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Sermon preached by the Bishop of Clogher at the Valedictory Service in Portora
Royal School, Enniskillen on 24th June 2010
Sermon preached by the Bishop of Clogher at the Valedictory Service in Portora
Royal School, Enniskillen on 24th June 2010
Valedictory Service and Thanksgiving, Portora Royal School on 24.June.2010
Readings: Galatians 3.23-29; St Luke 1.57-64
Sermon preached by the Right Rev’d Dr MGStA Jackson, chairperson of
the Board of Governors
Galatians 3.24: But now that faith has come, you are no longer
subject to a pedagogue, for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith.
Simon Callow, in his one-person Shakespeare, now about to be released at
large across the UK, brought us through the Seven Ages of Man and, in the
First of the Seven Ages, informed us twice that Shakespeare invented the
word: puke. I suspect this was of particular pertinence to the Headmaster’s
wife, sitting somewhere in front of me in the Steel Hall. She had travelled
that afternoon to Portora with a beautiful young pup, then under 12 weeks
old, a wonderful creature with all the Seven Ages of Dog ahead of it. Unaccustomed
at that early point in life to cars, it had regrettably been ill twice, as
often, incidentally, as Simon Callow’s introduction of Shakespeare’s
youthful addition to the English language to us in his performance. The proof
of the pudding was in the …… - I leave you to add the final 5-letter
word in this very technical and literary context, equipped with such essential
background canine information.
Simon Callow led us with flourish and flamboyance and also with the tenderness
which genuine love of words gives to a person who knows what he is doing
with words. And he led us into the rich, varied and textured life of William
Shakespeare in Stratford and in London. He introduced us to the Shakespeare
who was a keen and inspired observer of people in all of their colour, their
garishness, their gravity and their immorality – true to life and life
as it truly is, tragic, comic, complex, yet exuberant and life-giving. (I
could not but say to myself, as I listened and watched: What in heaven has
religion done to life on earth?!) The eye for what matters and the voice
to turn it into song can fill the most barren and Spartan of empty spaces
with the ringing tones which turn information into shared experience. And
this happened here – and those of us who witnessed it will never be
the same again. To travel with Simon Callow through the life of William Shakespeare
was a transformative event – all the more so because the product was
not polished to perfection but it was content at its best and we saw it at
the point of its maturing. Listening and watching in the Gallery in The Steel
Hall where I had not sat since the summer of 1975, rather like Shakespeare’s
own reluctant schoolboy, I remembered a number of people who still matter
deeply to me in the Portora Gallery of people of substance and of inspiration.
Many of them are still alive, some of them are sadly and tragically dead – Bill
Barbour, Martin Schrecker, Renee Benson among those who have gone from us – these,
I assure you, are simply their official names!
With nothing short of the greatest respect to them all, Portora is the place
of the living and, in our context, tradition is something alive and lived.
If we lose sight and sound of this, then we are doomed to banality. The pressure
is on to commodify education more and more – that simply means it becomes
a product which you sell and buy. The pressure is on to refine more and more
performance at a certain level of specialization which is, in my opinion,
much lower than the level of educational imagination which can be attained.
So, to put it in straightforward language, students are being squeezed to
reach a plateau of results, numerically computed, codified and collated,
as an end in itself, without sufficient attention being given to the meeting
of potential and imagination. Sadly, we live in Northern Ireland in an intensely
and suffocatingly literalistic environment which diminishes and punishes
creativity. But the same people, sitting with us this evening and in front
of me, move forward into a new climate of educational expectation which comes
as an almighty shock to their system. The key way forward, again in my opinion,
is to make the absolutely best use of the system as it stands while at the
same time living beyond it in terms of the furniture of the imagination offered
to students within and beyond their formal and examination-based studies.
This seems to me to be the challenge of big picture and attention to detail
which Portora must embrace and which its pupils and parents must also embrace
if all are to be enriched by being stretched in their schooldays in preparation
for the world of work and for the world of learning, both of which are entirely
and equally honourable. Imagination and personality need to meet information
and attainment if Portorans are to flourish in contributing to tomorrow.
In relation to education itself, I want to go behind the Latin word from
which the English word: education itself comes, to two Greek words which
are pivotal to our grasping what the educational experiment is. In my own
work from day to day, I am more and more convinced that the life of faith
is primarily an experiment. Plato describes Socrates’ educational technique
as the maieutic art. It is not as weird as it sounds. Every one of us here
has been through it in order to get here today. It is literally the work
of the midwife. Skills of manipulation, of easing new life forward, of drawing
into the light someone who has been entirely happy in the womb until things
simply do have to change – this is the picture which Plato uses to
describe and to characterize the teaching methods of his dear friend Socrates.
