The good news is that my landing was soft. I was sitting in the corn crib on croker sacks of feed-corn, nutrition pellets, and oats. It was cooler inside the room that outside. The scent of the grains was more comforting to me than my abductors likely supposed. I love the smell of barns, of hay, of feed, and even of manure in small doses.

My eyes did at last adjust. I saw that the room was not so dark as I had feared. Pin-thin spars of bright summer sunlight came into the space, making a complex chiaroscuro of pixey-stick illuminations against the dark, fermenting air. Light also came through narrow cracks in the walls. The board and batten was not so “airtight” as the builders probably assumed.

It remained dark in that place, but there was enough light to make out the contents of the room. I made out the sacks of grain, an old, never-used saddle hanging by a rope from a rafter, and a copse of long-handled tools took up one corner. I noticed the blackboard next to the door. It had chalk scribblings on it. This was likely an attempt to be systematic about feeding livestock.

I was less concerned about the rats I heard scratching around over my head and in the walls behind me than about the creatures that might be looking for the rats. I was not particularly afraid of rat snakes, bull snakes, or corn snakes, but it was not unheard of in that place and season that water moccasins, copperheads, or even rattlers would make their way into the barn and crib area, looking for dinner. The previous summer, a rattlesnake had been dispatched near the corn crib. It was hiding among the stacked hay bales and could have hurt someone. I was told this story not long before I was locked in the corn crib.

The sunbeams shining into the dark room were beautiful. I sat there as quiet as I could be. I did not want to give my abductors any satisfaction. They expected me to get upset and perhaps panic and cry out. That is just what I was not going to do. But my heart was not in any way still. I was frankly afraid that I would not see the snake that struck me, or perhaps a rat would attack from a dark space.

After what seemed like a very long time, I did yell out, “Okay, fellows! I’m ready to come out of here and go ride horses.” I waited another ten minutes or more. Then I heard steps, and the racket associated with pieces of the lock mechanism, then impish laughter, and the big wooden door swung wide open. I was now truly blinded by the sunlight rushing into the room. I put my forearm over my eyes. When my eyes had adjusted to the brightness, I jumped out of the crib and went chasing the slower of the two abductors, hoping to get in a lick or at least throw a rock.

The two boys, my beloved first cousins, could not run too well for their laughing at their prank. We played such tricks on each other pretty much constantly during the summers I would spend on my mother’s family’s farm in Mississippi. Since this was my cousins’ domain and I was the “city boy,” I was proud of myself that day for not getting upset about being locked in a dark room where venomous snakes waited to bite me and kill me dead. Or so I thought. We boys were about 10 years old that summer. And this was an unforgettable episode in the typical day of the farm boys.

Many years later, I was preparing to preach a Christmas sermon. The readings included the following line from the Letter to the Hebrews: “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son” (1:1). As I wondered how I might approach the exposition of this text, I remembered the utter darkness of the corn crib and the way my eyes needed to adjust to the wee bits of light coming into the black, aromatic space. And I remembered the way I was again blinded by the bright sunlight when my cousins threw the door open again.

I used the metaphor naturally presented to my imagination to open the text in a certain way. I suggested to the congregation that the light and truth given to Israel and to the world through the words and examples of the prophets was indeed light to enlighten the darkness given by the living and true God. There was light in nature; human reason provides a certain degree of very poor light: but through his Word the one God provided plenty of light to the human race across centuries and millennia, and we gained a rare and sacred light from the prophets, a revelation preeminent and priceless. I compared this light to the shafts of sunshine coming into the dark corn crib of the world: By this light, Israel and the world could see quite well.

But this light was not all the light there was. In the fulness of time, God threw the door of the world wide open and the Light of Christ rushed into the darkness. The Light was so bright — in fact it was a blinding Light — that the former lights seemed weaker in comparison. The world was virtually blinded by this Light by which we see all light: the Word made flesh, the stupendous, supreme, and final Revelation of God. Two thousand years later, the eyes of the Church are still adjusting to this Light. We do not yet see as we ought. May God give us the grace to see the Good News that is Christ Jesus, and to act on it.

When the wall of rain was almost to our westernmost meadow, something caught my eye overhead. It was a kestrel or sparrow hawk fluttering against the gale. These splendid small falcons — for the proper name is indeed Falco sparverius — live around the farm. They are beautiful, interesting, and do good work. They have survived all these thousands of years because they fill a niche and have a catholic appetite. Their hunger is satisfied in various ways by larger insects, small birds, little reptiles, bats, and small rodents. The kestrel I saw over the house meadow the other day was hunting for field mice, moles, and voles. I know it was a female because it was a larger bird sporting more white on the underside. She would beat her wings rapidly and then, still as a bird in a painting, glide. She never drifted backward. Her routine was to flap vigorously and freeze again. I suppose she intended to trick any game on the ground below. Perhaps a mouse would assume that she was not even there.

Watching this petite bird of prey hunting with an incredible storm on the brim of the farm struck me deeply. Bright against the darkening west, fluttering like a silvery butterfly, suspended in time and space like a fairy of sorts, she inspired me to various thoughts. I first thought of the “Spirit of the Lord” hovering over the waters in the Book of Genesis, the all-mighty God transforming chaos into cosmos, creating a world saturated with Logos from the primordial slosh devoid of meaning. When that pretty little falcon became perfectly still in the 50-mile-an-hour gusts, I also thought of “the still point of the turning world” in T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding. Durable affection for Eliot’s line reveals my generation, but the phrase and indeed the entire poem are hard to beat as evocations of the eternal realm.

But, above all, the kestrel’s amazing behavior in the face of the coming storm that early evening made me think of peace. Peace. What is peace? I first thought of the lack of peace in our world right now, and realized that war always begins in a single human heart, discontented, resentful, and angry. If impatience is the cause of anger, then the little kestrel hovering patiently over the hay meadow was a great symbol of the peace born of patience.

