Category: KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

Thou hypocrite

The readings in Chapel this week focus on an important ethical concern: the problem of hypocrisy which affects us all. The passage from Luke’s Sermon on the Plain contains the famous parable of “the blind learning the blind,” an account of hypocrisy. It means judging others while removing yourself from judgement. As Jesus says, we are quick to point out “the mote” – a mere speck of dust – in someone else’s eye while utterly oblivious of “the beam” – like a two-by-four – in our own eye.

The image of the blind leading the blind is by no means unique to Christianity. Siddhartha Gautama, for instance, uses the same image to criticise the Brahmin or priestly teaching caste of Hinduism. It belongs, in other words, to the emergence of Buddhism.

The passage from Luke is a strong reminder of the necessity of self-criticism and self-reflection as the counter to our judgmentalism and condemnation of others. The parable is told to highlight the need for mercy and compassion as distinct from judgement and condemnation. “Be ye merciful.” That belongs, as we saw last week, to the higher qualities of human character and life; it is God’s mercy at work in us. This draws us closer to one another as friends and equals rather than as enemies. The story from Luke is wonderfully complemented by the beginning of one of “the finest short stories in world literature” (New Annotated Oxford Bible with the Apocrypha, RSV), the story of Susanna and the Elders read in the Grade 11 and 12 Chapel services.

That story, too, is about the hypocrisy of those in leadership. From the outset, we are told that “iniquity came forth from Babylon, from elders who were judges, who were supposed to govern the people.” The whole story, so compactly and powerfully told, belongs to later additions to The Book of Daniel written in Greek sometime in the second or first century BC. It is simply told and yet there is a considerable degree of sophistication and depth to it. The two elders lust after the beautiful Susanna. They seek to seduce her by blackmailing her: give in to our lust or we will say that you were alone with a young man, caught in adultery, as it were. An obvious misuse of power, an abuse and a matter of utter hypocrisy, they are essentially accusing her of what they themselves intend. The famous story of the encounter between Jesus and the woman accused of adultery draws upon this story.

(more…)

Print this entry

Mercy seasons justice

The story of the raising of the only son of the widow of Nain and the raising of Lazarus provided the context for reflection this week on the Coronation of King Charles III and its significance with respect to the history and life of the School. How? Because these stories contribute to our understanding of the Resurrection as the opening out of essential life. They do so by showing us mercy and compassion in action.

“When the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her, and said to her, weep not.” It is a powerful and poignant scene. Out of that look of compassion comes the raising of the young man and his being restored to his mother. We are not left in misery and grief; in short, to endless weeping. “Blessed are those that mourn for they shall be comforted.” And Jesus weeps with Mary and Martha, deeply moved at the loss of their brother Lazarus. He bids the company to take away the stone and says, “Lazarus, come out.” Literally, these are ‘resuscitations’ but they belong to the thinking about the Resurrection as revealing the underlying principle of essential life.

In every case there is a transformation from grief and sorrow, from ignorance and uncertainty, from sin and death to joy and life. God is essential life. In these stories we see the motions of compassion and mercy which are greater than the limits of our hearts and minds. “Lazarus, come out” speaks to the nature of education. It is about being led out of the prisons or tombs of our minds. These stories provide us with a way to face the difficult things of our world and day. They are not about a flight from reality. They are about the possibilities of mercy and compassion alive in us in our lives with one another.

The Coronation of King Charles III marks a significant and symbolic moment in the history and life of the School. He is the tenth monarch in the history of the School and the first King named Charles in its history. The School was born out of the American Revolution in its rejection of the English monarchy and was founded by a loyalist bishop, Charles Inglis. At issue were competing ideas about the nature of sovereignty: republican or monarchical? The idea of sovereignty refers to the fundamental principle of authority with respect to our lives in political communities. In a Republic, the principle of ultimate authority is diffused among the members of the community. In a Monarchy, it is concentrated in the person of the Monarch and its family dynasty. But it is not absolute monarchy. It is constitutional monarchy for England and the countries of the Commonwealth world-wide.