It respects the life which already is independent inside the life which is
nurturing, caring and protective. It hastens the day of freedom and independence
and therefore, ultimately, enables a new friendship of responsibility between
parent and child, between teacher and pupil. The second is the word used
by St Paul in the Letter to the Galatians to describe the role of law in
relation to faith and of both of them in relation to the coming of Jesus
Christ. And the word is: pedagogue. A pedagogue is not really a teacher wandering
distractedly during break-time in a tweed jacket or an ill-fitting suit but,
originally, a slave who led the child of the master of the house to school.
This, in so many ways, is the first expression of Child Protection Policies
and Safeguarding Trust. St Paul’s illustration would have been as recognizable
to the Greek world to which he was writing and responding as would language
of texting, twittering and podcasting to us today.
So, what is Paul’s point? He argues that, like the trusted slave who
brings the treasured child to and from school daily, the law can bring you
and me to the point of grace but cannot of itself set you or me free in the
new world opened up by the coming of Jesus Christ. Language about the coming
of Jesus Christ is important to grasping the content of faith in this new
world. Christ uniquely subjected himself not only to the will of the Father
but to the law and so became, in a sense, the definitive content of the new
curriculum of salvation in and through what he did when he came - being born
in hastily improvised midwifery; being both teacher and pupil in the Temple
in Jerusalem; and in teaching the new curriculum in the towns and villages
of Galilee of the Gentiles; being crucified, dying and rising from the dead
in the Jerusalem in which he had first taught as a child. And so, Paul, as
we have heard, takes us into the new life which remains based on this curriculum
but has to be lived and lived out by each one of us. The community of faith
is no self-satisfied huddle of the self-appointed holy, waiting, in a spirit
of ever-deepening abstraction from the rest of this naughty world, for the
Second Coming of the same Jesus Christ. This community of faith and of confidence
and of hope and of love is one which is shaped by the greater community around
it and, in turn, shapes that wider community - if it has the knowledge and
the imagination to do so. If it does not do so, then everything it knows
is simply what the Americans call: infotainment. Infotainment is a cruel
word and a devastating concept precisely because it makes knowledge a commodity
and makes ideas an entertainment. It offers room for neither context nor
commitment. And this is an insufficient working model of Christianity.
In many ways, the world of information envelops our gathering here in pleasant
summer surroundings this evening at the heart of Portora. There is no muzzling
of information. There may, however, be a saturation-point for any or all
of us. Be that as it may, there will still be more and more information.
Judgement, selectivity, common sense, mature experience, integrity, care
for others – all of these abstract qualities have a voice if you, the
Class of 2010, give voice to them. If you do not, then our society runs the
risk of sliding rather quickly into greater banality, indifference and cynical
self-interest. In an end of exams, demob-happy environment, banality, indifference
and cynical self-interest will, I am sure, be far from your minds. Few of
you may become midwives but all of you can be pedagogues – leading
people to an experience of reality which is transformative and sustaining
of a quite different future, taking the best of what you have learned into
what you are going to give next – not what you are going to take, but
what you are going to give. With all the background and baggage which he
carries, St Paul expresses it as excitingly as he can, and I might as well
be honest: I don’t imagine that many of you regard Holy Scripture as
in the least bit exciting. This is how he expresses it: Galatians 3.28 There
is no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female; for you
are all one person in Jesus Christ. If any of you were to come back at me
and say: But do you not think that the overwhelming majority of the Christian
Church itself does not live this out? I should have no option but to agree
with you AND come back to you and say: But there is absolutely no reason
that you cannot do so, however!
We who are here this evening can also leave a challenge and a legacy to
this Royal School, which in some shape or form has doggedly, trenchantly
and creatively made a contribution to the life of Fermanagh for more than
four hundred years and we can do so in terms of St Paul’s argument
openly and generously applied in the Spirit of Christ. The law – a
system of discipline and order is essential if you and your successors are
to test the strength and limitation of your own authority against the rules
of engagement essential for the well-being of all; that is what a school
is. Faith – belief in yourself and belief in someone and something
beyond yourself and what you already know and how you currently use that
knowledge; that is what a religion is. Curriculum and the extra-curricular
lie at the heart of this – the former a security or a frustration,
the later a distraction or a fulfilment? Only you now know, after what must
seem to be a lifetime here.
Today in the Christian Church we celebrate the Birth of John the Baptizer – again,
we see the need of a midwife. John challenged the humbug which passed for
political accommodation - each one of you must do the same. John gave voice
to the overlooked and the despised – each one of you must do the same.
John, most of all, consistently pointed the way to someone and something
greater than himself, however it pained him that it was in fact his own cousin – each
one of you must do the same. John was named for independent thinking and
action, Just listen to another significant moment in Holy Scripture: … but
his mother spoke up: No! she said. He is to be called John. But, they said,
there is nobody in your family who has that name…They enquired of his
father …His name is John ( St Luke 1.60, 63).Listen, please, to the
voice that breaks new ground.