Category: King’s-Edgehill School Sermons

King's-Edgehill School Sermons, Sermons

Sermon for Encaenia 2020

“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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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections, King's-Edgehill School Sermons, Sermons

Sermons for Advent and Christmas 2019

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

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King's-Edgehill School Sermons, Sermons

Sermon for Encaenia 2019

How can this be?

What? It’s all over? “How can this be?” you might ask like Nicodemus in the lesson Nick read. High School no more?! IB no more?! “Hit the road Jack and don’t cha come back, no more no more no more no more”! Really? It’s all over and I have to go? Hooray! Or perhaps not! Do I have to leave? Can’t I come back?

“How can this be?” your parents, too, might be asking? My dear little one is graduating from High School?! It seems it was only “yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away”. Now it’s all over? Well enough of the old geezer tunes from the remote past with apologies to Ray Charles and the Beatles. But you get the point. There is a question. “How can this be?”

Nicodemus’ question to Jesus conveys a sense of wonder as well as perplexity that belongs to the special qualities of this day. Today you step up and step out no longer as students but shortly as graduates and alumni of King’s-Edgehill School. As such today is an ending and a beginning, a looking back and a looking ahead but as well a looking inward.

This service is called Encaenia, which is a Greek word – ‘Oh no, not another Rev kind of word. You mean I have to think in the morning? Isn’t it all over?’! Well, duh! No. Encaenia refers to a renewal of purpose and identity. Originally an annual dedication of holy places, it has become associated with “the annual commemoration of founders and benefactors at Oxford University in June” (O.E.D) and, by extension, to academic institutions derived from the medieval universities of Oxford and Cambridge throughout the English speaking world; such as King’s-Edgehill. Encaenia recalls us to our beginnings, to the foundational principles and ideals belonging to the life of the School and to the nature of education. Endings and beginnings, as it were.

Those things are embodied in the Edgehill motto, fideliter, meaning ‘faithfulness’, as married to the motto of King’s, Deo Legi, Regi, Gregi, which means ‘for God, for the Law, for the King, and for the People’. Such things signify an approach to education that connects learning and living, a turning of our hearts and minds to the things that belong to service and sacrifice, to things worth doing and worth doing well, especially academically speaking, but with the intention of seeking the good of the human community. These mottos express an enlightenment sensibility about an education that contributes to lives of service whether in church, law, government or social, economic, and domestic life wherever you are and wherever you go in the world. It has very much to do with the education of the whole person within a community of persons.

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King's-Edgehill School Sermons

Reflections for King’s-Edgehill School Cadet Church Parade, 2019

Church Parade Reflections 2019
Christ Church (Anglican), Windsor, Nova Scotia
May 14th, 2019
“But you, have you built well?”

I. “But you, have you built well?”

“But you, have you built well, that you now sit helpless in a ruined house?” T.S. Eliot’s question in ‘Choruses from “The Rock”’ reminds us that, one hundred years ago, the world was in ruins following the devastations and horrors of the First World War. His poem, The Waste Land, reflects on a world that is “a heap of broken images,” itself a scriptural reference about the wilderness which we create in contrast to the garden of creation that we heard about in the first lesson from Genesis read by Julia.

“You know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.”

It is a picture of desolation and despair. The only hope, he suggests, is found in “the shadow of this red rock.” “Come in under the shadow of this red rock.” The reference is to Holy Scripture, to the words which speak to our souls in all times and places, words which awaken us to comfort and consolation, and to thoughtful action. Only so might we learn from the ruins of our own making. Only so might there be a building anew.

“I will show you something different,” Eliot says, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” It is at once disquieting and yet comforting. It recalls us to creation in which God breathes his spirit into the dust of our humanity and ‘Adam’ became a living being. Fear is not only about the things which frighten us; it is also about the awe and wonder of God, the Creator and maker of all things.

“But you, have you built well?”

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King's-Edgehill School Sermons

Sermon for Encaenia 2018

How readest thou?

How do you read? What, reading? You mean, like books? I thought that was all over and done with, you might be thinking, as in Alice Cooper’s 1972 hit song “School’s Out”:

School’s out for summer
School’s out for ever
School’s been blown to pieces…

This was long before such things as the shootings in Columbine, Colorado, and its sad and continuing legacy right up to Parkland, Florida, and more. The song includes the old familiar jingle of uncertain provenance:

No more pencils
No more books
No more teacher’s dirty looks!

And concludes:

Out for summer
Out till fall
We might not go back at all!

Well, you will not be coming back here in the Fall, for you are done.

“Accomplished and concluded so far as in us lies,” as an ancient Eastern Orthodox prayer at the end of Mass puts it. Finished. IB done! High School’s over! Or, at least, almost. In just a few hours, you will step up and step out no longer simply as students but as having made the grade. You shall be, quite literally, graduates and alumni of King’s-Edgehill School. Today you are the pride of the School and of your families and friends. You made it! “You shall go out in joy,” as Isaiah puts it, in the passage which Arturo read, and even “the mountains and the hills before you shall break forth into singing and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.” All wonderful metaphors that belong, well, to our reading.

