Good morning.

 

In my office, just behind my desk, there is a framed photo collage of me from my boyhood days. The collage was presented to me upon my installation as St. Christopher’s Head of School last fall. It was a kind gift, orchestrated by Reverend Edwards and others who helped to plan the service, and I appreciate it very much. I look at it from time to time, as it serves its purpose—which is to remind me of what it is like to be a boy, filled with wonder and promise, but also with foibles and vulnerabilities.

 

My favorite part of the collage, however, is not the photos of me from my youth. It is the inscription on the bottom of the frame, attributable to St. Christopher’s founder and our first Headmaster Dr. Churchill Gibson Chamberlayne. The inscription reads as follows, “If we do faithfully, day by day, the small things, the time will come when greater things are entrusted to our care.”

 

You all have heard me reference, both in this space and outside of it, my belief in the importance of little things, the minutiae of life, which, while seemingly trivial in isolation or when compared to loftier matters, do take on considerable import in accumulated form and when repeated over time. The little things add up, gentlemen, and they form habits of mind and body that can shape behavior, character, and outcomes.

 

I think you know this, and I do not intend to lecture you this morning, so I will not belabor that point any further.

 

Let’s move from 1916, when Dr. Chamberlayne wrote those words, to 1998. I was preparing to graduate from college, and my job search was in full swing. I had committed to finding a teaching job somewhere and was casting a wide net up and down the East Coast.

 

It was in the spring sometime, April or May, and I was travelling from Virginia to Philadelphia, to attend a career fair for aspiring teachers. I was not travelling alone but with a friend of mine from Richmond; he, too, was looking for a teaching position, so we decided to attend the conference and travel together.

 

I don’t remember the context of the exact moment when I embarrassed myself, and I’m not sure it really matters. What I do remember is my uttering, largely unprovoked, a prejudiced statement that cast aspersions, spoke ill, upon a group of people. It was a foolish statement, an ignorant and hurtful one, and I regretted saying it as soon as the words came from my mouth. Still, I assumed my friend would let the statement go, perhaps ease any tension with a nervous chuckle, and we would move on.

 

He did not do that. He did the opposite. He called me on my ignorant and prejudiced statement—he corrected me, with firm kindness, and told me there was a better way to express myself. I was embarrassed, and he was right. In that moment, I admired him for having the courage to call me out and name my foolishness for what it was. I wished that I had more of that courage myself.

 

Let’s move ahead 20 years to the present day. It is common these days to remark upon our present epoch as “unique,” “unprecedented,” and “historic.” In many ways, our present times are all of those things—the ubiquitous presence of technology and the hyper-intense connectivity in our lives; toxic political rhetoric that has local and national leaders talking to or about each other rather than with each other; a sense of civic discord that has individuals of disparate racial, geographic, socioeconomic, and even gender identities seemingly at odds with one another like never before. Indeed, 2018 is a challenging time in which to live, to teach, to learn, to graduate from high school.

 

This past weekend I spent a good bit of time with St. Christopher’s alumni who were back on campus for reunion events. In particular, I spent time with gentlemen celebrating the 50^th anniversary of their graduation from this school—members of the Class of 1968.

 

1968—now that was a remarkable year in which to teach and to learn and to graduate from high school. Consider just a few developments from that period—the Viet Nam War was raging, with young men out of high school being drafted by the thousands for military service; in April of 1968 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and just two months later, in June, Bobby Kennedy, brother of the assassinated President John F. Kennedy and a presidential hopeful himself, was killed by assassination. Protests swept the nation and the globe, on college campuses, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and at the summer Olympics in Mexico City.

But 1968, while remarkable, does not stand alone as a uniquely disruptive period. Let’s turn back the clock another 50 years, back to Dr. Chamberlayne’s time, to 1918, 100 years ago. St. Christopher’s wasn’t St. Christopher’s yet—We were still the Chamberlayne School; World War One was raging through most of that year, with over 15 million deaths recorded worldwide from the conflict; Communist Revolution was overtaking Russia, setting the stage for Cold War geopolitics for the century to come; and the so-called Spanish flu was sweeping the world, infecting nearly one out of every three humans on the planet, approximately 500 million people, and killing millions more than the 15 million who died from the Great War taking place simultaneously.

