Category: KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

Truth, Lord, yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs
which fall from their masters’ table

For the most part, dogs get rather bad press in the Scriptures. Dogs returning to their vomit, dogs licking up the blood of Jezebel; these are hardly attractive images. To call someone a dog is an insult. On the other hand, in the Book of Tobit, for example, we have the lovely image of Tobias’ dog which captures something of the sense of the dog as man’s best friend and loyal companion, not unlike Odysseus’s dog, Argos, who sees his master in disguise after twenty years and doesn’t betray him but “passes into the darkness,” as Homer says, his destiny fulfilled. Elsewhere in the New Testament, there are the dogs that lick the sores of Lazarus lying at the gate of the rich man, destitute and in want, the dogs that show compassion and care in the face of our indifference and neglect of one another.

And then there is this story which opens us out to a whole other tradition and way of thinking about dogs in relation to our humanity. It is a powerful and, in a way, a disturbing story. A Canaanite woman comes to Jesus seeking the healing of her daughter, “grievously vexed with a devil,” disturbed in her mind, we might say. She is a non-Israelite. And yet she embodies most completely what it truly means to be an Israelite, namely, one who strives with God. Her exchange with Jesus is amazing for one simple reason. She, like the blind man by the wayside, won’t give up. She has a hold of something, an insight into the nature of God, of which she she won’t let go. She perseveres in the face of intimidating set-backs: silence, rebuke, and insult. Yet she, to put it bluntly, sticks with it.

To be an Israelite is to strive with God. Jacob becomes Israel precisely through that idea and experience. Here this Canaanite woman strives with God in Christ, seeing in him the healing power of God which alone can heal her daughter. We can say she is being put to the test and yet it is really the disciples whom Jesus is putting to the test. God cannot be simply the God of one group at the expense of others. At the same time Jesus draws out of the woman the deep truth and insight of her faith. The climax of the exchange is about little dogs. “It is not right to take the children’s bread and to cast it to dogs,” Jesus says, in what can only be received as a kind of insult. “Truth, Lord,” she replies, “yet even the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.” Exquisite and profound. It captures her insight into the radical nature of Christ and what God wants from us, namely, our active engagement with his will and purpose for our humanity.

(more…)

Print this entry

Lord, that I may receive my sight

The most important thing that has happened to you this week, perhaps, is that you have heard the reading from Luke 18.31-41. Coupled with the Paul’s wonderful hymn of love in 1st Corinthians 13, it speaks directly to the journey of our humanity. The concept of life as a journey is a commonplace but that doesn’t take away from its significance. The idea of a journey implies a destination, a place to which we are going but aren’t there yet. It suggests that there are limitations and obstacles which have to be overcome or engaged.

These two readings, the one which we heard in Chapel this week, the other a few weeks ago belong to the Christian preparation for Lent, a spiritual season of renewal and discipline. The essential elements of the Christian journey of the soul to God have their counterparts in the spiritual traditions of the other great religions and philosophies of the world. The journey is about illumination, purgation, and union or perfection. The reading from Luke as complemented with Paul’s great hymn of love speaks directly to the very nature of education. It, too, is about illumination or enlightenment, about purgation or the clearing of our minds and souls from all the clutter and chaos that results in confusion and disarray, and about union, a sense of oneness and wholeness of our being. But what makes this readings so particularly powerful is that they show us the essential conjunction of knowing and loving.

To put the point, very simply, there can be no learning, no journey without the desire to know. As Aristotle rather famously (or infamously) notes, “all men desire by nature to know.” In one way or another, the activity of thinking and knowing is fundamental to what it means to be human. Coupled to that activity is the activity of desire, of wanting to know, of love. The Gospel highlights this interconnection. Jesus says, “behold, we go up to Jerusalem.” There is a journey. He explains exactly what the journey means. It means the things of his passion and death out of which comes his resurrection. He tells them – us – what it means. But, as Luke puts it, “they understood none of these things.”

(more…)

Print this entry

Why are ye so fearful?

Sturm und drang. I always associate February with this wonderful German phrase which belongs to a literary work but which in turn gives the name to a cultural phenomenon that was the precursor to the rich traditions of German romanticism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Sturm und drang means storm and stress. How do we deal with the storms and stresses of our world and day?

There are, to be sure, no end of the storms of nature that beset us in the bleak midwinter of February, the stresses that belong to travel and even survival in the rather harsh winter conditions of the Maritimes, not to mention the winter bruising and beating that Newfoundland has endured. It is a wonderful part of the consolation literature to be reminded that things could be worse and that sometimes for others they are far worse than what we have to endure. It is a way of helping us to face the rigours of winter.

But there is something far greater and far more challenging than simply the storms of nature, the winter storms of snow and ice, of wind and cold. Beyond such storms of nature, there are the endless and never-ending storms of the human heart. How do we deal with those storms and stresses? They are the storms of anxiety and fear within us. In a way, they are far greater than the storms of nature.

