“I think the world is held together with stories,” novelist Colum McCann said last week in an interview with Gilbert Cruz on the Book Review podcast. “It is our inherent democracy that these stories are equal. They can go across borders, and different boundaries. Everybody has a story to tell, everybody actually wants to tell a story.” I have been thinking about what McCann, the author of many novels, including Transatlantic and his new book, Twist, said on the episode a lot over the past two weeks. As we celebrated Palm Sunday at the start of this week, held our school-wide Seder for Passover on Wednesday, and prepare for the Easter weekend ahead, the thought kept emerging because these holidays are all about stories. The Seder Haggadah we read during the meal is literally the story of the Jews’ escape from Egypt. The Triduum (Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter taken together), when complete, tells the miracle of God’s grace: dry bones become the glorious stuff of resurrection; love is more powerful than death.

The world is held together with stories. Our stories.

The Great Gatsby, which turned 100 this week and was celebrated by our III formers, who are reading it in class, is such a story. It has traveled across borders, boundaries, and even time, and for me, it never loses its freshness. This winter, I went to New York City to see the play “Gatz,” which is not so much based on The Great Gatsby as it just is The Great Gatsby—the members of the Elevator Repair Service theater company read the book, cover to cover, during the 8-hour performance. If you’ve read the book, you know it is by turns funny and lyrical, profound and trite; it can be vague but also gimlet-eyed; it is at moments a critique of, and at others a paean to, America.

The book is a puzzle, challenging us to try to solve it again and again. In fact, my sister gave me a 1000-piece Gatsby puzzle for my birthday, which I have just finished, a gorgeous metaphor for the book itself. I taught the book at St. Andrew’s as a faculty member, and what I learned about it in the classroom is that the puzzle is us—the reader and all of us. What was true of my IV formers in the early aughts is no doubt true of our III formers reading it today—the novel demands that we bring to it our own stories, our own judgments. The narrator, Nick Carraway, tells us he is in the process of writing a book about his neighbor Gatsby. This story-in-process, whose ink even after 100 years is never dry, presents us with a cast of characters—including so many delightful minor ones—that remind us of people we know, or the best or worst qualities of people we know. As all great literature—and art—does, it holds up a mirror and says, “Look! Really look.” And if we do this well, some of the pieces of our fragmented understanding join, if only for a moment.

And so, I come back to where we began: the world is held together by stories. St. Andrew’s School, this place, is so special because it brings people together. Each of us brings our whole self—our intellect, our assumptions, what we have read, seen, loved, learned, and questioned—to the table. Reading, talking, living, celebrating, and serving together we tell and retell our stories, moving across boundaries and borders even when we are sitting still, finding wisdom not at the end of our journey, but along the way in each other and our shared experience. Thank you for being part of it.