On that afternoon, I had been thinking about the sermon for Pentecost 4 (June 16), especially the verse, “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” (2 Cor. 5:17). The same early Christian writer spoke of Christian “confidence.” During the 50 days of Easter, I thought a lot about the “peace” Jesus bestowed on his disciples and continued to give when he appeared to each and all. “Peace I give to you, my own peace.” On likely more than one occasion, the disciples were in hiding, fearing for their lives. Jesus came among them and simply breathed on them, and into them came his peace. We think of nothing but peace when we contemplate the face of St. Stephen at the time of his martyrdom. Saints Peter and Paul must have been the same way when they were slain in Rome: at peace.

I am referring to “the peace that passeth understanding” (Phil. 4:7; BCP, pp. 339, 365). What is it? I am unqualified to say, but I have a few reflections. In my mind, I hold together the motive back of the Lord’s covenant with Israel, the giving of the Torah, the holiest sacrifice offered on the cross, the numerous resurrection appearances, the Ascension, when Jesus went away in one way so that he could come in another, and the coming of the Holy Ghost, whose first mission is to confirm in the believer everything about Christ Jesus — that he what he says is true, that he is the human embodiment of Torah, that he is the eternal Son of God, that he is the Messiah and Shepherd King of Israel, that he is the God-Man, and that he is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the whole world.

When pondering what “the peace that passeth understanding” might be, it has helped me to remember that Jesus was a devout Jew. In his own words, he assured his auditors that he did not come to abolish the Torah but to fulfill it — that is, to fill it full of the eternal actuality that was given him by the Father, the one obedient man in whom God is well pleased. This has something to do with peace above understanding: fulfillment or, indeed, glory. I like to think that, in the beginning, God had a “blueprint” for what the complete human being should be. In what does our glory consist? This was the first function of Torah: to indicate what the maker had in mind for human beings, how the superstructure is built and then the walls, roof, interior walls, the plumbing, wiring, and so on — all for the creature who would be in special communion with God. When Jesus appeared on the earth, God enabled many people to recognize that he fit the blueprint of Torah perfectly.

“Behold, my beloved Son! in whom I am well pleased.” I find that the words pleased and peace go together quite nicely, not only in English but in the religion of Israel. We know that “peace” was for Jesus a status vis-à-vis the living and true God: Jesus was approved of God and thus so near to God that Jesus was able to give to others the approval that the Father gives him forever.

In the religion of Israel, those who repented of their sins, who came to God with broken hearts and asked God to put the pieces of their lives back together again, brought peace offerings or peace sacrifices. I am far from any sort of biblical scholar, but I can read in an encyclopedia that there were in Israel three types of peace sacrifices. First, the “thank offering” was a response to a blessing or blessings. A believer would bring a “votive offering” when asking God for a particular blessing. The “free-will” or “praise” offering was a way to adore God from the heart, just because God is our Good. In each case, the offerings were animals of some kind.

According to the Hebrew Encyclopedia (and the old Jerome Biblical Commentary is great on this topic of Jewish sacrifices), what mattered more than anything else was the common meal that immediately followed the killing and cooking of the victim. In this deeply communitarian event, God was at once the Host and the especially honored Guest. As both Guest and Host, God communicated his own peace to the faithful person or persons who were seeking reconciliation with him. This is peace indeed. In this very context of sacrifices of the Old Covenant, I think of those times when we are so distraught, guilty, or otherwise extremely fouled up, and when we ache for peace. Words from Psalm 51 point to peace.

Had you desired it, I would have offered sacrifice;
but you take no delight in burnt offerings.
The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit;
a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

I believe that when Jesus celebrated the Passover with his carefully selected disciples on the night before he offered himself as both the propitiation and the expiation for the sins of the whole world, he initiated the process — at once temporal and trans-temporal — by which his people could gain “the peace that passeth understanding.” The beloved Son in whom the Father was well pleased identified himself with the Passover of Israel, commanding his disciples to henceforth observe the Passover in remembrance of him.

My gleanings from a small batch of Scriptures are not properly scholarly, but isn’t there a useful and reassuring logic here? We hold together the ideas of the covenant, of Torah as God’s Word to Israel, of the Word made flesh, of the Shepherd King, of the Passion and Passover, of redemption, of Ascension, and of God in us as the Holy Spirit. The eternal mediator is constantly working on our behalf, and the need for his mediated grace never goes away. And the great means to heaven that is the church of Christ in the world, the body mystical the members of which are forever told that to know God is eternal life. All of these have to do with the peace above human comprehension.

While we are pondering this priceless gift, we can behold the perfect man who is in perfect communion with himself because he gives himself in perfect obedience to the Father of love. Kierkegaard got it right: “Purity of heart is to will one thing.” And what is the one thing we ought to will? To do the will of God. Gladstone once said or wrote, “

The final state which we are to contemplate with hope and seek by discipline is that state wherein our will is one with the will of God.”

Our Lord Jesus the Christ possesses this peace beyond understanding. I pray that we all might have it now.

“Seek first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto it.”
— Matthew 6:33

Good evening! I am delighted to be here. I thank Father Dunnan and Father Montgomery for inviting me to share Founders’ Day with you. I hope you feel now, or will soon feel, as I feel, when I drive through those gates into Saint James. I feel deep love. I feel it because my son is an alumnus of Saint James and had a great, formative experience here. I feel it because I have known your headmaster for a great many years now. I have known the last several headmasters, in fact, and I have known all the Saint James Chaplains going back perhaps 30 years now.

