Category: KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

You shall love your neighbour as yourself

The juxtaposition of Isaiah’s prophecy about the coming of a Messianic kingdom, imaged in terms of Paradise Restored, with a passage from the Holiness Code of Leviticus is quite striking. Leviticus, perhaps the most forbidding and most misunderstood (though least read) of the Books of the Torah, the Law, provides scriptural ground for a most significant feature of the Law as the ethical or moral code for our humanity, namely, the love of neighbour.

The love of God commanded in Deuteronomy and elsewhere is complemented by the love of neighbour. They go together and in the Christian liturgies are known as the ‘Summary of the Law’ upon which two commandments hang everything else in both the Law and the Prophets, ethically and spiritually. What is striking and not a little intriguing is how both Isaiah and Leviticus essentially provide a commentary on the stories of Creation and the Fall in Genesis. They both highlight the important biblical and theological question about how we read and what we read and in what way.

Leviticus, at first glance, seems to be a random collection of rules and regulations governing human behaviour; in short, our actions towards one another and, importantly, our use of creation. With respect to the latter, it builds upon the clear sense of creation as the distinguishing of one thing from another within the unity of the whole order of things. It adds to this by distinguishing between things clean and things unclean and forbidding the consumption of the latter. What makes certain creatures unclean? As the sociologist Mary Douglas noted, it has entirely to do with clarity or lack of clarity about the distinctive features of each created thing. Creatures that cross the boundaries represent a kind of confusion of categories in relation to what belongs to land or sea, to insects or animals, and so forth. This simply illustrates the logic behind the dietary laws of the Mosaic covenant.

In other words, there is a logic at work about how one thinks about different creatures and about their distinguishing features or their confusion of features. Some parts of Leviticus are controversial, for instance, for those who identify as LGBTQ+. Later, the idea of things being unclean will be challenged by emphasising how all things in creation are clean and therefore embraced within the essential goodness of creation as a whole. But the logic of distinguishing one thing from another is not negated. In what is known as the Holiness Code in Leviticus the strong ethical claim is that Israel is to be holy as God is holy. That leads to a whole way of acting in the world that equally concerns our relationship with one another and our use of nature.

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Heart’s sorrow, and a clear life ensuing.

“But remember – for that’s my business to you”, Ariel says in a famous scene in Shakespeare’s The Tempest which is intended to convict the consciences of “You three men of sin”: Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian. They are meant to remember and face what they have done in seeking the harm of Prospero and Miranda. Yet that remembering is “nothing but heart’s sorrow”, meaning repentance, “and a clear life ensuing”.

Remembering has been all our business this week commencing with Remembrance Day on Monday when the whole School as a Corps marched down to the Windsor Cenotaph and then back to the School’s where we remembered by name those who went forth in the defining wars of the 19th and 20th centuries and didn’t return. Many of them sat in the same pews where you sit in Chapel.

Remembering is an essential faculty of the human soul. It makes us human because it recalls us to the larger company of our humanity, what Hebrews in the lesson read this week calls “so great a cloud of witnesses” that surrounds us and of which we are all a part. Remembrance Day is a reminder of our common mortality, on the one hand, and a reminder of the unspeakable horror of war, on the other hand. Yet our remembering is a way of facing the evils of our hearts and world without being reduced to sorrow and grief. That we try to remember the fallen by name is profoundly humanizing and touching.

If something is worth doing, it is worth doing well. That is the challenge for all of us. That requires our mindfulness about what we are doing. The Corps conducted itself with great attention and decorum, not simply because they were told to but out of a sense of the solemnity and special character of what we were doing together. It means paying attention to one another within a corporate activity of doing things together. It is about being part of something greater than ourselves.

“All these died in faith”, the lesson from Hebrew tells us referring to a great litany of figures all from the Hebrew Scriptures, what Christians came to call the Old Testament: Abel and Cain, Noah, Abraham and Sarah, and Issac, Jacob and Esau and Joseph, Moses, Rahab the Harlot, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, and David. “They desired a better country, that is, an heavenly,” a true patria or homeland of the spirit. They desire a better country is actually the motto of the Order of Canada, the highest civilian honour in the country. It is referred to in a different Latin translation than Jerome’s translation. “Desiderantes meliorem patriam” is the official motto. Jerome’s translation is “Nunc autem meliorem appetunt”.

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Remembering

This week the Junior Chapel carries the whole school in prayer into the serious business of Remembrance Day on Monday, November 11th. Remembering is an essential and fundamental feature of our humanity. In the face of the dark and difficult things of war, our remembering of those who died is sobering and reflective. Our students sit in the very seats where former students of King’s Collegiate School and College sat before they went off to the miseries and the horror of the great wars of the Twentieth century, many of whom did not return. Our remembering them by name at our Cenotaph recalls us to the larger community of the School.