(more…)

Print this entry

Behind closed doors

The 20th chapter of John’s Gospel begins with the story of Mary Magdalene and ends with the story of so-called ‘doubting’ Thomas. In the midst is Jesus. To what end? That our hearts and minds might be opened out to the greater life of God, to the possibility of acknowledging what the American writer and theologian Marilynne Robinson calls “the miraculous privilege of existence as a conscious being,” a wonderful phrase.

The tomb becomes the womb of new life in spite of our griefs and sorrows. “Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted;” the words of the Beatitudes take on a fuller meaning in these stories. Jesus appears behind the closed doors where the disciples are huddled in fear and uncertainty. He shows them his hands and his side and speaks of peace and forgiveness, and of a kind of knowing, faith, that says there is more though not less to reality than what can be seen and experienced. The two stories are a powerful reminder that we are essentially spiritual and intellectual beings in and through the limits of our knowing and experience. They are not everything but neither are they nothing.

The resurrection belongs to the idea of things metaphysical as the underlying principle of all life. It is a breakthrough of the understanding that frees us from the closed doors of our minds. We see this in both Mary Magdalene and Thomas. They are changed and set in motion but not through the negation of what belongs to themselves and the truth of their individuality. They do not become other than themselves but more fully themselves precisely through the awareness of their unknowing and confusion. This is the possibility of the greater transformation. It is neither a flight from reality nor a denial of creation. It is, to put it theologically, about the redemption of creation and of our humanity, individually and corporately.

In our post-Christian and post-secular world, religion is largely regarded, if regarded at all, as a matter of personal faith and identity, a matter of various agendas and interests. What, then, is the role of Chapel at the School? It cannot be the affirmation of personal faiths or non-faiths, or of the particular claims and assertions of identity for that would be impossible. Neither is Chapel about proselytizing, about forcing or coercing an agenda. It is really more about what we see in these stories: the encounter with ideas that may change us through our being opened to what is greater than ourselves whatever your interests and agendas. Education is about the exposure to ideas. What you do with them is another matter. In this sense, Chapel is simply part of education; the opening out of ideas.

(more…)

Print this entry

Woman, why weepest thou?

There is all the difference in the world between education and indoctrination, the one opening us out to ways of understanding, the other compelling thought and expression. We live, it seems, in a world that looks more like George Orwell’s 1984 than Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Religion, like education, cannot be forced, a point which is constantly stressed in Chapel. Like classes, sports, and cadets, students are required to attend but no one can be compelled to believe, neither can Chapel affirm or confirm the various agendas and perspectives, personal beliefs or unbeliefs of students and faculty. It would be almost impossible to think how that could be.

The approach is rather that of the “dignity of difference” which has to do with a deeper sense of toleration. As Jonathan Sacks in a book written just after the events of 9-11 pointed it out, it means holding each form of religion accountable to its own principles. That requires having some understanding of different religions and the forms of their interaction.

Chapel belongs to the history and life of the School as an integral part of the educational project. While the service is Christian and derived from Anglican traditions that honour the School’s history, it is actually very generic and connects to the various practices in many other religious and philosophical cultures in terms of the reading of texts (scripture), of prayers and devotions and reflections, of ritual and symbol. There is not and cannot be any coercion of belief or thought, only the opening out of ideas and concepts that belong to questions that are perennial.

Religion or religions in their variety of expression have certainly been coercive and doctrinaire at times. Such is the sad and ugly truth of our brokenness and sin, our failures. And certainly, there are those who have very negative ideas about religion. Richard Dawkins regards the God of the Old Testament, as he puts it, as the most awful and vile figure in all literature. This prompted the former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Jonathan Sacks, to observe, “Oh, I see that you are a Christian atheist.” The term Old Testament is a Christian way of speaking about the Hebrew Scriptures. And while there are many difficult and challenging passages in the Scriptures, Dawkins overlooks the forms of interpretation that highlight the nature of human sin and evil in contrast to the idea of the Law and creation as intrinsically good.

