StC News
Homily from Joint Opening Chapel Service
Held at St. Catherine's on August 23, 2018
Good morning.
I want to begin by thanking Dorothy White, Whitney Edwards, and Terrie Scheckelhoff for providing me with the opportunity to speak with you this morning. It is wonderful to see so many eager and familiar faces, colleagues in our shared calling of knowing and loving the girls and boys in our care. It is good to be with you and to welcome you to a new school year.
In thinking about my words for this morning, my mind drifted back to this same gathering, one year ago in the St. Christopher’s Chapel. I suspect I am not alone in remembering well Dorothy White’s powerful, inspirational, and, if my own memory serves me correctly, note-free homily about the power of love, reconciliation, and God’s grace in what was then the immediate aftermath of the horrific events of just one hour west of us in Charlottesville. As you might recall, Dorothy was moved that morning, she was moving to all of us, and we left the St. Christopher’s Chapel filled with inspiration but also consternation over her message and some of the tragic events she described from that sad day in Charlottesville.
I suspect that because of the poignancy of Dorothy’s remarks and again, because she spoke so eloquently from the heart and from the soul, I have had a famous political line running on a loop in my head over the past many days, as I prepared my remarks for this morning.
Who here remembers the famous quip from the 1988 vice-presidential debate between Lloyd Bentsen and Dan Quayle? In the debate, Dan Quayle, who was then younger than I am now, was attempting to quell concerns over his youth and relative inexperience by drawing comparison of himself to Jack Kennedy, who had a comparable level of political experience when he sought the presidency some 30 years prior. Quayle’s opponent, Bentsen, was ready for Quayle to make the comparison and when he did, Bentsen quickly rebutted, “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine.” And then came the gut punch, “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” The audience erupted in shouts and applause, and it was a painful moment for Quayle, though he did recover sufficiently to serve for four years as our vice president.
So, in my mind, thinking about these remarks today, I’ve been hearing the refrain, “Mason, I teach with Dorothy White. I know Dorothy White. Dorothy White is a friend of mine. Mason, you’re no Dorothy White.”
So, with that baseline now well established, let me do my best to share some thoughts with you this morning, from my typed notes, I am afraid.
Just over six weeks ago, my wife, Megan, and I were halfway around the world, on the Gold Coast of northeastern Australia, along with several colleagues from St. Christopher’s attending the International Boys’ Schools Coalition conference at the Southport School. It was a remarkable event, a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and I am truly grateful for the personal and professional opportunity afforded to me and my colleagues.
While we were in Australia, over a two-week period, the dramatic discovery of and rescue mission for a group of 12 young Thai soccer players and their coach played out in real-time before an international viewing audience. Like millions of people around the world, I became captivated by the story, following every suspenseful development in the quest to save those innocent lives.
Even now, nearly two months later, I cannot fully explain why I became so transfixed with this particular story. I have some ideas, but my fascination with these 12 boys and their coach, who I did not know then and likely never will know, still strikes me as a bit odd.
In general, I’m not much of a tv watcher. I keep up with news, as best I can, via traditional newspapers and magazines of different varieties, but I try to stay away from morning or evening news programs.
But for almost every day that I was in Australia—my time there happened to coincide almost evenly with the dates of the boys’ cave rescue—I was glued to CNN, the BBC, or any news channel I could find that was covering the unfolding saga. Perhaps, illogically, it was my relative proximity to the cave rescue that held my attention. In my head, I somehow felt closer to the incident, a mere 5,000 miles from Thailand and three time zones away, as opposed to the 9,000 miles away we are here and the eleven hours of time-zone difference. So, perhaps I empathized differently than if I were back in Richmond, literally half a world away. I am not so certain of this.
I do recall feeling quite conflicted, and critical of myself, when, at just the same time that matters were improving for those boys and their coach, reports were emerging from nearby Japan of catastrophic mudslides in the western part of the country that were killing dozens of innocent victims. In the end, those mudslides and flooding killed 155 souls, the worst flooding-related disaster to hit that country in over 30 years.
The events in Japan, while making international news, garnered nowhere near the same amount of attention from me or media coverage as the Thai cave rescue involving 13 souls. Why, I wondered then, and still wonder now?
There are some plausible reasons, of course—namely, the suspense, drama, and elements of the unknown involved in that tense cave rescue. The fact that media were able to eventually access the boys and their coach and convey photos and videos of the boys attempting to survive made the whole incident both surreal and quite real at the same time—Seeing their looks of exhaustion, fear, yet remarkable resolve surely drew us all closer to those boys.
As an educator, as a parent, really, as a human being, I have to conclude that we were all so drawn to this story because, unlike the mudslides or most other calamities of our time, this event was almost completely about children. Sweet, scared, brave, and innocent children. And one scared, brave, and guilt-stricken coach.
God bless that poor coach, right? Who among us, as leaders of young people, has not at some point in their career misled the very young people we are charged to nurture and protect? I ask that question both in a literal sense as in misleading them on a field trip, an off-site athletic event, or an overnight educational experience, but also in a figurative sense, thinking about the ways we lead young people in our classrooms, in discussions, in speaking to them or regarding them in a way that may be well intentioned, as surely this coach was, but just as surely had adverse outcomes. The unintended consequences of our labors—our efforts to bring out the best in these students—is an occupational hazard of teaching. It comes with the territory and is a heavy weight and sacred responsibility for all of us.
But that is not how I choose to recall and consider the events spanning from June 23 up to July 10, when every last boy and their coach was successfully rescued and brought to emergency care and recovery—a modern-day miracle by even the most sober of observers. Was it a miracle? I think so, but not in the sense of achieving an odds-defying physical improbability based on factors such as oxygen levels, marine navigation, and human endurance.
Rather, I think of it as a miracle just as the ancient Latin speakers would have us think of the term, which comes from the Latin “miraculum,” meaning, “an object of wonder.”
An “object of wonder”—a fitting phrase to describe any child at any moment of development. I think of it as equally fitting for the 4 and 5 year-olds that many of you care for, with their wide eyes and open hearts, as well as for the slightly more edgy and superficially jaded 16- and 17-year-olds that are also in our care. Objects of wonder, miracles, each and every one.
In today’s reading from the Gospel According to Matthew, we heard that, “whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.”
In the end, I believe that the Thai cave rescue was so compelling to me and to millions of others because it was a story of childish innocence, of humanity and the international community working together toward a common and noble goal—to save children’s lives, to give new life to them—and because it reminded all of us of the beauty, wonder, and miraculous capacity inherent in every child, every child of God. And every one of us, especially all of us, is connected to every one of those children in Thailand and to the children soon to grace our hallways in ways that we may not full comprehend at the very moments in which we are connecting with them.
And so here we find ourselves, ready to start our own new year, our own new round of grades and games and schedules and awards. We will all, soon enough, focus on the rhythm and routine of our days and weeks. We will celebrate, when it is time to do so, we will grieve over suffering and setbacks, we will grow anxious and elated and frustrated and inspired, often in the same day.
But through it all, let us not lose sight of the wonder, the very miracle of our lives and of the children in our care, of our sacred and finite time together. It is precious, and it is ours alone to hold and to cherish. Amen.
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