In the past weeks, I have had many occasions to reflect with gratitude on the finest aspects of this community, our values, our spirit, and our accountability to each other and our purpose. Most of all, I am grateful for this being a place filled with joyful people who are committed to building. Everyone here, our students and the adults who guide them, is constantly asking, what is constructive? What will heal? How can I mend? Rally? Build up?

This practice makes St. Andrew’s a place out of step with a world where discourse can quickly bend to what breaks down, undermines, and destroys our right relationships with each other and even with nature itself. Your children deserve a lot of credit for taking this on, because it is so easy to disintegrate and unravel the world with our carelessness, much less our intention. Positive effort, consistent work is required for us to be builders.

Mary Oliver once again provides us a lens to understand this work, in her minute attention to nature and her uncanny ability to communicate its meaning. I share with you her poem, “Song of the Builders,” which has inspired me this week:

Song of the Builders
By Mary Oliver, Why I Wake Early: New Poems
 
On a summer morning
I sat down
on a hillside
to think about God—

a worthy pastime.
Near me, I saw
a single cricket;
it was moving the grains of the hillside

this way and that way.
How great was its energy,
how humble its effort.
Let us hope

it will always be like this,
each of us going on
in our inexplicable ways
building the universe.

Imagine the Front Lawn where it pitches down to the side of Noxontown Pond, a hillside made of uncountable grains of sand and soil, and teeming with life. How can a single insect move “the grains of the hillside”? How outrageous even to attempt such a task! Life is full of big challenges, and it is easy sometimes to feel hopeless in the face of them. We can move only one grain at a time in what we sense—but perhaps cannot see—is an impossibly large universe in need of building up. In Mary Oliver’s poem, she shows us a model in nature, the work of a cricket: “how great was its energy, / how humble its effort.”

The juxtaposition of great energy and humble effort recalls to me the wisdom attributed in Pirkei Avot* to Rabbi Tarfon, “It is not incumbent upon you to complete the task, but neither are you free to absolve yourself from it.” We are called to radical work: to knit and heal and build constantly, without concerning ourselves with whether we might ever finish. In this, faith will be required, for it is in the words of Hebrews 11, “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” And so, we keep going.

The Oliver poem captures my attention as we head away from school for a break because it begins with the speaker sitting on a hillside to reflect—“to think about God”—which she calls “a worthy pastime.” Although the poem is about the unceasing, simple, and daunting work before us, the diligence that is required of us, it is equally about rest and reflection. I hope that you and your children and families and friends will find opportunities for the “worthy pastime” of contemplation during the break, reflecting with happy satisfaction on what we have done together, preparing to return to St. Andrew’s and the good work we share with good people, energized and humble. More than anything, enjoy having them at home and circling them with love and warmth.

* Part of the Mishnah, Pirkei Avot is a book of wisdom and ethical principles gathered in the third century from Jewish Rabbis.