Christ Church

“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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Church Parade Reflections 2024: To Govern Is To Serve

To Govern Is To Serve I

The image of the Shepherd is everywhere a symbol of government both divine and human. It is a powerful feature of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Scriptures of the New Testament. It is also an image for kingship in the ancient world, from The Epic of Gilgamesh through to Homer’s Iliad and beyond. For the ancient Greeks, the image of shepherding in terms of kingship reflects the divine government of the world itself. It is “a natural and an universal symbol of divine and human government“. Divine and human meet in the image of the Shepherd guiding and caring for the sheep. It is most powerfully captured in the image of Christ the Good Shepherd which we heard in the lesson which Spencer read. The critical emphasis is on the idea of the “good” shepherd.

In The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest literary works of our humanity, Gilgamesh is at first portrayed as a bad king because he uses the people of Uruk for his own self-interest. The people see his behaviour as the antithesis of what he should be: “The king should be the shepherd of his people … wise, comely and resolute,” they say. To be a bad king is to be a bad shepherd in terms of human government because it does not respect or care for the good of the people. The bad shepherd serves only himself at the expense of all others. In a profound image, Enkidu is created to be Gilgamesh’s friend and equal, his second self. Why? So that Gilgamesh can come to learn what it means to be a good king, a shepherd to his people.

The theme of the divine shepherd is emphasized in the Hebrew Scriptures: “Hear, O thou Shepherd of Israel, thou that leadest Joseph like a sheep.” We heard these words at the opening of the Advent Christmas services in our School Chapel. It is the idea of God as a Shepherd, the Shepherd of Israel, which in turn shapes the imagery of human rule in imitation of God’s rule, such as David as the Shepherd King or the prophet Isaiah looking for the redeemer and deliverer of Israel as one who will “lead his flock like a shepherd, and gather the lambs into his bosom.” Lovely images.

Plato, too, explores the theme of government through the idea of the shepherd in the Republic, building on the question which The Epic of Gilgamesh raises about what it means to be a shepherd. The sophist Thrasymachus claims that the shepherd is only out for himself but Socrates shows that is what it means to be a false shepherd. The true and good shepherd is one who looks out for and cares for the sheep of his flock, first and foremost. It means acquiring the art of care which seeks the best for those under the shepherd’s charge. To serve them, not oneself, belongs to good order and justice.

Such images and ideas have influenced and contributed to the idea of Christ as the Good Shepherd. It builds on those earlier images but intensifies the idea of care in a most radical way. The Good Shepherd is equally the Lamb of God. “The good shepherd gives his life for the sheep.” This challenges our thinking about rule and order; it is not about dominating others but serving one another. To govern is to serve.

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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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What is written? Reflections for the Church Parade, April 19th, 2023

What is written? And where? And how do we read? These are all questions that come to us through what is written. The word ‘scripture’ simply means what is written. What is written is an essential feature of the religions of the world.

There are the writings of Confucius in the Analects along with Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching of Taoism in China. There are the writings that belong to the Hindu tradition in the Vedas, the Upanishads and other writings such as the Bhagavad Gita in India. There are the many writings within Buddhism, both in classical or Theravada Buddhism, and Mahayana Buddhism, and Tibetan Buddhism. There are the writings of the Hebrews in the TANAKH, an acronym for the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. There are the writings of the Christian New Testament. There are the writings of the Recitation of Allah to Mohammed in the Qur’an for the cultures and people of Islam. Ramadan celebrates the giving of the Qur’an and ends with Eid al Fitr beginning on April 20th or 21st depending on the sighting of the crescent moon. Not to mention the many writings of the philosophers of antiquity who have contributed to the shaping of the ethical and spiritual imaginary that has been such a major part of our world, past and present.

What is written in the dust? Levi read the story about Jesus and the woman taken in adultery. It is the only time that Jesus is said to have written something. We hear about what he said as written down by others and even what he read as written in the Jewish scriptures, but what he wrote in the dust we do not know. Yet the image of him writing in the dust looks back to creation, to God breathing his spirit into the dust of our humanity such that we become living and thinking beings.

