Category: KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

Imago Dei

The stories of creation in Genesis are a poetic and philosophical tour-de-force that present the concept of creation as a pageant or litany of distinguishing one thing from another within the unity of creation as a whole. Several things are particularly significant about Genesis 1 which ends with the work of the sixth day. Classically, this is called the Hexameron, referring to the work of the six days which culminates with the idea of the seventh day as the Sabbath, a day of rest and contemplation. The first chapters of Genesis offer a remarkable and profound way of thinking about reality and the place of our humanity within its order. Some, like Thomas Cahill, have called it “the gift of the Jews.” Why?

Because we begin absolutely with order. Creation is an orderly affair owing to the clear distinction between the Creator and the created. This contrasts with other early cosmogonies – stories of the coming to be of the world – which begin with chaos out of which emerges some sort of order. Here we begin with order that derives from an ordering principle, God as the source and end of all things created. That makes all the difference. It is the counter to the fearful uncertainty in things both ancient and modern culture where one fears that chaos might somehow be greater than order.

It is not a ‘scientific’ account though it provides the metaphysical basis for the possibility of science. Why? Because it assumes that reality is intelligible, a premise of science itself. Here the emphasis is on distinguishing one thing from another: heaven and earth, light and darkness, sun and moon, and so forth. Like science, this rhythmic and poetic account does not divinize the natural world. This is especially clear with respect to the greater light and the lesser light, referring to the sun and the moon in terms of physical light. They are in this account emphatically not deities, not gods, not divine. This is a remarkable counter to other early and later cultures. The Creator/created distinction is altogether crucial.

But de-divinizing nature does not mean denying or diminishing the sense of the beauty and wonder of creation and its life-force. It does not mean reducing nature to merely dead stuff for us to manipulate and use according to an instrumental reason that often leads to destruction. The wonder of creation lies in its intelligibility and essential goodness; the whole is said to be “very good”; this is a strong affirmation of the world. It is to be respected and honoured in its very being as created by the goodness of God.

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The Beauty and Wonder that Begins and Never Ends

At the first Chapel services each year the Head Girl and Head Boy read passages from Genesis 1.1-5 and John 1.1-5. “In the beginning God”, as Genesis says, and “In the beginning was the Word”, as John says. In both readings there are the powerful and suggestive ideas of ‘word’, ‘light’, and ‘life’. God speaks creation into being and God is Word or logos. It highlights from the outset the idea of a Creator who is the author of creation, a theme which Jews and Christians and Muslims and others hold in common. As the Qur’an puts it, The “Originator (Badi) of heaven and earth. When He decrees a thing, He says only ‘Be!’ And it is”.

These readings are among the most powerful and the most commented upon theologically as belonging to the intersection of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic culture as shaped by Greek thought. They complement one another and belong to an intellectual and spiritual way of thinking about ourselves and the world in which we find ourselves. They contribute to a long tradition of philosophical reflection about reality. One cannot read the passage from John, for example, without being aware of how it is commenting on Genesis.

The beauty and wonder of the order of creation reflects the everlasting beauty and wonder of God. The Creator/creation distinction is paramount. It marks the idea of distinction within unity. The idea of creation, not as chaos but as an orderly affair in which one thing is distinct from another while yet connected to everything else in creation, is essential to intellectual inquiry. It emphasizes that the world as intelligible is also ethical. It is not evil. It is good. But it is not divine. It is the product of the goodness and love of God. Think of how radical that idea is in our disordered and confusing world of conflict and violence, a world of profound disconnect and unease.

Thomas Aquinas wonderfully observes that God is “the beginning and ending of all things, especially rational creatures”. In the Qur’an, eight of the ninety-nine names of God, of Allah, refer to Allah as the source of all that is. God is none of the things which God makes. In short, ‘there is no God but God’ understood as the principle of the being and the intelligibility of things and of human consciousness, too. Hans Georg Gadamer, commenting on Hegel by way of Aristotle, notes that “the highest degree of self-consciousness must be ascribed to the highest divine being”, the God who thinks himself thinks all things. Our own limited thinking participates at best in that divine self-knowing through the intelligible and ethical order of creation. Think of how this contributes to the biblical insight of our humanity as made in the image of God.

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What is written? … How do you read?

Two significant questions: what is written in the Law and how do you read? These are the questions which Jesus puts to “a certain lawyer” who was trying to put him to the test. In good Socratic fashion, Jesus turns his question about eternal life to these two interrelated questions. What happens belongs to education itself: truth is drawn out of the lawyer in spite of himself. He responds with what has come to be known in the Christian understanding as the Summary of the Law: the love of God and the love of neighbour.

