Category: KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

Light in darkness

The last lesson in the Advent/Christmas Service of Nine Lessons and Carols is the beginning of John’s Gospel (Jn. 1.1-14), known as the Prologue (though technically it ends at verse 18). This year, too, our Carol Services on Sunday, December 8th, came at the end of the last week of classes. With the Prologue, we end where we began back in September at the first Chapel Services.  “To make an end,” as T.S. Eliot observes, “is to make a beginning” for “the end is where we start from.” He means an end in the sense of a first principle as that upon which the being and the knowing of all things depends.

The lesson from John is the great Christmas Gospel that shapes a whole way of understanding about the nature of God’s engagement with our humanity. It speaks profoundly to the darkness of our world and day about the light which is greater than the darkness. “And the darkness comprehended it not” as the King James’ Version puts it, signalling precisely the intellectual aspect of light, as if to say that the darkness is not able to understand the light. The light understands the darkness but the darkness does not understand the light. The darkness in this sense is the absence of light, a negative.

The reading from John is also known as the last Gospel referring to a medieval practice whereby it is read, often silently, at the end of the Mass. Such practices underscore the significance of the Prologue of John’s Gospel for our understanding.

It opens us out to the idea of an intellectual principle as that upon which everything depends in spite of our uncertainties and fears, our anxieties and worries. John is speaking about Jesus Christ entirely in terms of Word, Light, and Son, yet Jesus is not even mentioned by name in John 1.1-14. Word and Light in relation to the idea of God are intellectual and spiritual commonplaces with respect to a number of religious and philosophical traditions. Augustine will note that he learned the “Word” which was “in the beginning,” which “was with God,” and which “was God” from the libri platonici, the books of the Platonists. Word that is light in the darkness of ignorance and evil is not a concept unique to the Christian religion.

How that Word lives in us belongs to the Christian insight of the Word made flesh, the principle of the Incarnation, one of the essential mysteries of the Christian faith. Yet that mystery speaks to the various ways in which cultures and peoples attempt to understand themselves in relation to a first principle, to the various ways in which that principle may be realized in human lives; in short, to the way in which it lives in us. There can’t be life or knowledge without the principle of life and light. “The life was the light of men,” John tells us. This testifies to an insistence on the primacy of ideas, to the significance of the Light which is greater than all and every form of darkness.

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In Dulci Jubilo

It was an appropriate ending to the last week of classes and perhaps a good approach to this week of exams. The Advent/ Christmas Services of Lessons and Carols were held on Sunday, December 8th at Christ Church, 4:00pm, for Grades 7-11, and at Hensley Memorial Chapel, 7:00pm, for the Grade 12 prospective graduating class of 2020. One of the few events at the School that are mandatory for students and faculty alike, the pageant of Word and Song is a significant feature of the School’s educational philosophy. It has very much to do with learning to attend, being attuned, as it were, to ideas conveyed through words spoken and sung together.

A veritable platoon of servers and singers and readers provided key leadership in the services. The central focus is the readings taken from the King James translation of the Scriptures. Six of the nine readings were taken from the Hebrew Scriptures or the Old Testament in the Christian understanding. They are powerful passages signalling light and hope and peace and joy in the face of darkness and despair, passages that point to the three readings from the Christian New Testament. The readers did an exceptional job of reading clearly and with understanding. The readers at 4:00pm were Will Larder, Alissa Pape, Vincent Armstrong, Mikaela Hinds and Will Mercer along with Head Girl, Ava Benedict and Head Boy, Evan Logan, who read at both services as did the Headmaster, Mr. Joe Seagram, and the Chaplain. Will Larder and Vincent are among the youngest students at the School; they read superbly as did all of the readers.

The servers at the 4pm service were Jacob Fines-Belcham, Alex Graham, Papa Ofori, Sarah Bell, Rendy Ashley, Owara Ofori and Lucas Martin, a wonderfully competent, confident and willing group. That service was greatly enhanced by a choir under the direction of Ms. Stephanie Fillman. They assisted in the singing of carols and hymns, at times by sweetly singing harmonies. The Advent Hymns and Christmas Carols sing the story of human hopes and human redemption in the tonalities of Advent expectation and Christmas rejoicing. In dulci jubilo, indeed, sweet joys, “the concord of sweet sounds.”

