Rector’s Letter
We are still in the season of Easter, the root and foundation of Christian life and thought. ‘If Christ is not risen then we of all people are most to be pitied’, but in reality, does it make any difference?
I read the simple statement that ‘Peace of mind is an oxymoron’ (Richard Rohr). The one thing so many people seek doesn’t exist. The mind always has something to think about, to worry about. As soon as we have sorted out one problem a ‘but’ appears and we are led down another rabbit hole with all sorts of twists and turns. In education you become more and more focused on less and less things until you become a specialist in some small section of a subject. But you can’t do that in more than one area (with a few exceptions) and you are left to go deeper and deeper ignoring all else.
We can’t hold all the information we need to make sense of the world; we can’t come to a point where we know enough to have peace of mind. But we can have peace of heart.
In Greek and Hebrew thought it was within the heart that people are fully human, the seat of learning, of personality, the place of the soul, the essence of who we are. The move to a western Philosophy of ‘I think therefore I am’ caused this separation between the rational (superior) and irrational self (inferior) but helpful this might be to academic learning we do lose so much more.
Art goes beyond the rational mind, the joy in beauty points to other ways of understanding the world. Religion is a strange thing. It can become far too legalistic, too rational and lose the sense of ‘being with’ God, of meeting Christ in the stranger, of encounter with the Divine. Maybe we need the structure, the rules and regulations but to find peace of heart we need to enter into the relationship with God we were designed for. It is messy and much more a journey than a destination, but if we can know in Paul’s words ‘Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ’. We begin on a solid base – everything we have just celebrated over the Easter weekend. We do it within the centre of our being (alongside intellectual questions if you like), we make it part of who we are, we live day by day in the resurrection.
The peace that goes beyond understanding is offered to us today; you might catch it out of the corner of your eye, find hints of it in the smile of a loved one, even in a tragedy. But keep looking and you will one know it is yours.
Nick Law
Rector