Here Jesus is the target of attack. His accusers set before him a woman accused of adultery to test him about his relation to the Law in its literal sense. He bends down and writes in the dust. What he wrote we do not know. We only know what he said. “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” And all the accusers fade away convicted in their own consciences. To the woman he says, simply and gently, “Has no one condemned you? Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.” These are powerful and moving words of life in the face of animosity and division. They are words of resurrection and forgiveness written in the dust.

Socrates, too, wrote nothing. But in Plato’s dialogue, The Meno, Socrates, not unlike Jesus, writes in the dust, or at least draws a diagram in the dust, to show that Meno’s slave boy who has never been to school nonetheless knows the Pythagorean theorem, meaning that it can be drawn out of him. It is a powerful scene about learning through a kind of remembering or discovering what is actually in us as spiritual and intellectual beings. These writings in the dust recall us to creation and speak to us about redemption and about who we are.

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Honouring Queen Elizabeth II

On Monday, September 19th, a short memorial service to honour the passing of Queen Elizabeth II was held in the Chapel, as was fitting for a School whose history and life is grounded in the principles of constitutional monarchy which she so graciously embodied. That sensibility is captured in the School’s mottoes: Deo Legi Regi Gregi and Fideliter, For God, for the Law, for the King, for the People, and, Faithfulness, the latter being the motto brought to King’s-Edgehill School by Edgehill at the time of the amalgamation of the Schools in 1976. Faithfulness to her Office as Sovereign was one of the outstanding features of Elizabeth’s life and reign.

The service drew upon the spiritual riches of the Book of Common Prayer, especially from the Burial Office, used at the official services held at Westminster Abbey in London and at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor, England. Her long reign of seventy years was distinguished by her strong commitment to the Office of Sovereign and never about herself, by her Christian faith and devotion to duty and service in the divided and tumultuous times in which she reigned, and by the way in which she was a symbol of unity not only for England and for the nations of the Commonwealth but for the world.

One of the prayers, which is perhaps better known in England than in Canada, is taken from A Sermon Preached at White-hall, February 29, 1628 by the poet-preacher John Donne (1572-1631) as revised and edited by Dean Eric Milner-White (1884-1964). Milner-White was also largely responsible for the shaping and promotion of the great Advent Service of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge in December 1918 which offered hope and peace to a world devastated by the First World War. Donne’s words as shaped into prayer speak to the deeper spiritual truths of the human condition and to our prayers for Queen Elizabeth II.

Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening
Into the house and gate of heaven.
To enter that gate and dwell in that house,
Where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light;
No noise nor silence, but one equal music;
No fears nor hopes, but one equal possession;
No ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity;
In the habitation of thy glory and dominion,
World without end, Amen.

Governments come and go but the Sovereign as Head of State remains now with her son, Charles III, our King and Governor. Long live the King.

(Rev’d) David Curry
School Chaplain, Head of English, ToK Teacher

“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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KES Cadet Church Parade – Friday, May 13th, 2022
It happened one Friday afternoon

‘It happened one Friday afternoon.’
‘You mean Friday the thirteenth?’
‘No, no. Not that.’
‘Oh, you mean our marching through the town and into the Church this afternoon?’ ‘Well, in a way, I suppose, but only because of what happened one Friday afternoon long ago.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Just look at the center window above the altar.’
‘What do you see?’
‘The picture of Christ crucified?’
‘Exactly. That is what happened one Friday afternoon and why we are doing what we are doing this Friday afternoon.’

It happened one Friday afternoon. The image of Christ crucified is the dominant icon or image here at Christ Church. The dominant icon or image at the School Chapel is Christ the Good Shepherd. They go together and complement each other. They belong to the intimate connection between the Passion and the Resurrection.

Christ Church has played a large role in the life and history of the School. It has been three years since we have been able to have the Church Parade and to be here in this sacred space. This service and space remind us of the history and life of the School and its connections to the community of Windsor, to the military, and to the Church. It means having to think about dark and difficult things such as war and conquest, about suffering and sorrow that are part of our disordered world both past and present. We can only do so because of what happened one Friday afternoon.

