Category: KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

Peace and forgiveness

Ideas matter, especially ideas that transform vision and give meaning and purpose. In Chapel, during this week which began with the phenomenon of the solar eclipse, there was a kind of inverse of the eclipse in pondering some of the intriguing stories about the resurrection. Simply put, the resurrection does not eclipse the passion of Christ; rather it makes visible what is hidden but present in the passion, namely, light in darkness, life in death. In an insight which belongs to a number of philosophical and religious traditions, the passion and resurrection witnesses to the powerful idea of the principle of life itself which is greater than sin and death, greater than suffering and evil which they in fact presuppose. The resurrection accounts in the Gospels show how that idea comes to be known by the disciples.

This week also marked the end of Ramadan with the Feast of Eid al-fitr for the Islamic world, itself a celebration of what is made known through the giving of the Qur’an to Mohammed. Once again the focus on what is made known about God through the forms of revelation in the various spiritual traditions of faith.

The stories of the resurrection belong to the process of education itself: how ideas are made real and live in us as students and teachers. The 20th chapter of John’s Gospel is particularly compelling in the image of the disciples huddled in fear behind closed doors “on the same day at evening” and eight days later, again behind closed doors. The image speaks to our culture of fear and anxiety. We are in fear and confusion behind the closed doors of our minds, literally and metaphorically closed in ourselves, even buried in ourselves. Our minds are like tombs where we are dead in ourselves and to one another. Yet this is the setting where Jesus comes into the midst and proclaims peace and forgiveness. He makes visible what was hidden but present in his crucifixion and death: the peace which God brings and the forgiveness which God alone gives.

A striking feature of John’s account is the emphasis upon the reality of the passion. “He showed unto them his hands and his side.” The marks of the crucifixion are central to the teaching; they become the marks of love, the love which transforms us and sets us in motion. “Then were the disciples glad when they saw the Lord.” The first moment is on “the same day at evening,” meaning Easter day in the evening and in the same Upper Room as the Passover meal on the night of Christ’s betrayal. The second moment is a week later but again behind closed doors. With the first moment it is as if time has slowed and we are in the moment, the eternal now of divine life itself. “Peace be unto you,” Jesus says, twice on this occasion and then a third time a week later. The first moment ends with the theme of forgiveness bestowed and entrusted to the disciples upon whom Jesus breathed his spirit, the Holy Spirit. They are sent to proclaim forgiveness, to make his forgiveness known to all who seek it. They are made apostles, those who are sent.

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Be not afraid

“Be not affrighted. Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: He is risen, he is not here: Behold the place where they laid him.” Mark’s gospel offers simple words that describe the utterly unexpected yet utter reality of human experience. The women come to the tomb of Jesus seeking his body so that they might anoint it with burying spices. They find the stone rolled away from the door of the tomb and “a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe.” The details are precise. He tells them not to be afraid or amazed and acknowledges why they have come and tells them that “he is risen.” Such is the beginning of the early accounts of the Resurrection. The dominant message is “be not afraid.” Yet, the so-called short ending of Mark’s gospel, ending at verse eight of chapter sixteen, ends with the words: “they were afraid.” Fears ‘r us, too.

Out of the horror and radical injustice of Christ’s Crucifixion comes Resurrection. What does it mean? The Easter accounts of the Resurrection show us the process of learning its meaning, the dawning awareness of the radical life of God made visible in Christ lifted up on the Cross and now lifted out of the grave. “He is risen. He is not here,” the women are told. Something has changed and something changes for them and for us. Be not afraid.

The Resurrection reveals the truth of Christ’s passion. Holy Week in its concentration on the accounts of the passion would be impossible to contemplate apart from the Resurrection which is its underlying truth. To paraphrase Sophocles, “all that we see here is God,” in and through the Passion and Eesurrection of Christ. Heraclitus’ insight that “the way up and the way down are one and the same” provides perhaps a way to enter into this mystery, the radical mystery of life. The way to the principle, to God, and the way from God, is nothing less and nothing more than God himself in his own self-complete motion and life and that motion and life in us. What is new at Easter is the making known of that eternal truth and motion for us and in us. We are allowed to see the process of how that idea and truth is grasped and known and how it sets us in motion towards one another.

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If I be lifted up

We return from the various ‘journeys’ of the March Break only to enter into one of the profoundest spiritual journeys of our humanity. Such is Holy Week. We immerse ourselves in the Passion of Christ in all of its fullness and intensity, in all of the ups and downs of the human condition. “And I, if I be lifted up,” Jesus says, “will draw all unto me” (Jn 12.32) All refers to all people or all things; the variants in the ancient Greek manuscripts allow for either meaning. There is something universal and cosmic in this text which complements an earlier text in which Jesus recalls one of the crucial events of the Exodus story of the ancient Hebrews. “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life” (Jn. 3.14). It is impossible to think about Holy Week apart from the journey of the Exodus which in its universal aspects belongs to the idea of human redemption and divine revelation.