Remembrance Day is a kind of secular All Souls’ day which follows immediately upon All Saints’ Day, itself the great celebration of the end and dignity of our humanity in the Communion of Saints. The Beatitudes belong to that remembrance as signalling the qualities of grace which perfect and redeem human activity.

Two literary passages come to mind. The first is from Louise Penny’s latest mystery novel, The Grey Wolf. All of her nineteen mystery novels focus to some extent on the fictional place of Three Pines in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. Almost if not all of the novels make reference to the little chapel of St. Thomas in Three Pines. As often as not reference is made to the stained glass window in the Chapel which depicts in brilliant colours three brothers who marched off to their fate in the Great War and never returned home. Yet they are always there by way of the window which commemorates their sacrifice. “There was in the little chapel”, Louise Penny observes, “the stench of shame and the overpowering fragrance of forgiveness for the unforgivable.”

It is an arresting phrase that belongs to our contemplation of the incredible horrors of the wars of the twentieth century, the deadliest and most destructive century ever, the legacy of which sadly remains with us. I can’t help but think of this phrase without recalling an equally powerful phrase from the great Canadian anti-war novel, The Wars, by Timothy Findley. At one point, a character asks, “Do you think we will ever be forgiven?”, meaning the generation of those who fought in the First World War and the immense carnage, devastation and loss of life and civilisation that it occasioned. Another character responds, “I doubt we will ever be forgiven. All I hope is – they’ll remember we were human beings.”

Yet to remember we are human beings belongs to the greater remembering to God of those who have gone before us. That greater remembering turns on the power of forgiveness, the motions of God’s love towards us in forgiveness and mercy. To remember is not to condemn but to place their lives and deaths with God in his infinite knowing and loving. This is the great teaching of the Beatitudes which opens us out to the summum bonum of our humanity; its highest good as found in the love which transcends and yet perfects our human loves. At the heart of the Beatitudes is mercy, the mercy which seasons and perfects justice, the mercy which points us to the true worth and dignity of our humanity. It is “the overpowering fragrance of forgiveness for the unforgivable”, an awakening to what transcends the divisions and animosities in our hearts and world.

Our remembering participates in God’s eternal remembering and forgiving of the follies of our world and day, of the sins and evils of our broken humanity. In that sense remembering is profoundly restorative. The Beatitudes recall us to the grace which perfects and restores what is broken and in disarray. They speak of what belongs to the truth and dignity of our humanity.

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

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Blessed are you

Eudaimonia is Aristotle’s word for happiness, especially in the Nicomachean Ethics. It means a great deal more than what we might mean by happiness which is usually subjective and personal as well as passive and accidental. For Aristotle it is much more objective and substantial. Simply put, happiness is a life lived in accord with virtue. It consists in the activity of the rational soul acting in accord with virtue or excellence. The highest or primary form of happiness is contemplation, an intellectual good, while politics is about moral actions and is secondary. That highest form of happiness approximates the life of the gods because the highest power in us is the mind. “We ought, so far as in us lies, to put on immortality, do all that we can to live in conformity with the highest in us”, which is the life of intellect. “The life of the gods is altogether happy”, he says, “and that of man is happy in so far as it contains something that resembles the divine activity”. The idea is that the human good seeks what lasts and is complete rather than what passes away. But the word he uses here is makarios which means blessedness, the idea of a blessed life.

We go from the giving of the Law to Moses in the Ten Commandments, the universal moral code for our humanity, to the Beatitudes of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount, the Summum Bonum, the highest good for our humanity. They are the blessednesses. The word in Greek is makarios and is used nine times in twelve verses by Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus “opens his mouth” and teaches what belongs to the highest good for our humanity. While Aristotle recognizes pleasure as a feature of happiness, pleasure is indeterminate: it takes many different forms. He does not deny the place of sensual pleasures as contributing to our happiness but he doesn’t make them essential to happiness since they do not last.

The Beatitudes extend that thinking to a remarkable degree. They argue for a greater degree of inwardness: a blessedness in spite of and in the face of hardships and suffering. The first and last Beatitude illustrate this and frame the whole set of the Beatitudes. In other words, there is a structure here that revolves around the paradox of difference for most of the Beatitudes except for the paradox of the same in the fifth Beatitude. The first and last have the same ‘reward’: “the kingdom of heaven” is promised to “the poor in spirit” and to those who are “persecuted for righteousness’ sake”. The kingdom of heaven contrasts with both the poor in spirit and those who are persecuted. That promise belongs to the idea of a life of blessedness that transcends the world but without negating it.

