Category: KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

What is man, that thou art mindful of him?

The words of Psalm 8.4 reflect the teaching of Genesis 1 about the nature of our humanity and our place in the created order. It captures what one of the priest’s prayers at Mass names explicitly: “O God who didst wonderfully create yet more wondrously restore the dignity of our humanity”. The Hebrew word in the Psalm actually means mortal but in both the Greek Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate, the gender neutral anthroposand homo, meaning humankind, are used, thus tying the Psalm passage to the Genesis text and to the word ‘ha’adam,’ again an all-encompassing sex neutral term for our humanity. In English that term, following the Hebrew in Genesis and the Greek and the Latin translations, has been rendered generically as man. ‘Ha’adam’ is Adam, not (yet) as a name but as a comprehensive and descriptive term – man meaning humankind.

Genesis 1 presents creation as an orderly affair which proceeds not in a temporal order but in a logical process of distinguishing one thing from another. Man, ‘ha’adam’, is a creation of the sixth day, at the end of that process but not as an afterthought and not as an accident. Genesis 1 says that man, ‘ha’adam’ is made “in the image of God,” the creator. God as Creator is utterly distinct from creation and emphatically not created since God is the intellectual principle of all reality. At once connected to everything else in the created order, from dust to angels, only about Adam, man, is it said that he is made in the image of God. It suggests profoundly the dignity of our humanity. And as the Christian prayer indicates, there is the concept of dignity both in creation and in redemption. These are powerful ideas that shape a whole tradition of ethical discourse.

This idea of our humanity as having a special relation to the Creator is critical to the Judeo-Christian understanding and carries over into Islam. That sense of  connection is also there in Hinduism in  the relation between the Atman, the self, and Brahma, the Creator. The idea of image becomes a matter of considerable controversy in the relations between Islam and Christianity, reflected in such things as the iconoclastic controversy in the eighth and ninth centuries that contributes to the different artistic representations of religion, not only between Islam and Christianity but also within the Christian world between East and West. One of the Islamic Hadiths – collected saying of Mohammed – speaks of Adam being made in the image of Allah. For Jews, Christians, and Muslims, one point is clear. Man made in the image of God is not God, not divine. Yet the idea of image confers a certain dignity.

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And God saw that it was good

It is a wonderful phrase which acts as a recurring refrain in the first chapter of The Book of Genesis read in Chapel this week. It confronts us with certain powerful ideas and ways of thinking that contribute to our lives as students and teachers and, especially, it seems to me, in the climate of our current culture.

Creation is an orderly affair that proceeds from an intellectual principle. It is not exactly science though it provides the essential foundation for the possibilities of science in the idea that the natural world is, in principle, intelligible. Creation is really about the relation of all things to the Creator who by definition is not the same as that which is made. Creation here is about distinction and separation, itself the intellectual activity of ordering and distinguishing one thing from another. The chapter challenges our assumptions about time and our literal ways of thinking. After all, what does it mean to speak of  light or one day or a second or a third day before the Sun and the Moon were created on the fourth day? It is more about the intellectual order of reality.

“God is the beginning and end of all things especially rational creatures”Thomas Aquinas notes. “The Originator of heaven and earth,”the Qur’an states,“when he decrees a thing, he says ‘Be’ and it is.” Such ways of thinking reflect the opening chapter of Genesis as informed, too, by the Prologue to John’s Gospel about the Logos or Word of God, the intellectual principle through which all things are intelligible. All this, we might say,is the great gift of the Jews. It is the idea of beginning, not with chaos or the sexual congress of divine beings, but with God.

Like modern science, Genesis utterly discounts the idea of the divinity of nature or of natural bodies, especially the idea of the heavenly bodies as gods. Humans, left to their own devices, default to the worship of nature, attributing supernatural powers to natural forces. Like modern science, too, Genesis argues for the distinctions between different things in the created world. Darwin’s great work is entitled “The Origin of Species,” implying the same idea that things are distinct from one another.

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In the beginning God … In the beginning was the Word

The tradition of our first two Chapel services at the beginning of term is for the head boy and head girl to read two short Scripture lessons: one from Genesis (Gen. 1.1-5) and the other from The Gospel according to St. John (John 1.1-5). They are powerful and significant readings about which it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that the Chapel would not be able to contain all of the books that comment upon, reflect, and allude to these two passages, books that embrace a large range of cultures and intellectual disciplines over a vast array of ages.

How to think about the beginning of term? In Chapel it is about recalling how there is a beginning for all of us because there is something there before us, a beginning that is ultimately about the principles of education that guide and direct the School. Begin with God, the beginning without beginning, and everything else comes after, especially the things that belong to our intellectual and spiritual life and which inform all our other doings. Chapel is an integral part of the School and speaks to the idea of the whole School and to the wholeness of individuals.

