Category: KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

Behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind

Ecclesiastes is the most philosophical of the books of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures in terms of form and content. It offers a profound reflection upon the whole range of human activities in terms of what we might call the Summum Bonum, the highest or greatest good for our humanity. Is it pleasure? Is it wealth? Is it power? Is it knowledge? Is it religion (understood naturally)? All of these are examined and found wanting. “There is nothing new under the sun.”

This seems pessimistic and bleak but really the Preacher – to use an approximate English term equivalent to the Hebrew word Qoheleth, rendered in Greek and Latin as Ecclesiastes – is pointing out something important about our humanity. We seek something beyond what the world can provide. “God,” he says “has put eternity into our minds.” That we can reflect on the whole range of human activity and see its emptiness allows for the possibility, like Plato, to look to what is above this world rather than simply be constrained by all that is “under the sun,” or, like Descartes, to look into ourselves and discover ourselves as thinking selves (the cogito) and to discover God. There is at the very least the possibility of an openness to what is transcendent at the same time as an honest and critical view of the finite world in which we find ourselves. A remarkable book with a remarkable outlook.

The recurring refrain is “vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” Vanity here doesn’t simply mean our endless narcissisms about ourselves, the constant attention to our selfies, endlessly gazing into our vanity mirrors. It is about the sense of emptiness and futility, the sense of incompleteness to all that we invest ourselves in only to discover that it does not satisfy the human spirit. The Hebrew image is fairly concrete and is captured nicely in the Revised Standard version translation, a “striving after wind.” Who has seen the wind, let alone caught the wind? To try to catch the wind is an exercise in futility. The King James version offers an early modern take on that sense of futility, providing an essential insight into one of the features of the so-called modern turn, a turn to subjectivity. “All is vanity, and vexation of spirit.”  “Striving after wind” can only result in a “vexation of spirit,” a sense of frustration born out of futility.

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A Still More Excellent Way

In the bleak cold of the mid-winter, we all need a touch of love. Such is the purpose of spirit week at the School. Thus in Chapel, we always read in this week St. Paul’s great hymn to love, 1 Corinthians 13. It is not specifically about Valentine’s Day, if by that one means a focus on the romantic or the erotic, not to mention the commercial. The love which Paul celebrates, however, includes and informs all and every form of love for it speaks about the true nature of love which seeks the good and the perfection of our humanity.

The power of this passage of Scripture in our world and day is intriguing. Often times a couple will want it read at a wedding, even though it is by no means specific to marriage. Yet it seems to speak to a deep sense of the power of the transcendent, of a love which is not simply of us but speaks to the deeper yearnings of the soul. Love, literally and properly, moves us towards one another. Years and years ago, I was particularly struck by how moved a very bright and outstanding student from China was by this passage which he read in Chapel. It moved him to tears and made him see things in an entirely new way.

The word for ‘love’ in the King James’ Version derived from Tyndale is charity which comes from the Latin caritas. The word, charity, has been somewhat cheapened in our own culture by limiting it to the forms of our outreach and care for the poor and the destitute. While such things are most important and belong to charity, they are only a part of its meaning and range. Paul is actually talking about grace, about what comes from God to us precisely in the realization of our own incompleteness and failings, including our failures to love one another as ourselves. He is opening us out to the transcendent power of the divine love which moves in us, if we will be open to it.

The three theological virtues of “faith, hope and charity” are the forms of grace that complement and perfect the four cardinal virtues of temperance, courage, prudence and justice. Those ancient qualities of excellence speak to the nature of human character and form a critical part of the ethical understanding of the ancient Greeks and Romans, as well as becoming part of the moral discourse of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic worlds. But without love, such virtues are radically incomplete. Augustine captures that sensibility in saying that without love, divine love, the virtues are splendida vitia, splendid vices.

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Mine eyes have seen thy salvation

It is a wonderfully complex and complicated biblical scene, and one which perhaps speaks to some of the complexities of our contemporary world. The story read in Chapel this week belongs to the great mid-winter feast sometimes known as Candlemas. Long before we defaulted to the inscrutable prognostications of rodents (Groundhog Day), there was this remarkable feast which signals the transition from the dead of winter to the hopes of spring and life. And it is a double-barrelled feast: the Presentation of Christ in the Temple commonly called the Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin; in short, a feast of Christ and Mary.

