Category: KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

What have you done?

It was the last question of God in the story of the Fall in Genesis 3, one of four questions that awaken us to self-consciousness and so too to our accountability as rational and spiritual creatures. The self-same question appears in Genesis 4 in the equally significant story of Cain and Abel. With this story we step into the violent and disturbing world of human sin and evil, a world of murder and destruction. We step into human history.

Genesis in one sense is the story of sibling rivalry, of brothers against brothers and, perhaps, of the possibilities of their reconciliation. Cain and Abel inaugurate the long tradition of fratricide and thus the sordid tale of humanity’s constant inhumanity towards one another. It won’t do to reduce this story to a conflict between shepherds and farmers, a kind of shallow sociologism. The story builds exactly upon the story of the Fall, even to the point of the repetition of questions. But it offers the beginnings of a philosophical and psychological account of human pride and envy that leads to murder and exile, and to the animosities and hatreds that are so much a part of our fallenness.

It begins with Cain being angry. At what? At Abel. Why? Because his gift was accepted rather than Cain’s. In other words, he is upset at the good fortune of another. This will later be named as envy: our inability to be happy at the good of another. There is nothing more destructive of human life in community than envy. We resent the good of another not just because we want that good for ourselves but also because we don’t want it for them. It is division and animosity over the good of another which we choose to see as an evil that harms us.

God’s first set of questions to Cain highlight the contradiction. “Why are you angry? Why has your countenance fallen?” We sometimes wear our hearts on our faces. “If you do well will you not be accepted?” This question is about our commitment to what is good and right and true. To reject it leaves us open to exactly what follows: the giving in to sin which seeks to master you rather than you being responsible to truth and honesty.

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Beguiled

Thanksgiving, we suggested, is a kind of thoughtfulness about God and the goodness of creation and thus a reminder to us about our place within that God-created order. But where then does evil arise? Unde malum? From whence evil? The Chapel readings from Genesis 3 this week speak directly to this question. It is the famous (or infamous) story of the Fall. Sadly, these reflections also follow upon the ugly spectacle of war in Israel that broke out this weekend, and in the extreme form of the rejection of the two-state solution by the militant organization ‘Hamas’ for whom the existence of the Jewish state is anathema, and even worse, the existence of all Jews. These are all part of the confusions and divisions within our global world. They have to do, in one way or another, with the idea of evil.

What kind of evil? “From lightning and tempest; from earthquake, fire, and flood; from plague, pestilence, and famine … Good Lord, deliver us.” The Litany was the first service to be translated (and modified) into English from Latin by Thomas Cranmer in 1544. It reminds us of another dimension of thanksgiving: our thanksgiving from the threats of the natural world, what later thinkers in the Enlightenment, like Voltaire and Leibniz, called “physical or material evil”. We have experienced some of these things this spring and summer. But added to that phrase is the prayer for deliverance “from battle and murder, and from sudden death.” Such things belong to the disorders and disarray of human hearts in the various forms of “moral evil”. And they are very destructive, cruel and deadly.

That we come to the question about evil after the pageant of creation and the creation of our humanity within that order is most significant. The concept of the Good is absolutely prior and thus counters from the outset the pathological dualism of seeing things in absolute contraries. The story, moreover, seeks to show how we come to self-consciousness through an awareness of ourselves as selves. It happens through our separation from the goodness of the created order and, especially, in relation to the commandment not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. At issue is how we come to the knowledge of good and evil. Will it be through separation by way of disobedience or in some other way? We choose the former with all of its fatal consequences. The Law and Mary’s fiat – her “be it unto me according to thy Word” (Grace) – suggest the other ways that belongs to human redemption.

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Thoughtfulness

Thanksgiving is a kind of thoughtfulness. It is profoundly spiritual in its awareness of God “from whom all good things do come” and of the created order as the expression of God’s good will. It is the counter to the arrogance of entitlement and to the ignorance of privilege both of which divide and separate us from one another and from God. We are not owed the good things which we enjoy and seek. We are not better than and superior to everything and everyone else.

Thanksgiving is our thoughtfulness towards God in creation and redemption and towards one another in creation. In this sense, thanksgiving complements our reflections on Genesis 1 and 2 about our being made in God’s image, on the one hand, and about our connection to everything else in creation, from dust to angels, on the other hand. Our readings this thanksgiving week in Chapel pick up on those themes.

