Category: KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

They presented unto him gifts; gold, frankincense, and myrrh

It is a lovely story and one which has shaped the Christian imaginary about Christmas. There is something exotic and strange about the Magi-kings from Anatolia, the wise men from the east, who come first to Jerusalem and then to Bethlehem. They come on a journey seeking the one that is “born King of the Jews.” They come to worship him.

Only Matthew tells us this story and yet we know very little about the Magi, who they were, how many exactly there were, or even exactly where they came from. Anatolia is a pretty broad term for Asia Minor or modern Turkey, a land from which different civilisations and cultures have emerged, from Assyrians to Persians and many others. Tradition speaks of three wise men but only on the basis of the three gifts. Later legends provide them with names and cultural identities that embrace the peoples of the world. We would probably provide them with email addresses and tik-tok or instagram accounts, for how else would they be real for us in our digitally obsessed age?

The story is known as the Epiphany which marks not just the event but a concept or doctrine. Epiphany means manifestation, the idea of something being made known to us, like a light that enlightens and embraces us in its meaning and truth. As such it connects very much to the life of intellectual communities, to schools and colleges where things are made manifest to us as students and teachers. Thus this story relates to the proper business of education, to the making known of the things that are to be known; in short, to the pursuit of learning. In a way there could be no schools without the idea of the epiphany, the idea of that there are things to be known. In this sense, the magoi represent Plato’s eros, the passionate desire to know, and Aristotle’s idea that all people “desire by nature to know.” The story belongs to the truth of our humanity in seeking to know, no doubt in one way or another and in varying degrees of intensity.

The Epiphany story marks the end of Christmas and the beginning of a new focus, a focus on the things of God made known to us through the witness of the Scriptures and our reasoning upon them. There is a journey to Bethlehem but equally a journey away from Bethlehem. They return to “their own country another way,” as Matthew puts it. Yet with the magoi-kings, the Christmas mystery goes global and extends to omni populo, all people. It is not just a cultural festivity for one culture and people; it speaks to a universal desire.

(more…)

Print this entry

Waiting in the wilderness

Advent is our waiting in the wilderness. We are, perhaps, not so good about waiting, wanting instead the immediacy and intensity of ‘celebratory’ events. That is to forget the meaning of waiting. What is our waiting? It is at once human desire and the divine gift that redeems our desires. Our human desires for this and that thing are radically incomplete and unable to be fulfilled. Our waiting is really prayer; the desire for wholeness and completeness which by definition cannot be fulfilled in ourselves.

What is the wilderness? It is not the external world or a world without us. The wilderness is us. This is the strong message of Isaiah, the most ‘evangelical’ of all the prophets, as some have noted. Looking back and reflecting on the great themes of Creation and the Fall, Isaiah movingly highlights the wilderness within us. “Let me sing a love song for my beloved, … a love song concerning his vineyard,” Isaiah 5 begins. “My beloved had a vineyard … and he looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.” It is the wildness in us that makes the wilderness both within us and in our world. “When I looked for it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes?” The question, like so many of the biblical questions, simply calls us to account and bids us reflect upon ourselves in our yearnings and desires. Ultimately what we seek is the absolute goodness of God which is more than what we can completely imagine and yet belongs to all our seeking and desiring.

But Isaiah, as we heard in the Advent Christmas Service of Lessons and Carols, shows us another view of ourselves and our world that stands in complete contrast to the sad and disturbing divisions and polarities of our divided and violent world. Isaiah offers us a picture of Paradise Restored, of the harmony between God and our humanity, the harmony of creation itself as grounded in the Creator. Instead of Nietzche’s will to power which supplants Darwin’s struggle for survival, the wolf and the lamb are envisioned as lying down together, an image of the interplay and interdependence of the natural world that transcends the binaries of distinction but without negating them. That image of Paradise Restored is the symbolic meaning of Bethlehem.

(more…)

Print this entry

Rejoice! Rejoice!

The three Advent Christmas Services of Lessons and Carols brought to an end the Chapel programme for Michaelmas, ending the term on a reflective and yet celebratory note, nicely captured in the stirring refrain of the great Advent Hymn, Veni Emmanuel. “Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.” Despite the paradox of having the ‘Christmas Dinner and Dance’ before these services, they nonetheless helped in appreciating more deeply something of the “true meaning” of Christmas, as the lovely Bidding Prayer from the original service of 1918 puts it. That sense of its true meaning emphasizes the vision of the redemption of our humanity as opposed to a world of war and conflict, a vision signaled in different registers in the nine lessons from Scripture and which speaks to our world and day.

