As the school corridors empty and the rhythm of term-time loosens, Easter arrives not simply as a break, but as an interruption—an invitation, perhaps, to think differently. For those of us formed, even loosely, within the Christian tradition, Easter carries with it a set of claims that are, at their core, profoundly difficult: death and life coexisting, loss and redemption entwined, the finite brushing against the infinite.
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It is, in many ways, an intellectual and spiritual paradox.

And yet, what strikes me this year—perhaps more than any other—is not the certainty of those claims, but their structure. Christianity at Easter does not resolve tension; it holds it. The crucifixion does not negate resurrection, nor does resurrection erase suffering. Both remain. Both insist. Both shape meaning.

This is not linear thinking. It is something closer to what, in another field entirely, might be called Superposition—the capacity for multiple states to exist simultaneously without collapsing into a single, simplified truth. Similarly, in Nonlinear Dynamics, systems do not move cleanly from cause to effect; they evolve through complexity, feedback, and coexistence.
I found myself thinking about this not in a chapel, but in a classroom.

This past week, as I began teaching the poetry of Ní Chuilleanáin, I experienced something that felt less like change and more like confirmation. What had long existed as an internal, intuitive way of reading—something felt and navigated but rarely named—revealed itself again, more clearly, under the pressure of teaching. It is one thing to appreciate her poetry privately, to sit with its strangeness and quiet authority. It is another thing entirely to render that experience into a form that is coherent, examinable, and transferable to students.

And it was in that act of articulation that something clarified.

Ní Chuilleanáin does not simply write “ambiguous” poetry. That term feels insufficient. What she does is far more precise: she sustains parallel states of meaning. Two ideas—sometimes more—are held in place at once. They do not collapse into one another. They do not compete for dominance. Nor do they interfere in a way that diminishes clarity. Instead, they coexist, each sharpening the presence of the other.

In The Fireman’s Lift, for instance, the act of lifting is both literal and something else—something approaching the spiritual, though never confirmed as such. The upward movement gestures towards transcendence, yet the poem refuses to name or stabilise that destination. The result is not confusion, but a kind of charged stillness: we are asked to hold both readings at once.
This, I realised, is not unlike the structure of Easter itself.

Death and life. Body and spirit. Presence and absence.

Held together, not resolved.

In practical terms, nothing in my approach has altered in essence; rather, I find myself increasingly able to name and stabilise what has long been an internal, intuitive process. What was once tacit has begun to take on a more deliberate conceptual form. The work, then, is not one of pedagogical change, but of articulation: translating a private mode of reading into an intellectual foothold that students can access, inhabit, and ultimately deploy under the pressures of examination.

Where previously I might have moved instinctively through the layered meanings of a poem, I now make that movement visible. The question is no longer simply “What does the poem mean?”—a question which too often implies closure—but rather how meaning itself is structured within the poem, how distinct interpretive possibilities are held in tension, and how that tension is sustained without collapse.

What I am, in effect, offering students is not an answer, but a method: a way of thinking that allows them to hold multiple ideas in place with control and clarity. The emphasis shifts from arriving at a singular, resolved interpretation to demonstrating an awareness of how meanings coexist, interact, and deepen one another. In this sense, sophistication lies not in choosing between interpretations, but in managing their simultaneous presence with precision.

This is a subtle distinction, but a crucial one. It marks the difference between students who search for certainty and those who can operate within complexity—who can recognise that, in Ní Chuilleanáin’s work, meaning is not something to be fixed, but something to be held.

And perhaps that is where I find myself, as this term draws to a close—slightly amused, if I am honest. For all the effort to clarify, to structure, to render thought teachable, I seem only to circle back to the same realisation: that the frameworks I reach for—these meta-theories, however dressed—do not impose boundaries or bring thought under control. If anything, they do the opposite. They open outwards. They create new expanses—spaces in which ideas can stretch, coexist, and continue to unfold.

It is, in its own quiet way, a distinctly Walt Whitman-esque realisation: that to think well is not to confine meaning within neat limits, but to allow it to expand, to contain multitudes, to resist the urge to close down what might yet grow.

Which, I suppose, is a long way of saying that, once again, my rather odd habit of thinking has led me not to answers, but to wider horizons—and, with a small chuckle, to the recognition that in both poetry and teaching, it is precisely this creation of new expanses, rather than the drawing of boundaries, that keeps the work alive.

