“But you, have you built well?”

On Tuesday, May 14^th, the annual Cadet Church Parade took place at Christ Church (Anglican) at 6:30pm. This memorable annual event is one of two occasions when the whole School is together as a Corps, a body, and indeed a living body rather than a corpse. At least that is the challenge! Our Head Girl, Julia Strickey, read the first lesson from Genesis which recalls the so-called second creation story about our humanity being formed from the dust into which God breathes his spirit and places us in the garden of creation. We are placed there with a purpose - to cultivate and to till the land, in short, to care for the land in which we are placed. The world does not, in this view, exist for our manipulation and destruction although that has become so much a part of the story of the contemporary global world. The second lesson read by Head Boy, Nicholas Cheverie, was taken from the last chapters of the last book of the Christian Scriptures, the Book of the Revelation of Saint John the Divine. That lesson emphasizes two things: God as the Alpha and Omega of all things, especially rational beings, and the reconciliation of garden and city. Civilization does not mean the annihilation of creation.

The Reflections are framed by a refrain from T.S. Eliot’s poem, ‘Choruses from the “Rock”’. Along with The Waste Land, they reflect on the ruins of our age and awaken us to the conditions of our building and our building well. The Reflections touch upon the recent fire of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris and the connection between the purpose of that building and Christ Church along with the only two aesthetically and historically significant buildings on the School Campus: Convocation Hall and Hensley Memorial Chapel. Like Notre-Dame de Paris, the Chapel and Convocation Hall are built of stone and, like Notre-Dame de Paris, they are held up by enormous wooden beams. Like the beams at Christ Church, those beams came from local stands of wood the like of which we no longer have with us. So too with Notre-Dame de Paris. There are no longer any stands of wood in France or in Europe of the size and stature of the beams that burned. This speaks to the issue about our use or misuse of the things of creation.

Particular attention was called to the beams of Christ Church which are known as Alpha and Omega beams because they are in the shape of the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet and thus serve both a functional as well as a symbolic purpose. In the Christian understanding, Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end of our lives.

The readers were: Andrew Atwood, Aimee Cooper, Ava Benedict, Duncan McLaughlin, Maddy Magee, Megumi Tsuji, Mateo Barbera Parra, Evan Logan, Jimin Choe, Eva Redmond, Ohemaa Ofori, Will Fleming, Ella Brown and Makayli Paul. Payton Adderley led the Intercessory Prayers. The servers were: Olivia Drava, Silas Fillmore, Papa Ofori, Ben Fleckenstein and Sarah Bell. 

The Reflections can be accessed here.