Framed by the sixteenth century Italian composer, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s Matin Responsory and shaped by traditional verses of the 12th century Veni Emmanuel that punctuated the reading of the lessons, the service is a moving pageant of Word and Song. The Choir, in its various configurations under the direction of Stephanie Fillman, not only led the singing of the Advent Carol, Hark a Herald Voice is Sounding, the Huron Carol, Canada’s first Christmas Carol originally written in the Wendat language (Huron) by the Jesuit missionary Jean Brébeuf, Silent Night, and Shepherds in the Field Abiding, but different choir members sang as solos the verses of the Veni Emmanuel with everyone joining in on the refrain. Many thanks to Steven Roe, organist, for his professionalism and flexibility, and for providing such fine preludes and postludes appropriate to the occasion.

The Choir performed as well a lovely anthem Once upon a December Evening by Stephen Flaherty. This was complemented at the Grade 12 service on Sunday night and at the Grade 10 and 11 service on Tuesday by the vocal and instrumental duet of Ann MacQuarrie (guitar) and Sophie Ning (keyboard) in a beautiful rendition of Matt Anderson’s My Little Country Church at Christmas Time. All three services were greatly enhanced by the meditative classical guitar piece El Noi de la Mare, a traditional Catalonian composition, performed with great precision and care by Harvey Hadley. All quite remarkable and rather special.

My thanks to the teams of readers and servers and to the Chapel Prefects who assisted in the preparations for the services in lighting the window candles in the Chapel. The readers at the Junior Service on Friday, December 1st performed very well. They were Willoughby Larder (Gr. 8), Ollie Boyle (Gr. 6), Nathaelle Etou (Gr. 9), Max Proctor (Gr. 9), Chelsea James (Gr. 7), Kelsea Griffiths (Gr. 9), and Lillian Blois (Gr. 9). Mrs. Taya Shields, Head of the Junior School, read the eight lesson and the Chaplain sang the ninth lesson, the Prologue of John’s Gospel which is traditionally read at Christmas. The servers at the Junior Service were Rowan Francis, Sokha Ebert, Spencer Armstrong and Farrah Webber.

(more…)

Print this entry

They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain

Isaiah is the great prophet of Advent. Advent, from the Latin, adventus, which means coming, is about the motions of God’s Word coming to us as light in the darkness of the wilderness of our hearts and world. This is concentrated for us in the great pageant of the Advent and Christmas Services of Nine Lessons and Carols. An important feature of that pageant are readings from Isaiah. This week in Chapel, one of those readings was highlighted and commented upon, Isaiah 11.1-3a, 4a, 6-9.

It provides a twofold reflection upon the Messianic King and the idea of Paradise Restored. The passage has had an enormous influence upon the theological understanding of our humanity and upon the idea of Creation as Paradise as well as contributing to the Christian understanding of the person of Jesus Christ. The idea of the Messianic King is associated with King David. “And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse,” it begins, recalling us to the family tree or lineage of King David, the King who united the unruly tribes of Israel in the worship of God centered in Jerusalem, Zion.

In Isaiah’s vision, “the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him.” The Holy Spirit of God conveys the sevenfold gifts of the Spirit upon the Messiah, the anointed one who is thought of as the saviour of the world. The gifts are spiritual principles which speak to the integrity of our humanity, to the unity of heart and mind and which are properties or qualities of the Messiah in us. The Hebrew text as we have it from a much later period than the Greek translation of it, called the Septuagint, names six gifts but the Septuagint itself speaks of the seven gifts of the Spirit.

But what are these so-called gifts, these qualities of soul that participate or share in the divine nature itself? “The spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.” The Septuagint, probably out of sense of the rhetorical patterns of the Greek language, couples “piety” or devotion with knowledge and makes “the fear of the Lord” a kind of concluding principle. The fear of the Lord refers to honouring or worshipping God.

They are all intellectual and spiritual gifts which come from God and speak to heart and mind. That is significant with respect to theological anthropology, namely, how we understand our humanity in the sight of God. Critical to that theological understanding is the idea of the integration of heart and mind, suggested in the sevenfold gifts of the Spirit. That these gifts are directly associated with the Messiah signify that these gifts ultimately derive from the Word and the Spirit of God and unite us with God. In other words, these spiritual gifts are principles that come from God to us and that speak to the greater dignity and truth of our humanity as seen in the sight of God.

(more…)

Print this entry

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?

At the end of this week in Chapel we have come full circle, as it were, and are now readying ourselves for the three Advent/Christmas Carol services at the School. The Junior School service will be next Friday, December 1st, 2:15pm in the Chapel. There is limited space for up to twenty parents or grandparents. The Grade 12 class service will be on Sunday evening, December 3rd, 7pm in the Chapel followed by a reception in Stanfield Hall. Parents and grandparents are invited to the service and the reception. The service for the Grade 10s and 11s will be in the Chapel on Monday, December 4th at 2:30pm.

These services are an adaptation of the Service of Nine Lessons with Carols devised in 1918 and used in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, just after the devastations of the First World War. A wonderful pageant of word and song, the service speaks of hope and peace in the face of the darkness of human violence and despair in every age, including our own.

