The school of St Andrew’s, Turi, is spectacularly situated
in the highlands of Kenya’s Rift Valley. From its foundation
in 1931, to provide education for the children of local
farmers, the school was run by Mr and Mrs Lavers,
affectionately known as Ma and Pa Lavers.
For years the school provided education for British
missionary children, and from its original number of 15 on
the school roll, there are now well over 100, and while
still Christian in its ethos, the school is both
international and multi-cultural.
On the 29th February 1944 a fire destroyed St Andrew’s. The
Lavers immediately set about rebuilding the school and at
the time the Colonial British government gave permission for
Italian prisoners of war to help construct the new school,
as the estimated cost of rebuilding was very high.
The new school building, erected in stone instead of wood,
has as its symbol a phoenix, a mythical bird calling to mind
both a brutal event and a blessed hope, both the fire that
burned the school down and the faith that ashes are not the
end.
After the fire Pa Lavers instituted an annual “Phoenix
Night”. On Phoenix Night each year a great bonfire was lit
in the shool grounds. There was a godly custom on Phoenix
Night that every child was invited to write on a piece of
paper anything and everything in the past year that made
them sad or sorry or ashamed. Then they gathered round the
fire and, as a sign of their intention by God’s grace to
make a fresh start, they crumpled up their pieces of papers
and threw them into the flames.
I don’t know whether Phoenix Night at St Andrew’s School
every coincided with Ash Wednesday, but what was affirmed
that night resonates with what Ash Wednesday should mean for
us. On Ash Wednesday, we enter what T. S. Eliot described as
“the time of tension between dying and birth”. Our purpose
at this time is to rid ourselves of illusions. We pray with
Eliot: “suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood.”
On Ash Wednesday we hear words that the world around us
conspires to drown out. As I receive on my forehead the sign
of the Cross imposed in ashes, Revd Denise says to me
“Remember that you are dust and that to dust you shall
return” The words are said to me personally. This isn’t
something that only happens to other people. I, Dennis
Smith, am the one who is dust and I am the one who shall
return to the dust.
The Victorians were better at facing the fact of death than
we are. I don’t have a skeleton by me as I say my prayers,
as many a Buddhist monk does, but many Victorians would have
close to hand a copy of a children’s book that sold in its
hundreds of thousands in the 19th Century: Mrs Sherwood’s
“The History of the Fairchild Family”. Old Rogers, the
Fairchilds’ gardener dies and the children are taken to see
his body.
“You never saw a corpse, I think?” says Lucy’s father. “No,
Papa, “ answers Lucy, “but we have a great curiosity to see
one.”
I wonder if we dislike the tale because we disapprove of
what we see as a morbid preoccupation with death – or
because we continue to mock ourselves and our children with
falsehoods, the most mischievous of which being that you
must keep young and beautiful if you want to be loved?
Today, Ash Wednesday, I confront the reality that I am a
sinner under the sentence of death. But sin isn’t merely
what individuals commit. Nor is death what happens to
sentient beings. There is social and corporate sin, the
wrongs in which we are complicit by our membership of larger
groups. Such groups – the crowd at a football match, the
lads out together on a stag night, the nation that declares
an unjust war – can behave in ways in which the men and
women who form them would never do.
We need to find ways of corporate repentance, ways more
costly than the token apology from someone in high office.
“Dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return”. The words
said to us individually apply to our institutions to. Nobody
lasts, but nothing does either. Institutions often find it
hard to recognise that the time has come to let go. For
example, we feel sad when a church closes, but if that
church has had a useful life and has done some good, then
our sadness is misplaced.
It looks as if the institutional church is in terminal
decline, but if it isn’t, that’s not because it is immortal.
Again we make Eliot’s prayer are own: “Teach us to care and
not to care”. Nothing lasts, save the love to which, as
rivers to the sea all we are and all we do returns.
Today, Ash Wednesday, we face reality. We face our own
sinfulness and mortality and that of the fleeting show of
things, our religious structures included. And – very
deliberately – we turn. We repent. We draw near to God and –
like boys and girls throwing balls crunched-up paper into a
bonfire – we ask that all that is ill in us may be consumed
in the inextinguishable fire of his love.