The 7pm service has an entirely different feel owing to the intimacy and the ambience of the Chapel. For our Grade 12s, it is their last carol service at the School, at least as students. The readers were Megumi Tsuji, Parker Kim, Aimee Cooper, Ohemaa Ofori, and Andrew Atwood, Head Chapel Prefect, along with Ava Benedict and Evan Logan, the Headmaster and the Chaplain. The servers were Makayli Paul, Ben Fleckenstein, Olivia Drava, Heavyn Beals, and Taewoo Kim. Mr. Owen Stephens was the organist at both services, providing different preludes and postludes for the two services.

I am grateful to all who helped and with those parents and family members who attended and showed their support and understanding of this kind of corporate activity so critical to a proper understanding of education. I especially want to thank the Chapel Prefects who have helped with the morning miracle of Chapel throughout the term. In dulci jubilo.

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

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Be it unto me according to thy word

The readings in Chapel in this last week of classes help to prepare us for the pageant of Word and Song in the Advent/Christmas Services of Lessons and Carols on Sunday and as well for next week’s exams. The lesson from John’s Gospel (Jn. 4. 46-53) in particular highlights an important feature of education. It is the idea of resonance, the sounding forth within us of the words coming towards us whether in Chapel, in the classroom, in the venues of sports or in our social interactions. In the teaching environment, you are taught various things, but what have you learned? What have you taken into yourself and made a part of you? Exams provide some indication.

“The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,/ Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils/…. Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music,” Lorenzo says in a famous passage about the power of music in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. It is very much about what moves within us. In the play, the idea of musical harmony relates to the themes of justice and mercy, to what has resonance within us.

In John’s Gospel, an Official comes to Jesus in Capernaum seeking the healing of his son who is at the point of death. He beseeches Jesus to come down, to make a house call, as it were, to which Jesus replies in a kind of general criticism of human expectations which is really about our attempt to make God subject to us. “Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe,” he says. The Official repeats his request to which Jesus then says, “Go thy way; thy son liveth.” The wonder of the story is captured in John’s simple phrase. “The man believed the word that Jesus spoke unto him and he went his way.” Christ’s word has resonance within him. In going down to his house, his servants meet him to tell him that his son lives. He learns that he was healed in the self-same hour that Jesus said, “Thy son liveth.” Truth has its resonance in us.

The Word of God of itself cannot be constrained to the ordinary limits of time and space as we saw last week both in the pageant of the Ten Commandments, as the universal ethical code of our humanity and as known by natural reason, and in the marvel of the Centurion’s “speak the word only.” At issue is the resonance of God’s Word in us. It is about what we have learned, about instruction alive and living in us. Catechism means instruction by means of question and answer. The word points to the echo effect that is the resonance of the teaching in us, a sounding forth of what has been received and grasped.

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I am the Lord thy God who brought you … out of the house of bondage.

The educational and ethical journey of the exodus reaches its climax with the story of the giving of the Law, the Ten Commandments. We have looked at the birth of Moses, the revelation of God as “I am Who I am” to Moses in the Burning Bush, the ‘star wars contest’ between Pharaoh as a ‘god’ and God with Moses as his agent culminating in the Passover story, the story of the Crossing of the Red Sea, and the provisions of manna to the people of Israel in the wilderness. That wilderness journey is about liberation from slavery understood literally and ethically. Something good is learned in the wilderness. The greater manna, we might say, is not simply God’s provisions for us physically but the manna of God’s Word and Will for us.