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Because God is God!

There is all the difference in the world between regulation and legislation. The first binds and confines, the second liberates and enables. The phrase ‘being over-regulated and under-governed’ refers to the first in the absence of the second. Much is made of our ‘rule-based’ international or global world. But does that mean rule by law or the rule of law? Another important distinction.

In Chapel we have gone from the stories of the Fall and the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis to the Exodus with the revelation of God to Moses in the burning bush and the giving of the Law, the Ten Commandments. They provide a powerful way to reclaim the ethical imagination and its truth even for our post-truth world. The story of God’s revelation to Moses leads to the revelation of God’s will and purpose for our humanity universally considered. The Ten Commandments are the moral code for our thinking and doing. They are not simply something arbitrarily and dogmatically given but provide a comprehensive way of thinking about the dignity and truth of our humanity. They encompass the whole range of human thinking and doing. They speak about the nature of our relation to God, to one another, and to creation, and even to ourselves in our self-awareness. In that sense, they connect with the theme of our awakening to self-consciousness explored through the stories of the Fall and of Cain and Abel.

Most profoundly, they are about liberation. Our human freedom and dignity is not just in being liberated from what constrains, limits, or enslaves our hearts and minds but what we are liberated to – our being with God and one another in love and service. The Prayer Book Collect for Peace expresses this concisely: “O God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom.” If we think of freedom only in terms of freedom from, negative liberty, as Isaiah Berlin called it, then we forget the more powerful and more liberating form of positive liberty, our being freed to an end and purpose which confers dignity and real freedom.

“I am the Lord thy God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage”, introduces the Law. It looks back to the revelation of God to Moses in the Burning Bush who identifies himself in two ways: The God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob – a form of tribal or familial identity, on the one hand, and I Am Who I Am – as the universal principle of the being and knowing of all things, on the other hand. The bush burns but is not consumed, signifying that this is not something natural. It reveals what is beyond the natural as its principle through God speaking to Moses. This is the idea of revelation: something being made known to us rather than something which we discover on our own. Yet what is made known to us tells us something about ourselves as intellectual and spiritual beings. Creation, too, is used in this novel way to point us to what is beyond creation, the Creator. This complements rather than contradicts the order of creation which reveals ‘the Mind of the Maker’ as Dorothy L. Sayers wonderfully puts it. Hearing and seeing are the two most intellectual of our physical senses which are commonly used to mean what we understand.

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Your brother’s blood is crying to me

There is something incredibly moving about the story of Cain and Abel. It belongs to the fall-out from the Fall, the fall from the harmony between our humanity and God and between our humanity and the created order. The fall-out also means division and animosity, envy and murder among ourselves. The story is the beginning of the long, sad story of our inhumanity towards one another.

The questions of God call us to account but only so as to awaken us to self-consciousness and understanding, and thus to the radical meaning of human freedom and dignity, albeit through the forms of negation. “Where is Abel, your brother?” God asks Cain. Cain lies, “I do not know”, he says, only to add the telling and dismissive rhetorical question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” This leads to God’s further question that echoes his question to Eve in the previous chapter. “What have you done?” Again, it is not that he doesn’t know, rather he wants Cain to acknowledge what he has done and to realize its significance. This comes out in the amazingly heart-felt statement of the Lord: “Your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground”. So simple and yet so profound. God knows and God cares. This underlines the whole meaning of the Creation stories and suggests the profound reciprocity between the Creator and the created as well as the ethical demands that belong to the truth of our humanity as part of that created order, indeed, an essential part.

God’s statement reminds us that our obligations towards one another in the human community belong to our relationship with God. To violate one is to violate the other. This underlies what will become the commandment to love God with the whole of ourselves and to love our neighbour as ourselves. It has come to be known as the Summary of the Law, in the Christian understanding and as building upon the Jewish Shema, the commandment to love God with the whole of one’s being. The story of Cain’s killing of Abel is precisely about the negation of what belongs to the truth of our humanity as made in God’s image. In killing Abel, Cain kills what belongs to his own being and truth. But it cannot be denied and dismissed. It is known by God and God cares because we are made in his image. The dialogue between the Lord and Cain highlights this truth which has been negated by Cain’s action.

In the face of our troubled world of war and destruction, with the mind-numbing number of deaths that come in its wake, this statement by God is particularly compelling. Why? Because it says that God knows and cares, that those who are killed are known and loved in God regardless; their blood cries out to him from the ground. There is no escaping this divine knowledge. Yet the God who knows all the secret desires of our hearts seeks to draw us into his goodness and love. This is the counter to all of the horrors of our hearts and world. It simply recalls us to the truth of ourselves in God which in turn convicts us about our relations with one another, each as made in the image of God, each as known and loved by God.