The reading from Deuteronomy highlights creation as “the good land” into which “God is bringing you.”It is described as ”a land of brooks of waters, of fountains and springs, flowing forth in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, land of olive trees and honey, a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing”; what will proverbially be called “the land of milk and honey” in other scriptural passages. These are all the things for which we should be thankful in our awareness of the givenness of creation but, as Deuteronomy makes clear, these things depend upon our awareness of God’s Word and Will in creation by “keeping the commandments of God and walking in his ways and by fearing him,” honouring him. Thus thanksgiving is to God as the ultimate author and source of all good things. Prepositions matter! Our ‘Truth and Reconciliation’ activities were also about our engagement with the good land of creation, not as possession but as places of respect and care.

The reading from Luke about the ten lepers who were healed but only one returned to give thanks to Jesus helps us to understand who we are in the sight of God, at once made in his image and the dust into which God breathed his spirit. Only about the one who turned back, “and he was a Samaritan,” an outsider as it were, whom Jesus calls “this stranger,” is it said that he was “made whole” or saved. God seeks our ultimate good, our wholeness which is more than being healed. It is our thoughtfulness towards God. In returning and giving thanks we are being made whole and as such take hold of the truth of our being in God. The one who turned back “giving him thanks” recalls us to the freedom and dignity of our humanity. It is found in recognizing creation not as entitlement but as gift and thus acknowledging God as the giver and sustainer of all life.

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Imago Dei!

The first chapters of Genesis are especially foundational and formative for our thinking. They belong to a long tradition of reflection about the world and about what it means to be human; questions that are always with us and which challenge our thinking about our relation to nature and to our lives with one another. As such it touches upon a common question for students, especially new students at KES: “Where do I fit in?” That in turn is part of a greater question: “What is the place of our humanity in the givenness of creation?” After all, we find ourselves in a world which exists prior to us and in institutions such as schools which have a tradition and life shaped and formed by principles which are also prior to us.

The challenge of education is learning not so much what to think as how to think. It means at the very least an exposure to principles and ideas which require reflection and thought. Teaching is not mere technique. It is really about the passing on of things which have been learned and thus making them part of ourselves in one way or another. Genesis raises some of the great questions that become the foundational basis for many subsequent quests of the mind.

It begins, as we have seen, with a principle, God. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” But what is meant by God? The philosophical and theological traditions offer a number of suggestions. Thomas Aquinas, in a kind of summary statement about ancient Greek wisdom complemented by Jewish, Christian, and Islamic understandings, simply says that “God is the beginning and end of all creatures, especially rational creatures,” referring to angels and our humanity. This alludes in some fashion to one of the great insights of the Genesis story of creation. ‘Adam, an inclusive term and not yet a personal name (and “functionally gender-indifferent” ), refers to our humanity in general which is said to be made in the image of God. “In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”

At least three things are emphasized in that statement: first, our humanity comes at the end of the litany of creation which distinguishes one thing from another thing within a unity of order. But are we, as in the ancient Sumerian view, simply an after-thought of the gods and thus insignificant beings? No. Because, secondly, ‘adam as the work of the sixth day is not only connected to every other created thing but alone of the things of creation is said to be made in God’s image. What does that mean? All that we can say about God is that God the Uncreated is the creative and ordering principle who speaks things into being and sustains them in their being. This underscores the idea of the world as intelligible (without which ‘science’ would be impossible). Our humanity understood in relation to God informs our role and place in the created order. Creation is order and not chaos; something significant is being suggested about us in terms of responsibilities and care. Thirdly, we are much like everything else in the created order as ‘beings in the world’ in terms of the basic categories of male and female.

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Paying attention: the one thing necessary

One thing is needful, necessary. It is a famous closing line to one of the most remarkable chapters in the Gospel according to St. Luke. It belongs to the end of the story of Martha and Mary which bookends the Parable of the Good Samaritan. That parable shows us the radical meaning of the love of God and the love of neighbour. But the one thing necessary has to do with the qualities of attention. Building on our first Chapels, the challenge is about attending to creation in the very ways in which things are named and numbered, understood as one thing rather than another within an order.