So does this day really mean that you are all over and done with reading? I hope not. Because what we have so often talked about is reading as living, about thinking as a way of being. As a 13th century tutor at Oxford advises: “study as if you were to live for ever; live as if you were to die tomorrow.” My hope is that you will always be students, that is to say, those who are always eager to learn.

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King's-Edgehill School Sermons

Reflections for King’s-Edgehill School Cadet Church Parade, 2018

Reflections: Cadet Church Parade. May 2018
‘Teach us to care and not to care’

I. Teach us to care and not to care

Icons are images that belong to the understanding. They point us to ideas and ways of thinking that shape our ways of doing and being.

The dominant and central icon in the School Chapel is the image of Christ the Good Shepherd. The dominant and central icon in the Chapel at the University of King’s College in Halifax, our sister institution, is an image of the boy Christ as Teacher among the Doctors of the Law. The dominant and central icon here at Christ Church is the image of Christ Crucified. These three images are interrelated and speak to the culture and life of the School.

They contribute to another icon, the images of Christ Pantocrator that are present and visible in the Chapel and here at Christ Church. Pantocrator means the ruler of all, a biblical and philosophical reference to God as the intellectual and spiritual principle of all reality. “God is the king of all creation” as the Psalmist proclaims. In the Christian understanding that is concentrated in the figure of Christ and powerfully so in the icon of Christ Pantocrator. A central aspect of the spiritual imagination of the churches of Eastern Orthodoxy, icons are increasingly found in the churches of western Christianity as well. They help us to think about our life and our world as gathered to God.

As such these icons challenge the ways in which we use and abuse one another and our world through a kind of instrumental or technocratic reason, a reasoning which is about power and action but without regard to an ethical understanding. This is the “new barbarism,” as the French philosopher, Michel Henry terms it, a certain type of knowledge which is destructive of culture and humanity. These icons recall us to the transcendent principle of our knowing and our being that redeems all our doings and all our actions.

As the Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor has noted, the question for our contemporary world is less about the  idea of what it is that is right to do and more about what it is that is good to be. This focuses upon a sense of ourselves in relation to the world and to one another that is not simply about using the world and one another which so often leads to abuse and destruction such as the last hundred years have shown in the devastations of war and the degradations of nature.

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King's-Edgehill School Sermons, Sermons

Sermon for Encaenia 2017

“Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground”

What he wrote in the dust of the ground we do not know. We only know what he said which in turn was written down. They are some of the most powerful words of compassion and forgiveness ever written in the dust of our humanity. “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone”. What has been written in the dust of your humanity during your time here at King’s-Edgehill?

The last day of the term, the last day of the school year, and for you, the last day of High School. Hooray! “O Frabjous Day, Callooh, Callay,” I hear you say. Finally, and, at last, I hear your parents quietly mutter while clutching their wallets and worrying about their stockmarket portfolios! In every sense, today marks a milestone, a sense of accomplishment, a kind of ending. Alleluias everywhere! Today you are the pride of the School, of your parents and grandparents, of relatives and friends, and of cultures and communities from all over the world. On this special day with so many of you who have come from far and near to celebrate, our school is even more a microcosm of the world than usual. A special day that requires a special designation. Hence Encaenia.

Encaenia is the traditional name for this service, just as the event which follows is properly known as Commencement, both terms conveying a sense of beginnings, it seems. Endings and beginnings recall us to the principles which belong to identity and purpose, to the true character of institutions and to our lives within them.

Encaenia is a Greek word that refers to a sense of renewal of purpose and identity, specifically, to a dedication service. Its origins lie in the annual dedications of holy places but has become associated with “the annual commemoration of founders and benefactors at Oxford University in June” (O.E.D) and by extension to the academic institutions derived from the medieval universities of Oxford and Cambridge throughout the English speaking world, even such places as King’s-Edgehill School here in Windsor. We are recalled to founding principles and ideals that remind us that we are part of something greater than ourselves without which we are less than ourselves.

Ah, merely a tradition then? No. If merely a tradition then nothing worthy of consideration let alone commitment. A living tradition is another thing and one which requires a certain mindfulness. Otherwise, we become quite literally traditors, traitors, those who betray what has been passed on to them by passing it over, that is to say, throwing it away as worth nothing. Living traditions are about our faithfulness to what has been passed on and to which we hold ourselves accountable. It is about letting them live out in us. Seeds are planted. Words are written in the dust of our being. And such is the real dignity of our humanity.

The crisis of our contemporary institutions is whether we will live from the animating principles that belong to their foundations or succumb to our technocratic obsessions that so dominate our minds and our lives and reduce everything to utility. All means and no ends. The challenge is to recover the primacy of the ethical and the intellectual.

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King's-Edgehill School Sermons

Reflections for King’s-Edgehill School Cadet Church Parade, 2017

KES Cadet Church Parade – Friday, May 19th, 2017
Reflections: “Fear in a Handful of Dust”

1.
T.S. Eliot’s classic poem The Waste Land written in 1922 begins with a section entitled The Burial of the Dead. It includes a particularly poignant image of the disorders and confusions that have largely defined the last one hundred years, from 1917 to 2017. It is, we might say, the long and disturbing twentieth century, a time of broken images in a broken and disordered world.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(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.