The point of the questions and statement by God is to awaken us to truth and to love. At the very least, it suggests the beginning of a way to transcend the divisions and hatreds in our hearts and our world. It challenges our thinking and changes our entire outlook. In this sense, the awakening to self-consciousness is also an awakening to ethical responsibility and genuine care for one another. A counter indeed to our culture of death and destruction, of division and animosity.

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

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Thanksgiving is all about prepositions

Theology, the science of thinking God, we might say, is really all about prepositions. They are those little words which position words and ideas in relation to one another. Little words like ‘to’, and ‘for’ and ‘with’ are particularly important in what was once known as the Queen of the Sciences, Theology as Metaphysics, which itself points us to another preposition. One of the meanings of meta is after; our thinking after and upon the things of God in creation or nature and beyond, even our thinking with God.

What does this have to do with Thanksgiving? Simply everything. Thanksgiving is the Headmaster’s favorite festival because it seems to be the one event which is the most free from commercial hype and fuss of busyness. That is true, I think. More importantly, it is profoundly spiritual and as such belongs to all of the great spiritual festivals that belong to the Christian Church and to many other religious traditions. Voltaire, who was a deist, a kind of enlightenment, quasi-Christian viewpoint, argues in his novel, Candide, that thanksgiving is the universal religion of our humanity.

Thanksgiving is not about getting but giving. It is primarily about returning and giving thanks as the classical thanksgiving story from Luke read in Chapel this week shows us. It is thanksgiving to God and for what we have received. Not the least of its importance, it suggests that whatever good things we enjoy we enjoy not because we are owed them; rather because they are a gift, something freely given. We can only work with what is given to us. It is the counter to the culture of entitlement. Thanksgiving cannot be forced. It is properly speaking a free motion from the heart. That you should be thankful for what you have received – all the things that are provided for you – is true but that truism cannot be forced.

This is the point of the Gospel reading where ten lepers – outcasts of society – are cleansed by Jesus but only one returns to give thanks. He does so in a most extravagant and heart-felt manner. All ten lepers were healed but only one “turned back” and “with a loud voice glorified God”, and “fell down on his face at [Jesus’s] feet, giving him thanks”. Luke tells us he was a Samaritan; an outsider in the Jewish culture of the time, but Jesus calls him a stranger. Somehow the stranger shows us what it means to be the neighbour! Meaning near to one another as belonging to our common humanity and so with one another as companions. The word companion, literally, means with bread, com panis. There is a profound social dimension to thanksgiving. We give thanks to God for what we have received and we do so with one another and, most profoundly, in the breaking of the bread, in the sharing of fellowship and food.

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Where are you?

The story of the Fall in Genesis 3 confronts us with five compelling and intriguing questions which reverberate throughout the pageant of Scripture. They connect as well to the philosophical traditions about what it means to be human and about our relationship to the world. They especially concern what is, perhaps, the distinguishing feature of modernity, namely, the question and issue about self-consciousness. How do we come to know ourselves as selves?

The first question is the question of the serpent in the Garden. “Did God say?” it asks. The other four questions are the questions of God to our humanity, ‘Adamah, now distinguished as Adam and Eve. “Where are you?” God asks Adam. “Who told you that you were naked?” and “Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” God asks him. To the woman, he then asks, “What is this that you have done?”

In the story of Cain and Abel that follows upon this chapter, the Lord asks Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” and, to his evasive response, then asks, “What have you done?” All the questions of God to our humanity in this mythological and poetic form serve to call us to account, to truth, and as such belong to our awakening to self-consciousness. The questions seek to make us aware of ourselves and of the radical nature of ourselves as rational creatures who are ultimately responsible for our thoughts and actions. In a way, these questions reach a kind of crescendo of intensity in God’s great question to suffering Job: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth … when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” The question recalls us at once to creation and to our separation from the Creator and his creation and thus to the pageant of redemption. Job, too, is being called to account about the meaning of the Law in terms of the prior order of creation upon which the Law of Moses ultimately depends.

In Luke’s introduction to his famous parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus asks a questioning and cynical lawyer, “What is written in the Law? How do you read?” and, then, in the conclusion of the parable that illustrates the love of neighbour, a further question, “Which of these three, do you think, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?” In every case, the questions of God seek to convict our consciences and in so doing awaken us to the greater truth of his creation of which we are a part but from which we have departed. Such is the radical meaning of the Fall.

