Category: KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

Thanksgiving in Thanksgiving

“There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger,” Jesus says in the classical Gospel thanksgiving story of the ten lepers who were healed of whom only one returned to give thanks. The story speaks to one of our current dilemmas: thanksgiving without thanksgiving.

We all like a good meal, to be sure. No one likes a bad meal but is thanksgiving simply an occasion for huge meal, for hedonistic self-indulgence and conspicuous consumption? Is it about celebrating our consumer selves? Something of the more radical nature of thanksgiving is shown in this Gospel story as highlighted by Jesus. More than a healing miracle, it is about the miracle of thanksgiving which is our participation in God’s grace, the true and only basis of gratitude. The root of gratitude is grace – what comes from God to us and in a myriad of ways.

True thanksgiving counters our complacency and our sense of entitlement. The harvest cannot be taken for granted; it cannot be said that we deserve a feast or that it is a right. There are times of famine and pestilence, times of drought and storm. Think only of the catastrophic humanitarian disaster that continues with the famine in Yemen. Here in Windsor, the annual Pumpkin Regatta will be a much diminished affair simply because there are far, far fewer pumpkins owing to the cold spring, the dryness of the summer, and, of course, Hurricane Dorian. Such things challenge our complacency and remind us that we can only work with God’s creation and that we do not have control of nature. They serve as a check upon our rather instrumental and utilitarian relation to the natural world and to one another.

(more…)

Print this entry

Tell me if you have understanding

The questions of God call us to account. They humble us, to be sure, acting as a check upon the ignorance of our arrogance, but they also open us out to the greater wonder of God and his creation, and to a deeper understanding about ourselves. The great questions of God to Adam and Eve, echoed in the same questions to Cain, are recalled in the questions of God to Job. And, perhaps, nowhere with greater intensity.

We have too small a view of God, of his creation, and thus of ourselves. The questions of God in The Book of Job counter our small-mindedness. They open us out to the grandeur of God which cannot be reduced to the petty little systems of our thinking, to the ghettos of our minds to which we retreat in fear and despair. The Book of Job counters our attempt to capture God within our thinking, to reduce God to us. In a way, I blame Milton in Paradise Lost. The idea of trying to “justifie the wayes of God to men” runs the risk of collapsing God into our thinking rather than raising us into the mystery of God and his creation which is always greater than what we can know. That the world is in principle intelligible does not mean that its meaning and truth can be fully grasped by us. Such is our small-mindedness that can only lead to nihilism and despair, not to mention the capacity for the destructive and misguided use of our reasoning.

Job is the Old Testament type of the best man in the worst misfortune. He loses everything – prosperity and family. He goes from having everything to losing everything. He is the Hebrew paradigm of the man of sorrows and suffering. He demands an explanation from God. The poet, novelist and theologian, G. K. Chesterton observes that the Book of Job is the most interesting of ancient books but equally the most interesting of modern books because in its philosophical wisdom it is eternal. It speaks profoundly to the assumptions of our middle class world. It challenges the old yet common idea that if you do well you will be rewarded materially, with prosperity. This is often the message projected by parents and teachers to their children and students along with the warning that if you do badly you will suffer poverty and material hardship. The Book of Job undertakes to point out the problem with such a way of looking at things; it is too limited, too small a view of the world and of human behaviour. The corollary of these positions shows their dangerous absurdity. If you are rich, therefore you must be good; if you are poor, then you are obviously bad?! The ethical measure of goodness or evil cannot be material prosperity. The Book of Job exposes the folly of this way of looking at things.

(more…)

Print this entry

They overcame him by the blood of the lamb

Above the entrance to the Romanesque Basilica San Michele Maggiore in Pavia, in northern Italy, stands a bas-relief of the figure of St. Michael the Archangel. He is depicted as looking straight ahead, calm and serene, while standing upon a dragon-like serpent. Around the portal a whole collection of creatures are arrayed, each chasing and devouring one another. It depicts. in an imaginative way, the important contrast and connection between two different forms of thinking: ratio and intellectus.

The angels remind us of the necessity and the priority of intellectus, the power of understanding, without which we are lost and consumed in ratiocination, our linear, calculative kind of thinking, chasing one thing after another without any sense of the whole; literally lost in the parts. Intellectus is about the gathering together of all things into understanding, into wisdom, and as such redeems our more instrumental forms of thinking which by themselves lead to destruction and despair. The redemption of ratio is found in its participation in intellectus, something which is wonderfully shown in Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, a work which draws upon Augustine and important intellectual developments in late antiquity. Both Augustine and Boethius are buried in another church in Pavia; San Pietro Ciel d’oro, mentioned by Dante in the Paradiso of his Divine Comedy. Such are just some of the profound aspects of intellectus, a gathering into understanding.