But with God’s great question to Job, “where were you?” from The Book of Job read on Thursday and Friday of this week, we are reminded of God’s first question to our humanity in Genesis: “Where are you?” Beginnings and endings, it seems, which somehow speak to our present. T.S. Eliot’s second poem, East Coker, in his Four Quartets, opens with “in my beginning is my end” and concludes with “in my end is my beginning.” That paradox is very much at the heart of the Chapel programme of spiritual reflections that are really about a constant going forth and return to God as the principle of all things, a kind of circling around and into the mystery of God. I love the questions of God in Genesis and the return to those questions over and over again in different registers throughout the Scriptures such as Jesus’ own question about John the Baptist which ultimately points to himself. “What went ye out for to see?” What are we seeking? What do we desire? Ultimately, all our desiring is not simply for this or that thing but for God, the absolute in whom we find the truth of our being and living and the truth of everything. Left to ourselves our desires are incomplete and partial, divided and in disarray.

God’s question to Job is really God’s answer to Job about the purpose and nature of creation and our place within its order. It is a check on human pride and presumption which seeks to reduce God and the world to mere instruments or things to be used by us. As if we are gods! Such are the delusions of our technocratic world which assumes that technology is the solution to all our problems, seemingly unaware of its ambiguities that make it just as much a problem. This is not new. We have forgotten what Neil Postman observed decades ago in Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change. As he puts it, “the human dilemma is as it has always been, and it is a delusion to believe that the technological changes of our era have rendered irrelevant the wisdom of the ages and the sages.” Chapel, in part, seeks to awaken us to the wisdom which is more than knowledge and information. God’s rhetorical question reminds Job and us that the order of creation and the Law belongs to something far greater than us and yet as that in which we participate and find our good.

(more…)

Print this entry

Love your neighbour as yourself

The remarkable parade of the ethical teachings of the Scriptures which we have canvassed over the past several weeks in Chapel would not be complete without Leviticus. While the love of God and the love of neighbour are implicit in the Ten Commandments and, for that matter, in the Beatitudes, and are concentrated in what is known as the Summary of the Law, the love of neighbour is made explicit in Leviticus and as explicitly connected to God.

The phrase “I am the Lord” punctuates repeatedly the various directives and laws in Leviticus. Thus Leviticus 19.9-18 ends with the commandment to “love your neighbour as yourself: I am the Lord.” Thus this important ethical teaching is grounded in God and God’s relation to our humanity. The ethical and the holy are united. Leviticus helps us to think about the meaning of holiness and to see its relation to our lives ethically.

Leviticus is an especially formidable book. Yet it is an essential part of the Torah and reflects deeply upon the themes of creation. What makes Leviticus so formidable? It is a collection of rules and regulations that seem arbitrary and obscure in their detail and proscription. Yet is that really very much different from the technocratic world which we inhabit? A world of dictates and rules, of the endlessness of bureaucracy that seems to serve only itself? Our reading and meditating upon Leviticus may awaken us to a wisdom that speaks more deeply to us in our relations with one another.

One of the least read of the Scriptures, at least in the Christian Churches, it is also one of the most misunderstood. Why? Because some parts of it seem so antithetical to our contemporary sensibilities. There are daunting passages about cultic rituals and practices that have emerged over many centuries, the origins of which are obscure. They may seem entirely arbitrary but actually there is a logic at work in the distinction between clean and unclean, or pure and impure. Following the work of the sociologist, Mary Douglas, holiness and purity are closely associated but holiness means more than simply that which is set apart from common usage. It also relates to wholeness, to the idea of the integrity of beings. As she puts it: “To be holy is to be whole, to be one; holiness is unity, integrity, perfection of the individual,” in the idea of things in their class or kind. As such, the distinctions in Leviticus are a further working out of the Genesis logic of creation as order through the distinguishing of things from one another. Similar arguments are present in Philo and Origen, Jewish and Christian exegetes from the first and third centuries CE as well as other Patristic writers.

(more…)

Print this entry

They desire a better country

The principle of mercy shapes all of the Beatitudes, we suggested in Chapel, because it reminds us of the truth and dignity of our humanity as found in blessedness. That is a more transcendent form of happiness that belongs to the good of our humanity. The Beatitudes provide a way to think about difficult things such as war and its atrocities.

Since the 10th century in western Christianity, The Festival of All Saints has been immediately followed by The Solemnity of All Souls. The thread of glory runs through the grave of our common mortality. Remembrance Day is really a secular form of All Souls’ Day. We gather at the Cenotaph in Windsor and then at the School’s Cenotaph. There we remember by name those students who once sat in Chapel where our students currently sit and who went off to the ‘great’ wars and didn’t return. That reality too was made visible in this week’s moving Remembrance Day assembly. We are being asked to remember their sacrifice as something to be honoured and respected.