All of the Marian festivals are tagged to the feast of Christ; Mary cannot be understood apart from Christ. As Luther beautifully puts it, “Mary does not want us to come to her but to Christ through her.” Paradoxically, it was the motto, too, for the Counter-Reformation Jesuits, Ad Jesum per Mariam. It states a basic principle of Christian orthodoxy. Here the feasts and festivals of Mary and Christ meet and are one.

Candlemas marks the fortieth day after Christmas and signals the transition from the light of Christmas to the life of Easter but only through the Passion of Christ which is also anticipated in this story. Candlemas is really all about the meeting of cultures, of ages, of peoples, of religions and hopes. For the Eastern Christian world it is known as “hypapante”, meaning ‘meeting.’ Here in the Temple in Jerusalem, aged Simeon watches and waits for the Lord’s Christ whom he beholds in the infant Christ carried in the arms of Mary and Joseph. He breaks forth into the Nunc Dimittis, the evening canticle of the Church’s liturgy. “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace/ according to thy word./ for mine eyes have seen thy salvation/ which thou hast prepared before the face of all peoples; / to be a light to lighten the Gentiles/ and to be the glory of thy people Israel.”

Such is the meeting of the Old Covenant and what will become the New Covenant. Here is the meeting of old and young, of man and woman, of God and man. His words speak about Christ but he also points to Christ’s passion and to the role of Mary in human redemption. “This child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel; and for a sign which shall be spoken against; (yea, a sword shall pierce through thine own soul also) that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” A profound meeting, indeed.

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Transfigured and Transformed

Christ’s Transfiguration is also an Epiphany, a making known of the essential divinity of Christ. But it also points to another consideration, the idea of the transformation of our humanity through what is made known and grasped by us. “Be not conformed to the world,” Paul tells us, “but be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds.” This is like Aristotle’s point about being thoughtful and contemplative, “do[ing] all that we can to live in conformity with the highest that is in us” for “the best and most pleasant life is the life of the intellect since the intellect is in the fullest sense the person.”

To live in conformity with the highest that is in us is to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. It means learning to appreciate the traditions of wisdom that are inescapably part of our history and story. Such is the counter to our easy acquiescence to the technocratic culture which so easily overwhelms and invades our souls and which reduces us to algorithms, to thinking like machines.

Paul’s account of his ‘conversion’ reveals the interplay of cultures that belong to the emergence of both Rabbinical Judaism and Christianity. They cannot be understood apart from the Hellenistic world of Greek culture and language and the Roman culture of governance and law. They cannot be thought about without each other. Paul’s ‘conversion’ is really only possible within a Jewish context of questions about the nature of the Messiah and about the vocation of Israel. His ‘conversion’ is not to Christianity since that doesn’t yet exist.

The complex of cultures in their interaction is instructive. As Amin Maalouf argues, we have more than one identity, and, indeed, the more we restrict ourselves to just one identity culturally, linguistically, ethnically, even sexually, the more we cut ourselves off from any kind of common humanity. Diversity becomes all and nothing; unity a nullity. We are endlessly divided and constantly in competition for attention among ourselves in the culture of ‘likes’, ironically unable to connect with one another face to face. Talking to machines but not to one another. Maalouf argues for a more profound sense of our common humanity in and through the realization of our hybrid or multiple identities. Identity politics divides the more exclusive it becomes. It leads to the unending conflict of them versus us. Identity becomes, as he says, one of our false friends. We are thinking about who we are in all of the wrong ways.

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This beginning of signs

The story of Jesus teaching in the Temple at the age of twelve is complemented by the story of the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee. Both are epiphanies of the divinity of Christ; the one about divine wisdom, the other about divine power. The order is significant and speaks directly to our contemporary confusions in which reason or knowledge is subordinate to power. Human reason and power are finite and limited, on the one hand, and deficient and flawed, on the other hand. To know this is wisdom.

The deep lessons of the Epiphany are very much about what God seeks for our humanity. What is the purpose or end of our being and existence? Do we presume to think that human reason on its own power is sufficient to achieve human perfection? Or are we able to recognize the limits of our knowing and the problems of our doing? The questions are not simply rhetorical.

Wisdom and power are complementary divine attributes; properties of God made manifest in Jesus Christ in the Christian understanding. Such attributes of divinity are recognized in the other religions and philosophies of the world, albeit with differences of emphasis about the relation of wisdom and power.