The two readings in concert are enormously influential and central to a large number of discourses both within and between different cultures and religions. The idea of creation and of the Creator as an intellectual principle is common to Jewish, Christian and Islamic thought, for instance, and all three in a creative relation to Greek philosophy. ‘He speaks and it is,’ as the Qur’an suggests, showing how it is influenced by both texts. The continuing engagement between these texts and the works of Plato and Aristotle all contribute to the idea of the cosmos as intelligible and to the rich tradition of ethical and philosophical reflection on how we think nature and ultimately ourselves.

These two passages also belong to the early modern developments in natural philosophy, even to the works of Newton and Darwin, and to all manner of subsequent debates. They have their counterparts, too, in the works of Hinduism and Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism. They belong to our constant reflection on what it means to think the natural world; in short, to think the world as being thinkable.

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Take with you words

Last Chapel services. Yay, God! To be sure, but such endings recall us to a kind of reflection about how Chapel matters and in what ways. At the very least, we confront the questions that never go away, the questions that stay with us. As the philosopher Heraclitus notes, “the way up and the way down are the same.”It is really all about our being with the principle of accountability and truth both in our movement towards such a principle and our going from it. Such is the power of ideas. They matter. Such encounters with the ideas that matter belongs to an education that is worthy of the name, education. We confront things that are bigger than ourselves that challenge our thoughts and actions.

That ideas actually matter belongs to the subversive nature of an education which challenges all of the attempts to control and confine, to conform and comply on the part of the various authorities of our world and day. Instead, we are opened out to the riches of a poetic and philosophical literature that belong to the religions of the world philosophically considered and that speak to the freedom and dignity of our humanity.

Times of ending are poignant and powerful. The poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox reminds us that “it isn’t the bold things … that count the most in the summing up of life at the end of the day./ But it is the doing of old things, / Small acts that are just and right; /And doing them over and over again, no matter what others say; / …. Of walking with feet faith-shod; /And loving, loving through all, no matter how things go / wrong.” And so it has been with Chapel.

Hosea is the great love-prophet of the Jewish Scriptures. His story is itself an image of his understanding of God in relation to Israel. It is about the powerful idea of forgiveness, that there is something more than our follies and foolishnesses, more than our failings and shortcomings. There is the transforming love of God who loves us in spite of our unloveliness. In being open to such ideas, we become learners, discerning and understanding something of what is shown to us.

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That you may know

“How can these things be?” Nicodemus’ question to Jesus is our question too, a question that goes to our lives as students and teachers in this School. In the face of the wonders of learning we might ask with a kind of wonder, “how can these things be?” It might be quantum mechanics, calculus, a sonnet of John Donne, an event in history, a moment of athletic excellence, a quality of character on parade in cadets or on the stage, a lesson read in Chapel, a rare but quiet moment in the stillness of a sunset. All things that might, just might, awaken wonder in us. But do they always?

The story of Nicodemus read in Chapel this week along with a story about the power of forgiveness all speak to this time of endings as we approach the end of the School year. Nicodemus journeys to Jesus by night and is perplexed by Jesus’s words, especially the idea that “you must be born again.” Is that to be understood literally, he wonders? That is the context of his question, “how can these things be?” It brings out an integral feature of education. We learn, I hope, to think not simply literally but metaphorically, to think more intellectually, we might say.

We use the metaphor of life and education as a journey. But what kind of journey? That is the question before us at this time of endings. What has been the nature of your journey throughout this past year? Nicodemus, it seems, comes to learn something from Jesus, “a man come from God,” he says. He wants to learn, we might say. He is committed to the journey of learning. Can that be said of you as you come to the end of the year?

The passage from John’s Gospel ends with a reference from the Book of Numbers. Jesus says, “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up.” The lifting up of the serpent in the wilderness refers to the stories of the People of Israel journeying in the wilderness. It was meant to be a time of learning, learning what it means to be the People of God, learning what it means to be defined by the Law given by God through Moses. In that journey, the People of Israel are provided with all that they need. Delivered by God from slavery in Egypt they are sustained by God, “a pillar of cloud by day, a pillar of light by night” and fed in their wilderness wanderings “manna from on high.” They are provided for by God. And their response?

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The Good Shepherd giveth his life for the sheep

It is a most familiar and, perhaps, a most comforting image. It is the classical and quintessential image of care for Christians and even for non-Christians. Yet, as is often the case with familiar images, we take them for granted and sometimes miss their more radical meaning.