The religions of the world also provide a constant corrective and a rebuke to all forms of self-righteousness, of presumption and indoctrination. Christopher Lasch notes that the spiritual discipline [of religion] is against self-righteousness and that while religion provides comfort, first and foremost, it challenges and confronts us with our short-comings. It is always self-critical. We confront the forms of our unknowing and the limits of our thinking. Only so are we opened out to what is greater than ourselves.

(more…)

Print this entry

The death of death is eternal life.

The “death of death” is radical new life. In the Christian understanding, it is the Resurrection. It belongs to the general philosophical and religious idea that life is greater than death and that good is greater than evil. It is not so much the ending of the story of the Passion as the beginning in the sense of being opened to God as eternal life and thus the source and principle of all life. In this sense, the Resurrection is a radical affirmation of life and not its negation since it is ‘the negation of the negation.’

It is the counter to our culture of fear and death. “Be not afraid,” is one of the first words of the Resurrection. Just as Holy Week witnesses to the intensity of the Passion and reveals all the horrors and cruelties of human sin, past, present, and to come, as visited upon Christ in his love for us, a love stronger than death and evil, so the Resurrection accounts witness in a remarkable way the dawning awareness of the idea and meaning of the Resurrection. It is not a flight from reality, from the world, or from the past. It is its recreation, its redemption and rebirth. God makes something out of the nothingness of human sin and folly. The various binaries of human experience, of good and evil, of spirit and matter, of body and soul, are transcended but not denied nor destroyed.

The Passion and the Resurrection challenge us about our illusions of control and power. They do so in profoundly moving ways. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” This is the first word of Christ from the Cross in Luke’s account and in what comes to be the Devotions on the Seven Last Words of Christ as developed by a Peruvian Jesuit priest in Lima, Peru, in the late seventeenth century. Out of the cacophony of the chaos and confusion of human sin in all its ugliness comes peace and joy and forgiveness; in short, life as love, the love of the good. It is transformative but the transformation is not about becoming other than who we are. It is about becoming who we truly are in God, the source and end of all life. The Resurrection belongs to the various ways of thinking about what it means to be human within the idea of creation and in the face of suffering and evil.

To my mind, the story of the encounter on the Road to Emmaus is the most dramatic and illuminating of the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection. It is about how we come to learn, about how ideas come to birth and are realized in us. It tells the story of two unnamed disciples fleeing from Jerusalem just after the Passion and Death of Christ. They are fleeing in fear and confusion and are going to a village called Emmaus. On the way they “talked together of all these things which had happened,” all the things of the Passion. Where there are two there is always a third, we might say, the truth that joins us together. Jesus draws near to them and joins their company but in their confusion they do not recognize him. They are not expecting him and all their expectations of him have been shattered. He draws out of them their confusions and uncertainties. They tell him what had happened including the finding of the empty tomb and the testimony of the angels to the women – the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. He draws out of them their confusion and unknowing; their fear and uncertainty.

(more…)

Print this entry

Learning good from evil

The paradox of the Christian Faith is that we learn love through sin. Yet that concentrates and complements what belongs to a great range of other spiritual and ethical traditions and teachings about what is learned through suffering and evil. Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita of the Hindu tradition faces an ethical dilemma about war and violence, learning from his confusion and distress by way of Sri Krishna to follow his dharma, the law of his being, but without attachment to results. It is a way of transcending the binaries of war, of conflict, but without denying or negating their reality. Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, confronts our suffering humanity in the form of a dead man, an old man, and a sick man as well as beholding the calm of a so-called holy man, a guru. It leads to an intense reflection about suffering in the Buddhist tradition. How we face suffering and evil is the question that simply doesn’t go away.

