Category: King’s-Edgehill School Sermons

“One thing is needful”

And so it ends and begins. Such is the paradox of encaenia. You have come to the end of your High School Career. Hooray! This is your last Chapel as students of King’s-Edgehill. Hooray! But it is also a poignant moment. In a matter of a few hours, you will have stepped up and out as graduates of the School. Whether you have been here six years or one, it is an ending and a beginning, and the beginning of an ending, too, at least for me. I get to go out with you, it seems! Hooray! But on this day you are the pride and joy of the School, of teachers and coaches, of headmaster and chaplain, and of your parents and grandparents, friends and relatives. We are at once glad and sad to see you go. You have all become quite dear to us. Yet there are always times of ending and times of beginning anew; in short, times of reflection and recollection.

T.S. Eliot’s poem “East Coker” in the Four Quartets begins with the phrase “in my beginning is my end” and ends with “in my end is my beginning.” This expresses the meaning of this service and this day. It is about what abides in you and continues to grow in you from your time here and into the years ahead. King’s-Edgehill has, in some sense or other, been your alma mater, your nursing mother, which has contributed to your growth and maturity spiritually and intellectually, and physically too! Some of you I can remember as smurfs, I mean littl’uns, and now you tower over me! But the idea of spiritual and intellectual growth signals the importance, even the necessity of encaenia.

Encaenia is a Greek word. It refers to a renewal of purpose and dedication, to end as purpose and meaning, the telos, we might say, of the whole intellectual and spiritual enterprise of which you have been a part. While anciently understood as an annual dedication of sacred shrines and holy places recalling us to the principles that inform what it means to be human in ancient Greek culture, it became associated with “the annual commemoration of founders and benefactors at Oxford University in June” (O.E.D.). In other words, it comes out of the intellectual traditions of the medieval universities such as Oxford and Cambridge which were very much aware of the philosophical and ethical cultures and communities of thought that preceded them and contributed to their life.

It has extended to academic institutions in places far beyond the Euro-Mediterranean world, such as our school here in Windsor, Nova Scotia, that derive their history and self-understanding from those medieval institutions. The confederation poet, Charles G.D. Roberts, when he was a professor here from 1885-1895, referred to the School and College, perhaps with a wry bit of Maritime humour, as “the Athens of Nova Scotia.” At the very least, encaenia reminds us of the long-standing traditions of learning, and thus to the foundational principles of the School. It is, perhaps, a needful counter to the iconoclastic and anti-intellectual tendencies of our current confusions and uncertainties.

Encaenia recalls the principles that belong to the life-long pursuit of education. Today marks another gradus or step up for you on that journey of the understanding. That has been very much a theme in Chapel emphasized in the Scripture readings this morning from Job and Luke. They call attention to the ethical principles that belong to wisdom and understanding; in short, to our thinking and our doing. End here as purpose is not something instrumental, a mere means to some other immediate or utilitarian self-interest or personal self-expression but to the substance of our lives as ordered towards the Absolute Good; in short, to God as the principle of our being and knowing. The Good, as Plato suggests, is always epikeina, always beyond or transcendent yet as that in which we participate. It can never be what we possess for ourselves for then it would not be absolute. God is not a thing. We participate in what is prior and greater than ourselves.

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“What is written? How readest thou?”

“The end of the matter?” Can it be? Is it really all over? Certainly, there is a kind of ending, the ending of your high school career certainly. This is the last Chapel service for you as students, to be sure. Tears of sorrow; tears of joy. Or both! We are both glad and sad to see you go and, perhaps, it is the same for you. In a short while, you will step up and step out of King’s-Edgehill, no longer students but alumni! You have made the grade, gradus, to being graduates. On this day, you are the pride and joy of the School, of your parents and grandparents, guardians and friends, family and neighbours, teachers and staff, and I hope, of one another. An end, indeed, it would seem.

Yet there is a different sense of ending signalled in this service and the events of this day. Encaenia is a Greek word that refers to renewal of purpose and dedication, to end as purpose and meaning, telos, we might say. Originally an annual dedication of sacred shrines and holy places, it has become associated with “the annual commemoration of founders and benefactors at Oxford University in June” (O.E.D) and extends to those academic institutions which derive their origin and raison d’être from the mediaeval universities of Oxford and Cambridge throughout the English speaking world, including King’s-Edgehill. Thus “the end of the matter” recalls us to our beginnings, to the foundational principles and ideas that belong to education. At the very least, the word suggests the necessary connection between religion and education that is certainly an integral part of the history and life of the School.

