“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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