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United Dioceses of Dublin & Glendalough

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09.04.2013

Ever Widening Circle of Wisdom Celebrated on Trinity Monday in TCD

“The circle of wisdom is ever widening, remaking itself in new times and other places,” Professor Geraldine Smyth, OP, Associate Professor and Head of the Irish School of Ecumenics said in her Trinity Monday sermon in Trinity College Chapel on April 8.

The annual service of commemoration and thanksgiving follows the announcement of the new scholars and fellows of Trinity College Dublin at the beginning of Trinity Week.

Drawing on the first lesson, Ecclesiasticus 44: 1–15, which was read by the Provost, Dr Patrick Prendergast, Dr Smyth said: “This text orients today’s Commemoration and Thanksgiving for those companions who have walked with us and opened up new paths of learning. But it stands not as stolid reminder of the rock from which we were hewn, but sustains a dynamic tradition, an ethos that keeps wisdom alive in succeeding generations. Our sober, sage, Ben Sirach was as Scribe, and more a disciplinarian than an “Alleluia” person, but today we are come to rejoice in wisdom … We come into this house of prayer, also, rejoicing in wisdom’s promise, embodied in the new scholars, fellows and indeed, in those whose commencements will be celebrated later in the week. Thus, the university community bears witness to a collective hope in a still more abundant harvest of research and learning that will be reaped beyond the halls of this college in Ireland and in distant lands”.

Highlighting the work of Ben Sirach and of Nelson Mandela, she said that scholarship was not an end in itself but opened up onto another threshold. “The circle of wisdom is ever widening, remaking itself in new times and other places,” she said. Therefore she pointed out that after his presidency, Nelson Mandela had sought new ways to empower and sustain nations and people still imprisoned in poverty and violence.

Dr Smyth said Mandela founded and organisation of Global Elders in 2007 comprising 10 people of wisdom who could fulfil the Millennium Goals using their personal influence to lead and inspire others in striving for a more peaceful and fair world. Among them is Mary Robinson, graduate and Chancellor of this university, and now leader of its Institute for Climate Justice, who has just set out as Special Envoy of the Secretary General of the UN for the Great Lakes, that war–torn, ecologically devastated region of sub–Saharan Africa.  

In her sermon Dr Smyth also observed that the service also marked the 40th anniversary of the chapel being opened for wider Christian use. In the Autumn of 1973, the chapel was decommissioned as a place of worship solely for the Anglican community allowing for a more ecumenical use for the space. Putting this event in context she spoke of three other outstanding moments of 1973 – the Sunningdale Agreement, peace breaking out in the midst of world wide wars and the churches’ awakening to the global ecumenical movement.

She wondered how the opening up of the chapel doors was received. “Was the mood, I wonder, one of ecumenical excitement and high hopes for shared worship and ecumenical hospitality barely believable even a decade before? Maybe at the time, approval was more ambivalent than total, and the event also occasioned some division of opinion, or a felt sense of collective loss. Some here today may actually recall the experience either in its predominant jubilation or with the lingering doubt and fear of a dilution of truth, identity and the beauty of worship,” Dr Smyth mused and said that today the fact that the chapel is an ecumenical meeting place is a cause of thanksgiving.

Dr Geraldine Smyth’s sermon can be read in full here.

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