Japanese Summary
このブログでは、Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáinの詩とキリスト教の復活祭（イースター）に共通する「複数の意味や状態が同時に存在する構造」について考察している。復活祭は、死と再生、苦しみと救済といった相反する要素を単純に解決するのではなく、それらを同時に保持するという特徴を持つ。この構造は、物理学におけるSuperpositionやNonlinear Dynamicsに見られる「非線形的な共存」と類似している。

Ní Chuilleanáinの詩も同様に、複数の解釈を排他的に選ばせるのではなく、それらを並存させ、相互に意味を深めるように構成されている。たとえば詩における出来事は、物理的現象であると同時に精神的・象徴的な意味を持ちうるが、そのどちらかに確定されることはない。この「意味の共存」が詩の核心である。

筆者にとって重要なのは、こうした読みの在り方自体は新しいものではなく、以前から直感的に行っていたものである。しかし現在は、それを明確に言語化し、生徒にとって理解可能な「思考の枠組み」として提示できるようになってきた点にある。教育において求められるのは、単一の正解を提示することではなく、複数の意味を同時に保持し、その関係性を説明する能力である。
このようなアプローチは、意味を固定するのではなく、むしろ新たな「思考の広がり」を生み出す。ここには、Walt Whitmanの「多様性を内包する」思想とも通じる視点がある。最終的に筆者は、詩の理解や教育において重要なのは結論ではなく、意味の可能性を広げ続けることであると述べている。

Imagine a school shaped by a Christian ethos. Its mission speaks of peace, dignity, moral formation, and care for neighbour. It rejects violence not merely as imprudent but as contrary to human flourishing.

Now imagine a proposal that students might study budō — not as street self-defence, not as competitive fighting, but as a disciplined martial art rooted in restraint, hierarchy, repetition, and self-mastery.

Is there a contradiction?

At first glance, perhaps. Martial arts train the capacity to strike. Christian education seeks to form the conscience away from harm. The optics are uneasy. Yet beneath the surface lies a deeper question — not about bruises, but about anthropology.

Christianity has never spoken with one voice on violence. Across history, it has held at least two distinct moral trajectories. One tradition — most visible in pacifist movements such as the Religious Society of Friends — insists that participation in violence is incompatible with discipleship. Peace is preserved by refusal. One simply does not take up the sword.

Another tradition — articulated most clearly in Augustine and Aquinas — accepts that force may, under strict moral conditions, be used in defence of the innocent. Here, violence is never celebrated, but neither is it categorically excluded. It is morally tragic, tightly bound, and sometimes necessary.

I write from within the Roman Catholic tradition — a tradition that developed just war theory as a moral attempt to regulate the use of force, yet whose historical record reveals how often those limits were strained, ignored, or manipulated. Crusades, religious wars, political entanglements: the Church has not always embodied the restraint it theologised. That history matters. It cautions against moral triumphalism in either direction.

Most Christian schools today operate, whether consciously or not, within this Augustinian inheritance. They teach virtue, justice, courage, and self-control. They field rugby and hockey teams without perceiving contradiction. Physical contest is framed as discipline rather than aggression.

The difficulty with budō is not injury. Controlled dojo practice often produces fewer serious injuries than collision sports. The difficulty is symbolic. Budō carries an explicit lineage of combat. It trains techniques that, in another context, could cause harm. The question, therefore, becomes whether the cultivation of such capacity is already a moral compromise.
Here, the tension sharpens.

One regime of thought holds that peace is safeguarded through abstention. If one refuses the sword entirely, one cannot misuse it. Moral clarity lies in distance from force. To rehearse violence, even in ritualised form, risks normalising it.

Another regime holds that force, as a human capacity, does not vanish by being ignored. Strength exists. Anger exists. The potential for harm exists. The question is not whether these capacities are present, but whether they are disciplined. Peace, in this view, is secured not by denial but by mastery.

Budō belongs to this second logic.

At its philosophical best, it is not the celebration of aggression but the training of restraint. Repetition tempers impulse. Hierarchy humbles ego. Ritual slows reaction. One learns precisely how much force is possible — and therefore how grave its misuse would be. The highest expression of skill is often the refusal to strike.

Everything turns on telos — on the end toward which the practice is ordered. If the end is domination, spectacle, or personal superiority, then it stands in tension with Christian anthropology. If the end is the disciplined formation of character in service of peace, the contradiction is far less obvious.