But I also feel great love for Saint James because the school stands for something in which I believe passionately. What is that? Saint James School stands for a certain kind of education that is quite rare in the world today: Saint James intends every day to educate the whole person to excellence. Not just the brain, not just the body, but the whole person is educated here: the soul and the inner person, the moral side of us, the emotions and the imagination, are educated here.

You know all about this. You know that your daily duty here is to get your homework completed and spend three hours on the playing field and get to chapel on time and learn lines and notes for the musical and hurry over to the Refectory for responsibilities this week. Saint James sets out every day to educate all of who you are. A Saint James education is not about forming one part of you but all parts of you.

Each of you is, in other words, getting a complete education here at Fountain Rock. That is the objective. Such an education is also called “the liberal education” because becoming strong in every aspect of our human nature gives us a deep sort of liberty, makes us — free.

This way to educate young men and young women may be quite rare in the United States today, but it is in fact the perennial philosophy of education. For at least 2,500 years, the best educators running the best schools have understood that the end or first purpose of education is Virtue, with the capital V. When I said a moment ago that Saint James wants to educate the whole person to excellence, I was saying that Saint James is aiming for Virtue with the capital V.

In the West, this perennial philosophy of education goes back to at least the time of the Greek philosopher Socrates, but you’ll find the same commitment to Virtue in other cultures and among other people around the world. The greatest educators took it for granted that, if you aim for Virtue, then all the other benefits of education will be yours also. Aristotle called these more mundane perks of education “natural goods,” and he was sure they too come to the student if he or she is aiming for Virtue. Among these natural goods are skills and practical knowledge and competencies and effectiveness in the workaday world, but seek the First Thing first.

According to his protégé Plato, Socrates got into an important debate with a group of teachers called the Sophists, from which we get our word sophisticated. (This is a cautionary tale!) The argument was about the meaning of Virtue. The Sophists were very popular teachers who taught students a particular skill and called it virtue. Skill and proficiency in a particular art suffices in order to be “virtuous.” The Sophists were not so interested in educating the whole person to excellence. They made their living instilling one skill with cash value. Examples of this single-mindedness are learning public speaking skills, or how to do woodcarving, or how to make metal coins, or how to calculate sums quickly, or how to play the lyre and sing. I think you’ll agree that each of these particular skills is valuable, and of course Socrates valued them also. But the Sophists called these skills “virtue” and saw no value in aiming higher. These popular educators assumed that a “virtuous person” is no more than this practical expertise. This approach to education appears very “practical,” don’t you think? Well — maybe it’s not so practical after all.

Socrates smelled a rat in the Sophists’ philosophy. He knew right off the bat that these teachers were aiming much too low and taking money for it. In any case, Socrates protested, bona fide Virtue cannot be reduced to being good at one thing. There is something more, something higher, for which we must aim. In Plato’s Protagoras, Socrates exclaims to a Sophist: “I have asked for Virtue, and you have given me a swarm of virtues.” Always aiming higher and digging deeper, Socrates defined Virtue as skill or proficiency in being human as such. Virtue is something like well-roundedness but goes much deeper than that. The complete person, the person made in the image of God and is all a human being can be: this is a person who possesses Virtue.

Virtue with the capital V is, then, general human excellence.

To hit this target defined by Socrates requires a certain type of school specially designed to develop Virtue in the students. Such an education is involved and requires a lot of time. There is likewise much emphasis upon the school community in such a philosophy of education. Plenty of time, lots of room, a long school day: These traits describe a community and in fact a family. This is why the greatest educators in our Western tradition would have no difficulty understanding the old African proverb that “It takes a whole village to educate one child.”

In some ways, isn’t this a matter of common sense? It’s all about a good aim and hitting targets. Imagine the longbow archer. He sees the target way off in the distance. To test his mettle in the tournament of life, the archer must hit a target set up far away. The skilled archer knows that he cannot hit the target unless he aims very high. If he aims low, the arrow will never get anywhere near the distant target. And as he bends his bow, does he not know that he must concentrate, not on the whole target frame, but on the bull’s eye? At a hundred or two hundred yards, the archer cannot see the target too clearly, yet he knows he must fix his mind’s eye on the bull’s eye. That bull’s eye is exactly what the worthy archer is aiming for: If he perchance misses the bull’s eye, well — he knows he’ll hit the target anyway. For this he knows he’ll get a prize. In any case, he knows he must aim high if he would stay alive in the tournament of archers.

Now there are many good schools in the world aiming for virtue as the Sophists defined it. Such schools graduate impressively skilled students year after year. They can read, write, and do math exceptionally well. But this is just the beginning of a sound education. The great schools are aiming higher. The first purpose of a great school is Virtue with the capital V. This proposition is verified in history. It is assumed in a great school that, if you aim above “academic excellence,” if you aim for Virtue, then you will achieve both Virtue and a general academic excellence: Because the entire scholastic community seeks first what matters the most, the student body generally will also gain the more mundane benefits of education along the way. This principle is as important in the history of education as the principle of lift was to the history of aviation.

Let me quickly say something very important. There are at least two kinds of human knowledge, and thus two kinds of knowing. On the one hand, rational knowing (ratio) gives us rational knowledge. One plus one equals two is an example of rational knowledge. To know that it is 70 miles to Baltimore is rational knowledge. To see how Shakespeare makes his drama through dialogue is rational knowledge. But there is another kind of knowledge and another type of knowing. This is non-rational knowing, or supra-rational knowing; such knowing gives us the knowledge of things not easily known by the reason (or rational faculty). This supra-rational knowing giving us another kind of knowledge is called the understanding, our English word for the Latin intellectum.

