Take With You Words

“Take with you words and return unto the Lord,” the prophet Hosea tells us. “The way up and the way down are one and the same,” the philosopher Heraclitus states. “Repentance,” Lancelot Andrewes, one of the great Anglican preachers of the 17th century, says “is redire ad principia, ‘a kind of circling’,” a returning back to the one from whom we have turned away. These words complement one another and highlight the purpose of Chapel. It is all about a kind of circling around and into the mystery of God, the beginning and end of all created beings, especially rational creatures, as Thomas Aquinas reminds us.

 

Hosea is the great love-prophet of the Old Testament. But what kind of love? The love that is forgiveness and grace, the love that redeems and perfects all of the myriad forms of our imperfect loves. Our loves have no meaning apart from what they presuppose and seek but cannot achieve or attain on their own.

 

Take with you words? Last Chapels are special and poignant times, I think, because of what we have been through together in the long course of the School year, and, for that matter, over many years. All the diverse enterprises of our lives, all the various aspects of our life together as a School are gathered into the mystery of God in prayer and praise. And what is that gathering except the understanding? The struggle and challenge is to enter into the images of scripture and literature to discover something about what it means to be human. Intellectus is the gathering into understanding; in short, education.

 

Take with you words, Hosea says. For what purpose? Wisdom and understanding. Nothing less and nothing more. “Whosoever is wise, let him understand these things; whoever is discerning, let him know them; for the ways of the Lord are right.” The understanding is profoundly ethical. In every way it recalls the principle upon which our being and knowing radically depend, something which we have been exploring in the stories of the Resurrection seen in terms of the different ways of knowing through which we arrive at an understanding of our world and ourselves. It challenges us about the perennial questions of good and evil, of right and wrong, of the realities of suffering and death, and of how we face them.

 

Take with you words that connect with the great works of literature, words which are transformative. In and through the ups and downs, the tempests and storms of our world and day, there is, as Ariel in Shakespeare’s Tempest says, the possibilities of “a sea-change into something rich and strange.” Or like Caliban, embraced in the spirit of reconciliation and forgiveness, we too may learn to say “I’ll be wise hereafter and seek for grace.” Or in a Canadian register, we might note the advice of Lady Juliet d’Orsey in Timothy Findley’s novel The Wars, “to clarify who you are by your response to when you lived.”

 

Take with you words. Whose words? The Rev’s words on these last Chapels? No. The words that we take with us are the words which have been given to us. The Scriptures are God’s words written. They are given to us that they may become our words and shape

our understanding of reality and of ourselves. In the case of Hosea, his whole book is about words as enacted parables of forgiveness and grace. They contribute to the idea that we are more than though not less than our bodies, our experiences, and identities in all their diversity and beauty, and in all of their confusion and disarray.

 

You have not been told what to say or believe in Chapel; it is not about an agenda, not about any kind of coercion of thought. It has been about engaging our minds with the images of Scripture that raise the deeper and more universal questions that belong to our humanity. In a religious and philosophical sense, that means the principle upon which our thinking and living depend; simply put, God.

 

At every service, you have heard me quote a passage of Scripture. And then you have heard me say, “In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” Those are explicitly and emphatically terms which belong to the Christian Faith and to its essential teaching of God as Trinity. They are the Scriptural names of God that provide a way of engaging with the insights and ideas of other philosophies and religions. There can be no real engagement without intellectual honesty about the different features of religious and philosophical expression that are part of how we think to and from the principle of life; the way up and the way down, as it were.

 

One of the features of Chapel has been “the dignity of difference” in the engagement and intersection between religions and philosophies and about human personality, you as persons. The emphasis has been upon you as intellectual and spiritual beings made in the image of God, regardless of the cultures, languages, and identities that are part of you, not because of them. Made for God, we might say, made for love by the God of love. At the very least it is an idea and a question worthy of thought, particularly in the confusions and uncertainties of our times, regardless of personal ‘faith’ or ‘non-faith’.

 

“In God’s eyes,” Augustine says, “I have become a question to myself.” What is that question? It is very much about knowing even as we are known, loving even as we are loved. The question about ourselves is bound up with the questions about God, questions that take us out of ourselves and set us in motion to one another. Such questions belong to the quest to know, the passionate desire for learning. The love of learning and the love of God are intimately connected. They shape and inform our lives with a sense of purpose that goes far beyond self-interest and self-obsession, far beyond the conflicting divisions and competing divides of domination, exploitation and power.

 

Take with you words. What else really is there to take from a school, a place of learning? Gentleness and learning are words inscribed here in the Chapel. I am humbled by the respect for learning that you have shown, morning after morning, in my poor, stumbling efforts to take the words given in the Scriptures and in the intellectual traditions of our humanity and to open them out to you. What more can I say? Thank you. Take with you words!