2.
From 1917 to 2017 we contemplate a relentless litany of death and destruction almost beyond calculation and certainly without precedent: the devastations of the First World War and the Second World War, the horrendous parade of deaths under the totalitarian regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, & Mao, the bombing of Dresden and the obliteration of Nagasaki and Hiroshima by democratic regimes, the slaughter in Rwanda, the Srebenica massacre, the ravages of civil war in Syria, the famine in the Sudan, and so on and so on. It is hardly a complete list of the horrors of a century and certainly not a pretty picture. It is the picture of our humanity in destructive disarray.

3.
“How long” was the refrain “pinched from Psalm 6” and shouted out by hundreds of people in the closing song ’40’ at U2 concerts. “How long (to sing this song).” As Bono reflects, “I had thought of it as a nagging question – pulling at the hem of an invisible deity whose presence we glimpse only when we act in love. How long…hunger? How long…hatred? How long until creation grows up and the chaos of its precocious, hell-bent adolescence has been discarded?

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King's-Edgehill School Sermons, Sermons

Sermon for King’s-Edgehill School Reunion

“One thing is needful”

Reunions are about companions getting back together, about friendships shaped and formed by common memories and associations that belong to the reason and purpose of institutions. The word, companions, has its roots in the sharing of bread, com panis. I am sure that there has been much in the way of the sharing of bread and, by extension, no doubt, wine, during the time of your reunion!

2016 marks a special year. It is, if I may be so bold to suggest, the Year of Edgehill. It marks the 125th anniversary of the founding of Edgehill in June of 1891. That alone is cause for celebration but it is also the 40th anniversary of the amalgamation of King’s and Edgehill to form King’s-Edgehill School; and that, too, is cause for celebration.

Sir Kenneth Clark in his celebrated BBC TV documentary, Civilisation, comments that civilisation greatly declines in the absence of women. It is, he says, “absolutely essential to civilisation that the male and female principles be kept in balance”. In the Year of Edgehill we celebrate the qualities of Edgehill School for Girls. They are the qualities of grace and elegance, a certain class and refinement, a kind of dignity. Those qualities are the gifts which Edgehill brought to King’s and which strengthened and deepened the ideals of gentleness, learning, and manhood, or better humanitas. I would like to suggest that it is captured in a word, sprezzatura. It is Castiglione’s word from The Book of the Courtier, a book about civilised life and behaviour, about a kind of courtliness. Sprezzatura is about doing difficult things with consummate grace and ease; in other words, making the difficult look easy. Such is the grace and charm of Edgehill and what Edgehill brought to King’s.

It is not simply about manners and morals but the deeper principles upon which those qualities depend such as the defining ideals of King’s and Edgehill. They are expressed in their complementary mottoes. Fideliter, ‘faithfulness’, is the Edgehill motto befitting what was originally a Church School for Girls but as joined with King’s motto, Deo Legi Regi Gregi, ‘For God, for the Law, for the King, for the People’, it suggests something of the content of that faithfulness. It has very much to do with character and service, with leadership and sacrifice.

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King's-Edgehill School Sermons, Sermons

Sermon for Encaenia 2016

“Martha, Martha; thou art anxious and troubled about a multitude of things;
one thing is needful”

Isaiah’s lovely words which Abigail read complement Luke’s wonderful words which Colin read. Together they suggest something about the significance of this day and our gathering here in the School Chapel which has been in so many ways an integral part of your time at King’s-Edgehill. Cadets, Chapel, Sports, Classes – “these are a few of your favourite things”! It is, to be sure, the last Chapel for the graduating class. Today you step up as students and step out as graduates and alumni. You have made the grade! And I am sure that along with the mountains and the hills breaking forth with joy, there are the prayers of many a parent and grandparent, guardian and friend, whose hearts are breaking forth with joy, too, a joy coloured by no little sense of relief that you made it. At last! I hear them sigh, checking their chequebooks for what they hope might be the last time. It won’t.

Along with your stepping up and stepping out, Mr. Darcy Walsh goes with you after thirty-six years of teaching and coaching here at King’s-Edgehill and after far, far more Chapel services than any of you can boast. I worry whether Chapel will be able to continue without his expertise – in turning off the blower, that is to say. I don’t mean me. We wish him all the best in his retirement. But no doubt he will be back and back to the Chapel too when Finn and Sawyer come of age to continue the tradition of Walshs at King’s-Edgehill.

Yet, paradoxically, this time of endings is also about beginnings. Encaenia is the proper word for this service, even as Commencement is the word for the ceremonies which follow. Both words speak of a sense of beginning by way of honouring the principles that last, the principles that inform the life and purpose of the School. Encaenia is a Greek word (en & kainos) referring to a dedication festival, to a renewal of a sense of purpose and identity. Used with respect to the anniversary dedication of temples and churches, it has its further application to “the annual commemoration of founders and benefactors at Oxford University in June”(O.E.D.) and, by extension to many other schools and colleges throughout the world, such as King’s-Edgehill here in Windsor. We are all part of something much larger than ourselves.

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