Simone Weil, the remarkable 20th century philosopher and activist, observes that “prayer consists of attention,” and, indeed, attention of the highest order, namely, “the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God”. This complements the observation of the 16th century theologian Richard Hooker that prayer signifies “all the service that ever we do unto God”. For him, as for Simone Weil, the connection between learning and prayer was ever so obvious. They belong to our relation to God’s truth and goodness.

As teaching bringeth us to know that God is our supreme truth; so prayer testifieth that we acknowledge him our sovereign good.

There is no greater contrast than between ‘being distracted’ and ‘being collected’, being attentive, as it were. “The faculty of attention, directed toward God,” Simone Weil says, “is the very substance of prayer.” She connects this to studies because seeking to learn means a commitment to ‘truth’ in all of its various forms in accord with our varying capacities and situations. Yet no genuine effort of attention is ever wasted. “It always has its effect on the spiritual plane and in consequence on the lower one of the intelligence, for all spiritual light lightens the mind.” For “there is real desire when there is an effort of attention” even if “our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result.”

But attention is equally important in terms of the love of neighbour. “Not only does the love of God have attention for its substance,” she writes, “the love of neighbour, which we know to be the same love, is made of this same substance.” As she explains, “the capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle.” She recalls the medieval story of the Grail where the Grail – a reference to Christ’s Passion and Last Supper – belongs to the first comer who asks “what are you going through?” “The love of neighbour in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: ‘What are you going through?’” As Miranda in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest poignantly says “I have suffered with those that I saw suffer” in reference to the shipwreck that Prospero, her father, has conjured up.

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Chapel beginnings ( and endings)!

“In the beginning God … In the beginning was the Word.” These are two of the greatest opening lines in all literature; the one from the beginning of the Hebrew Book of Genesis, the other from the Prologue which marks the beginning of The Gospel according to St. John. For quite a few years, it has become a tradition at King’s-Edgehill School for the Head Boy and Head Girl (Spencer Johnson & Ava Shearer) to read Genesis 1.1-5 and John 1.1-5 at the first Chapel services of the School year. Why?

Because they are such powerful foundational and formative passages which place us within the spiritual understanding of education which speaks to the whole person. Thus they provide a ground of unity and purpose to all four pillars of the School in its educational philosophy: the academic, the artistic, the athletic, and the idea of service in leadership. These are not merely a list of things, like boxes to be checked off. They are all interrelated. What gives them a deeper sense of connection and unity of purpose is the spiritual experience of Chapel. It recalls us to the idea and reality of how we are all part of something greater than ourselves and to the idea of an education which constantly calls us out of ourselves.

There is something quite wonderful and quite challenging about the first Chapels. Each year we have a whole lot of new students, many of whom have never been in a sacred space and have never encountered religion – itself a challenging word – as something that is to be thought about as belonging to education. There is no subject or discipline in our schools which does not have in some way or another a connection to the religions of the world. The greater challenge, perhaps, lies in addressing the most prevalent misconception about religion in contemporary culture: the idea that religion is, first and foremost, a private or personal matter.

Chapel is not about an affirmation of the various and indeterminate forms of personal identity and/or personal faith or non-faith that are part of our current culture. Like education, religion cannot be coerced or forced. It is more a question about ideas and questions that cannot be ignored or denied; at best, my task is to offer and to point out the ways in which religious traditions in their richness and philosophical truth address questions about the world and about our humanity. It is all about the questions. Students and faculty come from all sorts of different ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and ideological backgrounds with a whole host of assumptions and opinions. Regardless of our claims to identity and personal faith, we all enter into the life of the School which is prior to us all. Chapel is simply an integral part of the history and life of the School, an integral part of the educational project and experience.

The School’s origins and history are Christian and Anglican. The Chapel service is not ‘non-denominational’ but neither is it something narrowly sectarian. A simplified version of Mattins or Morning Prayer, it belongs very much within the orbit of the forms of worship common to a great number of religious traditions both Christian and non-Christian: two hymns, a Scripture sentence, confession and absolution, the Lord’s Prayer, a Scripture reading, a homily, intercessory prayers, the School prayer, and a blessing. All pretty basic. My challenge is to speak out of the Christian understanding but with a view towards the forms of its connection and engagement with other religious and philosophical traditions regardless of the faith or non-faith claims of students and faculty.

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The end of the ending

The last of the last Chapels happened Monday and Tuesday for the Junior School and for Grade Tens. As with the conclusion of the parable of the Prodigal or Lost Sons last week, so, too, it seems fitting to conclude the Chapel programme with the reading of the story of the Good Samaritan, paying particular attention to the setting of this powerful teaching about the ethic of compassion.

