Category: KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

Turn thou us and so shall we be turned

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the penitential season of Lent in the Christian understanding. It is an intentional period that emphasizes the idea of self-examination and reflection and the exercise of self-control by fasting and self-denial. It has its counterpart in the ascetic traditions of other religions and philosophies. This year, for instance, the Christian Lent and Easter and the Islamic observance of Ramadan will overlap; Ramadan begins on March 22nd and ends on April 20th with Eid al-Fitr. Lent began this Wednesday, February 22nd; Easter is April 9th.

Ashes are imposed on our foreheads as a sign of repentance which is the idea of our turning back to God from whom we have turned away. The ashes are imposed with the words which recall us to creation, to our being the dust into which God has breathed his spirit. In other words, Lent – an Old English term referring to the lengthening of the days – seeks our being renewed and re-created. It is the intentional journey of the soul seeking the good which is found in God and in the motions of God’s love.

The practices that belong to the disciplines of Lent involve the whole of our being: body, soul, and mind and as such are an important reminder of our lives as embodied beings and of our lives in community. The good that we seek for ourselves can never be a private good, a matter of mere self-interest. One of the great images against the good as self-interest is in Plato’s famous image of the Cave. The prisoners chained at the bottom of the cave mistake the images or shadows for reality. But in being turned around (how? By the eros or desire to know?), there is the discovery of the things themselves, the physical objects and events in time and space, and then, the ascent of the mind to mental realities such as in mathematics that are abstractions from the material world, and then to the Forms or Ideas that belong to the true knowledge of what things truly are. Beyond the line in the interrelation between knowing and being – different forms of knowing in relation to different forms of being – there is the Good which is the unity of the being and knowing of things as the principle upon which they depend. Going up the line is like going out of the Cave but here is the crucial ethical point.

The Good is for all and not just for the privileged few and all of the forms of knowing and being participate to some degree or other in this intellectual structure of reality. Thus Plato argues that those who have made their way out of the Cave have to return to the Cave in order to teach and guide those who remain in the Cave. His famous image is that either kings become philosophers or philosophers become kings. Either way what is emphasized is the priority of knowing in relation to human life individually and collectively. But that turning back to the cave by the philosopher highlights the ethical concern for all.

Lent (and Ramadan, too) are not simply self-serving but belong to our lives together. They seek to strengthen the idea of individual responsibility and service which belongs to the good of all and not simply for the few. In a world where the pressures to out-source our thinking to machines is increasingly so great, Lent recalls us to ourselves as knowers and lovers of the Good, a Good which is all-inclusive. Thus the disciplines of Lent speak to our human freedom and dignity as responsible agents and not just things to be manipulated by defaulting to thinking like machines. Lent in this sense is about reclaiming what belongs to our humanity.

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

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Stories in Glass

The stained glass windows in the Chapel tell a story of history and education with respect to the School’s life and purpose. This week’s reading from Hosea, the great love-prophet of the Jewish scriptures, speaks about the divine love which leads us with “the cords of compassion and the bands of love” in spite of our frequent betrayals of love. But God is God and not man. Divine love seeks the perfection of our human loves, as we saw last week with Paul’s great hymn to love. Just so the windows open us out to the larger dimensions of an ethical, intellectual, and spiritual way of thinking and being.

The window in the choir, just behind the organ, depicts the founder of the School, Bishop Charles Inglis. It is based on an actual portrait of him by Robert Field (1810) which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. The School was founded out of the turbulence of the American Revolution by those who were committed to the English monarchy, thus known as Loyalists. One of the first things Charles Inglis did as Bishop was to found the School and the College in 1788 and 1789 respectively, recognizing the importance of an education that would contribute to public life and service, hence the motto Deo Legi Regi Gregi, for God, for the Law, for the King, and for the People. Thus the window points us to the Buckle window in the nave about Christ as a child of twelve being found in the temple both as student and teacher but then going down to Nazareth and entering into public service.

That window in the nave is framed by the beginning of what I like to call the Canterbury Connection. Why Canterbury? Because the School comes out of a Christian and Anglican background; Canterbury is the seat of the religious head of the Anglican Churches. Bishop Inglis was consecrated and sent to Nova Scotia by the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Moore, in 1787. Thus the first window on your right in the nave depicts Augustine of Canterbury, sent as a missionary to England by Pope Gregory the Great in the 6th century. He had seen in the Roman marketplace some slaves. He asked who they were and was told they were ‘Angles,’ a tribe in ancient Britain. He famously remarked, non Angles sed Angeli, “not Angles but Angels,” and thereupon sent Augustine as a missionary. He became the first Archbishop of Canterbury.

