The first day of classes began with St. Albans students, faculty, and parents gathered in Washington National Cathedral for an Opening Day Service. As is custom, seniors and C Formers processed into the Cathedral together, providing a striking visual reminder of the transformation boys undergo in nine years at St. Albans.

In his homily, Headmaster Jason Robinson reflected on a popular phrase at St. Albans: “When one is honored, all are honored,” repeated whenever a student is acknowledged for exceptional achievement, from Prize Day to athletics banquets to lunch announcements.

 

Noted Headmaster Robinson: “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.