“They desire a better country” is taken from the Letter to the Hebrews. It is the motto for the Order of Canada and reminds of a fundamental feature of our humanity: we seek, desire, something more and better not just for ourselves but for one another. That is to acknowledge our own incompleteness. That “better country” is explicitly, “an heavenly” one. It is what we pray for in the Lord’s prayer, that God’s “will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” We are reminded of the divine mercy which alone perfects all the imperfect forms of human justice which so often turn into the spectacles of radical injustice; in short, hell on earth. Remembrance Day is a necessary reminder of our broken and wounded humanity, a sombre reflection on evil and death. But to remember such dark and difficult things recalls us to mercy and grace.

Paul, in his Letter to the Ephesians, uses the imagery of the accoutrements of war to emphasise the spiritual struggle for the good in our lives. “Put on the whole armour of God,” he says, naming the traditional elements of battle: breast-plate, helmet, and sword, but giving them a spiritual meaning. We are to put on “the breast-plate of righteousness,” “the helmet of salvation,” and “the sword of the Spirit,” but, “above all,” he says, “taking the shield of faith.”

(more…)

Print this entry

Blessed are the merciful

Chapel constantly focuses on the primacy of the ethical; in short, on the principles that inform and shape character and institutions about the concepts of good and evil, of right and wrong. It has been quite wonderful to go from the story of Cain and Abel to the Ten Commandments which make explicit the ethical principles violated by Cain, for instance. This week’s wonder is the Beatitudes, a most remarkable set of ethical teachings that continue to capture the imaginations of many, whether Christian or not. They speak to the truth and dignity of our humanity as a community of spirit.

Nothing could be more counter-culture. Like the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes speak to ethical ideas that are universal and which have their counterpart in other religions and philosophies. I have been trying to point out that these ethical teachings, such as the Ten Commandments and the idea of Dharma in the Hindu tradition, for example, all point to the ways in which we transcend the animosities and divisions, the blood and the hatred, that is so much a part of the sad tale of our inhumanity towards one another. These stories are all powerful reminders of what belongs to the truth and dignity of our humanity even in the face of the realities of sin and evil, of suffering and death, of massacres and atrocities upon atrocities. They offer hope and life.

The Beatitudes are set before us in the context of the Communion of Saints. That is the true meaning of Halloween. All Hallows’ Eve is the Eve of All Hallows or All Saints. We are part of a larger spiritual community, more than anyone can number, based not on self-assertion, self-obsession or self-righteousness but on service and sacrifice. It is about our life together in an ordered community of love in which we seek the good of one another.

The Beatitudes are the charter of divine love. They counter the culture of dominion and power by highlighting the qualities of grace which are given to live in us. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” “Blessed are they who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” These are the first and the eight Beatitudes. They embrace the other Beatitudes and articulate a powerful teaching about the ultimate good and joy for our humanity. We are called to something more than what belongs to the disorders in our hearts and world.

(more…)

Print this entry

Law is liberation

How wonderful that we go from the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis to the giving of the Law in Exodus in the form of the Ten Commandments! In the story of the Fall and in the story of Cain and Abel, God calls us to account, to an awareness of our separation from what belongs to the truth of our being and knowing. It is the beginning of an ethical understanding which has its fullest expression in the Law as the moral and ethical code for our humanity. It has its counterpart in the ethical teaching of Confucianism and Daoism, of Hinduism and Buddhism, of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, what C.S. Lewis termed the Tao, the ethical way of life for our humanity.

The principles that define the worth and dignity of our humanity in relation to God and to one another are set before us. The Book of Leviticus will give us explicitly the commandment “to love your neighbour as yourself,” the neighbour who is also the sojourner, the stranger in your midst! Yet already in the Ten Commandments we have explicit directives about the nature of our obligations and duties towards one another. The love of God and the love of neighbour are inseparable.

There is all the difference in the world between Law or legislation and Rules or regulation. Rules and regulation bind and limit our thoughts and actions; in a way they imprison us. Law liberates and frees us towards God and one another. This is clearly shown in the giving of the Ten Commandments to Moses. It begins with Revelation: God reveals himself to Moses in the burning bush – another great and powerful story that contrasts God, the Uncreated, with the things of the created order. The bush burns but is not consumed. God speaks out of the burning bush and identifies himself to Moses as “I Am Who I Am,” the principle of reality. This leads to the exodus journey of Israel out of bondage in Egypt into the wilderness where the challenge is about learning what it means to be the people of God. The high point of the exodus is the giving of the Law to Israel. They are to be the people of the Law who are freed to God.

The Law is given precisely in the context of liberation. It begins with God’s words: “I am the Lord thy God who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” “I am the Lord thy God” is a circumlocution for “I Am Who I Am.”

(more…)

Print this entry