Serving Others – Message from the Chaplain

Serving Others

Message from the Chaplain

The Australian researcher Dr Kerry Howells embarked on a landmark study of gratitude at her university when she noticed her students were resentful for being required to take one of her courses. Dr Howells later turned the study into the book Gratitude in Education: a radical view (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2012), which is now just over a decade old. Dr Howells makes an observation in the opening pages of her first chapter that remains just as relevant and forceful now as it was when it was originally written.

“We live in a time when we are constantly exposed to the suffering of those less fortunate than ourselves, or those who have had the world at their feet snapped away by an earthquake, a wave, a bomb, a fire, or a rampant storm. As they plummet into chaos or flee for refuge, we are summoned to answer just how to respond to the millions reaching out for our regard. If we have our own fortunes intact (for the moment) just one glimpse of others’ suffering, can, if we allow it, generate a deep moral questioning of how we should react. A common refrain is that we should be grateful for what we have. But for gratitude to be an effective and moral response, we would need to embrace it as more than something that makes us feel good or reminds us of how good we have it. For if we were to meet gratitude face to face she would say ‘take action that serves others’; give back, give up, say sorry, let go, clear the air, and connect.” At the start of 2022, The King’s School and its Governing Council decided to embrace an eighth value for the School – the value of Gratitude. A conversation several years back generated discussion about the kinds of graduates we want King’s to produce. If a student was to have the perfect confluence of all our aspirations for them during their time at King’s, how would we hope it showed itself? What kind of response would that give rise to? The answer was gratitude. However, it is not just any kind of gratitude, but the kind of gratitude Howells writes about. The gratitude that seeks to ‘take action that serves others’, that give[s] back, that give[s] up and connect[s] with others. Gratitude is a practice that takes us outside ourselves to the world around us, beyond ourselves to others who share this world with us, even above ourselves, metaphysically speaking, to a spirituality that takes us to a realm that far exceeds our finitude and human limitations. From a Christian perspective – to God, the Creator of it all and the One to whom ultimate thanks ought to be given. At its heart, then, gratitude is a practice that is antithetical to much of what currently undergirds our education system and its end goals. Its paradigm is characterised by individualism, instrumentalism and consumerism. It has become overwhelmed by the drive to have graduates that fit immediately into an economy rather than a community. People who are job ready and also prepared to be agile enough as learners to acquire skills and social and emotional capacities to fit into the twenty-first century labour market, where many of the jobs have yet to be invented. These are consumers – preferably ethical ones – who can help grow the global economy through their consumption of goods and services. At the same time, these consumers, driven by competition, have been forced to turn to individualism, with its mantra of self-actualisation. The risk is they are defined by a number, their ATAR score, HSC bands and their School’s appearance at the right spot in newspaper HSC league tables. As such, education has become less about the love of learning and more about instrumentalism: how can this school experience be used as an instrument to get me (or my child) where I want to be in life?

The beauty of gratitude is that it reorients us. It demands we get our perspective right. It fixes our myopia and colour-blindness to life and education and pushes us to see the vividness and grandeur of life and, from a Christian perspective, of God. That is why the Christian Scriptures are infused with poems and reflections and exhortations to gratitude for all that God is and all that He has in the world and for humanity in Christ. It is what motivates the Psalmist in Psalm 100:

A psalm. For giving grateful praise.

1 Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth. 2 Worship the Lord with gladness; come before him with joyful songs. 3 Know that the Lord is God. It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, the sheep of his pasture. 4 Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name. 5 For the Lord is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations.

Gratitude begins with looking outside ourselves. From a Christian perspective, it begins with looking up to God and His goodness. It is by His grace we are able to enjoy anything of life’s wonders and joys. It is by His goodness, His grace, in Christ to us that we can rightly, truly, deeply connect with God and with each other as a community, not merely in some sclerotic way as an economy. It is by His grace to us in the world and, especially in Christ, that He calls us, in gratitude, to give back and to ‘take action that serves others’.