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Charity never faileth

“Never that which is shall die,” is a fragment from a lost play by Euripides. It serves as an epigram for Timothy Findley’s classic anti-war novel, The Wars. It complements Paul’s wonderful hymn of love in 1 Corinthians 13 which was read in Chapel this week which happens to be Spirit Week at the School and includes the Valentine’s Dinner and Dance. Love is in the air, we might say, but what do we mean by love? “Never that which is shall die” highlights the idea that love conquers all, that love is forever, that love is stronger than death; in short, that love never faileth. Charity means love.

Paul is talking about the divine love which is transcendent and transformative. It seeks the perfection of our human loves which are invariably limited and incomplete, partial like our knowing. We know in part. Here is love as wisdom which is about our being open to what is greater than ourselves and which seeks to better us not destroy us. Here is the idea of a love which does not make us other than ourselves but seeks the perfection of our humanity individually and collectively. Paul uses the metaphor of the body to talk about the human community where each part of the body plays its role for the good of the whole body. No one part is to be despised but each is to be respected. He recognizes that we all have different gifts, different talents, that are to be used for the good of all. But he ends the previous chapter with the phrase that introduces his famous hymn to love. “I will show you a still more excellent way.” That still more excellent way is charity, an Englishing of one of the Latin words for love, caritas, itself a translation of one of the Greek words for love, agape.

That still more excellent way does not negate our humanity by making us other than human which is one of the struggles of our times in relation to technology and AI which sometimes risks turning us into bots or machines, training us to think like machines. There is the danger of outsourcing our own thinking which negates the idea that we are fundamentally knowers. This is the reverse of the Turing Test. Instead of making computers that can be mistaken for being humans, we turn ourselves into machines, into thinking like machines. This is the point made in “Re-engineering Humanity,” the 2018 book by Brett Frischman and Evan Selinger. But Paul was already countering the things that dehumanize us in a tradition that looks back to Plato and which belongs to a whole way of ethical thinking. It speaks to the truth of our humanity in terms of our being open to wonder, to wisdom.

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I put away childish things

To be childish is one thing, to be childlike is quite another. It is an important distinction. To be childlike is to be open to wonder; the very opposite of what Chaucer called “childissh vanytee”, a lack of maturity and a kind of egotism.

The poet and writer, Mary Oliver, observes that “I am, myself, three selves at least.” There is the child in us that remains with us; “it is not gone.” There is “the attentive, social child” that seeks the certainties of daily life in routines, to what is regular and ordinary, “the ordinariness that makes the world go round.” But there is the third child in us that is open to wonder, “a self which is neither a child nor the servant of the hours” for “it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.” That child or self in us has everything to do with intellectual, spiritual, and artistic life, she argues.

We read in Chapel this week Paul’s great hymn of love from 1st Corinthians 13 and part of the story of Christ’s Presentation and Mary’s Purification, commonly known as Candlemas. It marks the transition from Christmas to Easter, from light to life, but by way of love, as Paul’s hymn makes clear. Christ is but an infant, an unspeaking child, carried in the arms of Mary, but old Simeon taking him up in his arms sees in him both the hope of Israel and of our humanity; “a light to lighten the Gentiles and the hope of thy people Israel.” He has a grasp of eternity in our midst.

Paul’s hymn is one of the outstanding works of literature regardless of one’s religious or non-religious identity. The word “charity” is the key word, explicitly mentioned nine times and implicitly another eleven times. It means love, but what kind of love? This little word in English carries a great freight and weight of meaning. Charity is the English translation of caritas, one of a number of different Latin words for love and the Latin translation of agape, one of a number of different Greek words for love. The King James Version of the Bible, the classical English translation which has had the greatest influence on the shaping of the English language since 1611, bar none, uses charity, an Englishing of the Latin, caritas.

