The Beauty and Wonder that Begins and Never Ends

At the first Chapel services each year the Head Girl and Head Boy read passages from Genesis 1.1-5 and John 1.1-5. “In the beginning God”, as Genesis says, and “In the beginning was the Word”, as John says. In both readings there are the powerful and suggestive ideas of ‘word’, ‘light’, and ‘life’. God speaks creation into being and God is Word or logos. It highlights from the outset the idea of a Creator who is the author of creation, a theme which Jews and Christians and Muslims and others hold in common. As the Qur’an puts it, The “Originator (Badi) of heaven and earth. When He decrees a thing, He says only ‘Be!’ And it is”.

These readings are among the most powerful and the most commented upon theologically as belonging to the intersection of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic culture as shaped by Greek thought. They complement one another and belong to an intellectual and spiritual way of thinking about ourselves and the world in which we find ourselves. They contribute to a long tradition of philosophical reflection about reality. One cannot read the passage from John, for example, without being aware of how it is commenting on Genesis.

The beauty and wonder of the order of creation reflects the everlasting beauty and wonder of God. The Creator/creation distinction is paramount. It marks the idea of distinction within unity. The idea of creation, not as chaos but as an orderly affair in which one thing is distinct from another while yet connected to everything else in creation, is essential to intellectual inquiry. It emphasizes that the world as intelligible is also ethical. It is not evil. It is good. But it is not divine. It is the product of the goodness and love of God. Think of how radical that idea is in our disordered and confusing world of conflict and violence, a world of profound disconnect and unease.

Thomas Aquinas wonderfully observes that God is “the beginning and ending of all things, especially rational creatures”. In the Qur’an, eight of the ninety-nine names of God, of Allah, refer to Allah as the source of all that is. God is none of the things which God makes. In short, ‘there is no God but God’ understood as the principle of the being and the intelligibility of things and of human consciousness, too. Hans Georg Gadamer, commenting on Hegel by way of Aristotle, notes that “the highest degree of self-consciousness must be ascribed to the highest divine being”, the God who thinks himself thinks all things. Our own limited thinking participates at best in that divine self-knowing through the intelligible and ethical order of creation. Think of how this contributes to the biblical insight of our humanity as made in the image of God.

Yet the English translation of word as ‘beginning’ causes some confusion and similarly with the French (commencement) and the German (anfang). The word ‘beginning’ in Greek is arche, and in Latin, principia, both meaning principle, namely that upon which all things fundamentally depend, the principle which itself has no beginning in time. Italian and Spanish retain that connection with principio for both Genesis and John. It is eternal. And that is the powerful and radical idea which belongs to the beauty and wonder of philosophical religion and of education.

These strong readings belong to the beauty and wonder of an education that is not simply about an instrumental reason that dominates and destroys the natural and created world and ourselves. It is about the beauty and wonder of God and his creation and thus offers a way to discover what belongs to the truth and dignity of ourselves and one another. There can be no respect for others without a respect for the beauty and wonder of creation, the beauty and wonder of thought and being in its highest sense.

The passages read by Gabrielle Shaw '25 and Dami Adeniji '25 on Thursday and Friday of this week (and on Tuesday next week) underscore the point that Chapel is an integral part of the life of the School. It is not about the personal faith or non-faith or identity claims or experiences of students and faculty who come from many, many different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. It has everything to do with exploring the kinds of questions that religion raises, recognizing that there is not a single academic discipline that is not shaped and influenced by religious thought. For many students and faculty, it may be the first time that they have ever been in a sacred space such as a church, a chapel, a temple, a synagogue, or a mosque.

Chapel is not indoctrination: no one is being told what to believe. Faith like learning cannot be coerced. The Chapel service is generically Christian and modestly Anglican as befits the School’s history and life but that service maps onto many other religious and educational traditions: the traditions of a kind of ritual of reading and meditation upon what is read, for instance. But neither does it mean that the world’s religions are all the same. They are not. There are major differences of thought. Perhaps, the biggest challenge in our times is about respect and toleration of ideas with which we might think we completely disagree; a kind of constructive disagreement is part of learning and knowing. At best, there should be a willingness to try to understand one another. As with everything else at King’s-Edgehill, education should be about the exposure of students to ideas and concepts with which they wrestle and ponder and take into themselves in some way or another; in short, a kind of engagement of the mind that shapes character.

Chapel connects to all four of the School’s pillars: academics (a respect for learning and wisdom), athletics (the body matters!), the arts (reading out loud, singing, and being in an aesthetic and architectural space that tells a story as the best art does), and leadership and service. Here students have the opportunity to step out of themselves to read, to serve, to pray, to think and to learn to be quiet within themselves in the company of others. Counter-culture? In one way, but in another way precisely what belongs to a culture of education at its best.

The first Chapels are always exciting and not a little daunting, but I pray that such ‘beginnings’ will contribute to the spiritual and intellectual growth and maturity of our students and that they will be awakened to the beauty and wonder of what begins and never ends.