The following is an extract of Father Theo’s sermon on Staff Professional Development Day.
In the middle week of the break, Alison and I enjoyed a break further north, catching a plane to somewhere much warmer than Adelaide. Sitting in the row behind us were a couple of little chaps, Alison guessed in about Year 2 and 4. They were chatting to Dad who was sitting between them, asking all the sorts of questions that little children ask. Dad was doing his best to answer them. It may me kind of wistful. As we came into land, the plane’s tyres were just about to kiss the tarmac and this little sing-song voice called out, “What happened to the wing? It just broke!” Not exactly what you want to hear when you’re about to land! Then his older brother said, “Oh my God!” At which point Mum leaned forward from the seat behind and said, “That’s not appropriate language!” Dad had vagued out and was pondering the flaps on the tops wings which had lifted as we came in.
Partly as a result of the wonder that the two boys were expressing, but mainly because we were on holidays in a sunny part of Australia, I had something of a revelation about life, or perhaps a reminder. We were up near Cairns, a beautiful part of the world at this time of the year. It truly is beautiful. My revelation about life was that we are called to notice and appreciate and then to create … beauty.
Life is more nuanced than just that, of course, so let me expand on my revelation, as I reflect on the nature of beauty. It’s really a reflection on the nature of what is lovely too. How wonderful that we have that word in our school prayer, at a boys’ school: lovely!
What is beauty? It is a fascinating philosophical and theological question. There is an extricable link between beauty and justice.
When beauty is disconnected from justice, from fairness, from what is good and right, it always goes wrong. The luxury of the Sri Lankan President’s palace is evidence of that: undeniably beautiful, but wrong in the sense that the beauty was enjoyed by a handful of people, separated from the suffering happening all around them. True beauty can never be disconnected from justice.
But, equally, justice cannot be disconnected from beauty, because then justice becomes unyielding, … often brutal … and almost always unforgiving. Justice without beauty becomes self-righteous. Justice without beauty is often destructive. Justice without beauty is something to be feared.
Neither approach serves love: love is the glue that holds beauty and justice together.
In our tradition this beauty, held together with justice, comes from God. God is both the source of beauty and indeed God is beautiful and lovely. But let me just step for a moment away from the traditional language and peak at what’s behind it: another way of expressing this is that the Universe is more than the sum of its parts. Just as a human person is more than the sum of his or her parts, I believe, so too this is true of the created order, the Universe. There is a presence which includes, and is greater than, the individual parts which make up the Universe. The Universe we live in is pretty extraordinary, as we are seeing in the recent images of far-off galaxies from Nasa’s space telescope: for me this points to that presence, which is behind everything, at the heart of everything; it points to God.
In the midst of all of this, we need to affirm, ever more powerfully, that God wants the best for us. The presence at the heart of the Universe wants the best for us, wants us to live life in all its fullness and with all its joy. In the reading Luke 11, verses 1–11, Jesus teaches his disciples the Lord’s Prayer. This prayer combines, with perfect simplicity, the notion that God wants the best for us (our daily bread) and forgives us for everything, even as we must forgive those indebted to us (as this translation puts it): in other words, forgives us for the moments that we fail to connect beauty with justice. Forgiveness is a critical part of justice.
If we notice beauty, if we create beauty, if we help even one student truly grasp beauty: one student understand that a verb is a doing word, one student see that the struggle that the character of Hamlet experiences is real, one student see that mathematics and physics are truly beautiful, well, then, we will have done our job.
So, this term, when your Year 8 student still doesn’t know how to decline the present tense of the verb “to have”, even though you’ve spent the first ½ of the lesson using every trick in 21st century and 20th century pedagogy to help him learn, and you’ve remembered to include a brain-break in the middle of the lesson, do not despair! All is not lost! He will find his way. He will see will notice and create beauty somewhere!
Our human notions of beauty are inevitably conditioned by our time and place. In the Christian tradition, this is expressed as, “We do not see as God sees.” As Alison and I stood marvelling at the tropical fish in the Cairns Aquarium, we heard a man’s voice say behind us, “Hello, do you remember me?” I actually thought he was only talking to Alison, so it took me a moment to turn around, but in fact he was speaking to both of us. I didn’t recognise the tall, straight, confident young man standing behind me, with a sort of a beard and a bit of a mullet happening. “I was in School and Allen.” I thought to myself, “Better for me to be honest about not recognising him,” so I said straight up, “Remind me of your name?” At first, I didn’t recognise his name. I thought to myself, “but I’m pretty sure I didn’t teach him in the classroom.” Then, from of the deep recesses of my mind, I vaguely remembered his name blipping up in boarding house staff meetings and not in a good way!
He said, “I’ve almost finished my teaching degree, to be a D&T teacher, like Mr Green.”
We do not see as God sees. God sees beauty everywhere. Our task is to catch up.
The Reverend Dr Theo McCall
School Chaplain