Now look what we have done: We have made a distinction between reason and intellect. The intellect or understanding gives us knowledge of immaterial realities, of ideas, of spiritual and moral things, and of eternal values. When I apprehend true beauty in that Shakespeare play or in a geometric function, that’s my understanding at work. When I apprehend a mysterious truth in a Stanford hymn tune or a Byrd motet, it is my understanding that gives me this experience, not my reason particularly. And it goes without saying that God is above reason but may be apprehended somewhat in the understanding. Mystical knowing is closer to the understanding than to the reason.

Thus sound knowledge comes by the two ways, Ratio and Intellectum, by reason and understanding: You and I apprehend realities by both means. Reason and understanding work closely together, but do mark it that it is the understanding — not the reason — that first apprehends eternal values such as goodness, truth, beauty, and unity. A school dedicated to the high-aim philosophy will guarantee that every student is exposed to both kinds of knowledge and “exercising” both kinds of knowing. This is getting a bit technical just before your supper! Suffice it to say that Saint James School is dedicated to both kinds of learning and to acquiring both kinds of knowledge.

May I be bold? For about a hundred years now, most schools in the North Atlantic world have concentrated on the rational sort of knowledge and greatly limited what knowledge students gain from the deeper faculty called the understanding. A great school pursues both kinds of knowledge all the time, every day, and in myriad ways.

Now let me finish this sermon. I’m getting hungry too. It was the great genius of William Augustus Muhlenberg, whom we commemorate today, that he figured out a way to “marry” the perennial philosophy of education and the Christian religion. The title of his first book was The Application of Christianity to Education (1828). That small book marks the beginning of a movement in education that saw the creation of some of the best schools in American history. The booklet is filled with “quotable quotes” such as:

The mind must not be furnished at the expense of the heart.

There can be no such thing as Christianity in the abstract.

Some great minds are slow in developing;
the acorn gives little promise of the oak.

The great weakness in American education is the preoccupation with method,
when we all know that the secret is the living spirit of the teacher.

Religion should never be held to account for inferior scholarship.

Let’s pause on this last choice maxim. “Religion should never be held to account for inferior scholarship.” The Muhlenberg-type school is not by any means a religious seminary. Religion and religious faith are of course mixed into the daily life of the school, and beautifully so, but the Muhlenbergian educators never forgot that they were doing school and not church. Everything was carefully conceived and a proper balance between the sacred and the secular was achieved. The old idea of “little by little” is something Muhlenberg and his disciples in education assiduously applied to their schools. Religion is not acquired in big doses once a week but “little by little” all the week long. This is what we call today “developmentally appropriate.”

While his two succeeding schools on Long Island combined Christian principles with the classical pursuit of Virtue, from the get-go Muhlenberg did realize that he had a problem to solve. For as you know, a key doctrine of Christianity is that you and I are disabled deep down and we cannot attain Virtue as we defined it a moment ago. This weakness the church calls “sin.” It goes deep! St. Paul appreciated this problem very well, when he wrote to some new believers in Rome that as much as he tried to do the right thing and be what he knows God wants him to be, he was falling short every time. “For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do” (Rom. 7:15). I sure know what Paul is talking about.

But Muhlenberg took another central Christian teaching to heart: that there is one Man who attained the Virtue the human race desires. Christ is Virtuous and thus Christ is our Virtue.

If Christ is our Virtue; if we would hope to attain to this Virtue, or let us say participate in the Virtue of Christ, then it is obvious that you and I must in some manner or other have Christ in us, and we must also somehow be “in him.” How in the world can this happen? The answer is that, if you and I want it to happen, and if we ask God to make this relationship with Christ happen, then God can and will make it happen for each of us. God’s means to make us part of Christ is called God’s grace.

This doctrine of grace is thus another of Muhlenberg’s applications of Christian doctrine to education. Grace is a word that denotes God’s help. “By grace you were saved, through faith in Christ Jesus,” wrote St. Paul. God’s help or grace is of course undeserved and comes when we least expect it, but this grace is absolutely essential if you and I would have any little part of the Virtue of Christ. There’s an old maxim, “Grace perfects nature.” I’m sure Muhlenberg knew the maxim, because it is associated with the greatest Christian thinker of all time, St. Thomas Aquinas. “Grace perfects nature.”

Our human nature, impressive as it may be in some ways, is yet too weak to achieve what we rightly desire — what we know in our hearts is our target. Hence our creator has arranged that you and I really can and do become by grace a part or members of Christ. The first reading we heard tonight from the fourth chapter of Ephesians is about the body mystical of Christ and its members.

What does a school have to do with the body mystical of Christ and its members? This leads me to a crucial fourth aspect of Muhlenberg’s philosophy of education. Seventy years before John Dewey wrote of the principle in such books as The School and Society (1899) and Democracy and Education (1916), Muhlenberg realized the radical importance of the school community and that the school community is itself educative. This is so obvious that it is easy to miss the point. We get at this idea when we say sometimes that students in a school learn much “by osmosis.”

Muhlenberg realized that the school is the church in the church’s scholastic or teaching mode. And if the school is “a little image of the Church” (H.P. Liddon), then the school is in fact the Body scholastic (if you will). Look at how very high standards can be set for each student in such a scholastic Body, and this for the simple reason that God’s grace or help is mediated in Christ to and by each member of the school community.