The Ten Commandments are not precisely numbered in the Exodus account and there are different traditions about their  numbering. They are neither a list from which we might pick and choose nor are they simply a set of suggestions. There can be no additions to nor substractions from them. In other words, they form a complete series of interrelated ethical principles that comprise the moral code for our humanity. They are universal and while presented authoritatively, they are actually the precepts that belong to natural reason. They are for thought and are about thought itself; God’s thinking for our thinking and acting. They are really the authority of thought or reason itself.

It might seem that they are negative given their proscriptive force: “thou shalt not.” But this is to miss the essential content and positive meaning of what is set before us and which shape an understanding of law and order externally and internally. They reveal for thought what is known by reason about ethical thinking and practice. They are the unfolding of the principle of God for us in terms of an understanding of the real truth and dignity of our humanity. It is an axiom of thought that a principle cannot be demonstrated by anything prior to it but only by the dependency of everything else upon it. The Ten Commandments are the unpacking of God as the principle of the being and knowing of all things. They begin with God as principle; “I Am Who I Am.” “I Am the Lord thy God” marks the beginning of the Commandments.

Because God is God there can be no other gods. Because God is God, God is not to be confused with anything in the created order; in short, God cannot be imaged for that would deny the reality of God as that upon which everything else depends. An image is not the reality. This is true and necessary for our thinking about God but also for us. You are not your ‘selfie’. Your instagram images are not you. You are more than your image. Thus our self-knowledge depends upon the knowledge of God and God’s self-knowledge. Because God is God, God’s name is not to be taken in vain which means that God is not to be used for our ends and purposes, as if God were subject to us.

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Crossings

The Crossing of the Red Sea marks the culmination of the story of the Plagues and the Passover, which distinguishes the Israelites from the Egyptians, and inaugurates the wilderness journey so central to the Exodus and to the ethical education of the people of Israel. This week in Chapel students read and heard the story of the Crossing of the Red Sea and the provision of manna to the people of Israel in the wilderness. Both stories speak to the enterprise of education and its challenges.

The Passover story ends with the question which reverberates down throughout the ages, “what mean ye by this service?” It complements the greater question raised by Jesus that introduces the famous parable of the Good Samaritan. That greater question is “how readest thou?” How do you read? How do we read the story of the Crossing of the Red Sea? My point is that we easily mis-read it if we remove the story from the way in which the story has come down to us in the coming together of the books of the Hebrew Scriptures as a whole as well as the coming together of the Christian Scriptures. In other words, these stories belong to a rich and profound reflection about an ethical education, about the principle which defines and informs our lives with respect to what is good and right, to what is true and beautiful. The Exodus belongs to a tradition of ethical reflection.

Thus Philo of Alexandria, the great Jewish theologian writing at the time of Jesus, sees Moses in terms of Plato’s Philosopher/King, as Lawgiver, and as Prophet. The stories of the Exodus are part of a moral and ethical education about how to think and live. It is about living towards and with a principle which by definition cannot be defined by anything prior to it but upon which all else depends. This counters the mistaken view of fundamentalist and atheist alike to read these stories in a literal manner and to attempt to explain them or to explain them away by reference to some sort of empirical phenomenon; in other words, to look for a naturalistic explanation, for example, the east wind, rather than recognising the theological point about God as beyond and above nature who uses the forces of nature for his will and purpose. This is the main point of the story of the Crossing of the Red Sea through which Israel is finally and completely freed, at least externally, from Egyptian domination. At issue is a clash of principles.

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They desire a better country

The reading in Chapel on Tuesday from Hebrews 11 & 12 provided an opportunity for further reflection on the significance of Remembrance Day, something which perhaps we are only beginning to understand. It is really about contemplating the devastations and destructiveness of the technology of war in its global extent, on the one hand, and the idea of sacrificial love, on the other hand. These are ethical considerations about the overarching nature of the Good. Contemplating the miseries of our humanity in its destructive disarray actually belongs to our felicity, to blessedness, such as the Beatitudes show.