 

Over a thousand Richmonders, nearly 1% of the city’s population at the time, died from the virus, including St. Christopher’s own Jack Williams, Class of 1919, who died from the flu just days after sneaking out of his home to volunteer at John Marshall High School, which had been converted to a hospital to care for the thousands of infected patients in the city.

 

So, yes, we have seen tumultuous periods in this country, not just in 2018, but in 1968, 1918, and many other periods in between. People then were not paralyzed by the scope of the challenges beyond their homes or schools, and we should not be paralyzed now.

 

“How does one eat an elephant?” goes a common adage. The answer, of course, is “One bite at a time.”

 

Small things, done faithfully, day by day, while serving as our “brother’s keeper,” to quote our scripture passage from this morning.

If we were to select a singular global or national set of developments from the 2017-2018 academic year, we have several options from which to choose—international conflict in Syria; U.S. diplomatic tensions with China and Russia; continued gun violence in the U.S.; race-based discord worldwide; a controversial U.S. president under intense media and legal scrutiny. I could go on.

 

I think we would be remiss, however, if we did not mention the avalanche of accusations and convictions that have taken place this academic year regarding men who have mistreated women in some form, physically or emotionally, either in the workplace or in a personal sphere.

 

Male misconduct to women is not a new phenomenon, of course, but the scale of allegations and revelations, perhaps starting with claims made against Hollywood film mogul Harvey Weinstein this fall and continuing in rapid succession through this winter and spring, is, frankly, staggering, even numbing in scope. It seems that with each passing week there has been a new revelation of male misbehavior, typically from a man holding significant power over others. Depending on your point of view, these developments can be viewed as inspirational—Finally, sexual misconduct in the workplace, especially, is getting proper attention and accountability—or deflating—As men, can we not do better than the countless examples of prominent male leaders abusing their positions of power in highly inappropriate ways? That question, of course, is rhetorical—the answer being, emphatically, we can and must do better.

 

Here is a question that I suggest is worthy of our pondering, even in these final few weeks of school, “What is our responsibility, as an all-boys school inculcating a values-based education to nearly 1,000 young men, in response to revelations of waves of misconduct?”

 

There is not time in this forum to fully address such a question, and I promised you this would not be a lecture, so I will simply state that I believe St. Christopher’s, and institutions like ours focused on male learning, do have a special responsibility to address topics of male mistreatment of women, broadly, and of sexual harassment and violence, specifically.

 

That is a daunting task, so daunting, perhaps, that we don’t know where to begin. You can imagine how I might approach it—with small, courageous action, perhaps seemingly modest, but done repeatedly, and with great effect over time.

 

To that end, I will suggest that the two best approaches we can take as an institution are as follows: First, to talk about the issue and provide education of what mistreatment of women looks like, in real form. This can and should include extreme examples of unhealthy male-female relationships, ones that can end in tragedy. Our seniors spent time on Friday learning about just this type of example through the powerful story of violence and loss that took place in Charlottesville eight years ago last week involving UVA student-athlete Yeardley Love.

 

Second, I believe that we, as a community of teachers and learners, can commit to not permitting the minor verbal transgressions, the subtle put-downs or off-handed comments that can contribute to an environment in which women can become objectified, demeaned, and disrespected, perhaps in ways we may not fully recognize or intend in the moment.

 

I will raise my hand to say that I now recognize, as a young man, that I was guilty of not always being a true gentleman, that I allowed, or even worse, took part in a social environment among some male friends in which women were spoken of in ways that were demeaning and offensive. While there were times in which I spoke up, as my friend in the car ride to Philadelphia did with me, I wish I had done it with greater courage and consistency.

 

That friend of mine, the one who called me on my inappropriate comments 20 years ago, is a St. Christopher’s man, by the way. We are friends to this day, and I respect him greatly. About 10 years ago, we were together, and I decided to recount that story with him and to thank him for what he did for me. He did not even remember the incident—and I was glad for that—but it allowed us to have a conversation about addressing inappropriate behavior—whether it’s prejudice, mistreatment of women, or general unkindness—at its root and before it metastasizes into something greater.

 

My hope is that each of you, like my St. Christopher’s friend, develops the courage and conviction to answer the question Cain posed to God in dramatic form, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” with a clear affirmation of our shared responsibility for the betterment of all humanity.

 

Amen.