It is a profound ethical teaching that unites God and our humanity. The love of the one requires the love of the other. In terms of the Torah or Law, it draws upon Deuteronomy and Leviticus in the Hebrew Scriptures and states the ethical principle that belongs to Judaism, Christianity, and beyond. It belongs to the universal ethical teachings to which everyone is subject, what C.S. Lewis called the Tao, deliberately using an ancient Chinese term meaning The Way to encapsulate a common sensibility about an overarching ethical principle that speaks to the truth and dignity of our humanity. It is the counter to the subjectivism of values.

The last two Chapels of the School year were on Monday and Tuesday of this week. Just as we ended on the note of wisdom with the 11s and 12s last week, so it seemed appropriate to end with the ethical principles that have been with us throughout the year for the Junior School and the 10s. It was also the last Chapels for a number of faculty, some of whom have been here at the School and in the Chapel far longer than I have been. We say farewell to Mrs. Taya Shields, Mrs. Michelle Belliveau, Mr. Paul Hollett, and Mr. Kim Walsh among others. My thanks to them for their support and consideration over these many years.

The two questions belong to the setting for one of the most famous parables of Jesus, the parable of the Good Samaritan. The lawyer had answered the question about what is written in the Law and he read it correctly, Jesus said, adding “this do and you shall live.” But the lawyer, Luke tells us, “willing to justify himself” asks, “and who is my neighbour?” It is a sceptical and cynical question of disdain and dismissal, a rejection of the compelling conjunction of the love of God and neighbour by denying any obligation towards the latter. In response Jesus tells the parable of what has come to be known as the Good Samaritan.

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A certain beggar named Lazarus

Our Chapel reflections over the past couple of months have centered on the comings and goings of God with us made visible in the Word and Spirit of God. They reveal the meaning and purpose of our humanity and shape our ethical thinking and doing.

How we think about the world, as we have seen, changes how we think and deal with one another. The Passion and Resurrection of Christ is about the redemption of the world which is gathered to God as opposed to seeing the world as something alien, indifferent, and hostile. That, in turn, changes how we see one another. The recurring theme has been about a change from fear and resentment of the world and one another to our joy and care towards one another. So, too, with how we think about God; it affects how we think and deal with one another.

Words and metaphors open us out to a deeper understanding of reality and of ourselves; and nowhere, perhaps, more profoundly than in the parables of Jesus. The parable read this week in Chapel is the story of Lazarus and Dives, a beggar and a rich man. Dives means the rich man. It is beautifully told and catches our attention, I hope. How we think about God affects how we think about one another. Our indifference to the one is also our indifference towards the other. This is what the parable shows. It is not simply about the great and glaring gaps of inequality between the abject poor and the extremely wealthy, as disturbing as such things may be. It is more about how we see one another and how we act accordingly.

A certain rich man, a certain beggar. Yet only the beggar is named. He is Lazarus. He lays at the gate of the rich man’s house, “full of sores and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table.” In Luke’s telling and moving phrase, it is only the dogs who attend to him: they “came and licked his sores.” We are reminded of another story where the Canaanite woman says that “even the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.” Here Lazarus is served by the dogs but is not granted even the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table. In short, Lazarus is ignored and overlooked; as if he doesn’t even exist. Only the dogs acknowledge him.

It is a telling indictment of a culture of indifference or avoidance towards those who are regarded as beneath our notice or a threat to our vision of ourselves in our comfortable complacencies. The parable is about a reversal of situation. The rich man turns out to be poor towards God and thus at a far remove from God and heaven while Lazarus, poor with respect to the things of the world, is rich in the things of God “carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom,” an image of heaven. The parable imagines a dialogue between the rich man in hell and Lazarus in Abraham’s bosom. The dialogue turns on the question of our attention to God and to one another, upon the ultimate good of our humanity as found in God and only so with one another.

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Word and Spirit

The story of Pentecost read this week in Chapel is especially powerful and significant. The Scripture reading from Acts tells us about the wonder and the miracle that belongs to the Descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples gathered in Jerusalem. The images are intriguing. How does one capture the idea of things spiritual through the images of things material and physical?

The coming down of the Holy Spirit, the promised gift of the Son and the Father, is imaged by way of wind and fire; the most elusive of physical phenomenon. They point us to the things of the spirit which cannot be reduced to the physical but which can be glimpsed and known through the world. God uses the things of the created world to make known the things of the spirit.

Such is revelation, the idea of things intellectual and spiritual being mediated and made known through the material and physical world. But the greater miracle or wonder of Pentecost has in part to do with language which reveals thoughts and ideas.