Ubi est caritas et amor, ibi est Deus – “where there is charity and love, there is God.” A famous line from an 8th century poem by Paulinus of Aquileia, it captures prayerfully and powerfully how love is not simply something personal, emotional, romantic or sensual. Like Paul, it is talking about love as God. His hymn complements the scripture text you have heard repeatedly: “God is love, and he that abideth in love abideth in God and God in him.” Both John and Paul have an insight into the idea of eternal love which seeks the perfection of all our human loves which are in disarray. Yet to be reminded of the uncertain qualities of our human love as Shakespeare reminds us, (“In faith I do not love thee with mine eyes”), is also to be opened to its transcendent and eternal qualities. In this sense, love here is not something fleeting and fickle but constant and eternal, dynamic and active. Why? Because it is grounded in the idea of God himself and in his will for us. And it is transformative. It is about growing up in understanding and maturing in love.

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Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.

There is the greatest difference between wanting to control the world and seeking to understand it. The love of learning which we talked about last week is about seeking to understand rather than presuming to control. Epiphany is the making known of things but that can only happen in part because of the desire to learn on our part. It has very much to do with a respect for learning and for the quest to know. Only so is it transformative.

This week the readings were the story of the “beginning of signs” at the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee, and the “conversion” of Paul on the proverbial road to Damascus. Both are Epiphanies, as it were, and both challenge us about what we claim to know and seek to know. We might like the idea of having a kind of control over nature that allows us to change water into wine. Such is one of the illusions and fantasies of our technocratic world. But the point of the story is not about human manipulation of nature for so-called human ends but about what God seeks for our humanity in all of the ‘miracles’. He seeks the ultimate good for our humanity which is, perhaps not surprisingly, found in social joys. Most of the miracle stories are about healings but what are we healed for? For what end? Our good as found in God, in our delight in the goodness, the beauty and the truth of God which does not negate our humanity by turning us into machines, into automatons and bots, but perfects our humanity.

The story reveals at once the human predicament as named by Mary, “they have no wine.” We lack the means of our own sufficiency and joy. Jesus’ response is intriguing. “What is that to thee and to me? Mine hour has not yet come.” This may puzzle us but Mary gets it. “Whatever he tells you to do, do it,” she says, an echo of her own fiat mihi, “be it unto me according to thy word.” God seeks what is good for us according to his word and will, not according to human dictates and desires in all of their confusion and incompleteness. His hour refers to his passion, death and resurrection; in short, to the purpose of his Incarnation, his coming in the flesh of our humanity to recall us to our truth in God. There is perhaps no greater lesson than learning how to take delight in one another rather than using and manipulating one another in the illusions of control.

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They found him in the temple

This intriguing Gospel story was read in Chapel this week. It has a special relevance to our School and its history. There was once both the school and the university on this campus; the School founded in 1788 and the University of King’s College in 1789. Edgehill Church School for Girls was founded later in 1891 and in 1976 amalgamated with King’s Collegiate School to become King’s-Edgehill. But what about the University? In 1920, just after the devastations of the First World War and after the Spanish Flu epidemic, there was a fire and the main dorm burnt down. The University was forced to relocate to Halifax where it has been since 1923. So what does this have to do with Luke’s story about Jesus at the age of twelve being found in the Temple at Jerusalem?

The story has influenced the educational project of both School and College. It is one of the few Scriptural stories represented in the stained glass windows of the Chapels of both the School and the College. Why? Because of what the story signifies about education. In our Chapel, the last part of the story is depicted in the central window in the nave on the quad side. It is about Jesus stepping into the life of public service. In the College Chapel, the first part of the story of Jesus being in the midst of the doctors both hearing them and asking them questions is the central icon in the window above the altar; the emphasis is on teaching and learning. These are images that give us pause to reflect about the purpose of education, about teaching and learning and about service Deo Legi Regi Gregi, for God, the Law, the King and the people, the motto of the School and the College.

This story is an Epiphany on several different levels and one in which we are very much a part of its meaning, again on several different levels. The main Epiphany in the Christian understanding is Jesus as human student, on the one hand, and divine teacher, on the other hand. But it also makes known a central feature of education, namely, the seeking or desire to learn; in short, the love of learning. In the story, there are four references to the idea of seeking, the idea of wanting to know. Without that there can be no learning. What Jesus says here to Mary is particularly instructive. It is captured in the rhetorical question, a question which presupposes the answer, “Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?” meaning the heavenly Father. It highlights the making known of the purpose of the Incarnation. Human redemption is about learning what God seeks for us.

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Journeys

Exams end the school term, or so it seems. Yet they are really a feature of the continuing and, we hope, never-ending journey of learning; in short, they are a basic feature of education and life.

