(1 Corinthians 12:4-13,25-26)

 

St. Albans is a school rich in tradition, where we take great pride in the accumulated wisdom of the past. Much of this wisdom is expressed in iconic phrases that are as much a part of the texture of our shared life as the Little Sanctuary and the Refectory.

 

Eight years ago, when I was beginning my tenure as Headmaster, I shared some thoughts about the inspiring words from former Headmaster Canon Martin to “choose the hard right over the easy wrong,” which made a deep impression on me as someone new to the community and which continues to resonate in so much of what we aspire to be at this school.

 

Here I’d like to say a bit about another phrase we often repeat at St. Albans, a phrase that captures something of enduring importance about our mission and values.

 

We pride ourselves on being a school of excellence where we have the privilege of teaching and coaching the best and brightest young men from the D.C. area and beyond. When a young man achieves something of importance — whether an academic distinction, an athletic recognition, or an artistic triumph — we pause to acknowledge this, often in the form of a lunch announcement in the Refectory.

 

We do this because we believe in excellence — and we think it important to recognize excellence when it shows up in our midst. For those of you who have seen the movie The Incredibles, if we have a boy like Dash in our school — the young man who can run faster than everyone else — we encourage him to cultivate his gifts to the fullest potential. And we proudly honor the excellence he embodies.

 

But we recognize talent and excellence in a distinctive way. When we pause to honor a young man, we also do so with the phrase that has been part of the fabric of St. Albans for many years: “When one is honored, all are honored.”

 

Because we are gathered together today as a full school community from C Form to the Sixth Form — one of the few times of the year when we are able to do so — it is worth thinking about what it means when we utter this phrase: When “one” of us is honored for an act of excellence, “all” of us are honored.

 

A number of things this summer got me thinking about this theme of excellence and the inspiring, but often complex, relationship we have with it.

 

One was watching individual acts of greatness in the world of sports. I was especially moved by Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner in the thrilling championship matches of both the French Open and Wimbledon — watching their extraordinary athleticism and gifts, and even more, the grace and humility with which they carried themselves, in both victory and defeat.

 

Around this same time, I ran across a book about the idea of brilliance, greatness, and genius — about individuals endowed with extraordinary talent and how we as a culture regard them.

 

Not all of the book will resonate with readers, and as with many books, I found myself both agreeing and disagreeing with different parts of the author’s arguments.

 

While not the main focus of my homily today, one idea the book develops involves artificial intelligence, arguing that our attachment to the idea of individual genius and greatness, while not without its challenges, may well be a helpful antidote to some of our fears about AI. Although a powerful technology, AI is ultimately a “prediction machine,” only able at this point to work from existing models and frameworks; what it cannot yet do is what the great works of human creativity have always done: think in unpredictable ways beyond existing frameworks in acts of genuine originality (from The Genius Myth, by Helen Lewis, pages 282-283).

 

But the part of the book that most spoke to me — and that I hope will have some resonance for us as we begin the new school year — is connecting the idea of genius and human excellence to the idea of the divine, something we inevitably think about as we gather here in the National Cathedral. As the author explains:

 

“We want our lives to have a mythic dimension …We all hunger to experience the transcendent, the extraordinary, the inexplicable. And that is what geniuses offer us … people who somehow burn a little more brightly than those around them” (The Genius Myth, pages 283, 3-4).

 

Encountering brilliance and excellence fills us with wonder and admiration while contemplating Carlos Alacaraz’s explosive grace on the tennis court, Van Gogh’s paintings, the “words Shakespeare gifted us,” or Mozart’s music (The Genius Myth, page 4).

 

Great acts of human achievement put us in the presence of things larger than ourselves. It is our gift at St. Albans to be surrounded by so many young men who are already on their path to an excellence that inspires our awe and gratitude.

If one looks at the world beyond our school, however, there is a tendency in an age of increasing individualism and secularism to treat those possessing great talents as singular bearers of a rare inscrutable greatness, as individual objects of worship, rather than thinking about the larger spiritual context out of which these great achievements emerge.

 

Here, as in so many other areas, St. Albans is a proudly counter-cultural institution.

 

When we honor individual acts of greatness, we remind ourselves that “when one is honored, all are honored.”

