learners and leavers

Today marked the end of another academic year for the secondary school I'm chaplain to.

And they always let me be a part of the final celebrations. A formal sort of occasion, with speeches and prizes and opened and closed with a prayer. Which is part of the reason I'm invited along.

The Royal High School here in Edinburgh is the 18th oldest school in the world. Or so I'm told. Which means that there's more than a few excuses for being strong on the old 'tradition' side of things.

The Provost was in the chair today. He's a former pupil of the school. So 'the boy done good' as the grammar of the football academies seems to put it.

It isn't all that often that I meet a man with a necklace worth a million pounds slung round his neck. In fact, it's not all that often I meet a man with any sort of necklace round his neck at all, I suppose.

But a million pounds? I thought he was kidding when he told me it's value at first. But no, he said, that's what it's worth (and the Lady Provost's 'chain' around her neck is double the value, I learned).

All to do with the diamonds with which it's made. A mere 497 of them (not that I troubled to count - I took his word for it, having checked to see that there were certainly more than a few).

How do you measure a person's worth? A day like today, where the morning is spent at a ceremony such as this, raises questions like that all the time.

Is a person's worth to be measured by what they wear, by the wealth that they've acquired? Do you measure that worth by the prizes they win, the prowess they show in their learning, their sport or the sort of position they've gained in the life of the school?

When the 'leavers' all troop out at the end through the grand old memorial door, it's striking that by far the greatest number of them all have won no prize at all.

But all of them, across these five or six short years, have found among their peers a group of friends. That's how they're valued by those they know best. Just in terms of the persons they are.

For years on end, perhaps to an extent that's never quite the same in life again, they're with the same extended group of friends, incessantly.

Day after day after day. Learning with each other, talking and laughing and playing with one another. In the classroom. On the sports fields. Out on the town at night (at least in later years).

No wonder they grow so close. No wonder the bonds are rich and real. No wonder there are tears in their eyes on a day like today when these years at their school come to an end.

That's how they measure the value they place on each other, I guess. As friends.

Which got me thinking again about the way that Jesus gathered people round about him, just like this. For days and months and years on end. Doing everything together.

And he said, I call you friends.

They're described, of course, as disciples. Which means 'learners'. Which is not that very different from a school.

And I guess it was the friendship, just as much as anything they learned, that made this whole 'discipleship' so wonderful a thing in their experience. And why so many joined them.

Sitting there, for two hours on the trot, and watching all of this unfold before my eyes, I found myself reflecting that in many ways that's how and why we've got the thing all wrong.

We've subtly (and unconsciously, I guess) gone and turned the whole thing wholly upside down. We've made the heart and focus of discipleship the learning - not the fun of being together and the friendship that there is.

Another revolution is required. Turning the way we do things upside down.

Or, more to the point, turning them right way up.

A whole new form of 'monasticism' could be coming into vogue!