In the Christian understanding, Christmas brings us to Bethlehem. But it is not just a destination, an ending. The pageant of Lessons and Carols as well as the Christmas crèche scenes concentrate a great crowd of images in Bethlehem: shepherds and kings, men and angels, a man and a woman, a woman and a child, God and Man, heaven and earth, and, at the very least in the biblical accounts, sheep, to which holy imagination has added a whole menagerie of animals! Bethlehem is paradise restored, we might say, with the idea of the harmony and unity of the objective diversities of creation. “High and low, rich and poor, one with another”, as the Advent Matin Responsory suggests. This contrasts with the subjective categories of radical indeterminacy in our contemporary confusions.

But Bethlehem is not an end-point but the beginning of a greater journey that encompasses within the Christmas mystery the flight into Egypt and then the journeys to Jerusalem. Bethlehem and Jerusalem are the twin poles of the Christian imaginary around which everything moves as in an ellipse. They are inseparably connected. As the poet/preacher John Donne nicely notes: Christ’s “Christmas-day and his Good Friday are but the evening and the morning of one and the same day”.

As has been noted on occasion in Chapel, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all religions of the logos, of the Word, albeit in different registers of understanding. For Judaism that is captured in the TANAKH, an acronym of Hebrew consonants representative of the Torah (Lawa), the Prophets (Nevi’im) and the Writings (Ketuvim) emphasizing the centrality of the Word as Law; for Islam, the Word is concentrated in the recitation of Allah to Muhammed, the Qur’an, the Word as Will; for Christians, it is the Scriptures of the Old Testament and the New Testament understood as witnessing to the concept of the Word made Flesh. Along with other world religions and philosophies there is an abiding focus on things written, on texts. One of the meanings of the word, religion, is re-reading (re-legere). The other is the idea of a bond (re-ligare) between God and humanity.

Bethlehem in both these senses marks the beginning of the longer journey of the understanding. The metaphysical light which comes into the darkness of the world in Advent becomes the light of God within the world which teaches and illuminates our understanding in the midst of the complexities and confusions of human experience. Like exams, it is all part of the journey of education that belongs to a deepening of the understanding of our humanity.

A blessed Christmas break to all.

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

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Light in darkness

There are few images more powerful and more universal than the symbolism of light. It is a feature of the religious and philosophical traditions of the world. We began Chapel this Fall with the first five verses of Genesis and first five verses of John’s Prologue. In both light is a predominant theme. With the pageant of the Services of Nine Lessons and Carol, we end the Fall term in Chapel with John’s Prologue in its entirety. It signals “the light which shineth in darkness and the darkness overcame (or comprehended) it not.” That light is the Word and Son of God who in the Christian understanding is the Word made flesh.

Advent is God’s Word coming to us as Light and Life. It awakens us to the intellectual and spiritual principle of reality which embraces, shapes and redeems the material and sensual world. It reminds us of the truth of our humanity as essentially intellectual and spiritual beings who are inescapably part of that world. To be reminded – note the word, re-mind – is the light in darkness, the darkness of ourselves and the world when we forget or deny the primacy of the spiritual and the intellectual. That forgetting or denial is a kind of violence that contributes to the many forms of violence against the world and one another that is part of the long, sad story of human folly and wickedness. The light of Advent is about the possibilities of hope and peace, of respect and compassion signaled in the greater reality of God’s light and truth.

God in Genesis speaks the world into being. “Let there be light”, the light which distinguishes one thing from another and relates each and every part of the created order to the whole of creation. Our humanity, too, is located within that ordered structure of reality, a reality which is neither completely mind-dependent – it is not just what is in our minds- nor is it completely mind-independent – we cannot remove ourselves from the picture. The theme of light is further developed in John’s Prologue as the Word and Son of the Father. Christ is the light of the world. Thus the imagery of light is critical to the Jewish and Christian understanding and to Islam – Allah is the light of the Heavens and the Earth, even light upon light (Quran 24).

For Hinduism, the feast of Divali is the festival of light, light as Dharma, the principle of essential law or order.. Buddhism literally means enlightenment; the Buddha is the enlightened one. Our School was founded in what has come to be called the Enlightenment, the term for late seventeenth and eighteenth century European culture. Education is about enlightenment, both the light of reason and the light of revelation, through which ideas come to us and become part of us. It is all part of our learning and maturing in understanding. But it means facing the darkness.

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