Encaenia marks a redire ad principia, a return to a principle, a kind of circling back and around and into the ideas that belong to the educational project. In that sense, it is an ending that has no end. The mottoes of King’s and Edgehill remind us of an education that is about character and service: Deo Legi Regi Gregi – for God, for the Law, for the King, for the People – and fideliter – faithfulness in the life-long pursuit of learning.

We may wonder whether education is even possible in our technocratic culture. This is not new. There is no wisdom in techné, in the various skills and arts of human life, as Plato taught, and likewise so for technology. There is an abundance of knowing how to do but perhaps not so much of knowing what is. “Where is the life we have lost in living?” T.S. Eliot asked ninety years ago in his verse pageant “Choruses from the Rock.” He was not referring to Newfoundland. He notes the modern loss of the vital connection between living and wisdom. “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” Data or information is neither knowledge nor wisdom. This is an ancient commonplace.

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“Abide in my love.”

And so, at last it ends! And yet, begins. Today you are the pride and joy of the School, of your parents and grandparents, friends and peers. Today, at last, you step up and step out of the School. In a few hours you will have been transformed from being high school students to becoming alumni. There is, I am sure, a tremendous sense of accomplishment and, no doubt, some great sighs of relief. Yet parting is such sweet sorrow, too, for you, perhaps, and for all of us. We are at once both glad and sad to see you go. Why? Because of the intensity of our abiding together in the pursuits and challenges of education. That, I hope, is something that never ends.

This is the paradox of the Encaenia service: An ending that is a beginning. “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds,” as Paul says. Encaenia is the renewing of our minds upon the principles that belong to our abiding and being together as a School. Such is the paradox of truth itself. The coming together of opposites, as the great 20th-century physicist Niels Bohr noted, signifies the approach to a deeper level of truth. We “give voice to our opinions,” Augustine remarked more than fifteen hundred years ago, “but they are only opinions, like so many puffs of wind that waft the soul hither and thither and make it veer and turn. The light is clouded over and the truth cannot be seen, although it is there before our eyes” (Conf. IV. 14). Yet the truth is there, “before our very eyes.” We are not simply left with the muddle of endlessly conflicting opinions. Perhaps there is a way to think through the divisions and conflicts of our divided world of partial truths and competing assertions.

Encaenia is a Greek word (εν καινος) that refers to renewal, the re-dedication to certain ideas and principles that define institutions. Originating in the dedication of holy places, such as ancient temples and churches, it became associated with “the annual commemoration of founders and benefactors at Oxford University, held in June” (OED), and has extended to Schools and Universities which derive their origins from the medieval universities of Oxford and Cambridge, such as King’s-Edgehill. It reminds us that we are part of something larger than ourselves and recalls us to the foundational principles, to the telos, the end or purpose, of the institutions which in some sense shape our thoughts and actions.

Encaenia in this sense complements what has been an abiding feature of Chapel, namely, a form of critical self-reflection about the ethical principles that belong to our thinking. It is about “interrogating the writings of the wise,” as the poet Horace puts it, by way of the intellectual and spiritual traditions of our humanity, what C.S. Lewis called the Tao, the path of ethical wisdom, conceived “in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike”. This was in a series of lectures delivered in Durham, England, in 1943; in other words, at a time of conflict and division, of great fear and uncertainty. How do we face the difficult things that belong to the divisions and conflicts of our divided world?

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“O where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?”

At last! An Encaenia in June, not August! Who can believe it? And here in the Chapel. Today marks the last time that you are in Chapel as students. In just a few hours you will have stepped up and out into the world as graduates and alumni. Congratulations! You are the class that has suffered through the sturm und drang of the pandemic and, now, at last, you have been able to have exams! What’s not to like?! You have persevered quite well and, I hope, quite wisely. How? By that constant renewing of our minds upon the principles that animate and shape our lives together. An ending that is at once a beginning.