In Chapel this week, we read a wonderful story about Jesus in the midst of a storm at sea and about his response to our fearfulness and anxiety. The story has influenced the tradition of consolation literature. Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, draws upon this image in suggesting that out of the tempest, out of the sturm und drang of human life in all its disarray, there can be “sea-change into something rich and strange.” There is something that can be learned in and  through the storms of life, whatever they may be, ranging from our fears and worries about the coronavirus 2019 outbreak, now mercifully shortened to CoVid19, to our worries and anxieties about the climate, the economy, about the interrelation of nations and peoples or the lack thereof, and of course, the endless anxiety of parents about their children which only adds to anxiety upon anxiety.  Lots of sturm und drang, we might say!

(more…)

Print this entry

If I have not love, I am nothing

Love, it seems, is in the air, whatever that means. ‘Spirit Week’ at King’s-Edgehill School brings us to Valentine’s Day following upon the Headmaster’s Valentine Dinner and Dance on Thursday night. The challenge in Chapel has been to place the events of this week upon the foundation of divine love which seeks the perfection of all our human loves. This suggests that there is something radically incomplete about our human loves and that, no doubt, is a challenging concept to students and faculty alike.

On Monday and Tuesday, the reading in Chapel was St. Paul’s great encomium or praise of love from 1st Corinthians 13. “If I have not love, I am nothing.” Caritas. Charity, as the King James Version puts it, is love. In English the little word, love, has to bear a great weight of meaning. For the Greeks and the Latins, there are a host of words that express a sense of the different kinds of love, love as defined by its relation to the object of love. Therein lies the problem as Plato intuited in using, provocatively and deliberately, the word eros to speak about the movement of our souls to the truth. Eros which we associate with sexual passion and desire is used intentionally to highlight  “the passionate desire to know.” Brilliant.

So what do we mean by love? How do we think about love? For our culture, I suspect that the demand to think about love is exactly the problem whereas for earlier times not to think about love was precisely the problem. St. Paul’s great and profound praise of love is about the divine love which perfects our human loves. This recognizes the painful truth that our human loves are incomplete and even destructive. We often hurt those whom we love the most. So what Paul is saying here is quite important about the qualities of love. “Love is not boastful … love seeketh not her own …thinketh no evil … Love rejoices in the truth,” and so on. It is a powerful hymn of praise about the power of love which perfects our humanity and belongs to the building up of a community of love. 1st Corinthians 13 is “the still more excellent way” for the understanding of our lives together as a body, as a school, and for our self-understanding as well. “We see in a glass darkly; but then face to face.” Faith, hope, charity are the theological virtues which perfect the cardinal virtues or qualities of human excellence, the ancient virtues of temperance, courage, prudence and justice. Charity or love is the greatest of the three.

(more…)

Print this entry

A light to lighten

The transition from darkness to light, from ignorance to knowledge, is an ancient and universal feature of education, itself a kind of enlightenment. In the fearful confusions of our world and day, we forget about its power and necessity. Yet, it is in our face through the readings in Chapel this week. The reading from the Prophet Malachi, proclaiming the idea of the Lord “whom ye seek” coming “suddenly to his temple,” was poignantly juxtaposed with Luke’s account of Christ’s first coming to the Temple forty days after his birth.

In the Christian understanding, it is a double-barrelled feast, a festival of Mary and a feast of Christ, his presentation – a kind of dedication of the first-born to God – and her purification – a kind of thanksgiving to God for childbirth. Presentation and Purification go together. It concerns how we are prepared for truth, for its presence in our lives. A refiner’s fire and fuller’s soap are Malachi’s images about the refining of metal, on the one hand, and of sheep’s wool, on the other. In the face of the truth of God, all that is not and not of God is stripped bare and made pure. Only as purified can we be awakened to the light that enlightens our humanity, the light which is life.

This week marks an intriguing and important transition, at least for the churches of the Western Christian world. It is the transition, the turning point, from Christmas, the festival of light, to Easter, the festival of life. February 2nd is not so much about groundhogs and their shadows, except to say that without light there can be no shadow. Candlemas, as the Presentation of Christ and the Purification of May is commonly known, marks that transition.

The lessons are wonderful and profound, complex and yet simple. We are called to be light but only in the light of Christ, without which we are really only darkness, indeed darkness upon darkness, abyss upon abyss. “In thy light shall we see light,” as the Psalmist puts it, emphasizing at once the idea that human knowing depends upon God’s knowing and our participation in that knowing.

(more…)

Print this entry

It’s good to be here

“This is a country/where a man can die/ simply from being/caught outside,” Alden Nowlan observes, “the forgotten poet of Stanley,” Nova Scotia, as I once styled him. He was making an observation about January here in the Maritimes. There are, to be sure, the challenges of winter, of darkness and light, of cold and thaw, of ice and snow. There are also the anxieties and worries of our culture of fearful uncertainty in the great litany of fears that threaten to paralyze us, from viruses to wars.