Grace happens in the body scholastic just as in the body mystical. Grace is happening right now in this chapel. Here we are, the whole school gathered for evensong. None of us can know how this awesome mystery works; you won’t see with your eyes how the person on your left or the person on your right is mediating God’s grace to you. The reason doesn’t get it, but the understanding knows! We are talking about the mysteries of faith, are we not? In an infinitesimal number of ways, God is “working on” each one of us every day, all the time. More importantly, God is working in you. The idea is expressed in a prayer you use often here at Saint James:

O God, because without you we are not able to please you, mercifully grant that your Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. (Proper 19, BCP)

In 1828, Muhlenberg set out to create the best school in the world. He had carefully studied schools in Europe, England, and America. He did not want to do things the way they had always been done. To make his beau ideal reality, he knew that he had to either give up the 2,500-year-old perennial philosophy of education, which dared to aim for Virtue but never hit the target, or he had to create something totally new, or he had to figure out a way to combine Christian principles and the classical, perennial tradition. He did not see why he had to give up the perennial philosophy altogether. He was educated under the principles of this philosophy and did well by it. He also assumed that Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and all the best pagan philosophers and moralists saw pretty clearly what is the purpose, at least, of education: the development of Virtue. The only problem — a major one — is what we’ve already noticed: Human nature is just too weakened by the power of sin to hit the target. Therefore, Muhlenberg’s two successive schools on Long Island were commended to the God of grace.

Muhlenberg’s hope was that Christ Jesus, the perfect man, would serve as not only the model of school ideals but the end and the means of the fellowship’s pursuit of Virtue (in the Christian sense of the word). If you and I would be Virtuous, we must have Christ, and Christ must have us. The scholastic brotherhoods Muhlenberg created on Long Island were definitely grace-full communities. Others noticed something exceptional about Muhlenberg’s “school sons.” They were growing into young men of noteworthy character, and these graduates were achieving a very high level academically as well. They easily gained admission to the most selective colleges. You know that these students were aiming much higher than academic excellence, yet in the process they were exemplary scholars of sound knowledge and impressive skills. Go figure! Does the high aim somehow make the mind more capacious and powerful? I think maybe so.

One poster boy for this educational program was a strapping Philadelphian named James Lloyd Breck (1818-1876). By all accounts, Breck was average in terms of intellectual power, but after five years in Dr. Muhlenberg’s school family, he slowly but surely developed into an astonishing young man who became a most effective adult. Breck matriculated at the University of Pennsylvania as a third-year student and graduated magna cum laude in classics in just two years. From Penn he went to New York City, where he distinguished himself once again in preparation for the priesthood of the Episcopal Church. In the chapel of St. Paul’s School on Long Island, Muhlenberg “commissioned” Breck for the work of a missionary educator on the American frontier.

Deeply impressed by the story of the sixth-century St. Columba (Colmcille) and his companions, who founded a scholastic brotherhood on the Isle of Iona, just off the coast of Scotland, Breck founded three colleges, three seminaries, five boarding schools, a dozen parochial schools, and perhaps a score of parish churches in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and California. When Breck died in 1876, people from coast to coast mourned him. One bishop in New York, who knew Breck well, wrote in a church magazine that this virtuous man struck him as the closest thing America had ever produced to Sir Galahad of the Arthurian lore. What he meant was that Breck was faithful, pure, gallant, brave, and virtuous. Throughout his distinguished and exemplary life, James Lloyd Breck constantly gave God and his old “school father,” Dr. Muhlenberg, the credit.

Now the Bishop of Maryland of course wanted Muhlenberg to come to Maryland and start a school just like the one that spawned the likes of James Lloyd Breck! Muhlenberg was flattered but said he could not come to Maryland. Instead, he sent his right-hand man. This was John Barrett Kerfoot (1816-81), who came to Maryland in 1841 and, with Muhlenberg, William R. Whittingham, and Theodore Lyman (rector of St. John’s, Hagerstown) planned what became the College and Grammar School of St. James’s. The school began classes in October 1842. The rest is history well known to you.

What I wish to impress on all of you tonight is that you are being educated in the time-honored way. You are part of the great tradition. The end of education here at Saint James is Virtue in the Christian sense of the word. How do we hit that luminous target? God gives the grace mediated in Christ to and by each of you. The highest standards may be set because within the body scholastic is found the grace by which very high standards may be achieved. We all know that we fall short of the target rather often, but “the striving is as important as the arriving,” as someone once put it; but to be members of a scholastic fellowship with a target such as ours — well, this alone is a great privilege and a blessing.

I love the metaphor Dante used in the first Canto of the Paradiso. The poet compares us human beings to arrows God has carefully made, fletched, and sharpened: God then strings his bow, notches the arrow, pulls the bow, and sends the arrow to the target, which is heaven. And that great saying of C.S. Lewis is likewise relevant to what’s been said this evening: “Aim for Heaven, and you get earth thrown in. Aim for earth, and you get neither” (Mere Christianity, 1942).

High standards and hard work in the helping community: this motto sums up the daily routine of the Muhlenberg-type church school. I do know this is hard to appreciate on most days. I realize that you have a lot on your minds this very evening. But I also know that off in the distance you can at times gain a glimpse, at least, of the target: I know that on your best days you can just see it in your mind’s eye — envision the bull’s eye on the target of Virtue — and you can feel yourself hitting it with God’s help.

Keep aiming high. Don’t lose heart. Believe in the Lord and be confident about the ideals of your Alma Mater. They are worthy! Believe every morning when you rise that God will provide you with the requisite grace to string your bow, to bend it, to aim high, and to let fly the arrow.

I hope each one of you is proud that Saint James is your school. I promise you — it is one of the rare and fine school experiences that can be had in America today. Here at Fountain Rock, you are being tried and tested in every aspect of your human nature. Every part of who you are is being challenged and nurtured, that each might become virtuous. Be glad for this! No merely sophistical education is valued here at Fountain Rock! No — you are aiming higher than that. You are pursuing the real thing. What a blessing it is to be a member of a scholastic fellowship aiming for this target. When I go away from this beautiful place tomorrow, I will pray that, when you return to these hallowed grounds years from now, you will love to know that you have come home.

Good evening and God bless you.

Amen.