In our contemporary global world, the technocratic reason that dominates our culture is very much about the subordination of reason to power. There is, however, no wisdom where reason is reduced to a tool or instrument of domination. These stories offer a corrective and a counter to our assumptions about power achieved through technology, a power which compromises the integrity of our humanity by reducing human thinking to thinking like a machine or to being “organic algorithms” as Yuval Noah Harari imagines. Greg Lukianoff’s and Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind, Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home, James Bridle’s New Dark Age, Emerson T. Brooking’s and P.W. Singer’s Likewar, and Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now are but a few of a great and growing number of books and from a range of perspectives that highlight the problems of our over-dependence and uncritical relation to the digital world.

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Did you not know?

Epiphany is the season of teaching. It speaks profoundly to the nature of education at King’s-Edgehill. Teaching and learning concern the whole person and the formation of character. Such is the recurring emphasis on gentleness and learning, respect and dignity. So too with Epiphany. The question implies that there are things that we should know or at least come to know.

In the Christian understanding, the teaching is about the essential divinity of Christ. In other words, something about the idea and nature of God is made known through Christ. The stories of the Epiphany season illustrate the wisdom, the power and the eternity of God manifest in the words and deeds of Christ. The further point is that through the teachings about the nature of God something is shown to us about ourselves; indeed, something about the vocation of our humanity.

The lesson from Isaiah 42 read on Monday and Tuesday is the first of the four so-called ‘suffering servant’ songs in Isaiah. Powerful poetry, the prophet presents God as saying, “behold, my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen in whom my soul delights; I will put my Spirit upon him, he will bring forth justice to the nations.” The servant can be understood individually as a Messiah figure or collectively as the people of Israel. The vocation of Israel is as God’s servant, charged with “establishing justice in the earth,” as being “a covenant to the people”, “a light to the nations,” as “opening the eyes of the blind,” as “bringing the prisoners out of the dungeon”, “from the prison those who sit darkness.” The images speak to the redemption of our humanity and ground the vocation of our humanity in the life of God. For Christians the song is seen in relation to the Baptism of Christ understood as an Epiphany of Christ’s divinity, an Epiphany of the Trinity. Jesus “coming out of the waters of Jordan” “sees the heavens open and the spirit like a dove descending upon him.” He hears “a voice from heaven saying, Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” It is the voice of the Father. The imagery draws explicitly upon Isaiah and continues the theme that the teaching of God’s Word and Will shapes human thought and action.

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But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart

“If music be the food of love, play on,” Orsino says at the opening of Shakespeare’s Christmas play, Twelfth Night. We return to King’s-Edgehill after the Christmas Break only to find ourselves still within the orbit of Christmas, still within Christmastide and yet to come to the twelfth night of the proverbial twelve days of Christmas. No doubt, if not music as the food of love, there has perhaps been a lot of the love of food, even “surfeiting”! Too much Christmas, it might seem. No matter, the greater question has to do with the meaning of Christmas itself which may or may not have much to do with the culture of christmas, globally and locally.

Christmas, religiously and artistically speaking, is about a surfeit of images, a fullness of images which entrance and mystify. Christianity, as the Christmas mystery reminds us, is very much about the fullness of imagesin contrast to Buddhism which is about the emptiness of images. For both, though, there is the awareness of the problem of attachment; our being too attached to one image or another in the wrong way or to the wrong extent. In short, there is the constant challenge about thinking Christmas.

I am reminded of the lovely tondo painted c. 1440/1460 by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi in Florence, Italy. It now hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Tondo refers to a circular painting. Known as The Adoration of the Magi, it portrays imaginatively and in a rich fullness of images the Christmas story, actually the story of the Epiphany on the twelfth day of Christmas in the western reckoning, with the Magi-Kings presenting gifts to the Child Christ pictured in the foreground of the painting. Included in the painting are a host of people: men and women and children; and a number of animals, a kind of representation of the whole world of creation coming and worshipping Christ. It envisions the powerful idea of creation as a whole worshipping the Creator now and wondrously in its midst, Christ as God and man. Among the animals there are ox and ass, many horses, camels, a dog, perhaps a greyhound, and two peacocks. While ox and ass are common features of many representations of the Nativity and along with camels have at least some sort of biblical resonance with other passages of Scripture, particularly the prophet Isaiah, they are not literally part of the nativity story in Matthew and Luke or in John’s majestic theological narrative about “the Word made flesh.” And certainly there is no mention of peacocks and greyhounds, let alone moose and beaver or kangaroos!