In a post-Christian, and even anti-Christian, culture and even more in the climate of anti-intellectualism, I am struck by the paradox of the hold that an older and principled ethical and philosophical discourse still has in our current world. “They desire a better country” is the motto of the Order of Canada, the highest honorific in our country. The phrase comes from the King James Version of Hebrews, itself translated into English in the 16th and  17th centuries from the Greek. The motto has been latinized (but not by reference to the Latin Vulgate translation): Desiderantes meliorem patriam.

That idea of a desire for a better country catapults our thinking into a reflection upon the Good and to the ways in which the ethical shapes our thoughts and actions. This is a fundamental feature of the great philosophical and religious traditions of the world. It is about the challenge of acting in accord with virtue as Aristotle says. The traditions of moral philosophy presuppose our openness to what is transcendent, to what comes into us through, for example, illumination, purgation, and perfection that belong to our lives as “strangers and pilgrims” seeking “a better country, that is an heavenly.” We are reminded of “a great cloud of witnesses” of those who have sought to will the good and were willing to sacrifice themselves for principles and ideals which they considered worth dying for because they belong to what dignifies life.

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He taught them saying, blessed are you

The Beatitudes complement and complete the ethical and educational project of The Book of Exodus. At issue is our awareness of an ethical principle, the idea of the Good which shapes and informs all our thinking and doing. The Beatitudes mark the beginning of Christ’s famous Sermon on the Mount. They present us with a challenging set of ethical principles that are profoundly counter-culture and yet belong to a long and rich tradition of ethical and philosophical thinking. To read them in the lead up to the Remembrance Day observances along with Christ’s words about sacrificial love, “greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends,” words which adorn a thousand cenotaphs throughout the world, is particularly poignant.

The Beatitudes are the great Christian ethic of grace and belong to the challenge about what truly defines us, a question which belongs to the traditions of ethical and philosophical thinking. Socrates argues that it is far better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. He lived and died what he taught, accepting the suffering imposed upon him by Athens, his death for teaching (accused of corrupting the youth). Confucius in the Analects calls attention to the inner qualities of ren, of virtue and goodness. Sri Krishna advises Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita to follow his dharma as a warrior but without attachment to results or outcomes. Buddhism will extend the theme of detachment from desires to the extent of the complete extinguishment of the self. There is no you. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all teach the theme of renunciation and sacrifice, the idea of being defined by something greater than yourself that shapes thought and action.

“Blessedness includes every concept of goodness,” the great mystic Cappadocian theologian of the fourth century, Gregory of Nyssa, observes, “from which nothing answering to good desire is missing.” He goes on to note that “to tell the truth, blessedness is the divine itself.” The Beatitudes are about nothing less than our participation in the illuminating, purifying, and perfecting grace of God which dignifies and defines our humanity. Nothing could be more counter-culture and nothing could better help our remembering about the sombre realities of the devastating and destructive wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They speak to what God seeks for us even in spite of ourselves.

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To mask or not to mask?

To mask or not to mask? That is the question. I have to confess that I approach Halloween with a certain degree of trepidation, with a sense of uncertainty and unease about what we are doing and what it means. Ambiguity lies at the heart of the secular forms of Halloween albeit in different ways than what belongs to the festival, historically and spiritually speaking. The common ground to some extent is the blurring of boundaries which may (I stress the conditional) help us to think more fully about what it means to be human. The boundaries between human and nature, between human and animal, between human and machine, between male and female, between the living and the dead, between the grotesque and the cute, between the safe and the threatening in the frisson of the scary, are all deliberately blurred. Some people apparently like being frightened. All these things point to something more than our quotidian  experiences.

Halloween, literally speaking, means All Hallows’ Eve, the eve of the medieval Christian Feast of All Saints. All Hallows means All Saints, all the hallowed ones. The Lord’s prayer helps to make the point. “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name,” we say at every chapel service. “Hallowed be thy name” means “holy be your name,” the idea of the holy which we explored last week in terms of the idea of holy spaces, places set aside for what has meaning. Halloween, religiously speaking, refers to the idea of the Holy and of our calling to be holy. It speaks in other words to the end or purpose of our humanity, something wonderfully captured in the Communion of Saints, the company of the holy ones who embody the hopes and dreams and aspirations of our humanity in its truth, a truth found in God.