It begins with a lawyer who seeks to put Jesus to the test; in short, to a situation of hostility and conflict. “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?”, he asks. Jesus turns the question back on him. “What is written in the law? How do you read?” I love this because it goes to an important feature of Chapel, the constant challenge about how to understand things in the face of hardships and difficulties. Ideas are set before us in the Scriptures and in relation to a host of other philosophical, theological, historical and literary considerations. At issue is how do we read? The lawyer is compelled – by truth itself it seems – to state what is sometimes known as ‘the Summary of the Law’: to love God with the whole of your being and your neighbour as yourself.

This unites passages from Deuteronomy and from Leviticus. It is an important ethical statement in itself that challenges us about ourselves in relation to one another and to God and the world. It belongs to what C.S. Lewis called “The Tao, what others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality,” the ethical way of thinking and living as found in the religions and philosophies of the world. It is, he says, “not one among a series of possible values. It is the sole source of all value judgments,” the principle upon which our ethical thinking and doing depend (The Abolition of Man).

Jesus commends the lawyer on the rightness of his answer but rightly bids him, “this do, and thou shalt live.” With knowledge comes responsibility. But then the lawyer “willing to justify himself,” asks in a cynical way, “and who is my neighbour?” This is to remove himself from any real sense of responsibility. This launches the parable of the Good Samaritan, though the term “good” is never used. We are meant to see ourselves in this parable and be convicted of our own neglect of one another, on the one hand, and be convinced of something greater, namely grace itself, on the other hand. “A certain man on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho,” symbols of the heavenly and the earthly city respectively, who “fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment,” leaving him wounded and half dead, is an image of our humanity wounded and broken. But we, too, are like the Priest and Levite, religious officers in the Jewish world, who see the one who is wounded and half dead but “pass by on the other side.” We are meant to convict ourselves of how we, too, at times have looked upon the distress of others and have simply passed by and done nothing.

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The beginning of the end

There is a certain intensity and a frisson of excitement about the last weeks of the School year. In Chapel this week we have had the penultimate services for the Junior School and the Grade Tens and the last Chapels for the Grade 11s and the Grade 12s. On Monday and Tuesday, we read the last part of the parable of the Prodigal Son and on Thursday and Friday, the story of the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Both are powerful stories that speak to an understanding of ourselves as individuals and as members of the human community but in intriguing and challenging ways.

The second half of Luke’s parable might equally be called the parable of the lost sons. It is not just the return of the younger son to the father but also the exchange between the elder son and the father. It is not just the one who goes into a far country who is lost and dead to the love of the father, it seems. We can be close at hand and yet be far removed from that same love. What remains remarkable in the parable is the father’s love which runs out to greet the returning younger son and also goes out to the elder son who is angry and hurt about the special treatment the younger son has received. Such is the destructive power of envy. The elder son can’t even acknowledge his brother as brother; he complains about “this son of yours”. It is his own brother!

This is sibling rivalry – a major theme in Genesis, for instance, that is about separation and animosity through resentment and the desire for exclusive attention. I often think about this in relation to graduation and prize day. Will you resent the accomplishments and awards of others or will you rejoice and be glad in what others have achieved? The first is destructive and harmful both to ourselves and to one another and to the community of which we are a part. Why? Because it is a refusal to see the good in others which is equally the good for us; a refusal of the good which unites us. “It was fitting,” the father says to the elder son, “to make merry and be glad for this your brother was dead and is alive, was lost and is found.” There is joy not only for the younger son in returning to the truth of his being in the father’s love which he had rejected; there is the joy of the whole community. This, too, is an important feature of the three related parables that Luke tells in chapter 15: the parable of the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost sons. It is not just rejoicing over the finding of the one lost sheep, the one lost coin, and the lost son; there is the rejoicing of the whole community which is not complete without them. We are part of something greater than ourselves. Will we be able to rejoice in that and find the good for ourselves?

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“Have you condemned a daughter of Israel without examination
and without learning the facts?”