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The Simple Givenness of Things

“Love is in the nature of a first gift through which all gifts are given,” the great Medieval theologian, Thomas Aquinas notes. His words capture something of the wonder and the mystery of the Christian celebration of Christmas but extend as well to the sense of the awesome mystery of life that belongs to the other great religions and philosophies of the world. One of the passages of Scripture which always catches my imagination is from the Wisdom of Solomon. “When all things were in quiet silence and the night was in the midst of her swift course, then thy almighty word leapt down from heaven, from thy royal throne.” It awakens us thoughtfully and prayerfully to the presence of the wisdom of God in the world, an image too that counters so much of the hype and busyness of this time of the year in our frenetic, hectic, and distracted world.

This sense of “the givenness of things”, to borrow a phrase from the American novelist and theologian, Marilynne Robinson, is part of the greater wonder and mystery of Christmas, part of the greater wonder and mystery of the wisdom of the ages. The simple givenness of things in which we find wonder and delight stands in contrast to the idea of life as simply that into which we have been thrown, the thrownness of things, as it were, in which we find only alienation and despair, a sense of nihilism. The simple givenness of things is about life as a gift, about life as light and love. The simple givenness of things is the love through which all other gifts are given.

To appreciate that simple givenness of things requires that we sit and listen, that we pause and reflect, that we take the time to ponder what has been given to us. That means that we too have to give of ourselves to what has been given to us. Such are the possibilities of being opened out to the wisdom of God that illumines and enlightens our world of darkness and despair.

It is my hope and prayer that our Advent Services of Nine Lessons and Carols will have helped you in finding a time to sit and contemplate, to read and quietly ponder the simple givenness of things. It has become my stock phrase, of course, and yet one which I stand by in all seriousness, namely, to wish you all a happy and blessed Christmas ‘reading’ break, emphasis on the reading! It is a break from all of our usual routines and habits that belong to the life of the school, a break from classes and patterns that allow you a freedom, I hope, to read and to think, to ponder the mystery and the wonder of life; in short, the simple givenness of things. One of the gifts, I think, that flow out from the love and wisdom of God.

With every blessing.

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

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Behold the Lamb of God

The philosopher, Josef Pieper, reminds us of a deep truth which our world has largely forgotten, namely, the proper meaning of leisure. In our culture, we live to work. This is one of our problems which stands in stark contrast to the wisdom of the Hebrews and the Greeks where we work to live. The Greek and Latin words for leisure are skole and scola from which we get the word, school. School, properly understood is leisure, our freedom from the pressing necessities of everyday life. Aristotle literally says “we are un-leisurely in order to have leisure” (Nicomachean Ethics 10. vii). Work is un-leisure, literally, a-scolia. Similarly in the Latin, busyness is neg-otium, literally, the negating of leisure. Thus, leisure is the freedom to contemplate, to wonder at the mysteries of life, and, ultimately, to take delight in the things of God. A profoundly counter-culture idea and yet how necessary and how freeing! Once again, we are freed to God and to the truth of ourselves in God, to our good as found in Him. Without it we are  lost in all of the distractions of ourselves, unable to focus; literally, uncollected.

The Advent and Christmas Services of Nine Lessons and Carols simply but profoundly amplifies our regular Chapel services. Sitting and listening, standing and singing, kneeling and praying is what we do, to be sure. At the Carol services there was rather a lot of sitting and listening, standing and singing! Up and down and all around! Yet that pattern speaks to the nature and life of the School as a place of purposeful leisure, a place of contemplation and learning. The Advent pageant of Word and Song is all about ethical, intellectual, and spiritual ideas and principles coming towards us and engaging us, but only if we will sit and listen, stand and sing, kneel and pray. A whole person experience, we might say, and certainly activities which connect to the four pillars of the School: to Academics for we, like Mary, must sit and listen in order to learn and take delight in truth and knowledge; to Athletics for we are embodied beings and our bodies matter whether in sitting to listen or standing to praise; to the Arts through our singing and being in the ambience of the Holy expressed in the architecture of Church and Chapel; and to Service because like Martha we are reminded of our service to one another through our service and commitment to truths held sacred without which all our labours are nothing worth.

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