Encaenia is a Greek word that refers to renewal of purpose and identity, a dedication service (εν καινος) with respect to the spiritual and intellectual principles that belong to the founding of institutions. From its ancient origins in the dedications of holy places, Encaenia became associated with “the annual commemoration of founders and benefactors at Oxford University in June” (O.E.D), and extends to the academic institutions which derive from the medieval universities of Oxford and Cambridge in the English-speaking world, even to King’s-Edgehill. It reminds us that we are part of something greater than ourselves.

One hundred years ago in 1922, T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land. Written shortly after the devastations of the First World War, the poem reflects profoundly upon the wilderness of modernity imaged as a wasteland, a world in ruins. Images of death and decay are drawn from Ezekiel, the poet-prophet of the exile, and from the poet-philosopher of the Hebrew Scriptures, Qoheleth or Ecclesiastes. Our humanity, ben adam, “Son of Man”, knows only “a heap of broken images” and cannot say what lives and grows “out of this stony rubbish” of a world in ruins. The image is from Ezekiel: “Your altars shall be desolate, and your images shall be broken” (Ez. 6.4). His world, too, was a world of ruin and fragmentation, of loss and exile on Babylon’s strand.

Yet the poem offers far more than darkness and dystopian despair, far more than fear and death. It suggests that wisdom may be found even in the ruins of our times. “Only There is shadow under this red rock.” The Rock is the dominant image of God in the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy: “the Rock that begot you … the God who gave you birth”(Dt. 32.18). “(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),/And I will show you something different from either/Your shadow at morning striding behind you,/Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;/ I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

“Fear in a handful of dust”? How is that happy making? Yet it is about hope and life. It refers to the custom of throwing earth on the casket or urn of the dead but doing so “in the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life” (BCP, p. 602). Fear is more than the fear of death or the fear of Covid or the fear that haunts our broken and fragmented world of economic, social, political, and environmental uncertainties – our world, your world.

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Link to the audio file of the service of Encaenia 2021

And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying, Blessed … are you”

You’re here! How wonderful to see you and to be together at last for this rather historic Encaenia service, unfortunate as it is that not all of the graduating class are able to be here. We miss them even as we think of them as being present with us in spirit. It is historic because this is the first Encaenia service to be held in the Chapel not in June but in August. Last year, too, Encaenia was held in August, again owing to the COVID-19 restrictions, but it was held at Christ Church (a slightly bigger barn than this more modest stable!).

Encaenia is a Greek word (εγκαινια) meaning the renewal of purpose and rededication belonging to the intellectual life of sacred places and institutions of learning. It is found, for instance, in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures, in Apocryphal texts such as 2 Esdras, and in the New Testament in John’s Gospel. A feast of the renewal of beginnings or principles, it has become associated with “the annual commemoration of founders and benefactors at Oxford University in June” (O.E.D.), and to schools such as our own, which derive their origins from the great medieval universities of Oxford and Cambridge. But we meet in August. Well, if the Tokyo Olympics of 2020 can be held in 2021, then surely the June Encaenia can happen in August! Guess what, you’re here!

The blessing lies in our being here together and in being reminded of the principles which shape the life of the School and all of you who are actually now graduates. The blessing lies in what you have gone through and in what way. Instead of ‘the woe is me’ syndrome, the endless whine of complaints and grievances which turns us all into perpetual victims, there is the deeper sense of perseverance and accomplishment belonging to the principles of education which has been your experience in this place. At issue is how you take a hold of those things and make them your own.

“I have become a question to myself,” Augustine remarks in his Confessions (Mihi quaestio factus sum, Bk. X, xxxiii). And so, too, for all of us in the contemporary world. It is less about the external circumstances of global and local concerns, the fears and anxieties about the pandemic, the climate, or the economy, all of which we face and will continue to face, and more about how we think about things. Only on that basis is philosophy, the love of wisdom, and education, its pursuit, even remotely possible.

Our gathering is profoundly counter-anticulture by which I mean that it goes against the levelling forces of the ideology of liberalism, the governing worldview of our times, which corrodes and dissolves the reason and truth of the institutions which embody human freedom and dignity and which constitute culture through the cultivation of character. This ideology assumes a false anthropology, the idea of the utterly autonomous individual freed from all and every constraint of nature and authority, which in turn leads to the destructive technocratic mastery of both non-human and human nature and thus the antithesis of culture.

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