Chapel Matters

Next Thursday afternoon we will be celebrating St Hilda’s Day in St Paul’s Cathedral after missing it last year due to Covid. We will have the school choir singing, and kapa haka group performing, a student doing a musical item, and we will all be singing hymns! It will be quite lovely being able to express ourselves through our voices again! Communion will be of one kind (ie. just the bread, no wine), so we aren’t quite back to “normal” – yet! But in many ways, I doubt any of us will ever quite be back to whatever that “normal” used to be. For a start, we seem to be settled on having St Hilda’s Dayduring our school week rather than on a Sunday as it used to be. As part of that, however, the whole school walks down to the Cathedral which is much more like St Hilda’s students used to do decades ago! I am sure that in the future our ways of doing things will change yet again!

I like this combination of the past, the present, and the future – this is really what life is all about. There are some great quotes about being in this kind of space: 

“The past is behind – learn from it. The future is ahead – prepare for it. The present is here – live it.” 

“The past is your lesson; the present is your gift; the future is your motivation.”

But we can go even deeper with these ideas when we consider the dimension of faith in our lives. The Bible encourages us to “live by faith” (Romans 1.17). For the past, that might mean being thankful for the foundations we have because of those like St Hilda, Sisters Geraldine and Etheleen, and the students who have gone through the school before us. We are honouring distinguished members of the Alumni in our St Hilda’s Day service this year – a new initiative to celebrate the past! For the present, this might mean being more consciously aware of God’s loving presence with us in our day-to-day lives, and, specifically in relation to St Hilda’s Day, I would suggest being present to the music, the words, the imagery of the stained-glass windows, and the sacredness of the space. As for the future? Faith enables us to face the future with hope because we know that God loves us and is able to strengthen us to deal with whatever challenges await, and to do so with both grace and a willingness to serve and care for others to make this world an even better place!