Pentecost is a Greek word referring to the fiftieth day after Easter for Christians, on the one hand, and an ancient Hebrew festival, Shavuot which celebrates the giving of the Torah, the Law to Moses, on the other hand. In both cases it has to do with what is made known or revealed. Part of the wonder of Pentecost is that it is a reprise or re-working of another ancient story, the story of the Tower of Babel.

The former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, the scholar and writer, Jonathan Sacks, comments on the story of the Flood and the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis. He notes that the first is the problem of freedom without order, in short, anarchy or chaos; the second, the problem of order without freedom, in short, tyranny. These terms suggest the interplay or lack thereof between intellect and will which need to be seen together; something which the readings in Pentecost about the Holy Spirit make clear in terms of the interrelation of Word and Spirit, a theme common to Hebrew and Christian thought and beyond.

“We do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God,” Acts tells us about the Pentecostal mystery. Unity and universality are grasped through the diversity of languages and cultures. In this sense, Pentecost marks the redemption of the story of the Tower of Babel. But it is a story, as Sacks makes clear, that we often misunderstand and misconstrue and in so doing fail to do justice to Pentecost itself.

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That you may know

The Resurrection culminates in the Ascension. It complements an essential insight common to a number of different intellectual and spiritual traditions about the priority of an eternal and everlasting principle that underlies all reality. “Never that which is shall die,” as a fragment from a lost play by Euripides puts it.

The Ascension is the exact opposite to some of our contemporary assumptions. It is emphatically not about a flight from the world. It is the homecoming of the Son to the Father, as Jesus makes clear. And that, in turn, is our homecoming, the making known of the end and purpose of our humanity as found not in the world itself but the world in God. As Thomas Traherne cogently remarks, “You never learn to love the world aright until you learn to love it in God.” The Ascension is the gathering of all things back to God through the going forth and return of the Son to the Father. “We ascend,” as Augustine puts it, “in the ascension of our hearts.”

John Lukacs’ The Question of Scientific Knowledge in At the End of An Age quotes Ludwig Feuerbach, the German radical theologian who influenced Karl Marx: “The old world made spirit parent of matter. The new makes matter parent of spirit.” This is, Lukacs suggests, “as good a summation of the historical philosophy of materialism as any.” He goes on to show rather convincingly that “matter … is increasingly dependent on spirit … that the human mind … both precedes and defines the characteristics of matter.” In his view this is one of the important features of quantum physics. We cannot remove ourselves from the equation about knowing and thinking nature. Or as Neil Postman puts it about the forms of technological determinism, “there is no escaping ourselves.”

The reading from Psalm 47.5 about “God going up with a merry noise” locates the Ascension in the eternal and divine motions of God himself. It is, as the theologians of the Church in the Patristic period put it, “the exaltation of our humanity.” Prayer is really about the lifting up of heart and mind in the lifting up of all things to their end and source in God. It does not negate the physical and material world but signals its redemption in God. This way of looking at reality contrasts with our increasingly virtual world in flight from the real world and ourselves.

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Comings and goings

This week in Chapel we had two sets of readings: one from Luke’s Gospel about the widow of Nain for the Junior School and Grade Ten services on Monday and Tuesday; and one from the sixteenth chapter of John’s Gospel read on Thursday and Friday. Each in their own way helps us to think about the radical teaching of the Resurrection that makes visible what is present in the Passion of Christ. It reveals what underlies and gives meaning to the comings and goings of our own lives. Ultimately, the comings and goings of our own lives find their purpose and meaning in the comings and goings of God in the motions of the divine life itself.

The story of Christ’s compassion towards the widow of Nain is quite powerful and moving. It follows immediately upon the story read last week about the healing of the Centurion’s servant by the word of Christ. “Say the word.” God’s word in Christ heals and restores; such is the power of the Word of God in creation and redemption which, unlike our words, creates and restores. In the story of the widow of Nain, we see the power of the Word and Son of the Father who when he “saw her, he had compassion on her.” It is an expression used several times by Luke.

Everything turns on how we see one another. Do we look at one another with hostility and fear? In hatred and envy? As enemies and opponents to be beaten and conquered? The conflict narratives of our world and day diminish the sense of our common humanity. It is the failure to respect one another and ourselves because we have lost sight of who we are in the eyes of God.