In the Islamic tradition, the Qur’anic story of Joseph, for instance, shows how good comes out of suffering and evil. Likewise in the similar story of Joseph in the Hebrew Scriptures. The point is that we confront ourselves in all of the contradictions of our fallen humanity. We are meant to find ourselves in the madness of crowds. Counter to the prevailing ideology of victim culture, Holy Week reveals that we are not the victims but the victimizers. Christ is the victim, the sacrificial scapegoat upon whom is visited all of the betrayals, confusions, contradictions and uncertainties of our humanity. We behold ourselves in all our disarray but even more we behold the greater love of Christ, the one who bears our sins.

The intensity of the Passion is equally the power of the Scriptures. We are meant to hang upon the words of the one who hangs upon the Cross for our redemption. In contemplating our evil, we learn something about the greater love of God for us and for our world and day. “God commendeth his love towards us,” Paul says, “in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” While we were yet sinners. Thus the Pageant of the Passion opens us out to the wisdom of love. As Lancelot Andrewes notes Christ crucified in liber caritatis, the book of love opened out for us to read. For “he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities, upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are made whole,” as Isaiah prophetically puts it. Somehow we can learn love through sin, good from evil. That is itself a testament to the wisdom of God, a wisdom that is there for us to ponder.

I wish you all a blessed Holy Week and a joyous Easter.

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

Print this entry

Five barley loaves and two small fishes

“But what are they among so many?” The story of the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness along with the story of the Canaanite woman who seeks the healing of her daughter “grievously vexed with a devil” are important teachings for us. For we, too, are in the wilderness. The question is about what is learned in the wilderness. These stories in the Christian scriptures recall the Exodus in the Hebrew scriptures.

Wisdom, Thomas Aquinas observes, is spiritual refreshment. Wisdom takes three forms. There is the wisdom that belongs to teachings of the ancient philosophers. There is the wisdom that belongs to the Law of Moses. But both those forms of wisdom are limited and incomplete, partial truths, we might say. Why? Because of sin and evil. Thus creation, though good, is not perfect and the Law, though good, is not perfect. Indeed, the Law, as Paul observes, is sin in the sense that it convicts us of what we would like to be but are not. Something more is needed, namely, grace. In the Christian understanding, Christ is “the power and the wisdom of God.” Both these stories show us that power and wisdom and in intriguing ways. Both are about what is learned in the wilderness, itself a powerful metaphor for the human condition.

How do we deal with the realities of suffering and evil? Wilderness is imagined in a number of different ways: as a kind of pristine paradise of nature but sometimes without the presence of humans, as a refuge and a retreat from the “madding crowd” of the city, as the urban jungle of contemporary life, or as a “wasteland,” to use T.S. Eliot’s famous image for his poem, The Waste Land. He saw our modern world as a desolating wilderness of destruction and emptiness following the devastations of the First World War. Dante, in the early 14th century, says that he awoke to find himself in a selva obscura, a selva selvaggia, a dark and savage wood. And yet he says that there he discovered “a great good”. There are things to be learned in the wilderness. That is the point of the Exodus for Israel that provides the larger context that informs the stories read in Chapel this week. It is really about what can be learned in the wilderness journey of our lives. Wisdom is spiritual refreshment.

(more…)

Print this entry

They understood none of these things

“We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus says. The phrase signals the beginning of Lent in the Christian understanding. This Thursday at the School, we “go down” for the March break. It is an interesting conjunction of metaphors both indicating a kind of journey, an exodus of some sort or another.

For some it is about getting away from the bleak midwinter to warmer climes either out of a sense of privilege or entitlement. For others it may be a journey to other countries and cultures, “an educational experience,” we hope. For many others, it is a matter of staying close to home. But they are all journeys of one sort or another and signal a break from the routine of classes and patterns and/or the distractions of events. Whether one travels far or stays close at hand, there is one thing that you can’t get away from: yourself.