This week in Chapel the story of the Transfiguration of Christ was read following upon the story of the Baptism of Christ. Both stories speak to the Epiphany theme of the  manifestation of the things of God revealed and made known in various ways: through nature, and, more specifically, through the humanity of Christ as shown in the Scriptures. Things are made known through what is sometimes called God’s Book of Nature as well as through the Book of Scripture, through Revelation. The emphasis is on what we come to know and in what way. Such things speak profoundly to the fears and anxieties of our day.

Epiphany season emphasizes what is made known through what is seen and heard. In the story of Christ’s Baptism and his Transfiguration there is something seen and heard: the Father’s voice, the Son seen coming out of the water of Jordan or transfigured on the mountain, the Holy Spirit coming down upon Christ, like a dove. “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased,” God the Father says in both stories. These are important images that arrest our attention. Guarda e escolta, as Dante says. Look and listen. To what? To what is seen and heard. Such is education. These stories speak to the Christian understanding of Christ as the Son of God – something which Islam and Judaism completely deny – and to the idea of God in his infinite self-relation as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, God as Trinity, something which they also deny. Yet something is made known about the infinite power, wisdom and goodness of God, insights and ideas which are more universal and belong to the world’s cultures.

(more…)

Print this entry

Have courage, you who are human beings: Jesus, he is born.

It is a wonderful line from the first Canadian Christmas carol (c. 1643), St. Jean de Brébeuf’s  Jesous Ahatonhia. I was asked to do something in Chapel on Monday that would relate to School’s day of honouring and celebrating ‘indigenous learning and culture’ and asked if would be appropriate to sing the Huron Carol. It was and we did. This led me to look more closely into the carol largely by way of the famous Canadian folk-singer, Bruce Cockburn’s, 1993 Christmas album which highlights the Huron Carol. He performs it in the original Ouwendat or Huron language. The liner notes and other research revealed a number of intriguing features of the carol which help us to think more deeply about the intersection and interplay of cultures within the Christian concept of the Epiphany.

The Epiphany season focuses on what is manifest about God in and through the humanity of Jesus Christ. The stories of the Epiphany are all about teaching and learning both within the Christian understanding of the essential divinity of Christ and in terms of “the infinite power, wisdom and goodness” of God which belong, it seems to me, to a universal and philosophical sensibility within the cultures of the world, including the cultures of the native peoples of Canada.

As the Canadian poet and philosopher Jan Zwicky notes, our contemporary technocratic culture provides no meaning for human life; it is meaningless and in our technological obsessions there is a profound disconnect from the created order. Thinking seriously about the history and character of the indigenous cultures is very much needed in order to reclaim philosophically what we have lost, forgotten, and ignored in our technocratic culture, that is to say, a world dominated by technology which is of our making and our unmaking.

(more…)

Print this entry

Unum necessarium

“One thing is needful,” Jesus says to Martha, “and Mary has chosen the better part.” What is that “better part”,  “the one thing needful”? Perhaps it is another Mary, the Mary of the Christmas story, who shows us best what is most needed. She is, in the Christian understanding, the Theotokos, the God-bearer, the Mother of God, who embodies the highest dignity and truth of our humanity, “most highly favoured lady” as a carol puts it.

The Christmas story in all of its richness carries over into Epiphany. For Orthodox Christians following the Old Calendar, the Julian calendar, as Stanislav, a student from the Ukraine reminded me the other day, January 7th was Christmas. January 19th will be their Epiphany. The shepherds journey to Bethlehem to “see this thing that has come to pass,” literally, this saying that has happened; in short, “the word made flesh.” The shepherds “make known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child,” awakening wonder in all that heard it. “But Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart.” The one thing needful is to ponder the wonder of God.

Sometimes one story throws light upon another. The Christmas scene, quite frankly, is all a confusion of images, a great cluster of things seen and heard. At best we can only dance around it, looking in upon what is there and thinking about its meaning. In the story of Martha and Mary, sisters in Bethany, Jesus is a guest. Mary sits at Jesus’ feet, “listening to his word.” Martha, on the other hand, is “distracted by much serving” and gets annoyed at Mary and complains to Jesus. Jesus’ response is a profound but gentle rebuke and one which speaks to the confusions and the busyness of our world and day. “Martha, Martha; thou art anxious and troubled about a multitude of things; one thing is needful; and Mary hath chosen the better part.”

We so easily lose ourselves in our busyness as if being busy was the most important thing, as if we could justify ourselves by busyness alone. The problem is not that there aren’t things that have to be done, mouths to be fed, children and others to be cared for, and so on. No. It is more about our preoccupation with our busyness at the expense of the one thing needful. It is a question about ends and priorities. After all, our busyness can often be a form of sloth. Usually we think of sloth as being lazy but it is also about avoiding doing what is needed to be done, using our busyness as an excuse to avoid papers and assignments, studying and reading, for example. Jesus reminds us that contemplation, a kind of serious and thoughtful attention to what is wanted to be known and learned is the one thing needful. The Martha syndrome checked by the Mary solution.

(more…)

Print this entry