- Head of School's Blog
Dear Families, This is the first full week of classes at St. Andrew’s, and your children are incredible! I will write to you on intermittent Fridays with updates or reflections, and this is the year’s first such message. Sometimes I will share tidbits that I hope will help you have more substantive phone conversation with your children on the weekend—a good time to catch up and find out how they are doing. This week, I’ll give you a sneak preview of what this coming Sunday holds. We will worship at Old St. Anne’s, the 18th-century Episcopal parish church (that still has no electricity or running water) where St. Andrew’s students worshipped on Sunday from 1930 until our present chapel was built in 1936. I always think of this service as marking the end of the beginning of the year. We return to Old St. Anne’s each May, a service that marks the beginning of the end of the year. It is a nice symmetry in the calendar that hearkens to the earliest days of the school’s existence. The homilist for this coming Sunday—me!—appreciated that the Episcopal lectionary calendar (the regular rotation of scriptures read in services throughout each liturgical year) provided good fodder for starting the school year! In the assigned passage from Proverbs, Solomon reflects on our human tendency to ignore Wisdom at our peril, even though she is shouting at us in the streets. And the text from James reminds us how powerful we are as humans, especially in our speech, which in many ways projects and propels a central contradiction of human nature—our ability to do great good and great evil. Spoiler alert for families: I will propose to the students that the path to Wisdom lies through three wise practices suggested in our texts—listening, curiosity, and patience. Perhaps you can ask them, when you speak, which of these three presents the biggest challenge for them. For me, it’s definitely patience! As the texts also remind us, we are not perfect, and so we practice. We are fortunate to be able to practice these things in this community, together. Thank you for making it possible. |
- Joy Blog