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Light in darkness

There are few images more powerful and more universal than the symbolism of light. It is a feature of the religious and philosophical traditions of the world. We began chapel this fall with the first five verses of Genesis and first five verses of John’s Prologue. In both, light is a predominant theme. With the pageant of the Services of Nine Lessons and Carol, we end the fall term in chapel with John’s Prologue in its entirety. It signals “the light which shineth in darkness and the darkness overcame (or comprehended) it not.” That light is the Word and Son of God who in the Christian understanding is the Word made flesh.
 
Advent is God’s Word coming to us as Light and Life. It awakens us to the intellectual and spiritual principle of reality which embraces, shapes, and redeems the material and sensual world. It reminds us of the truth of our humanity as essentially intellectual and spiritual beings who are inescapably part of that world. To be reminded - note the word, re-mind - is the light in darkness, the darkness of ourselves and the world when we forget or deny the primacy of the spiritual and the intellectual. That forgetting or denial is a kind of violence that contributes to the many forms of violence against the world and one another that is part of the long, sad story of human folly and wickedness. The light of Advent is about the possibilities of hope and peace, of respect and compassion signaled in the greater reality of God’s light and truth.
 
God in Genesis speaks the world into being. “Let there be light”, the light which distinguishes one thing from another and relates each and every part of the created order to the whole of creation. Our humanity, too, is located within that ordered structure of reality, a reality which is neither completely mind-dependent - it is not just what is in our minds – nor is it completely mind-independent – we cannot remove ourselves from the picture. The theme of light is further developed in John’s Prologue as the Word and Son of the Father. Christ is the light of the world. Thus, the imagery of light is critical to the Jewish and Christian understanding and to Islam – Allah is the light of the Heavens and the Earth, even light upon light (Quran 24).
 
For Hinduism, the feast of Divali is the festival of light, light as Dharma, the principle of essential law or order. Buddhism literally means enlightenment; the Buddha is the enlightened one. Our School was founded in what has come to be called the Enlightenment, the term for late seventeenth and eighteenth century European culture. Education is about enlightenment, both the light of reason and the light of revelation, through which ideas come to us and become part of us. It is all part of our learning and maturing in understanding. But it means facing the darkness.
 
The Service of Nine Lessons and Carols established at King’s College, Cambridge endeavoured to bring hope and peace and comfort to a world of darkness and despair after the horrors of the First World War. It offers a vision of something more and greater than the violence of our humanity in disarray. Six of the nine lessons are from the Hebrew Scriptures, three are from the Christian Scriptures of the New Testament.
 
We begin with the story of the Fall – “Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree”, as Milton puts it. Paradoxically, the questions of God to our humanity as counter to the devious questioning of the serpent, emblematic of human reason in contradiction with itself, launch us into the pageant of redemption which is about light in darkness. “The people that walked in darkness”, Isaiah famously says, “have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined” (Is. 9.2). Darkness and death are countered by the idea of light and life, the light and life of God coming to us in the darkness of our hearts and world.
 
This is our enlightenment and the comfort for our souls. We confront ourselves and all of the follies of our humanity, but we hear about the light which shineth in the darkness, the light which is greater than our darkness. Such is the joy of Advent, the joy which comes in the pageant of Word and Song. The Advent Christmas Services of Lessons and Carols is a strong reminder of education as light in darkness. It is the greater parade – a parade of Word and Song that speaks to heart and mind, to intellect and feeling, to the primacy of things intellectual and spiritual. It is an occasion for rejoicing not in ourselves but in what comes to us in the darkness. It is light in darkness. The verses and refrain of the Veni Emmanuel highlight the note of joy. Rejoice! Rejoice!
 
My thanks to the battalion of readers at the three services, to the musicians and singers, and to the servers and the Chapel prefects who have all contributed to this pageant of Word as Light and Life.
 
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, Head of English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy


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King’s-Edgehill School is located in Mi'kma'ki, the unceded ancestral territory of the Mi’kmaq People.