Lent and Ramadan – they overlap somewhat this year – are intentional seasons of self-examination that connect to the philosophical traditions of self-reflection. There is Socrates’ famous remark that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” and Descartes rigorous examination of the ideas in his mind to see what can be known and in what way, for example. The pursuit of learning necessarily includes us as knowers and thinkers; in short, students which really means those who are eager to learn! Traditionally, school breaks were understood as “reading breaks.” Why? Because they were intended to provide a time of leisure, of scholé, ironically the root meaning of school in the sense of a freedom from the practical necessities of life which inhibit the freedom of the mind in contemplation. The reading breaks were a break from the routines of schools to allow for time to read and think.

In the passage from Luke 18, Jesus tells the disciples and us exactly what going up to Jerusalem means. It means some rather disturbing things, things which are a reworking of the exodus theme of wandering in the wilderness to some extent. He speaks of suffering and abuse, of his passion, death and resurrection. But the disciples, Luke tells us, “understood none of these things, and this saying was hid from them, neither knew they the things which were spoken.” It is a strong indictment of our unknowing; a triple negative. And yet to know that we do not know is to know something and marks the beginning of the journey of learning. Thus what follows immediately is the encounter with “a certain blind man” sitting “by the way-side” near Jericho. Jericho is the biblical symbol of the earthly city in contrast to Jerusalem, the symbol of the heavenly city. He cries out to Jesus. The disciples try to shut him up but he calls out all the more incessantly. Jesus speaks to him and asks him what he wants. “That I may receive my sight,” he says. His desire is drawn out of him explicitly. He is healed and glorifies God.

(more…)

Print this entry

Exodus: a going forth

“You shall strike the rock and water shall come out of it, that the people may drink,” God tells Moses in a striking passage in Exodus. Exodus is the second book of the Torah, the second book of Moses, as it is sometimes called. Exodus is its Greek title from the Septuagint. Its Hebrew title is Shemot – Names. It is the scriptural classic about the idea of journeying and as such complements The Odyssey of Homer. Both are about the journey of learning through suffering and reflection, we might say, which have to do with the understanding of our humanity in relation to the intellectual structure of reality either in the form of the Greek cosmos or the Hebrew creation.

The idea of the exodus is taken up by Christians and Muslims alike and relates to the larger philosophical and ethical quest for wisdom. As such the concept of exodus speaks directly to us as a School and to all of you as learners, those who have embarked on the quest for understanding. Exodus, as a book, however, confronts us with the disorders of our humanity. We are really a whole lot of complainers! On the one hand, never being satisfied (like Mick Jagger’s ‘Can’t Get No Satisfaction’!) signals a yearning for something more than the material and quotidian realities of our lives. On the other hand, it signals a presumption and a pretension about ourselves, namely our hubris or pride in which we think we are entitled to, well, everything. It extends to the idea that God owes us and thus that God is accountable to us. It is exactly the reverse of the teaching of both The Odyssey and Exodus.

Exodus means going forth in the sense of a departure. The Odyssey is about the homecoming of the Greek heroes after the battle of Troy; the journey back to where they are from and, in that sense, where they belong in the order of things. The exodus in the Hebrew Scriptures is literally the account of the people of Israel being delivered from slavery to the Egyptians. It marks the entire journey in the wilderness that is about learning what that liberation properly means. It is, literally, a going forth from slavery but, morally, the exodus extends to a going forth out of sin, out of ourselves in our preoccupations and obsessions, our selfish pride which is blind to God and to one another. And, intellectually, like The Odyssey, the exodus is the going forth out of ignorance and into the understanding of the will of God expressed concretely in the Law, especially the Ten Commandments. Unlike The Odyssey, it is not so much about a place such as the polis, the Greek city-state, but about the Word of God written which defines the journey. But it means that the exodus as freedom from slavery, from sin, and from ignorance, is fundamentally a freedom to a principle; in short, to God as the ethical, spiritual and intellectual principle of reality.

(more…)

Print this entry