 

This is not the soft egalitarianism that replaces the great heights of human achievement with a leveling mediocrity.

 

No, there is deep spiritual wisdom in this phrase, this insistence that there is always something larger and more profound at work in the realm of human greatness than the individual alone.

 

When prior cultures and historical eras encountered a great work of art or act of human physical grace, they tended to see it, as we do at St. Albans, as the product of something larger — as spiritual forces and divine gifts expressing themselves through the individual, who for a brief moment shines with a radiance that reminds us of our dependence on larger things: on God, on one another, on community.

 

Nowhere was this wisdom expressed more beautifully than in the Christian tradition, as captured by today’s reading from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, which — as it turns out — is the inspiration for our iconic St. Albans phrase: “When one is honored, all are honored.”   

 

Paul begins by observing that there are many different gifts possessed by humans. But we must never forget that they are gifts, things given to us by God for the good of all.

 

The Holy Spirit works in each person in one way or another for the good of all:

 

To one there is given through the Spirit a message of wisdom, to another a message of knowledge by means of the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by that one Spirit, to another miraculous powers, to another prophecy … All these are the work of one and the same Spirit, and he distributes them to each one, just as he determines.

(1 Corinthians 12:8-11)

 

Paul, I think, is inviting us to look at two things there: the source of humans’ gifts and the purpose of these gifts.

 

The source is something larger than ourselves: these gifts are not entirely our own but are reflections of God’s grace upon us.

 

And God’s grace works through us for a special purpose: different talents and excellences are seeded by God throughout creation not for our own individual glorification but for the good of all. Each of us is endowed by God with gifts that work together — in an interdependent way — with the gifts God gives to others, all for the purpose of building a community where our many disparate gifts come together, according to God’s purposes, for the good of all.

 

Paul compares this to the many parts of the human body – eyes, ears, hands – all working together to form a spiritual “body”:

 

Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body … so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.

(1 Corinthians 12:12-13,25-26)

 

It is in this deep spiritual sense that “when one is honored, all are honored.” Acknowledging one person’s gifts invites us to consider how that gift reflects a larger spiritual design, a gift that comes from a source beyond ourselves and exists to honor and serve a greater purpose larger than ourselves.

 

The other interesting thing about the gifts God gives us is that while some of them are entrusted to us for a lifetime, others are with us only for a brief time. The especially luminous moments in our lives sometimes have a singular quality that grace us for a brief transcendent moment but then recede. Great artists and athletes peak. The brilliance of a writer or public figure burns brightly, as if illuminated by a divine spark that we wish could last forever but that we somehow know cannot endure. It was there to meet some moment, to serve God’s purposes at just that time, to give meaning to it in a special way. But it was not meant by God to be our possession forever.

 

This does not mean we should be opposed to celebrating talent or ambition. But we should be humble in its presence, holding it lightly. And always remembering that those special, radiant moments in our lives when all things seem possible are not entirely of our own making. As the book I read this summer concludes, they reflect “moments of alchemy, brief and serendipitous collisions, the beautiful texture of interwoven lives” (The Genius Myth, page 284).

 

Or, as another modern Christian writer put it in a review of the book:

 

Genius is divine and inexplicable and outside our control — inspiration strikes; the pieces fall into place. It’s one person’s possession only for a time, a temporary gift rather than a lifelong identity, an expression of God’s power and beauty and creativity. As onlookers [and as possessors of these temporary gifts], we can only be grateful . . . [The question is] where we direct our worship, [our gratitude].

(Christianity Today, “Geniuses Have Divine Gifts, Even When They’re Insufferable,”

by Kate Lucky, June 17, 2025)

 

Every time we at St. Albans say the words “When one is honored, all are honored,” it is a way of getting our gratitude oriented in the right direction: a gratitude that begins with the recognition of individual gifts, but then moves upwards and outwards, in humility, to recognize the larger spiritual sources of these gifts, the mystery of why they are entrusted to us, sometimes only for a brief time, and the larger purposes these gifts are meant to serve — a sign of God working through us for the good of all, opening a path that brings God’s will into our lives.

 

With that, I wish you a blessed school year, one filled with great achievements, but also a year in which, I hope, your hearts and lives become filled with grace and gratitude, with the special sense of meaning and purpose that arises when we pause to remember our connection to one another and to larger things.