The conclusion to the outstanding short story of Susanna and the elders read in the two senior Chapels this week following the May long weekend is dramatic and powerful. Daniel speaks up and identifies the problem: the arbitrary misuse and miscarriage of justice not only by the judges in their wickedness but by the assembly itself. The assembly has condemned Susanna simply on the authority of the judges without an examination of the case. Such is injustice and a betrayal of Israel itself in ignoring the Law.

This complements the famous ‘myth of Gyges’ in Plato’s Republic which launches the inquiry into the nature of justice. Instead of just one ring of invisibility, we are asked to imagine two rings, one in the possession of someone who is just and one who is unjust. Show us, Socrates, Glaucon asks, why justice is better than injustice in all cases. The idea of the ring of invisibility raises the perennial question: wouldn’t we all cheat and lie if we could get away with it? In other words, power without wisdom, without virtue, leads to injustice in the individual and in the community. “The state is the soul writ large” is Plato’s equally famous analogy.

The assembly allows Daniel to examine the judges who have falsely accused Susanna. The approach is classic. He separates them from each other and asks them under which tree did they see Susanna and the purported young man she was supposed to be with. There is a wonderful ironic wordplay in the Greek about the two trees, perhaps best rendered in English as a clove tree and a yew tree, suggesting the verbs ‘cutting’ or ‘cleaving’, and ‘sawing’ or ‘hewing’ apart. The point is that they are caught out in a lie and in so doing become subject to the very same penalty which they had wrongly sought to inflict upon Susanna. We might call it poetic justice. They have betrayed Israel and themselves in seeking to harm Susanna.

We might note, too, how the argument brings out the significance of empirical evidence in the way the wicked judges are caught out. This kind of tree, says the one; that kind of tree, says the other. The empirical – what belongs to sense perception – goes together with the rational. Their own words convict them.

The deeper ethical principle is that justice cannot be arbitrary. The deliberate misuse of justice for their immediate self-interest comes back upon them. They are caught in the web of their own deceit and evil. They have, as the text makes explicit, betrayed the idea of the love of neighbour which we learned about from the Book of Leviticus which goes together with the love of God.

We have read the conclusion to the story of Susanna in Ascensiontide. In the Christian understanding, the Ascension of Christ to the right hand of God the Father is the homecoming of the Son having accomplished all that belongs to human redemption. As the Fathers of the early church emphasize, this is “the exaltation of our humanity,” an image of the dignity and virtue of our humanity as found in God. The Ascension is not a flight from the world as if it were evil. It points us to the reconciliation of spirit and matter and reveals the greater truth of our humanity as found in communion with God.

Perhaps, just perhaps, the story of Susanna serves as a counter to our cynical despair about our institutions and political life. It recalls us to the principles that properly dignify and ennoble our lives, the principles that make us truly human.

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

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The Lord heard her cry

In the Junior School Chapel and the Grade Ten Chapel this week we had the first part of the Parable of the Prodigal Son who, having wasted his inheritance, “came to himself” and remembers his father and the home which he had left to go into “a far country.” At Senior Chapel, we had the second installment of the story of Susanna and the Elders. At once powerful and disturbing, it, too, ends with a kind of awakening. Susanna’s cry to the Lord, we are told, was heard by the Lord. Just as she is being led off to be put to death on the strength of the false witness of the two wicked judges, Daniel is moved to protest, “I am innocent of the blood of this woman.” Pretty intense and quite telling. The judges accused her of what they themselves had intended. This story is part of the background to the Gospel story of the woman taken in adultery and to the problem of motives and hypocrisy. “Has no one condemned you,” Jesus said to the woman, “Neither do I, go and sin no more.” Here, however, Susanna is innocent.

But what was her cry? It is an insight into the nature of God who discerns what is secret, who is aware of all things, and thus knows that these men have borne false witness against her. The opening prayer of the liturgy of Holy Communion signals the same idea: “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.” This kind of ethical understanding belongs to the story, the idea that God sees all and everything, the idea of a principle of justice and truth that is greater than us and our evil.

We might be tempted to read the story through a feminist lens seeing it as essentially about the victimization of women by men. There is something to that approach, to be sure. After all, the beauty of Susanna is emphasized. The judges lust after her. In the trial, she is literally unveiled so that the wicked men “might feast upon her beauty.” One cannot ignore the “male gaze”, the way in which she is viewed as an object. It might also be said that a male, Daniel, is seen as coming to the rescue of the damsel in distress, as if Susanna is simply weak and helpless. But the story is more than this.

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