I am deeply moved each Christmas Eve when the Christ Child figure is gently placed in the crèche. I am inspired by the Scriptures and the theology of the feast, but the simple beauty of the scene affects me powerfully. Tears well up. I usually cannot sing the rest of the hymn as we proceed from crèche to altar. I thank not only my Heavenly Father for this annual gift of sentiment and emotion; I thank my mother. Mother loved Christmas! She loved Easter too, but her enthusiasm for the December festival drove her lively imagination and gave scope for her creativity. She possessed uncommon aesthetic gifts. These were especially manifest as the family prepared for Christmas.

She would open the box containing the crèche with great solemnity. While unwrapping each piece with tender loving care, she would explain its part in the unfolding drama of the Christmas story. She was a great storyteller. With the greatest enthusiasm showing in her face and eyes, and using her hands, she told the Christmas story based on the Holy Scriptures. She loved the Bible. She knew it by heart. This commitment to the authority of Scripture does not mean she did not give it flesh and blood embellishments.

“Children! It was not just one angel but the entire Heavenly Host was there that cold night in Bethlehem,” she would say. “So great was the radiance in the night that people far and near saw a great star shining upon high.” Then she tried to explain to young children what it meant that the Heavenly Host was present at the birth of this particular child.

It came upon the midnight clear,
that glorious song of old,
from angels bending near the earth
to touch their harps of gold:
“Peace on the earth, good will to men
from Heaven’s all gracious King!”
The world in solemn stillness lay
to hear the angels sing.

By Christmas Eve our crèche was fulsome in its appointments. We had quite a few shepherds and a number of gypsy-looking figures. There was a figure with a piglet under one arm, a violation of Torah. Half a dozen sheep, goats, camels, dogs, cats, horses, cows, calves, donkeys, mules, and a peacock were all present and accounted for. Barbie showed up one year. She was quickly forbidden, not because of her attire, but because she was out of scale.

I was perennially anxious to place the animals in just the right way around the manger. Mother would say, “The shepherds worshiped the Christ child long before the wise men came to Bethlehem. God sent the angel Gabriel to them. That’s the same angel who told Mary she was pregnant by the Holy Ghost. If Gabriel ever visits you, get ready — something big is about to happen.”

After sundown on Christmas Eve, the Christ Child was placed in the crèche that sat on its own little table near the fireplace and meticulously decorated evergreen tree. Mary and Joseph looked down adoringly on the Newborn. Above them all was the bright Star of Bethlehem, which it was Dad’s job to firmly attach to the peak of the pitched stable roof, which featured tiny shingles. Is there anything more beautiful than this colorful, dramatic scene at Bethlehem?

This splendid icon was made again a few days ago in the little church I serve in West Texas. Per custom, I asked a small girl to carry the bambino in the procession. She placed him in the manger. The collect was offered. We adored the newborn king and moved singing toward the altar. As we celebrated the Christ Mass, we sang the Sanctus in its place.

Holy, Holy, Holy Lord!
God of power and might!
Heaven and earth are full of your glory.
Hosanna in the highest!

Heaven and earth are full of God’s glory. Since glory belongs properly to God, it was proper that we sang that marvelous French carol named “Gloria.”

Angels we have heard on high,
singing sweetly through the night,
and the mountains in reply
echoing their brave delight:
Gloria in excelsis Deo!
Gloria in excelsis Deo!

What is glory? What if we set aside for the moment the frequent mentions of God’s great “brightness” that angels saw in Jean Mauburn’s and many others’ carols? Is there another way we can understand God’s glory? I can see that there is a link between God’s glory and beauty, and other attributes such as truth, goodness, and unity. Some philosophers, perhaps of a Kantian bent, do not welcome an inextricable union of the four transcendentals and the Deity, if they believe in God at all. But in Christian thought the Incarnate Lord cannot be conceived without the irreducible eternal values.

I spent years trying to comprehend what is denoted by the Hebrew word kabod and the Greek word doxa. Surely the words mean more than a “shining.” The Bible dictionaries are of great service in this regard, but at a certain point I came to rely less on the denotation of the two biblical words than on their connotation. I began to make progress. We must look at the question through the lens of that great doctrine we contemplate especially this time of year: the incarnation. If God’s taking up our human nature in the incarnation is a permanent reality, then our life is already “hid with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3). Of course this definite but discreet mixture of the human and the divine is, as St. Paul wrote, “a profound mystery” (Eph. 5:32). But I submit that glory describes the way God “finishes off” humankind, fulfills the personal destiny of each human being who accepts the gift, and veritably completes the human nature given us at conception. Christian thinkers have held various views of which particular event in the life of Jesus was the most paradigmatically glorious. Was it the resurrection or the passion? Was it when Jesus joined his disciples by walking on the sea? When Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, many witnessed that unmistakable manifestation of God’s glory. And of course the transfiguration on the mount had all the elements of glory in it: the radiant presence of the Lord, Jesus’ human flesh looking altered and yet the same, and the Almighty speaking important words the disciples were able to hear.

If we take the Scriptures as a whole; if we look for the idea in the fathers; if we look into the lives of the undisputed saints of the historic Church, then we must allow that God’s “glory” has a great deal to do with us. “Glory” is very often a way to describe the phenomenon of God in us and the proper end of human life. This is the burden of many of the greatest works of Anglican divinity, including Book V of Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1600), which associates “participation in God” with grace and the sacraments. Many of our Anglo-Catholic titans offered important books on this topic. I think immediately of one of the greatest books ever written, Robert Wilberforce’s The Doctrine of the Incarnation in Relation to Mankind and the Church (1848). Two books by Eric Mascall are wise and indispensable: Christ, the Christian, and the Church: A Study of the Incarnation (1946), and Grace and Glory (1961). Glory as human completion effected by Grace is likewise the pastoral and moral thrust of Michael Ramsey’s Glory of God and the Transfiguration of Christ (1948).