This is not alien to Christianity. Monastic traditions cultivated bodily discipline through fasting, silence, obedience, and structured hardship. The aim was not punishment but purification of desire. The body became the site where will was trained. Budō functions analogously as a corporeal asceticism: through physical form, the self is governed.

The New Testament does not present a systematic theory of violence; it presents actions that later theology must interpret. Christ refuses retaliation at his arrest and commands Peter to put away the sword. Yet he also confronts injustice forcefully and disrupts the Temple in a dramatic prophetic gesture. The Gospels leave space for ethical development. Christian history filled that space in divergent ways.

It must also be admitted that the cultivation of force always carries danger. Discipline can slide into pride. Technical mastery can inflate ego. A martial framework without humility becomes caricature. But refusal carries danger as well. Moral abstention can drift into abstraction, detached from the embodied realities of conflict and responsibility.

The disagreement, then, is not between peace and violence. It is between two visions of how peace is secured.

Peace can be imagined as the refusal of power.

It can also be imagined as the disciplined governance of power.

Within a Christian educational setting, this becomes a question of formation. What kind of person is the school trying to produce?

A person who never touches the sword, believing that purity lies in abstention?

Or a person who understands the weight of the sword so thoroughly that it remains sheathed?
The Roman Catholic tradition, for all its historical failures, has long held that strength itself is not evil; it is its ordering that determines its morality. The tragedy of history is not that power existed, but that it was so often disordered.

Yet there remains a further question — perhaps the most uncomfortable one. Can one meaningfully guide others through the realities of conflict without ever having encountered its mechanics? Peace formed entirely in abstraction risks fragility. Restraint that has never wrestled, even in disciplined form, with the dynamics of force may prove thinner than it appears. There is a difference between refusing violence. After all, one cannot wield it and refuse it because one has learned its weight.

What appears at first to be a curricular question is in fact a theological one. It turns on the nature of the human person. Is strength inherently corrupting? Or is strength morally neutral until directed toward good or ill?

The sword, literal or metaphorical, is always dangerous. The Church’s own history testifies to that.

The question is whether peace is best preserved by refusing to touch it — or by learning to hold it without drawing it.

Optics cannot settle that question. It must be answered by anthropology.

And that, perhaps, is a conversation worthy of any Christian school — especially one mindful of its past.

「平和」と「鞘に収められた剣」― キリスト教的学校における武道の位置づけ（要約）本稿は、キリスト教的理念を持つ学校において武道を導入することが矛盾するのか、という思想的問いを扱っている。
キリスト教は歴史的に暴力について一枚岩ではなかった。一方には、すべての暴力参加を拒否する平和主義的伝統（例：クエーカー）がある。もう一方には、アウグスティヌスやトマス・アクィナスに代表される「正戦論」の伝統があり、一定の厳格な条件下でのみ武力行使を認めてきた。
筆者はローマ・カトリックの伝統に属しているが、その歴史は武力を神学的に制限しようとしながらも、必ずしも常にその理想を守ってきたわけではない。この歴史的自覚は、どちらの立場にも単純な道徳的優越を与えない。
武道の問題は、怪我の多寡ではなく「象徴性」にある。ラグビーなどの接触競技が容認される一方で、武道は「戦いの技術」を明示的に扱うため、倫理的緊張が生じる。
ここで二つの「真理の枠組み」が現れる。

1. 平和は「力の拒否」によって守られるとする立場
2. 平和は「力の統御」によって守られるとする立場

武道は後者に属する。武道の目的（テロス）は支配ではなく、自己制御と節度の形成にある。反復訓練、礼法、階層構造は、攻撃性を賛美するのではなく、むしろ抑制するための身体的修養である。
キリスト教の修道的伝統における断食や沈黙の修練と同様に、武道も身体を通して意志を鍛える「身体的禁欲」と理解できる。
しかし最後に、より根本的な問いが残る。
暴力の現実や力の構造を一度も経験したことがないまま、人に平和を教えることは可能なのか。
抽象的な平和は脆いかもしれない。力を知らずにそれを拒否することと、その重みを理解した上でそれを鞘に収めることは同じではない。
結局のところ、この問題は課外活動の可否ではなく、人間観の問題である。
力は本質的に腐敗的なのか。
それとも、方向づけられることで善にも悪にもなり得る中立的なものなのか。
平和とは、剣に触れないことなのか。
それとも、抜かずに持つことを学ぶことなのか。
この問いこそが、キリスト教教育の核心に触れている。