Category: KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

We saw…we came…and worshipped

In complete contrast to the most disturbing story of the slaughter of the Holy Innocents, there is the most attractive story of the coming of the wise men to Bethlehem, though the two stories are connected. There is, after all, a dark note of deceit in Herod’s questioning of the wise men about where the child king is to be found, claiming that he wants to know so that he, too, can come and worship. In fact, he sees in the story of a child King a potential rival to his power. That leads to the horror of infanticide, the slaughter of the Holy Innocents in his attempt to annihilate a threat to his rule.

But the story of “the magoi from Anatolia,” the wise men from the East, captures our imagination and excites all manner of forms of ‘holy imagination’. Three Kings? There is no mention of how many came to Bethlehem or that they were even kings. All Matthew says is “magoi from Anatolia.” The imagery of kings, crowns, and camels all derives from Isaiah’s prophecy about “kings coming to the brightness of thy rising”, journeying by camels and presenting gifts of gold and frankincense to the Messiah. Matthew’s account adds myrrh, the ancient burying spice; hence three gifts from which comes the idea of three wise men. They follow a star suggesting that they were astrologers or, as we would say, astronomers. Anatolia is a rather broad term hinting at parts eastward, and things exotic.

The coming of the wise men marks the Epiphany, the making known of Christ’s nativity in principle to the whole world, a world outside the confines of ancient Israel. But where and how many and who they were is left unsaid and unknown. It is here that ‘holy imagination’ has gone to work and in wonderful ways, elaborating on the already exotic qualities of Matthew’s simple narrative. An Armenian tradition a century or so later gives the wise men names and places of origin: Balthazar, Melchior, and Gaspar from Arabia, Persia and India respectively. Nothing of that is in the biblical story. Other traditions keep the names but differ about the places of origin. Some imagine different races, variously treating either Balthazar or Melchior as black, for instance. Others think of them as representing different ages of life: young, middle-aged, and elderly, sometimes with and sometimes without beards! In short, a whole mythology develops out of the work of ‘holy imagination’ which informs later traditions such as the Drei König in Germany, the three kings, and other stories that build upon this simple narrative.

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

The world divides between those who wish Christmas was over and done with and those who wish Christmas would never end. It can seem to be altogether too much, too much fuss and bother, too much tinsel and wrap, too much food and drink, too much travel; in short, the problem of too much of a good thing, perhaps.

There have been times when Christians themselves were anti-Christmas, particularly those of a Puritan persuasion. At Harvard in the 17^th century, for instance, classes were held on Christmas day and in England during the Cromwellian Inter-regnum, Christmas was forbidden to be celebrated since it was viewed as mere superstition and “painted-over paganism”. Even earlier in the 16^th century, the reaction in Cornwall to the first Book of Common Prayer (1549) was to dismiss it as being “like a Christmas game,” suggesting something frivolous and not serious, not holy. How to think about Christmas is not entirely a new concern.

Yet to think about it is the main feature of the Feast of Christmas in the Christian understanding however much it has been overwhelmed by a host of add-ons. There is a fundamentally intellectual character to the Christmas season liturgically considered. Christmas Eve, for instance, for centuries upon centuries, was not about the babe in the manger but the Word of God Incarnate, signalled in the thunderous words from Hebrews and the Prologue of John’s Gospel. No mention of Bethlehem really.

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When all things were in quiet silence

Of the reading and marking of papers and exams there is no end, with apologies to Ecclesiastes. For students, too, it may seem that there has been no end to the preparing and writing of exams! But it has, at last, all come to an end.

But what kind of an end? My hope and prayer is that it is also “the beginning of wisdom” for us all. With the end of term we enter into the Christmas Break and while that can be a busy and frantic time, I hope that there will be some quiet times of reflection that are so necessary for the soul and for our life together, for our families and friends. Those quiet times of reflection allow for all of the busyness of the term to take root in us and grow into wisdom and understanding.

“When all things were in quiet silence, then thy Almighty Word leapt down from heaven, from thy royal throne.” It is a beautiful image that speaks to our busy and noisy world as well as to the mystery of Christmas. Taken from The Wisdom of Solomon, the passage has been understood in relation to the idea of the Word made flesh, the Incarnation of God. It is very much about the nature of God’s engagement with our humanity. A leaping down of God’s Word into our hearts and minds.