If that were not enough to consider, there is also the Islamic festival of Ramadan which overlaps with much of Lent, Holy Week and Easter this year. It celebrates the revelation of the Qur’an to Mohammed and ends around April 9th with the Feast of Eid al-fitr, the breaking of the fast. It, too, echoes the Exodus story in terms of the making known of God’s Word and Will in the Law.

Something is made known to us about ourselves and God in the pageant of the Passion. Passion here refers to what Christ wills to suffer for us in what belongs to the truth of our humanity. He wills to bear our sins and in so doing makes the nature of sin known to us. We go into the Passion to learn the great lessons of sin and love; those “two vast, spacious things” as the poet George Herbert says. There can be no lifting up without a going down but in both those movements what we contemplate is nothing less than God in us even in our twisted brokenness. In this sense we are redeemed from the obsessive passions that imprison us in our own emptiness. It is not simply about ourselves.

Sin and love are made known explicitly in the events of the Passion and in ways that convict and move our hearts. As such we are lifted up out of the twisted forms of our loves in disarray. Homo incurvatus in se, humanity curved in or turned in upon itself is a helpful definition of sin derived from Augustine. We are too much with ourselves in the wrong ways and/or for the wrong ends that lead to the forms of suffering. It is not that our human passions are wrong but disordered.

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Paradise and Wilderness

The two concepts belong to the nature of spiritual pilgrimage illustrated in and through many religious and philosophical traditions: the Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer’s Odyssey, Plato’s ascent from the Cave, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, to name but a few. And not least of all, of course, the Exodus of the Hebrews. That story is central to the remarkable miracle of the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness as told by John in his Gospel.

It re-works the ancient themes of pilgrimage, especially those of the Exodus, the wilderness journey of the Hebrews out of Egyptian captivity to freedom found in the Law and in God’s provisions for them. All in spite of ourselves, in spite of our complaining and whining, we might say. Learning through suffering is part of the pilgrimage of thought as explored in both the Odyssey and in Exodus, for example.

Jesus is in the wilderness. It is a powerful image about the human condition in its limitations and failings and yet in its longings and seeking for what belongs to the truth of our humanity which is ultimately found in what is absolute, beyond all the changes and happenstances, beyond all the follies and wickednesses of the world; in short, God. The realization of our limitations serves as the moment of God’s provisions for us in our spiritual journey to God. A taste of paradise in the wilderness as “pilgrims through this barren land,” as one of the hymns puts it, essentially re-imaging the entire Exodus journey. It is simply and profoundly about how God provides for us in the wilderness journey of our lives spiritually and intellectually.

The story, as John presents it, emphasizes the limits of human enterprise and technique. Two hundred denarii or pennyworth of bread, to use the King James expression, is not enough to provide even a little for so many, Philip says to Jesus. And Andrew pipes in to say that “there is a lad here with five barley loaves and two small fishes,” only to ask rhetorically, “but what are they among so many?” Obviously not nearly enough.

This becomes the setting for the miracle. What is the miracle? As with all miracles it is really about the miracle of life itself, the miracle of God. Jesus takes the bread, gives thanks and gives the bread to the disciples to distribute to everyone else. All are fed and, if that is not enough, he bids the disciples to “gather up the fragments that remain that nothing be lost.” Twelve baskets of the fragments from the feast are collected. It is powerfully symbolic: one for each of the twelve tribes of Israel and by extension for each of the twelve apostles of the Christian church. God alone can make so much out of our so little; even more, God makes everything out of our nothing, even the nothingness of our sins. Thus God provides.

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O woman, great is your faith

The encounter between Jesus and the Canaanite woman is at once powerful and instructive. It belongs to the spiritual pilgrimage of Lent and to the journey of education. Three words illuminate its power and meaning: faith, humility, and perseverance. At first glance it is a disturbing story but one which ultimately turns on the idea of self-criticism; a criticism of the assumption that we can constrain or limit God to our little groups and identities. Self-criticism is a feature of the religions and philosophies of the world.

This is highlighted here by the setting. Jesus departs “into the coasts of Tyre and Sidon” even as she comes out of that land of the Gentiles. She is a Canaanite, meaning that she is a non-Israelite. She sees something universal in Jesus that transcends the limitations of any one culture. It is an insight into the infinite mercies of God that arises out of the context of her finite situation and concerns. “Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou Son of David,” she says. But her concern is not simply for herself. “My daughter is grievously vexed with a devil,” deeply troubled in mind and soul. The troubles of the daughter are the worries of the mother; they always are.