For years upon years, since the late 19th century and throughout most of the twentieth century, students from King’s Collegiate School and from Edgehill Church School for Girls marched down to Christ Church on Sundays for service. In rows of two by two, they entered and sat on opposite sides of the Church. No doubt, like Bassanio and Portia in Shakespeare’s play, The Merchant of Venice, they looked across the aisle to one another signaling with their eyes “fair speechless messages” of love (or mischief!). There were no devices and so no texting. A different age.

To this day a box hangs at the back of the Church near the entrance specifically designated to hold prayer books and hymn books for the use of the Schools. It recalls the connection between the School and the Church in the community of Windsor.

It happened one Friday afternoon. To understand the image of Christ crucified means appreciating the different ways in which the crucifixion has been depicted in art and devotion over the centuries.

The earliest image is that of Christus Rex, Christ the King. Christ is depicted as a king, robed in royal robes and crowned with a crown of gold. It is a powerful symbol of the triumph of life over death.

But later the emphasis turned from the victory to the agony, the agony of suffering. Christ was depicted in terms of his suffering humanity. The focus is on the body, on the sufferings. Christ identifies with the forms of human suffering, sometimes in very grotesque ways, especially after the black death in the 14th century which had such a devastating effect on European culture and life.

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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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“A garden enclosed is my sister … a paradise of pomegranates”

I did not think that I would see you again. I have wanted to “hear your voices,” even if muffled, and to see your comely faces, even if masked! So what is this? A carnival? A masquerade? Mirabile dictu, we are at this special Encaenia service; the real rather than the virtual. We are missing some of your friends and fellow graduates who are not able to be here owing to the restrictions and limitations of these ‘Covidious’ times. But they are with us in intent and in spirit. We embrace them in our gathering as companions in the garden of learning.

It may seem odd, and to use the overworked word, ‘unprecedented,’ but as such historic, to have Encaenia in August rather than June. But to be gathered here at what I call the ‘big Chapel,’ Christ Church, is not without precedent. Encaenia and graduation services were held here in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Nor are you strangers to this place where you have gathered for Advent & Christmas Services of Lessons and Carols in years past and for the Cadet Church Parade; the latter, a casualty this year of Covid. But never mind, here you are! It may seem trite but ss Bobby McFerrin puts it, “Don’t worry, be happy! In every life we have some trouble but when you worry you make it double”.

One other thing is different. Officially you are already graduates of King’s-Edgehill rather than standing on the edge of that momentous transition from students to alumni. But Encaenia is more than a milestone, a rite of passage. It signals and recalls us to the foundational principles that belong to the life of the School.

The term derives originally from ancient religious festivals but has migrated to the annual celebrations of the intellectual and spiritual traditions that belong to the foundations of schools and universities, particularly those derived from the great medieval universities of Oxford and Cambridge, such as King’s-Edgehill. At a time when our institutions are in disarray and confusion, we do well to recall the principles that belong to their truth and character for they are about things which are greater than ourselves and which hold us to account in the face of our many, many failings. Schools are only as strong as their commitment to their foundational ideals which have, in their truth, a corrective and reformative aspect. For you as graduates, it is about your experience of being at the School, as being part of the School, and as being shaped by the School. As such it is about your experience as grounded in School’s life and history.

Our gathering is not simply defined by Covid-19. You are more than Covid-19 victims. I would caution against such a way of thinking; to define yourself as a victim is to be a victim twice over. Our current epidemiological uncertainties are just as much about our epistemological confusions, that is to say, about how we think about ourselves and the world around us. Encaenia, in recalling us to the principles which define and shape the life of the School, reminds us of things which are greater than the circumstances and events of our world and day. That has been a constant point of emphasis in Chapel. We have, time and time again, considered questions about the self and the other, about how we look upon one another, and, consequently, about how we deal with one another within a wider consideration of reality, intellectually and spiritually understood. The word is respect which is, literally, about looking at things. It relates to our present experience of so-called social distancing and the wearing of masks. Such things are about a kind of respect for one another; looking at one another as more than walking pathogens. Looking at one another with respect, not out of the fear of the other.

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Fr. David Curry has compiled his homilies and Chapel reflections for Advent and Christmas into a single document. Click here to download (pdf).