Mascall’s emphasis in Grace and Glory is given in a quotation he liked from Bernard of Morlaix, a 12th-century monk of Cluny: “Grace is nothing else than a kind of beginning of glory in us.” Ramsey’s mature thinking on the question is indicated in the quotation from St. Irenaeus of Lyons inscribed on his gravestone at Canterbury:

The glory of God is the living man,
and the life of man is the vision of God.

Ramsey believed that transfiguration — change — in Christ is a powerful theme of both the New Testament and the fathers. The Bible should be taken at face value in this regard, and we see that the fathers wrestled with the meaning of the Bible. St. Paul believed that some people will be “transformed” into Christ’s image (2 Cor. 3:18), and St. John assumed that “we will be like him” (1 John 3:2). An avid student of the fathers by way of the Eastern Orthodox tradition, Ramsey took the doctrine of theosis for granted. The resurrection life is already happening in us. Ramsey liked the following quotation from St. Leo the Great:

The foundation was laid of the life of the Church, that the whole body of Christ might realize the character of the change which it would receive, and that the members might promise themselves a share in that honor which had already shone forth in the Head. (Sermon 60. Emphasis added)

Ramsey loved the New Testament scholarship of B.F. Westcott, who wrote in The Historic Faith (1885): “The Resurrection shows us our end. The Lord, as Son of Man, gives the measure of the capacity of humanity and shews that to which He leads those who are united with Him.”

Ramsey favored Mascall’s thinking on the question:

Christ’s humanity develops into the perfect organ of His divine self-expression to the universe. … In the transfigured Christ, the system of relations which forms His humanity no longer manifests it as subject to the normal laws of science but shews it to be governed by new laws into which the old have been absorbed by a process of continuous modification. (Mascall, quoted in Ramsey, Glory, 143).

That the word glory may be used to describe the completion or fulfillment of our human nature is a major emphasis of a sermon C.S. Lewis preached in the University Church at Oxford on June 8, 1941. The famous “Weight of Glory” sermon is about God’s desire to glorify his faithful. It goes without saying that God creates us with the desire for glory in some manner or other. The mature person has moved from the desire for worldly glory to a desire for the glory that God wishes to bestow on us by grace. We are born caring what others and God think of us. When we are mature, we care how God truly sees us. God wants nothing more than to see us and to approve of us as members of his Son, Christ Jesus, and this approbation by God would indeed be our glory.

Lewis makes the interesting observation that we may desire the beautiful, the true, the good, and the one, but they are always out of our reach. We gain intimations of what we want deep down — we want to possess these eternal values and to be possessed by them! — but we overlook that which we can have and which God tells us we can have: God’s glory. The most meaningful possession we can have is God’s approval, and that is our glory. We are born wanting God’s approbation or glory. The “weight” or burden of glory is that I do secretly believe that this can happen, that God is pleased with me like a father for a son. The “weight” of glory is also my knowledge that the persons I encounter every day have the exact same destiny as me: glory. I should care more — much more — about these people. It is in this context that Lewis famously said that the person sitting next to me is the most sacred thing in the world, excepting the Blessed Sacrament.

But in truth it is also possible that I could miss out. Lewis said that we walk along “a razor’s edge” of one possibility or the other. Will we gain God’s approval or not? Jesus spoke hauntingly of the possibility that God will say to us when we meet him face to face, “I know you not.” Lewis writes that “the truest index of our real situation in this world is that our being outside of what we desire most — which is to be inside where God dwells eternally — can end up a permanent state and God says in the end, ‘I know you not.’”

The most important thing is to follow the Lord. We must have faith that the promises of Christ are true. We shall wait faithfully. We are presently outside of the “splendid, luminous reality” beckoning us Christians to be faithful, but Lewis reminds us that “all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor” that we will not be outside always.

When I was 23 years old, I had an unexpected, life-changing experience. It was a two-part phenomenon. One early afternoon, I was sitting in the lunchroom of the United Methodist Publishing House in Dallas. I was a floor clerk at what was once the largest bookstore west of the Mississippi. It was a balmy September day. The windows were open. I could hear the traffic on Main Street five stories below.

I was finished eating, cleaning up my lunch effects, and I intended to go back downstairs to Cokesbury bookstore. As I was eating my lunch, I noticed a blue iris someone had placed in a bottle on another table. I stopped to look at it more closely. It was a large blossom in a pale green Dr. Pepper bottle filled with water. The flower was so remarkably beautiful that I sat down to take a closer look. The color was neither violet nor purple nor any shade of lavender but was a deep sky blue, the rich, marvelous color of the eastern sky just before twilight.

The sheer beauty of the flower drew me to it. I sat and contemplated it. The early afternoon daylight gave it a rare radiance. I spoke no words but quietly praised God for making such a perfectly beautiful creature. Very briefly, for a second only, I felt the presence of God “behind” the flower. It lasted but a second, yet I felt strangely lighthearted and filled with Grace for the rest of the day. It was an extraordinary experience, like none I had ever had. Yet I also reflected afterward that creatures must, of course, reflect or reveal the glory of the one who created them. As the great Étienne Gilson wrote in The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy (1936), if even the fragments of the shattered world yet declare the glory of the Lord, surely a creature as beautifully made as that blue iris can be a medium of revelation.

This mystical apprehension of God was followed a few days later by a second extraordinary experience. I was in the same place. As if to get my attention, or more likely to open my mind, I felt the sudden, momentary presence of God and the Lord “told” me without words or anything the ear can hear that the resurrection of Jesus really happened.

