Good morning and welcome. Thank you!

We’re so glad you’re here with us for Arts Weekend, one of the most vibrant and joyful traditions at St. Andrew’s. You’ll see your children sing, paint, perform, play, and dare—dare to express what they think and feel, sometimes in public, sometimes for the first time. And that is no small thing.

I also want to thank our staff, who have the campus looking so beautiful and who have organized everything that makes this weekend happen. We also have to express gratitude to our incredible faculty, and particularly our Arts Department, for everything they have done all year to prepare for this culmination of a year of work in the arts.

I usually speak on the topic of courage during this weekend. It’s a natural connection to all we do here, especially in the arts. This spring, I have found myself thinking about courage, how we teach it, how we learn it, how we cultivate it. And every time, I return to the question of fear. We have to think about the uses of fear in education because fear so often accompanies us when we pursue the truth. Fear is a question that lurks behind so many of our debates about schooling these days—about free expression, academic freedom, how we teach and what we teach, even how we engage the arts.

Fear is a powerful emotion. I learned a lot about human emotion earlier in my career, when I worked for Peter Salovey, Yale’s former president who is a scholar of human emotion. Peter was the first person who defined and measured the phenomenon we now call emotional intelligence. And the simple principle I learned from Peter, which initially blew my mind, is this: emotions are adaptive. Like our opposable thumbs or our outsize brains, humans evolved emotions because they help us survive. They are, in an existential sense, useful. So how does fear, as an emotion, help us?

I recently read an essay by the climber Alex Honnold—you may know him as the man who famously free soloed Half Dome. I remember so clearly watching the documentary about his triumph on Half Dome, a film entitled “Free Solo,” late one jet-lagged night, with Cyrillic subtitles, on a work trip in Vilnius. The movie perfectly conveys—repeatedly—the agony of Alex dangling by his fingers on a sheer face of rock, not entirely sure how to move to the next grip. Watching it, I thought I would never sleep through the night again. Hanging hundreds of feet above the ground with no rope, Honnald must not feel fear, right?

Wrong. In fact, in an essay he wrote in the New York Times last year, Honnald said he is not only afraid when he is rock climbing, but he was even more afraid delivering a TED Talk about it. “The key to managing fear,” he writes, “is to remember that it’s always driven by a kernel of truth. The problem is that all fear feels the same.” What he’s learned is how to distinguish between the panic of actual danger and the uncertainty of risk, between real threat and general anxiety. And how did he learn that? By practicing. Over and over again.

And that, of course, is exactly what we do here.

No, we’re not asking your children to scale cliffs—although, trust me, it sometimes feels like it. But we are offering them, again and again, the opportunity to practice facing their fears, and how to discern those that are truly life threatening from those that only feel like it. We practice facing our fears because Dr. King was right that most anything worth doing, anything that brings us forward, is going to require us to overcome fear, whether that’s fear of the unknown, fear of failure, fear of scarcity, or fear of ridicule. So here, if kids are in a singing group, they’re assigned new and challenging parts, where they miss the harmony in front of everyone and have to sing it again. They do not write papers or make drawings or paintings that only their teachers see—we ask students to present them in critiques and exhibitions, where their work is challenged by multiple teachers and peers. They try out for teams or seat race in boats where, yes, it can seem like everyone is watching—win or lose.

And we do this not to make students fearful—but to teach them how to meet their fears with courage. In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a sermon entitled “Mastery of Fear,” for which he began to make notes over five years earlier. (A lesson for procrastinators!) It was a topic he mulled over quite a bit—and it’s no surprise, given the terrifying realities of his life and his nonviolent movement. King’s sermon embraces the idea that there must be a good reason for fear—and he preached that Jesus’ admonishment to “be not afraid” does not mean we should eliminate all fear. In fact, he argued, we need fear. Without it, humanity could not survive, much less progress. King wrote that fear is our “alarm system”—it keeps us from stepping off cliffs and into traffic, yes—but it also motivates. “Every saving invention and every intellectual advance,” King says, “has behind it some dreaded thing we seek to avoid.”

In that sense, fear is a powerfully generative and adaptive force. And yet, like fire, King preached, “fear is a necessary servant—but a ruinous master.” The question is how do we use our fear for good? And the answer, of course, is courage. I think we often misunderstand courage—defining it as the absence of fear. But as all of you know, courage is what arises when we face fear directly and keep going. “The only way out is through,” as those who market athletic gear tell us, and it’s an idea any daring rock climber must know well.

Dr. King wrote that “fear is mastered by love. Fear is mastered by faith.” Reading these words, I thought immediately of our school’s motto, Faith and Learning. We tend to understand the learning part. That makes sense in school. The faith part is more complicated, but when we examine the importance of fear in a great education, we begin to understand the role of faith.

What does it mean to say that fear is mastered by faith? In his sermon, Dr. King wrote that “religion gives us the conviction that we are not alone in this vast and uncertain universe.” And I believe that. But I also think that faith, at St. Andrew’s, is broader and closer than that. Faith is the cultivated sense, developed as we live in community with one another, that we are seen, known, and loved. That when we face fear—on a stage, in a classroom, in the world—we do not face it alone. As an Episcopal school, we are constantly in conversations about faith. Our own faith, our collective faith: how to nurture it, how to challenge it.

Educator Angelo Patri said, “education is being afraid at the right time.” This sentence is copied in King’s handwritten notes for his sermon. Education is “being afraid at the right time.” And I would add—having the right people with you when you are afraid, as we all are at times. And that comes down to all of you and this community, the people who are with them when they are asked to face their fears, who help them know that they can and will persevere.

Courage is not summoned out of nowhere, or even from within us. It doesn’t come from sheer willpower or stoic resolve. Rather, courage is generated by faith—and also by love. Courage is a collective phenomenon. When we find the strength to face what frightens us, we are drawing on something outside ourselves: the experience of being loved, the knowledge that we are not alone, the conviction that our lives are held within something greater than ourselves. Faith inspires us to believe that there is meaning even in the unknown. Love means that someone will stand beside us in that unknown. In fact, this may be the very purpose of life. As George Eliot wrote in Book VIII of Middlemarch, “What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?”

Together, these great, collective powers of faith and love give rise to our courage—not the absence of fear, but the determination to keep going through it.

So, when you watch your children and their schoolmates perform this weekend, when you see them show their work, step onto the playing field, or walk out into the spotlight, know that they are not just displaying talent. They are demonstrating courage. Courage that they have developed and practiced in school, face-to-face, all year long. They are showing you what it means to face uncertainty with others, with faith and love. To set out to face fear and press on, knowing we are with them, and believe they will hold fast.

And in that, they are teaching us all. We are so very proud of them.

Thank you.