We need to be reminded about the different forms of thinking. The angels are part and parcel of the scriptural landscape and intellectual thought-world of the ancient Greeks and of the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic imaginary. They belong to our life together as an intellectual and spiritual community which is especially the role of Chapel in the life of the School. They remind us of the important truth and insight that there is more to reality than what is known by our senses. We can’t see the angels. In a way, that is the point. We can only think them. They are pure mind, spiritual and intellectual beings who are the invisible thoughts of God in creation.

(more…)

Print this entry

Where are you?

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” God asks Job out of the whirlwind. Where are we is equally an important question in the opening chapters of Genesis. Where do we fit in the order of things? In Genesis One we are there, I have suggested, first in our thinking after God in his creative acts and, then, explicitly in our being made in the image of God. Nothing speaks more completely to the truth of human dignity. The point is that we are connected to everything in the created order and have a special relation to God as made in the image of the one who calls everything into being. Made in the image of God means that we are emphatically not God. To be made in the image of God bestows a certain dignity that should shape our relationships with everything else in the created order, including one another.

Genesis Two provides another account. Rather than locating our humanity within the grand pageant of creation as an orderly affair, the focus turns, in a more intimate and unabashedly anthropomorphic way, to our humanity itself. But it must come as a bit of a surprise since it seems to offer a complete contrast. We go, it seems, from dignity to dust. “Remember, O man, that thou art dust.” It marks an important spiritual act of remembrance.  But from dignity to dust!? How are we to think this?

These two chapters of Genesis have existed side by side for more than two millennia. Rather than seeing them in contrast or even in contradiction with one another, we can see them as complementary. To be reminded that man is formed from the dust of the ground – the word adam comes from adamah meaning the ground – not only humbles us but grounds us, connecting us with everything that belongs to the material and physical world. We are the dust into which God has breathed his spirit. Such is the dignified dust of our common humanity. This serves as a check perhaps upon our hubris and arrogance and the misuse of our God-given domination of the world which can really only properly mean our acting in the image of the Dominus, the Lord, who calls creation into being and sustains and cares for it. We are in his image as the dust into which God breathes his spirit.

(more…)

Print this entry

And God saw that it was good

The first Chapel services last week began with the hymn, “I feel the winds of God today,” sung to a lovely English traditional melody called Kingsfold. I don’t know about the “winds of God,” but I think many of us certainly felt the winds of Hurricane Dorian! Wind and rain, falling branches and uprooted trees, one of which glanced off Alexandra Hall, the Headmaster’s House, power lines down, no internet. Catastrophic. Yet, unlike the Bahamas, there has been no loss of life, just lots of damage. We are keeping the people of the Bahamas in our prayers, especially in this difficult time of grief, and for all relief and restoration efforts. The experience of the storm raises the question, how is this good? The question relates to the opening chapter of Genesis and to what we heard in verses 6 – 23.

There is a great deal of contemporary concern about safety, about safe places and about feeling safe. But does the culture of safety-ism imply that the world, then, is a dangerous and threatening place? That evil lies outside in the ‘natural’ world? The culture of safety-ism suggests that we, too, are fearful and anxious. Yet one of the great “untruths” of contemporary culture, as Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argue in The Coddling of the American Mind, is the idea that you are fragile. The truth is that you are actually quite resilient. Which is why we need to remind ourselves yet again of the great wisdom of Genesis 1 with its recurring refrain, “and God saw that it was good.” Something profound is being said about the world as created and something profound is being said about us.

We can appreciate the wisdom of Genesis 1 by way of comparison to something like the creation stories of the ancient Sumerians in Mesopotamia. The Genesis story is told in contra-distinction to such accounts which see creation as a struggle between chaos and order. For the ancient Sumerians, who had achieved a great number of practical technological innovations, not unlike our modern world, there was a fearful uncertainty about reality as if chaos might just be greater than order. Chaos just might rise up and overthrow everything. Despite their technological advances, they lived in a state of fearful uncertainty, one of the images of which is Humbaba, the force of the forest who, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, is said to be “the evil in the land” and who, as “a battering ram,” is viewed as a threat to the city. The fearful uncertainty is not just the fear of the unknown but the greater fear of the unknowable, what is literally unable to be known and grasped intellectually. Evil or danger lies outside the city. The world is a fearful, dangerous and deadly place.

(more…)

Print this entry

In the beginning God … In the beginning the Word

And so it begins. It has become a tradition to have the Head Boy and Head Girl read the two lessons which have become a special feature of the first two Chapel services. The two readings are Genesis 1. 1-5 and John 1. 1-5; two of the most profound texts that belong to intellectual thought and reflection. The reading from John is most clearly and obviously a kind of complement and commentary on the passage from Genesis. These readings from the Jewish Scriptures, and the Christian New Testament are also complemented by a wonderful passage from the Islamic Scriptures, the Qur’an. The “Originator (Badi) of heaven and earth. When He decrees a thing, He says only ‘Be!’ And it is.”