We live in apocalyptic times. Against the fears and worries of the secular forms of the apocalypse, the sense of the catastrophic ending of all things, there is the power of God’s Word coming to us in the darkness of Advent. It is the counter and the challenge to our fears and worries. How? By awakening us to “the beginning of wisdom” which the religious traditions identify as “the fear of the Lord,” meaning our awareness of the awe and wonder of God. In that idea is found the real worth and dignity of our humanity.

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What seek ye?

What do we really and truly desire? Do we know what is to be rightly and properly wanted for our good and the good of others? Advent is the season of questions that open us out to what God seeks for us which is always good. The question for us is whether we will be teachable. To be a disciple, after all, is to be a learner. At issue is a respect for learning.

The Advent Pageant of Lessons and Carols is the great parade of God’s Word coming to us illumining the darkness of our hearts and our world. Only in confronting our darkness, both our sins and follies as well as the limitations of our thinking and doing, can we begin to discover what God seeks for us which is the good and the dignity of our humanity. The motion of God’s Word coming to us in the stirring words of the great lessons of the Advent Pageant is about the presence of God’s truth calling us to account. It is at once judgment and mercy.

It is all in the questions. “Where art thou?” and “Who told thee that thou wast naked?” are the great questions which God asks as we heard in the first lesson from Genesis. These are questions which belong to the story of the Fall, to the story of our separation from God and the world and from one another, the story of the form of our awakening to self-consciousness. Then through the recollection of the Abrahamic covenant through which all nations and “all peoples of the earth shall be blessed,” through the prophecy of Micah about “little Bethlehem,” through the prophetic insight of Isaiah about “the Prince of Peace” and about a renewed paradise where “the wolf lies down with the lamb” rather than eating the lamb, through the Annunciation and the story of Christ’s birth, and finally through the great Christmas Gospel of “the Word made flesh”, we are being offered another way of thinking about life than the despairing dog-eat-dog world of domination and bullying, of power without truth.

The questions of Mary, “troubled at the saying” and wondering in her mind “what manner of salutation this should be” and “how shall this be since I know not a man?” emphasize that Advent is anything but mindless. It offers a profound critique of the dangerous and destructive forms of instrumental reason which have largely defined modernity. The counter is found in the encounter with God. Advent is about God’s deep and profound engagement with our humanity. We are in the presence of God as truth through the coming of the Word.

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What went ye out into the wilderness to see?

Advent. Such a powerful idea. It marks the movement of God’s Word coming to us. Without that motion there can be no Christmas, spiritually and religiously speaking. It is not about Santa Claus, for however much Santa Claus belongs to Christmas, Christmas does not belong to Santa Claus.

There is a far deeper meaning to Advent that speaks to the darkness and the despair of every age including our own. Our two services of Advent and Christmas Lessons and Carols on Sunday, December 3^rd, the one at 4pm for Grades 7-11 at Christ Church, and the other at 7pm in the School Chapel for the Grade 12s, speak to the critical idea of a culture in which there is a profound respect for learning.

We awaken to self-consciousness only to discover something which is prior to us, something which has a greater primacy than ourselves and without which we cannot make sense of selves as selves. Such is the truth and the goodness of God which cannot lie hidden and concealed but must manifest itself and gather us into itself. Such is the nature of the Good, we might say. Advent is the season of teaching and particularly marks the idea of Revelation. God’s word comes to us as light in the darkness of human experience and evil. The coming of God’s Word in the rich parade and pageant of the Carol Services awakens us to hope and peace, to joy and love.

Designed in 1918 and first performed at King’s College Cambridge, England, the Advent Service of Lessons & Carols was intended to speak to a world devastated and destroyed by the ravages of the First World War by recalling the greater themes of hope and peace.

This year, 2017, marks the 140^th anniversary of Hensley Memorial Chapel in the 229^th year of the School. The Chapel is a strong part of the culture of learning which counters the corporatization of education which reduces all learning to a means rather than an end, turning education into a consumer product, a for-profit model which does little justice to the classic themes of an education for the whole person and expressed in service and sacrifice for others.

The Scripture readings in Chapel challenge us to think more deeply about what it means to be human beyond the reductive approaches which turn us all into things to be manipulated and used by others. They recall us to freedom and truth, to order and love without which we consign ourselves to a wilderness of our own making, the wilderness of modernity.