It is not by accident that the central icon or image in the School Chapel is the image of Christ the Good Shepherd, visible in the central window above the altar. It signals an ideal and principle about the nature of the School and about the kind of education that it promotes. At issue is how well we live up to the expectation and idea that this image conveys. It is, I suggest, about an education that cares for the whole person. King’s-Edgehill School is, I hope, an institution which cares for you as students.

That care is signaled in a myriad of ways in and through the myriad of experiences that contribute to the learning ambience of the School. The question for you is: do you care? Do you care about the School which cares about you? Do you care enough to step up and take your place in the various things that belong to the busy life of the School? Do you care enough to take on duties and responsibilities towards the community as a whole and for others?

The powerful passage about Christ the Good Shepherd turns on the whole matter of care. The Good Shepherd is contrasted with the hireling, the one who is hired, “a wage-slave,” we might say. The hireling is in it for the money, for a kind of self-interest. “The hireling,” we are told, “careth not for the sheep.” This is in complete contrast to the Good Shepherd who cares for the sheep and who knows his sheep. The word for “care” here means “to bestow careful thought upon” something or someone. That is the challenge for all of you every day. How do you think about one another and by extension the community and the world around you?

The image of Christ the Good Shepherd draws explicitly upon a number of familiar images from the Jewish Scriptures, particularly the so-called “Shepherd’s Psalm,” Psalm 23. “The Lord is my Shepherd, therefore can I lack nothing.” It signals the idea of God’s care and commitment towards our humanity as the Good in whom we find our good. Several of our hymns are based directly upon this psalm, such as “The King of Love my Shepherd is,” connecting care with love. The Psalm shows us something of the divine love for our humanity. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” Why?“For thou art with me; thy rod and staff comfort me.”

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Why stand ye gazing up into heaven?

The question raises a certain contemporary attitude towards religion. Isn’t religion, after all, utterly useless and of no earthly good? “Don’t just stand there, do something?” Isn’t that the familiar mantra of the culture of busyness? This presupposes the fatal separation between doing and thinking. It might be better and truer to say, “don’t just do something but sit and think”!

It is, to be sure, a post-Christian world and one in which there appears to be no end of suspicion and disdain for all forms of religion. But the triumph of secularism is itself an illusion. Our post-Christian culture is also a “post-secular age,” a point which has been well known for several decades, notably expressed by the self-described metaphysical atheist, Jurgen Habermas. He pointed out the demise of ‘secularisation theory’ in the phenomenon of the modern return of religion. That return is ‘the good, the bad and the ugly,’ perhaps, but it means, at the very least, that religion has to be thought about seriously. The gaping hole in our systems of public education is the place (or non-place) of religion.

There is no area of knowledge, no subject or discipline in the academic world, that does not have some sort of connection to religion as philosophy. The terms ‘science’ and ‘religion’ are themselves very modern constructs which presuppose a conflict narrative perpetuated on both sides. The term, scientia, knowledge, was for more than two millennia about an inner disposition of the mind, about the discipline of thinking ethically with respect to any number of different areas of knowledge and interest. It was only in the 19th century that the term was reduced to a body of knowledge and a way of thinking, mostly empirical, about the natural world and, sadly, without a sense of the ethical. Ironically, it is easily conflated with a body of knowledge at the expense of us as knowers. The term, religio, religion, too, is at once ambiguous and uncertain and does not easily map onto the earlier forms of philosophical discourse. Religion, historically, was more about philosophy as a way of life; our knowing as knowing and living ethically.

These observations simply go to the important question about how we read and think, speak and act, something which often gets addressed in Chapel. This week brought us to the Christian mystery of the Ascension of Christ. The question about gazing up into heaven is not about the uselessness of all things religious and spiritual but more about how Christ’s Ascension is the fullest possible affirmation of our humanity, soul and body, and of human individuality. The Ascension celebrates the homecoming of the Son to the Father. At once cosmic in scope, it says something profound about the dignity of our humanity; “the exultation of our humanity,” as the Fathers spoke about it. It highlights the spiritual insight that our bodies and the world of nature are not nothing; they belong and have their place and truth with God. The Ascension is the culmination of the Resurrection. It points us to a profound view about our humanity, about who we are in the sight of God.

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I am hemmed in on every side

Artemisia Gentileschi’s 1610 painting of the story of Susanna captures the moment when she discovers that she is being watched by two elders who conspire to have sex with her. The painting shows Susanna’s shock, dismay, and vulnerability at the ‘male gaze’ which reduces her to the object of their lust and violates her privacy and her personality.