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Michaelmas Daisies: Dancing with Angels

Michaelmas daisies in all their varied hues dance along our maritime roadsides in the soft September air. They are asters, a Greek word meaning star, and are called ‘michaelmas daisies’, because their appearance here and elsewhere coincides with the great Fall festival of St. Michael and All Angels on September 29th. They serve as a reminder of the larger dimensions of creation and of the traditions of intellectual and spiritual life which are part of the life of academic institutions.

Angels are a strong reminder to us of our spiritual and intellectual nature. They, too, are creatures but purely intelligible beings, spiritual beings, in other words. As Diotima teaches Socrates in Plato’s Symposium spirits are intermediate between god and humans. She notes that “they interpret and carry messages from humans to gods and from gods to humans”. This ancient Greek view complements the angelic messengers in the scriptural traditions and belongs to the idea of good news that is shared and in which we participate. Evangelist means, literally, a good angel, a good messenger; hence, gospel or good news.

Angels are an inescapable feature of the scriptural and spiritual landscape of the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic worlds. The ideas or forms of Plato have become the ideas or thoughts of God and have entered into the spiritual imaginary of the theological cultures of reflection and to a branch of theology known as angelology. They belong to our thinking about creation, spiritually and intellectually, and to ourselves as spiritual creatures, albeit not angels, because we are embodied beings. Angels are the great ‘celestial no-see ums’. The artistic traditions picture and imagine the angels in various ways but in truth they can only be thought. When we think and pray – itself a form of thinking in a Godward direction – we are in the company of angels.

Some of the most important things in life are the things which we cannot see but are known intellectually or spiritually. Such are the angels who contribute to our thinking about the intellectual principles that belong to the created order and to our lives in thought and prayer.

In the year 1257, at the University of Paris, Thomas Aquinas, known as Doctor Angelicus, the angelic doctor, undertook in his “Disputed Questions on Truth,” the question “Can a man be taught by an Angel?”. Angels can teach us, he says, not by supplanting what is given by the light of nature or the light of grace, the human and the divine respectively, but, as he says, by “moving the imagination and strengthening the light of understanding”. They belong to our life as intellectual beings. The feast of St. Michael and All Angels is the first major festival in the early Fall and thus marks the beginning of the first term at the great medieval universities such as Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge and the institutions which derive from them. At King’s-Edgehill, this term is historically and traditionally ‘Michaelmas Term’.

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Dust from the ground

The Genesis accounts of creation are the ground for a number of reflections on the nature of reality and our place in it. I am struck with how Genesis 1 and 2 hold together in a creative tension three sets of assumptions that are in opposition to one another in the fragmented character of modern thought. There is the dominant idea of nature as dead stuff there for us to manipulate which assumes our separation from the created order; there is the equally powerful idea that simply collapses our humanity into nature without regard for what makes our humanity distinctive and thus fails to provide any account for human actions – we are just acting naturally. And there is the idea that words are essentially meaningless and have no reference to anything outside of our own minds; paradoxically this leads to the reactionary power games of those who want to control words and assume that their words create reality.

The Genesis accounts argue that our humanity has a special relation to God, on the one hand, and is connected to everything else in the created order, on the other hand. In Genesis 1 God speaks the world as a whole into being. John in the Prologue of his Gospel will argue that God is Word, the Word which is life and light without which nothing exists. This is particularly important with respect to the understanding of our humanity which is said to be made in the image of God. In the Greek text of Genesis 1, the verb for making is poiesis, from which we get the word poetry: God is the poet-maker of all things, and, especially, the one who makes our humanity in his own image, and thus in the image of his speaking all things into being.

Yet human speech is not the same as divine speech. As the scholar and ethicist, Leon Kass notes about the first instance of divine speech in Genesis 1, there is “absolutely no difference between the utterance and the thing called for. In this one perfect case, there is a complete identity of the divine speech and the creation act that went with it: word and thing, word and deed are exactly the same. No human speech is like that” (Leon Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis, 2003).

The second chapter of Genesis complements Genesis 1 with a more mythological and anthropomorphic picture of God. Here God is said not to speak our humanity into being but to form our humanity from the dust of the ground. In the Greek, this is about molding, an image of God as being like a potter shaping our humanity as Jeremiah will suggest. This shows our essential connection to all other created beings, from dust to angels, we might say, though emphasising especially our bodily and material being. But it also emphasises that God is the very life of our being. We are the dust into which he breathes his spirit, literally “the breath of life”, and thus ‘Adam “became a living being”. The term ‘man’ is still generic and refers to our humanity in general. Our humanity is ‘adamah, from the ground but as molded or shaped towards God, hence the idea of our being upright and thus able to look up to the source and principle of our being and life.

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