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“As you did it to one of the least … you did it to me”

They are known as the works of corporal mercy, mercy directed towards one another in relation to the physical and material conditions of human life. Corporal refers to the things of the body. There are seven works of corporal mercy in the Christian understanding as derived from Scripture but which have their parallel or equivalent expressions in other religions and philosophies.

The locus classicus is the Matthaean Apocalypse, the term sometimes used to describe the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth chapters of Matthew’s Gospel. Read in Chapel this week, it follows wonderfully upon our consideration of the Ten Commandments and earlier, the Beatitudes; in a way, those ethical teaching converge in the works of corporal mercy. Intentions shape actions. There is the constant challenge for our deeds, our actions, to be the proper expression of our creeds, our intentions. Matthew presents powerfully six of the works of corporal mercy. What are they? Feeding the hungry; giving drink to the thirsty; clothing the naked; s giving shelter to the homeless; visiting the sick; visiting the imprisoned. And the seventh? Burying the dead.

The critical point is that these are all motions of the Good in us as directed to others and for their good. It requires us to see ourselves in the other especially the other who is in need. But it is also a profound recognition of the good in the other and the good for the other. It means acting out of the Good by doing good to others. The works of mercy are the motions of God’s goodness in us towards others. That is why Jesus says in Matthew’s Gospel that “as you did this to the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” In the Christian understanding, it is about seeing Christ in one another.

These are powerful ethical ideas that counter the ideologies of power and domination of whatever form. Plato famously argues that justice cannot be what is in the interest of the stronger because justice has to be a universal principle, something for all and not merely for the few. He argues, again famously, that our souls and our communities will not be well-ordered until “philosophers become kings or kings become philosophers,” meaning that reason must have priority over the spirited and the appetitive aspects of our humanity in order for those features of our personality to achieve their proper expression. Since it is all about the Good, Plato argues that the Philosopher/King cannot simply ascend to the Good and remain there in rapt contemplation but must descend back down into the Cave for the good of the others. It means dealing respectfully with the confusions and the difficulties that belong to the whole spectrum of human experience. The Good can never be a private possession. In a way, that journey back down into the cave of images parallels the teaching about the works of corporal mercy.

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Because God is God

A moment’s reflection on the Scripture readings of the past few weeks suggests how powerfully they speak to many of the current confusions and uncertainties in our culture. Just recently we have been pondering the spiritual journey that takes us from the Covenant with Noah to the Abrahamic Covenant, from Moses and the Burning Bush to the Mosaic Covenant in The Ten Commandments, the moral code for our humanity, as it were, written in stone. This provides the background, too, for The Beatitudes which presuppose the Law and perfect it, at least in the Christian understanding. At the very least, they stand in a complementary relation to each other.

“I Am Who Am” is God’s revelation of himself as the ultimate principle of thinking and knowing without which there can be no causality at all. That leads in the thinking of Exodus to the further revelation of God’s will for our humanity in the ethical principles of The Ten Commandments, themselves a coherent set of interrelated concepts that speak to the nature of our humanity individually and communally and always in relation to God as the causal principle of all and every good. Not unlike Plato’s arguments about the ethical and intellectual priority of the Good in which the being and the knowing of all things depend.

This way of thinking is framed as a rejection of the fearful uncertainties of the ancient Mesopotamian world and its legacy wherever the movement of thought goes from chaos to order. For the ancient Sumerians, for instance in The Epic of Gilgamesh, this sense of fearful uncertainty about reality is imaged in figures like Humbaba the unknowable, the Bull of Heaven which Ishtar unleashes upon the City of Uruk symbolizing drought, and the ancient flood story which threatens even the Gods. In all of those images, chaos is seen as always fearfully present and as capable of upending everything. Even the gods are a most uncertain quantity. Quite apart from any sort of confidence even simply in “natural processes”, all is basically “random” even though the ancient Sumerians, much like our own culture, were remarkably practical about many things from irrigation to sailing to wine-making. The first major technological revolution speaks to its latest iteration and, yet, with a similar degree of uncertainty.