The masks of this week are ambiguous. The mask or costume you wear either reveals or conceals some aspect of your personality. Take heed! This inherent ambiguity is the best part of the idea of a masquerade. What does this representation really mean? If someone dresses up as Winnie-the-Pooh is that a Christopher Robin fantasy, a comfortable childhood memory, or a mocking of Xi Jinping? Because of the latter references to the Winnie-the-Pooh are banned in China. But who knows? Who can say? The lines of meaning are blurred. There is a necessary gap between the appearance and the reality.

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You are standing on holy ground

“Put off your shoes from your feet; for the place where you are standing is holy ground.” What do we mean by holy spaces? Morning after morning we meet in Chapel. It is “holy ground.” Why? Because of what Exodus 3 presents to us. It is, we might say, the quintessential story for the understanding of sacred or holy spaces.

It would be hard to overestimate the significance of the story of ‘the burning bush’ in which God reveals himself to Moses not only as “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” but, more importantly, as “I Am Who I Am,” the universal principle of all reality, of the being and the knowing of all things, we might say, philosophically speaking. Here is the defining moment for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. What is that? The principle of ethical monotheism.

We are going to spend some time with the Book of Exodus. Not only does the idea of ‘exodus’ belong to the project of education – the idea of our going out from ourselves into a larger understanding of things – but the book itself is, I suggest, an ethical treatise to be considered alongside Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Ethics. In a world where some political leaders think they are above the law, we need to reclaim an understanding of the ethical upon which law fundamentally depends. The ethical is about what is the good from which we might begin to determine what is right to do. The legal depends upon the ethical and not the other way around. The Book of Exodus teaches us much about the ethical and connects to a whole world of philosophical and religious thinking about what is good and what is right.

The story of the burning bush is definitive for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. It is about ‘Revelation,’ the idea that things are made known to us through what is seen and heard so as to be understood. Here we have a story which is the premise and presupposition of the Genesis story of creation. A bush burns and yet is not consumed. That is not natural. Exactly. That is the whole point. It is entirely about revealing the prior principle upon which the world as any sort of intelligible reality ultimately depends. God speaks to Moses out of the burning bush to reveal himself, not just in terms of particular and tribal identities – read our current identity politics – but in terms of something utterly universal, the famous ‘name’ of God as “I Am Who I Am.”

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And she named him Moses

Who named him? The daughter of Pharaoh, the King (and God figure) of ancient Egypt. And who is Moses? The founding figure of Judaism. It might seem passing strange that the history of the Hebrews as the people of God begins in Egypt and in a situation of uncertainty and tension, of slavery and infanticide.

With the exception of Sanatana Dharma, that is to say, Hinduism, all of the major religions of the world have a founding figure and all of them have birth narratives about their founding figures. There are the birth narratives of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha in Theravada Buddhism and in the various forms of Mahayana Buddhism and Vajrayana Buddhism. There are the birth narratives of Jesus in Matthew and Luke (and in a different and much more philosophical sense in John), narratives which reflect intentionally on aspects of the birth of Moses in Exodus. Then there are the Al-sira traditions within Islam that treat the birth and upbringing of Muhammad. They all point to the significance of the founding figure for what defines these religious and philosophical traditions and for what develops within them.

In the case of Moses, the birth narrative marks the beginning of Philo of Alexandria’s treatment of Moses as the great lawgiver and the embodiment of the truth of our humanity, a theme which will be taken up by Gregory of Nyssa’s consideration of Moses as embodying the path of spiritual perfection. In other words, Moses becomes an exemplar of the way of being human through his attention to the things of God.

Exodus is the Greek name given to the second book of the Bible, what has come to be known as the Second Book of Moses in the Torah, the first five books which are traditionally known as the Books of Moses. This does not imply authorship by Moses. Rather it shows the spiritual significance of Moses as the figure through whom God gives the Law to Israel and through Israel to the world.

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