The momentary presence of the Lord made me shiver from head to toe. I did not see a bright light. I did not see anything. In fact, some part of me I did not know was freshly activated. Was it something I was made with and now it was “turned on”? In any case, my mind was opened to understand something. I did not know that I needed to know what the Lord “said” to me. I was a Christian. I offered the creed on Sundays. I assumed that I believed the dogmas of the creed. But there was evidently a part of me that doubted the resurrection as it was reported in the New Testament. I suppose that a part of me tacitly accepted the falsely “spiritual” or “demythologized” view and theory of Jesus’ resurrection; after all, my education had been thoroughly modern to date. What the Lord “said” to me in that powerful moment in the lunchroom was that the four Evangelists got it right. Their testimony is true. Jesus was raised from the dead and the Evangelists were only being faithful to what they themselves experienced in the flesh or were told by those who had witnessed “these things” in person. If I sensed the glory of God “behind” the blue iris, I saw it again in the Risen Lord.

These two experiences of God — utterly related to each other — changed my life. I found places to worship often. For the next several months, my only prayer was very brief and simple: “Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Lord!” Except for liturgical prayer in church, this was all I felt moved to say when I prayed. I would kneel beside my bed and could only say, “Thank you, Lord!” This is all I prayed when I was driving down the road.

I soon found myself in the hands of wise persons of mature faith. I was discovering the church too. I was daily gaining an understanding of what is meant by the body of Christ. My heart was touched and my mind opened. I knew I was now on an adventure.

Such experiences do not and cannot replace the saving faith enabled by grace. These experiences do not happen to everyone. When they do happen to someone, they happen for God’s own purpose. In my case, I knew it was my duty to assure others that the resurrection happened. I had no further duty than to give others confidence to believe that the gospel is true.

If the resurrection really happened, so did the incarnation. Both the resurrection and the incarnation make a “new category” for human reckoning, and glory — God’s glory and our glory by grace — are at the center of it all. These events change everything, not only philosophy and metaphysics, but religion too. Grace makes Christ’s glory our glory. Something in each of us was born at Bethlehem. You and I were made to participate in God’s glory. If grace completes nature, grace also purifies our desire, so that all we desire is God’s approbation. “Glory” denotes our completion and fulfilment in God. W.W. How (1823-97) evokes the idea in the penultimate verse of his great hymn put to glorious music by Ralph Vaughan Williams:

But lo! there breaks a yet more glorious day;
The saints triumphant rise in bright array;
The King of Glory passes on His way,
Alleluia, alleluia!

Richard Mouw of Calvin University speaks for many of us when he laments the deep political divisions between Americans and the increasingly public disagreements over politics and public policy, among committed Christians especially. As we begin another presidential election year, and one likely to be as divisive as any in American history, Mouw’s book is a practical ministry to us all. What is the correct way for Christians to be patriotic? How might Christians on both and every side of the political spectrum affirm each other’s patriotism, even if we cannot affirm the other’s view about a particular law or policy?

Mouw believes patriotism is a good, even God-given, thing, but love of country must include compassion. While practicing charity to all and affirming the human dignity of all are core values of the gospel, Mouw asks us to stop and consider that another’s political views are usually motivated by deep “hopes and fears.” If we stop to listen to another person about his hopes and fears, we will at least understand where he is coming from in his politics.

Mouw finds Simone Weil a perfect example of good patriotism. In The Need for Roots (1949), Weil holds up compassion for one’s fellow citizen instead of prideful, “pomp and glory” patriotism. In a most significant passage, Mouw writes that Weil helped her fellow French citizens see how they “must be solidly grounded in an honest grasp of the facts about the nation.” It goes without saying that Americans are grappling with many facts about our nation that are neither sweet nor inspiring. These facts apply to citizens in every political party. But it is our duty to face them and to pray for compassion for those on every side of an “issue.”

For the citizen as voter, elected persons do not only embody the voter’s values but are means to an end: the voter’s vision of the good life. Addressing Christians in this book, Mouw wants to find the happy medium between an exclusive Christian nationalism and a patriotism built on religious agnosticism. America is becoming only more of a melting pot, but “one nation under God” does not require that one person’s views are lockstep the same as another’s. Magnanimity is rare in our time, but Mouw is hopeful we can develop this virtue.

A dyed-in-the-wool democratic republican and a committed Christian, Mouw understands that truth — whether philosophical or political — cannot be won without debate, disagreement, challenge, struggle, and even strife. (A survey of Christian history shows that such debate and contest is also true of the development — or at least the reception — of Christian doctrine.) In any case, such a dynamic situation is exactly how the federal government of the United States was set up to function.

Truth is a large thing. What individual can know it all? Moreover, an assumption crucial to the mechanism of our republican government is that “men are not angels” (Federalist 51). Tainted by sin, we therefore assume that no single person or party can be relied on to deliver the truth. Mouw therefore takes it for granted that “spiritual and theological wrestling” is our Christian duty. A great and glorious blessing came from Jacob/Israel’s contest with the angel (Gen. 32). Mouw reminds us that Jacob “engaged in the match in order to be blessed.” If we find ourselves in a place where there is no debate and no wrestling, we are likely in the place called hell.

Mouw offers good tips for our political wrestling. We must do “the work of contemplation,” which means looking for Jesus in everyone we meet. We must “cultivate compassion,” whether racial, ethnic, gender-oriented, social, economic, and political. We must “go deep in the quest for rootedness,” which means seeing ourselves not as Americans alone but part of a transnational Christian movement transcending nation-state and patriotism in the narrowest sense.

Our fundamental identity is in Christ, now and always. And it must be God in Whom we trust. Jesus “speaks to the deepest hopes of the human spirit.” Even in politics — and perhaps especially in politics — “the God who sheds his grace on each of us individually sent his son into the world to take on the hopes and fears of nations and peoples. To be assured of that in the deep places of our hearts is what should inspire us to keep wrestling with what it means to be patriotic Christians.”