We begin with the radical concept of God and in a way which challenges our contemporary culture. These readings show the intimate and necessary relationship between power and wisdom. Power without wisdom, I think we know, is deadly, destructive, and dangerous. God speaks reality into being. God as Word (Logos) is an essential feature of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These passages are poetic and philosophical. They are not ‘science’ in its modern sense though they are precisely what science in all its forms presupposes, namely the world as being in principle intelligible. They also belong to an older sense of scientia as an inward habit or virtue, a way of thinking and living.

In principle. En arche, In principia – for ‘beginning’ means principle as well. The idea of Creation is set before us in a much more radical way than is commonly understood or rather misunderstood. God does not make the world like a clock-maker to use a famous early modern image. Creation is about the animating principle which creates and sustains what is created. Creation is always about a relation to a Creator who by definition is not any one of the things of creation. Thomas Aquinas makes the point beautifully that God is “the beginning and end of all things, and especially of rational creatures.” In the Qur’an, eight of the ninety-nine names of God, of Allah, refer to Allah as the source of all that is: al-Badi (Absolute Cause), al-Bari (Producer), al-Khaliq (Creator), al-Mubdi (Beginner), al-Muqtadir (All-Determiner), al-Musawwir (Fashioner), al-Qadir (All-Powerful), and al-Qahhar (Dominator). Such expressions emphasize that God is none of the things which God makes. In short, ‘there is no God but God’ understood as the principle of the being and the intelligibility of things.

(more…)

Print this entry

He shall teach you all things

The school year runs out in the week of Pentecost. Pentecost marks at once the Jewish festival of Shavuot, a harvest festival and a celebration of the giving of the Law, and in the Christian understanding, a celebration of the descent of the Holy Spirit to give birth to the Church. Wind and fire and the speaking in tongues are the distinctive and outward signs of the Pentecostal event. And yet for all of the emphasis upon the ecstatic and the experiential, the whole point of Pentecost is on teaching. Jesus explains that the Holy Spirit “shall teach you all things and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.” There is a clear sense of the interplay of Word and Spirit.

Peace and order and unity are the defining themes of Pentecost but they are all about God’s peace, God’s order, and the unity of God in whom we alone find peace, order, and unity. The point is that we can find none of these things simply in and of ourselves. In that sense, Pentecost is about the redemption of our humanity.

It is neither reductive nor gnostic. It is not about the collapse of God into the material world (reductive) any more than it is about a flight from nature and matter as if they were somehow evil, as if spirit and matter were to be understood in some sort of fatal opposition (gnostic). Precisely through the wonderful yet elusive images of wind and fire we are opened out to the mystery of God at once with us and beyond us. Precisely through the differences of languages that so often divide and separate us we are recalled to the truth of God, to a unity of the understanding that grounds the diversities of human language and culture in what is universal; in short, in God. This is enormously suggestive and speaks, I think, to the diversities of culture and language at our School.

For in the story of Pentecost, one thing is heard in and through the diverse tongues of the peoples of the world. That one thing is the praise of God. “We do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God.” Pentecost celebrates the unity of God in whom true diversity is found and is redeemed. Instead of separation and opposition, there is unity and truth found in and through the diversities of tongues and cultures. This is profoundly counter-culture because the emphasis is on what is understood as one in and through the differences of culture and language. We are reminded of our humanity as one, as universal not in spite of its diversity but through it. The insight of Pentecost is that the human community has no unity in itself but only in God.

(more…)

Print this entry

Metanoia: “He came to himself”

The parable of the prodigal or lost son (or sons) was read in Chapel at the two last Chapel services. The parable is the third of three parables Jesus tells to counter the ugly spectre of self-righteousness, a quality by no means restricted to religion. The Pharisees and the Scribes murmur against Jesus for associating with “tax-collectors and sinners.” The three parables are all about repentance, about its power and truth, its significance and its necessity. The word in Greek is metanoia which offers a deeper and more profound understanding of repentance.

Metanoia is about our minds, literally a thinking after; in short, reflection upon our “thoughts, words and deeds”. In a way, it is very much about Chapel within the educational project of the School. The three parables are the parable of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son or sons, the prodigal son and the elder son. “There is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repents,” Jesus says, “than over ninety and nine that need no repentance.” The phrase is ironic in that everyone in this view needs to repent, to reflect and to return to the principles from which we have wandered away. The further point is that the return of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost sons signals the redemption and wholeness of the whole community; hence joy.