While the story may have been composed as early as the sixth century BC, it was added to the cycle of stories about Daniel in the first century BC. Some argue for an Hebrew original but the story itself has come down to us in Greek as part of the Septuagint and subsequently included in the Latin Vulgate. Regarded as canonical, though not without debate, by Roman Catholics and the Churches of Eastern Orthodoxy, it is regarded as an Apocryphal text by Protestants. Yet the story of Susanna along with the story of Esther, of Judith and of Sarah (in The Book of Tobit), not to mention the admirable mother of the sons of Eleazar in The Books of Maccabees, contribute to a remarkable collection of texts which deal intentionally with strong, virtuous, and pious women in the face of persecution, adversity, and abuse. They exemplify the classical virtues as seen through the lenses of Hebrew law.

Such stories are intriguing and illuminate an important aspect of the philosophical literature of religious traditions. They reveal the concept of self-correction and self-criticism in the awareness of the limitations of human justice and of its betrayal through the various forms of sin. Here the story is about the attempted abuse of Susanna by the elders who have betrayed their office of guarding and governing their people. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will guard the guard themselves? The ancient and classic question is our modern question too. “They perverted their minds and turned away their eyes from looking to Heaven or remembering righteous judgements,” as the text puts it.

A gem of a short story from a literary standpoint, it is sometimes regarded as the first detective story. How do we face adversity? How do we face abuse? These are real questions and here those questions are addressed theologically and in terms of character. The story of Susanna has not only influenced a great number of artists, appearing as a fresco in the catacombs of Rome as well the subject of paintings by Tintoretto, Rembrandt, and others, not to mention Artemisia Gentileschi’s achievement. It has also influenced Shakespeare, explicitly in Measure for Measure and in The Merchant of Venice.

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Despising the suffering that brings death

Maccabees . Not certainly well known and yet The Books of Maccabees are profound and important works that belong to the intertestamental period; in other words, works that were written between the setting down of the Hebrew or Jewish Scriptures and the emergence of the Christian Scriptures. The Books of Maccabees are among a collection of writings that are sometimes called Deutero-canonical texts by Roman Catholics and Apocryphal texts by Protestants. They have different kinds of standing within the Protestant Churches and the Churches of Eastern Orthodoxy. For Anglicans they are read, if at all, not“to establish any doctrine” but “for example of life and instruction of manners.”

First and Second Maccabees deal with persecution, with the collision of cultures during the Hellenistic period. Maccabees itself means ‘hammer’ and refers to a family of heroes who stood up against Greek dominance. But more than simply belonging to the conflict narratives that bedevil so much of our own discourse, they open us out to important questions of a moral and an intellectual nature that, to some extent, transcend the divisions and oppositions that are the assumption and conclusion of all conflict narratives. As such, perhaps, they speak to some of our confusions and uncertainties about character and about what it means to be human, what it means to be a self.

In Chapel this week we read from 2nd Maccabees and from 4th Maccabees, the latter most likely completely unknown to most students and faculty and not found in most Bibles. The story in 2nd Maccabees was the powerful story of “the admirable mother” of the seven sons of Eleazar, all martyred because they stood up to the tyranny of Antiochus Epiphanes. The story reflects the conditions of Israel under Hellenism following the conquests of Alexander the Great. In a way, the story speaks to the question, the important question for all of us, about how we face adversity.

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Did not our heart burn within us?

Our readings in Chapel this week take us from the company of the broken hearted to those whose hearts are on fire with love and joy. And all, in part, because of the breaking of the bread. That action consolidates the teaching and brings it home in the minds of the disciples. It is not just that seeing is believing. It is rather the breakthrough of the understanding, seeing as understanding, seeing things in a radically new way. That is what happens on the road to Emmaus, the story which we read in two installments; one last week, the other this week.

“He was known of them in the breaking of the bread.” Christ’s actions at the Last Supper on the night of his betrayal are now seen and remembered in the light of his passion and resurrection. He opens our understanding by opening the Scriptures, showing us that our wholeness, our wellness and health, if you will, are found in the face of our brokenness and not in spite of our broken hearts. But the opening of the Scriptures to our understanding is not all; what brings the teaching home to the heart is an action related to our being together at a meal.

Food plays an important role in the accounts of the Resurrection because of the body. Immediately after the conclusion of the story of the Road to Emmaus, Luke tells of another appearance of Jesus to the disciples gathered in Jerusalem, it seems, where he proclaims peace and shows them his hands, and feet, saying, “it is I myself; handle me, and see; for a spirit has not flesh and bones and you see that I have.” And yet, “they still disbelieved for joy, and wondered,” Luke tells us. It is in that context that Jesus then asks what might seem to be an utterly bizarre question. “Have you anything here to eat?” “They gave him a piece of broiled fish” which he took and ate. Nothing confirms the reality of the body more, it seems, than eating. Something powerful is made known through our being together at a meal. Through something as ordinary as a piece of broiled fish comes something extraordinary and powerful.

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