Respect is one of those big little words that mean so much more. We forget that respect has very much to do with how we look at things. Looking at things is contained in the word respect itself. In this story, it leads to compassion, another interesting word which refers to the inner being of a person understood in terms of the liver, or the womb or the heart. To have compassion is to take the other into the very being of oneself; in short, to see yourself in the other and the other in you. It means to grasp the essential nature of our humanity. In Christ, compassion means placing the experiences of sorrow and grief, of sin and suffering, in the very heart of God. For that is what the Passion and Resurrection ultimately make visible.

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Your sorrow shall be turned into joy

In Chapel this week two different Scripture passages were read. At the Junior School and Grade 10 chapel services, a passage from Luke was read about the healing of the centurion’s servant. At the Grade 11 and Grade 12 services, a passage from John’s Gospel was read about the meaning of the resurrection seen in terms of the transition of sorrow into joy.

The first reading notes the interplay and interrelation of cultures out of which Christianity emerges. “Say the word,” the Centurion says to Jesus after having asked the elders of the Jews to ask Jesus to heal the slave “who was dear to him.” They had told Jesus that the Centurion is worthy because “he loves our nation” – the Jewish people – and has built a synagogue for them. But the Centurion himself runs out to say he is not worthy, just “say the word and let my servant be healed.” The Centurion is an officer in the Roman army who has charge of one hundred men. This reminds us of the world in which Jesus historically lived in the convergence of three important spiritual forces: Roman law and authority, Greek philosophy and intellectual culture, and Jewish religion and ethics. This is the context for the emergence of the Christian faith and world.

There is a sense not of opposition and hostility but of mutual respect that is at work here in the interplay of things Roman, Greek, and Jewish. “Say the word,” the Centurion says, and explains the whole concept of order. Commands are passed on down through the ranks. There is a sense of being part of an ordered whole, of a rational community. Jesus marvels at what he says. The Centurion sees in Jesus the power and truth of God as something for everyone, even for him and for his slave. His insight is into the power and nature of the divine word which alone creates and heals. This contrasts with our words which do not create and heal; at best, we are “secondary creators” (Aquinas) who respond to what has been given in the order and structure of creation. The Centurion has grasped this essential insight that occasions wonder on the part of Jesus. What he has grasped cannot be constrained to one culture or group.

The students of the School last Wednesday were all part of the Cadet Corps that marched down to Christ Church. They stepped up and into what was asked and expected of them in an exemplary fashion; a kind of miracle of education. Why? Because it means respect and honour and taking responsibility for what belongs to our life together. It was an illustration of the theme of the Church Parade: To Govern Is To Serve. A wonder indeed!

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To Govern Is To Serve

I often think of Chapel as a miracle in the morning. Somehow within ten minutes servers and readers are found and organized and then it all happens. But only and all because of the willingness and support of the students and, especially, the leadership and service of the cohort of Chapel Prefects.

Wednesday afternoon was a miracle in the afternoon with the Church Parade at Christ Church. The School as a Corps marched down through the streets of Windsor, resplendent in their Highland Reds. There had been little to no time for rehearsal, just directions. Yet a battalion of servers and readers stepped up and took their places and illustrated and embodied precisely the theme of the Parade: To Govern Is To Serve. It was impressive; I couldn’t be more pleased.

Jacob Fines-Belcham led the procession with Acolytes Spence Armstrong and Chelsea James; followed by Alexandra Urtheil carrying the wooden cross with Acolytes Kelsea Griffiths and Sokha Ebert. Caleb DeCoste carried the Gospel Book with grace and aplomb leading the cadre of readers for the Reflections. Ewan Shaw preceded Mr. Joe Seagram, and Lily-Beth Fisher, the Chaplain. The Colour Party followed the Procession and presented the Regimental Colours and the service unfolded after the first hymn.

Head Girl, Ava Shearer, read the first lesson from The Song of Songs, a lovely passage with powerful images about the passing of winter into spring, and of the idea of the garden of creation as the place of love and delight. Head Boy Spencer Johnson read the second lesson from The Gospel According to St. John about Christ the Good Shepherd. Following the Apostles’ Creed, the classic and catholic statement of the Christian Faith for the many different forms of Christianity, a series of reflections were presented by students positioned at the Lectern and the Pulpit.

Vinnie Armstrong, Sadie O’Callaghan, Gabby Shaw, Alex Graham, Sofia Ning, Skye Hussey, and Jack Sangster read effectively and with conviction about the concept of service and sacrifice belonging to the image of Christ the Good Shepherd in contrast to power as domination. The reflections were centered on the paradox of the shepherd: “the sacrifice of one for all and the sacrifice of all for one,” as Michael Foucault puts it. (This is ironic since Foucault following Nietzsche’s “will to power,” regards all forms of social and institutional order in terms of power and domination).

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