I cannot think of this story without being reminded of “the Sorrow Songs” in W.E.B. Dubois’ great classic, “The Souls of Black Folks,”written in 1903. Dubois was a seminal figure in the Afro-American world and notes that these folk songs are “the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas” … “the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro spirit.” The Sorrow Songs are an important feature of his work for they give expression to the experiences of the Afro-Americans under slavery and yet reveals that “through the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes hope – a faith in the ultimate justice of things.” This is exactly what we see in this remarkable woman. She has faith in what she sees in Christ that enables her to face all that is thrown at her: silence, rebuke, and rejection. She has a faith in the ultimate justice of Jesus which is the infinite mercy of God.

Like the Sorrow Songs, we see in her a kind of “soul-hunger,” “an infinite longing for peace,” a yearning for “some unseen power and sign for rest in the End.”

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They understood none of these things

It is a telling remark that belongs to the possibility, on the one hand, of Lent as the pilgrimage of love in the Christian understanding, and to the whole project of education, on the other hand. Learning can only happen in the awareness and the acknowledgement of our ignorance. The disciplines of the spiritual traditions focus especially on the importance of self-examination. “The unexamined life,” Socrates goes so far as to say, “is not worth living.” Why? Because we are all learners in one way or another. Education necessarily emphasizes the theme of self-criticism as the counter to self-importance and pride. The Lenten journey begins with dust and ashes; in short, with the spirit of humility.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” as the first Beatitude of the Sermon on the Mount puts it. The poor in spirit are the humble, precisely those who seek the things of God and recognise their need for what transcends the boastful claims and assertions about ourselves. We are too much with ourselves only to find a kind of emptiness within. Loneliness, we are told, is the major problem which our culture faces. It is the paradox of the ‘connect to the disconnect.’ The forms of connectivity actually separate us from being able to connect face to face and to engage in meaningful conversation. We need more than social media with all of its distortions and distractions to find meaning and purpose in our lives.

“We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus tells us in the Gospel story which launches us into “the journey of the mind to God,” to use Bonaventure’s great phrase for the pilgrimage of the soul (Itinerarium mentis ad Deum). Jerusalem is the summit and symbol of human aspiration for what is beyond ourselves. It is the biblical symbol for the heavenly city, the “Jerusalem which is above,” as Paul puts it in Galatians. Our human longings – our desires – are incomplete and partial, an endless and futile chasing after this thing and that. Mercy is the gift of divine love which redeems and seeks the perfection of our partial loves. Thus the story of Jesus going up to Jerusalem illustrates and is shaped by the divine love so extravagantly expressed in Paul’s great hymn to love which was read last week; the charity that never faileth, that suffereth long, that seeketh not her own.

Jesus tells the disciples precisely what it means to go up to Jerusalem. It means the spectacle of the disorders of our humanity made visible in the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus. He tells us that “all the things written by the prophets concerning the Son of Man shall be accomplished” in Jerusalem. Such is the divine love which overcomes all and every form of sin and evil. It is made manifest in the crucified Christ.

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It’s all about love

“Push come to shove/ It’s all about love/ Or so it would seem in the great to and fro” of life and experience as Bruce Cockburn puts it in his 2023 album, “O Sun O Moon.” As he says, “the list is long – as I recall/ Our orders said to love them all,” referring to all manner of states and conditions of our humanity. We have in Chapel wrestled with the interrelated concepts of the love of God and the love of one another and with the overarching idea that God is love. This week at KES is ‘spirit week.’ It has been a tradition to have Paul’s great hymn to love (1 Cor. 13.1-13) read at the Chapel services that week.

It is quite a paean of praise to love and one which complements in intriguing ways Plato’s great dialogue on love, The Symposium, especially the mysteries of Diotima. She is a woman philosopher (fictional) who has taught Socrates, he says, all that he knows about eros or love as the passionate desire to know the Good and the Beautiful. She leads us up the ladder of love from lower forms to the transcendent Form of the Beautiful itself, transcending binaries but without negating them.

Somewhat like Paul’s hymn in 1st Corinthians, Plato’s dialogue turns on the matter of love not as an object but as an activity, emphasizing the lover and not the object of love, the beloved. For Paul, love or charity is an active and dynamic principle that seeks our good. The love he celebrates is the love of God, God’s love active in us perfecting our loves.

