KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 4 September
In the beginning God… In the beginning was the Word
And so it begins, again and yet again. For as T.S. Eliot puts it “in my beginning is my end” even as “in my end is my beginning”. There is far more to beginnings than a linear sequence, first this, then that. In a profounder sense, there is a philosophical, a theological beginning that is about ends and purposes, about truth and meaning that we can only enter into and begin to learn more and more about the mysteries of life.
To be sure, we are at the beginning of a new school year, the beginning of term. And for students and faculty alike there is all of the excitement and anxiety that comes with expectations and wonder. We make a beginning. Yet we can only do so because of the far more radical nature of beginnings and ends which are signalled in the Scripture readings for the first two Chapel services.
It has become a tradition to have the Head Boy and Head Girl read sequentially Genesis 1.1-5 and John 1.1-5. It takes no great wisdom on my part to note that these readings complement and comment upon one another. They are some of the profoundest and most philosophical passages in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures and they open us out to the mystery of God and the created order which is clearly and emphatically intelligible in principle. It is not science but the presupposition upon which science and all our studies depend. In the beginning God…in the beginning the Word.
In the beginning God what? God created. Begin with God and everything else comes after. We begin with God who is without beginning, eternal, and everything begins to be seen in God and from God. This, too, is John’s great insight. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God.” And as in a comment upon Genesis, John’s Prologue adds, “all things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made.” This too has its complement in Islam. The “Originator [Badi] of the heavens and earth. When He decrees a thing, He says only ‘Be!’ And it is” (Qur’an 2:117).
Chapel is an integral part of the educational programme at King’s-Edgehill School. It belongs at once to the School’s honouring of its religious and philosophical origins – Christian and Anglican – but just as importantly to the role and place of religion in education, something which is often overlooked and ignored in the dogmatic forms of our secular culture. The point is rather simple. There is not a single area of study or discipline of learning that is not profoundly shaped and informed by religious and philosophical thought. The task in Chapel is to engage seriously and respectfully with the questions which religion philosophically raises.
Students and faculty come from all manner of cultures and places religiously and non-religiously. Chapel is not simply about people’s individual faith or non-faith commitments precisely because of that obvious plurality of cultures. It is about speaking faithfully out of a Christian perspective but in ways that reflect upon and engage the different aspects of our world in all of its confusions and glory and particularly with the different religions of the world such as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism as well as the forms of secular atheism.
It is primarily about respect for another way of thinking than what belongs to the distresses and strains of contemporary culture, what Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, refers to as “the currents in our peculiar contemporary society” such as “an instrumentalizing and managerial spirit, an anxious shrinking of language into cliché and formula, a nervousness around emotional risk and exposure that is balanced by profound and fluent sentimentality, a desperate not-knowing-how-to-cope faced with a nightmare world of mass atrocity that sits alongside the acquisitive fevers of our economy.” Quite a comprehensive description! O brave new world – with all of the allusions to Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Huxley’s dystopia.
At the very least, we endeavour to engage and to think humbly and critically, responsibly and respectfully, not presuming to have the answers but refusing to despair of thinking ethically and intellectually.
David Curry