What stands in the way of metanoia is ourselves, our ignorance of ourselves. This is why the third parable is so important. It shows us the dynamic of metanoia, reflection in action, as it were. And it counters the kind of gnostic moralism which appears in the various forms of self-righteousness in our own world and day, dividing the world into them and us; in short, demonizing others. ‘Others are bad and I’m good’ is the unmistakable assumption and by definition. Some have called this way of thinking neo-Marxist: extending Marx’s division between the proletariat (good) and the bourgeoisie (bad) to the ideologies of identity politics, for instance. An unhealthy dualism, to say the least.

(more…)

Print this entry

She reacheth from one end to the other mightily and sweetly ordereth all things

Strongly and sweetly. Fortiter et sauviter. Who is this ‘she’? In Chapel this week we read from the eighth chapter of the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon. It is a most famous passage. It is what I like to call a connector passage, writings which connect to many other  cultures and patterns of thinking. Students and faculty, for the most part, have perhaps never heard this passage but that doesn’t make it any less famous. The ‘she’ here is wisdom; sophia in Greek, sapientia in Latin. The passage is a wonderful paean of praise to wisdom and as such speaks to the educational project of the School in terms of understanding and cultural literacy. Wisdom, not knowledge simply, and certainly not mere information is what is looked for and sought. Wisdom is about maturity of character, about a way of understanding that shapes a way of living ethically and responsibly.

Written in Greek probably in the first century BC, Wisdom connects directly to the forms of discourse and thinking that belong to Greek or Hellenistic philosophy. The created wisdom of God shows us that wisdom is to be sought above all other things. “If riches are a desirable possession in life, what is richer than wisdom who effects all things?” Wisdom teaches temperance, prudence, justice and courage, the four classical virtues of Greek and Latin antiquity which in turn contribute to the moral and ethical discourse of Christianity and Islam. Wisdom here is about an understanding of the created world and thus about ourselves. The influence of this text is altogether remarkable. It continues to speak to us even in the arrogance of our unwisdom.

Some seven centuries after the Book of Wisdom was written, Boethius wrote a most influential treatise known as the Consolation of Philosophy. Sometimes called the last of the Romans, Boethius was actually a Christian philosopher whose life ambition, largely unfulfilled, was to translate the works of Plato and Aristotle into Latin. The only explicit Scriptural reference in the Consolatio is this passage about wisdom strongly and sweetly ordering and moving all things. “O qui perpetua mundum ratione gubernas” – O thou who dost rule the world with everlasting reason, Boethius says. Wisdom is what is looked for in our lives.

(more…)

Print this entry

Found in translation

Lost in translation has become an all too familiar trope at once simplistic and naive. It contributes to the idea of translation as betrayal, literally a traducing of the text, the idea that what is expressed in one language simply cannot be expressed in another. This implies a kind of intellectual despair which runs counter to the ideals and principles of education. That there are difficulties and questions about translation is one thing; but that translation is impossible is an entirely different matter. And so perhaps, just perhaps, there is also the idea of things being found in translation.

Cultural literacy is a feature of Chapel, it seems to me, along with the effort to provide at least a limited kind of biblical literacy. In a School where there are more than two dozen different nationalities and a multitude of languages, cultures, and religious and non-religious identities, whatever that means, translation is not only a pressing concern on a day-to-day basis but is assumed as being in principle possible, indeed necessary. Translation is about more than language; it is also about the intersection of ideas in the cross-overs of culture. In short, translation is an essential quality of education. It requires a capacity to engage with one another respectfully and with a willingness to learn from one another. In this sense, translation counters the disquieting tendencies towards cultural arrogance or national superiority, to the tunnel-visions of narcissism, solipsism, or even racism.

The lesson from Ecclesiasticus read this week is partly about the question and problem of translation. One of the books of the Apocrypha, books written in the period between the setting down of the Hebrew Scriptures and the emergence of the Christian Scriptures, the New Testament, it belongs to a category of writing known as ‘wisdom literature’. It is the only apocryphal text whose author we know. Ecclesiasticus is the Latin term literally meaning ‘church book’ for what in Hebrew and Greek is The Wisdom of Jesus, The Son of Sirach, frequently abbreviated to Sirach. The work is in praise of sophia, wisdom, which already reflects something of the confluence of Greek and Hellenistic philosophy and Jewish thought; itself a kind of translation, we might say. Written in Hebrew in the early second century BC, it was translated into Greek some fifty years later by the grandson of the author as indicated in the Prologue which he added.

There we see explicitly the question of translation with respect to language. “For what was originally expressed in Hebrew does not have exactly the same sense when translated into another language.” But Sirach’s grandson also notes the desire on the part of his grandfather to communicate the wisdom of the Jewish world to others as part of an universal and ethical desire to live wisely. Thus there is a kind of congruence of cultures, a translation of ideas and principles through the love of learning that in turn governs our living.

(more…)

Print this entry