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All shall be well

“All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well,” the 14^th century mystic, Julien of Norwich, famously said at a dark and difficult time of plagues and pestilences, of sorrows and deaths. How can we think about wellness without recourse to (or at least a recognition of) the rich wisdom of the religious and philosophical traditions which speak profoundly and constantly about wholeness and completeness? Such things as The Beatitudes, which we heard last week in Chapel, belong to the rich tradition of consolation literature. We are reminded of the spiritual qualities that contribute to the formation of character. The Beatitudes are about those qualities in us in the face of darkness and evil. We ignore such lessons at our peril.

The deeper lessons of the spiritual and intellectual traditions of which we have either forgotten or remain profoundly ignorant have very much to do with the care of the self as understood through the care of God. The lessons are about principles which shape character within a community of souls. They are not about individual projects and aims so much as objective goods which belong to our life together through an awareness of the essential goodness of existence. They counter the tendencies in our age to focus endlessly on the self and which reveal a terrible fragility of the self, its radical instability, because without the ideas of truth, beauty and goodness, to use Plato’s terms, we discover only our own emptiness. The consequences are one or other of the forms of nihilism: passive or active, self-destructive or destructive of others. There is nothing to live for.

It is here that the principles of the School itself come more fully into play. I have in mind not so much the School’s marketing slogan “Be More” but rather the ideals of “Deo, Legi, Regi, Gregi” and “Fideliter”. They are the mottoes of King’s and Edgehill respectively which signal the educational purpose of the School and which counter and correct the obsessive and dangerous over-emphasis on the self in contemporary culture. The educational project of King’s-Edgehill is about a life lived in service and sacrifice for others: “for God, for the Law, for the King, for the people” and lived “faithfully” to those principles which dignify and ennoble our humanity. They temper and transform our narcissism and selfishness, our blindness and arrogance, by making us more thoughtful and more careful both of ourselves and others. Gentleness and learning are de rigueur if there is to be dignity and respect, a proper care and concern for one another through a commitment to the ideals which crown and adorn our being.

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What are these?

Halloween. Sigh. Or is it ‘hooray’? How do we think about Halloween and the customs and activities that surround it in contemporary culture? Can we even think about it? The gentle reminder to students at Yale to be mindful about their costumes while acknowledging the inherently transgressive nature of mask and costumes at Halloween created a student uproar in which staff actually lost their jobs for not insisting on proscriptions about things which might be deemed offensive.

Halloween in the secular and popular culture is equally about something quite ancient. It is the idea of boundaries. The transgressive feature of Halloween is all about crossing over or fudging boundaries, not the least of which are things about death and evil, about gender and culture. The important point, perhaps, is to recognize that there are boundaries. In Chapel on Halloween, I looked out upon a rather strange collection of costumed students – a pirate, a pink unicorn from the Ukraine, pussycats from Deutschland and Asia, what I thought was a marshmallow from Beijing which turned out to be sushi (my bad!), two Franciscan monks, various princesses, a bottle of spicy mustard, a ninja warrior, various versions of zombies and different animals, several boys wearing school girl uniforms, two playing cards, and the Headmaster as a Sasquatch or so I thought, wrong again – it was really an Ewok! And so on and so on.

It seems to me worth thinking about these things. Masks, after all, both reveal and conceal and how are we to know? Taking a risk, I asked the Senior Chapel what would it mean for someone to dress up as Hitler, as Stalin, as Mao? Would that mean an endorsement of those figures and their programmes (and pogroms!) or would it be a satirical take on the monstrosity of their evil and depravity? They are certainly among the monsters of evil in the twentieth century. There is an inherent ambiguity that belongs to masks and costumes especially at Halloween.

But perhaps the best way if not the proper way to think about Halloween is to recall what it means spiritually and intellectually. I have in mind not just the ancient Celtic festivities of Samhain and other things, which reflect on the post-harvest death of the year and, by extension, death and the after-life, but its explicitly Christian meaning. Halloween is All Hallows’ Eve. The eve of All the Saints, the hallowed ones. The word is familiar from the Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father who are in Heaven, Hallowed by thy name.” Hallowed means the holy. In the lesson from Revelation read in Chapel, we are reminded of a multitude which no one can number of all peoples and nations. They are “those who have made their robes white in the blood of the lamb,” a reference to Christ in the Christian understanding. We are being reminded actually of the human vocation to holiness – to a sense of the perfection and truth of our humanity which is found in the spiritual community of All Saints. That calling is a calling to be better people, a calling which cannot be achieved simply on our own strength, hence the reference to the Lamb.

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