Candlemas – last Friday – marked the transition from the Christmas cycle of feasts to the Easter sequence, a transition from light overcoming darkness to life triumphing over death. Next Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the season of Lent. It is at once about a journey into light and understanding that belongs to life. But the radical meaning of that light by which we see light and find life is love. Life, light and love. Lent is the pilgrimage of love, of our growing into an understanding of the mystery of the divine love made visible to us in the Passion of Christ. We see “in a glass darkly,” knowing in part, as Paul puts it, but “putting away childish things,” we seek to know even as we are known in the love of God. “Charity never faileth” because it is of God.

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Mine hour is not yet come

The weekend past marked the celebration of Mr. Kim Walsh’s many, many years of excellence in wrestling as he segues into retirement. Well done! The metaphor of wrestling complements the universal theme of pilgrimage, the idea of the journey of education, of learning. Both presuppose that there is something to be grasped and learned, something made manifest. In Chapel, morning after morning, we are engaged in wrestling with the images of Scripture in pursuit of wisdom and understanding. Epiphany is especially the season of ‘the pilgrimage of the understanding’ with respect to the things of God which ultimately belong to the good of our common humanity.

Such things as the concept of God’s infinite wisdom, infinite power, and infinite goodness are universal in some sense or another as refracted through a number of different philosophical and religious traditions. They require a journey, a pilgrimage into the concepts that belong to the structure of the reality of which we are a part. There is Arjuna wrestling, we might say, with Sri Krishna about his dharma, the sacred law of his being in the face of a great ethical dilemma in the Bhagavad Gita. There is the Buddha, Siddartha Gautama, stepping beyond the walls of his palaces to encounter and wrestle with a world of suffering, Dukka. There is Confucius wrestling in his Analects with the concepts of li and ren which cannot be reduced to simple means and methods of thinking what is good and right to do. There are, of course, the traditions of learning in the world of Plato and Aristotle and their successors about the eros, the passionate desire to know, that belongs somehow to the nature of everyone. And there are the teachings of Israel, of Christianity and Islam that draw upon such things each in their own distinctive ways.

One of the oldest works of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh gives us the first wrestling contest in human history: Gilgamesh wrestling with Enkidu out of which comes their friendship; a friendship which ultimately will lead Gilgamesh on his quest for wisdom concerning life and death. In Genesis, Jacob wrestles with an Angel (or God?!) and in so doing is changed and becomes Israel, which means “one who strives with God.” Wrestles with God, we might say.

This week, one of the traditional and classical Epiphany stories, which has been read in the epiphany season for more than a millennium and a half, was read in Chapel. It was the story of the Wedding Feast at Cana of Galilee, a story told only in John’s Gospel. It is, as he says, “the beginning of signs.” And yet it points to the end or purpose of all the signs and wonders of the Gospel. Signs and wonders mean miracles. It is a miracle story where Jesus changes the water into wine. Why? For the good of our humanity, for our social joy which God seeks for us. Wow.

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Wist ye not?

‘Wist’ is an Old English word with Germanic derivations from wissen, to know. We still use words like ‘wit’ to describe a certain form of thinking usually connected to clever play with words such as in puns. It is good to be reminded that the English language has both Germanic roots as well as Latinate roots. At the heart of this remarkable Gospel story from St. Luke, about the boy Jesus being found in the temple in Jerusalem at age twelve, is the rhetorical question that he puts to Mary who was worried about where he was. He had stayed behind in the temple among the doctors of the law, “both hearing them, and asking them questions,” to the amazement of all that heard him.

“Did you not know,” he says, “that I must be about my Father’s business?” The whole scene is a kind of epiphany, the making known or manifestation of the things of God in our midst. The story is always read on The First Sunday after the Epiphany, just after the celebration of the coming in and going out of the Magi-Kings. Like that story, it, too, is all about teaching. There can be no knowing without the idea of things being made known, or manifested. In this story, as it has been received and understood in over fifteen hundred years or more of liturgical use and commentary, is the Christian idea and teaching that Jesus is both true God and true man. Here he is the divine teacher and the human student.

It is the only story of Christ’s boyhood, found only in Luke’s Gospel following upon the infancy narratives. An infant is, literally, one without speech. Thus this story marks the first time that Jesus is reported as having spoken. The whole scene signals what we might call, to use a later Jewish term, Jesus’s bar mitzvah, the transition from childhood to adulthood, and which carries over into the Christian traditions of ‘confirmation.’ What that entails is a knowledge of the Law, the Torah, for which the individual within the community’s life of prayer and devotion undertakes personal responsibility. It is about growing up into an understanding of ideas that are made manifest and which you undertake to grasp and make them part of yourself. It is about taking responsibility for your own education and learning, humanly speaking. That presupposes that there are things which are to be known and embraced in the constant pursuit of learning. There is the teaching but then there is the struggle to learn for us all; each according to the capacity of the beholder to behold.

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