in motion towards one another because it is the motion of God’s love in us. God’s love runs in us. That connects us even when we seem separate and isolated from one another. There is the greater connection of prayer and thought. It happens when we are running in the path of learning. Such is the real purpose and meaning of a school as a place of learning, of care and compassion, of love and service.

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It happened late one afternoon

It seems strange to be in the Chapel without all of you physically present but the deeper point of Chapel is how we are connected spiritually through the ways in which we think and pray for one another. What we wrestle with in Chapel, we wrestle with in our global world. Something has happened, “late one afternoon” in this story; late in December, in one part of the world, and now everywhere. In both cases, we are in the story. In both cases, there is an ethical challenge, first, about sin itself, and second, about how we deal with human suffering; in short, how we care for one another in a suffering world.

You have all heard of the ‘slippery slope argument’ and the ‘domino effect,’ about how one thing leads to another, about things going from bad to worse. You may even have realized that at times in your own lives. We return from the March break and, indeed, something has happened. You are not here in the same way and yet we are together in the intellectual and spiritual life of the School. We return to the story of David, but it is not David as hero but as sinner. Something happened. The lessons are there for us all. As the poet/ preacher John Donne wonderfully puts it, “David shows us the slippery ways into sin … and the penitential ways out of sin.”

The Thursday reading is about the first; the Friday reading relates to the second. A marvellous story told with great craft and care, the story of David holds up a mirror to each of us, just as it is also a window opening us out to the wonder of God in the face of human sin. What happened “late one afternoon”? David walking in his roof-top garden in Jerusalem sees a beautiful woman bathing. She is Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, a soldier fighting for David against the Ammonites. He sees her. He desires her. He acquires her. He has sex with her. He impregnates her. Note the progression from what we see to what we desire to what we possess.

Think about it for a moment and you realize that this story shows the dynamic of the ethics of the universal moral code of our humanity, the Ten Commandments. First, David covets – desires – another man’s wife. Secondly, David commits adultery. But that is not all. She is pregnant. What next? David seeks to cover it up, recalling Uriah from the battle, sending him home to his wife in the hopes that her pregnancy can be attributed to her husband. It is an act of deception through a misuse of reason and speech. But Uriah holds to the warrior code and sleeps at the door of the King’s house, the King whom he serves. He is acting out of solidarity with his fellow soldiers. David then tries to get him drunk in the hopes that he will go to Bathsheba; his plan is foiled yet again. In desperation, David conspires to have Joab place Uriah at the forefront of the battle where he will most surely be killed. Joab reports to David that “your servant Uriah the Hittite is dead also.” David covets Bathsheba; he commits adultery with her; he conspires to have Uriah killed. Such is the slippery slope of sin graphically and compellingly told. In a marvel of understatement, we are told that “the thing which David had done displeased the Lord.” Do you think?!

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Looking on the heart

Discipline actually means learning. In the Christian understanding, Lent is a season of spiritual discipline. It is not just about the lengthening of the days, but a time of discipline through “self-examination and repentance,” through “prayer, fasting, and self-denial,” and through “reading and meditation” upon the Word of God (BCP, p. 612). It has its counterparts in the other religions and philosophies of the world and at the heart of it are the important questions about self-understanding and self-awareness.

At the end of last week we embarked on the beginning of a brief consideration of the story of David, one of the great and compelling narratives in the Hebrew Scriptures found mostly in 1st and 2nd Samuel. David is a kind of ‘everyman’; that is to say, that his story reveals something to us about ourselves. In a way, the story of David is like a mirror held up to us so that we may see the truth about ourselves and as a window through which we may see something of the wonder of God, of one another, and of creation. A mirror and a window. The story of David begins with him being anointed as king. The context is a question about how Israel as a community is to be governed. Will it be by the prophets? Or by a king?

Samuel is the prophet sent by God to anoint as king one of the sons of Jesse, the Bethlehemite. Seven of the sons of Jesse are brought before Samuel but in each case none of them are chosen. “The Lord sees,” Samuel is told, “not as man sees; man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” It is that sensibility that goes to the heart of the story of David and speaks most profoundly to our image obsessed world of selfies and instagram posts, twitter and facebook. You are more than your selfie, more than the image you present or as others imagine, more than the flickering shadows of your devices. David, the youngest son, is out tending sheep. He is sent for and, behold, the Lord says, “this is he.”

In many ways, it is a question about character but not on any strength of our own. This week in Chapel, we heard the story of David and Goliath and the story of the friendship between David and Jonathan. When we come back from the March break, we will continue with the story of David which entails the sin of David and his repentance. The ‘hero’ is not without his faults and failings. David shows us, as the preacher and poet John Donne notes, “the slippery ways into sin but also the penitential ways out of sin.” Pretty powerful stuff, the stuff of education.

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