Is Everything Going to Be Okay?

What a journey we have traveled since March 2020.

As we reflect on the past two tumultuous years, it is natural to ask ourselves: What did we learn? How did it change us? And perhaps most importantly, how have we tried to ensure that the events of the past two years did not change what is most important to us about St. Albans?

It is important to celebrate all we have achieved during this academic year, to claim the well-deserved sense of satisfaction in seeing our boys restored to their school and their former routines, to celebrate all that remains good and noble about St. Albans. And it is also important to recognize that, even as this process of restoration and renormalization continues to unfold, we are educating boys at an unsettled and vexing moment—a moment when the world isn’t what we thought it was, when our confidence has been shaken, when we hold onto optimism but with less confidence than we used to, with more of a fragile, doubt-filled faith.

From divisions over covid-19 to cancel culture, from climate change to critical race theory, through instability and incivility, rancor and recriminations, virtue signaling and new covid variants, domestic and international crises, these have not been easy times.
 

Often in the past two years, families have reached out to me asking what the school is doing to help our students engage with these challenging topics. Some want to know what the school is doing to protect and insulate our boys from tendencies in the world that they worry about. Others just want to know if their son is going to be okay. And this is perhaps the question that most captures the spirit of our times: Is everything going to be okay? 

At the opening Cathedral service, in chapel, at lunch, at alumni receptions, I’ve proposed that our work this year, as a school, is to restore and heal, to reestablish connections, to reclaim our traditions and restore the rhythm and rituals of community.

During my tenure at St. Albans, I have also argued that the school needs to find access points to engage with the great questions of our time. The motto of St. Albans—For Church and For Country— reminds us that we are called to be an outward-facing institution devoted to ideals larger than ourselves. As a school located beside the Washington National Cathedral and overlooking the nation’s capital, we all sense we are part of something larger—something that places moral, civic, and spiritual obligations upon us.

I am proud of the way we live these ideals. And I am excited about the commitments in our strategic plan to do more with civics education, social service, and the enhancement of our community life—to imagine new programs and new opportunities for our boys.

But I have gradually come to see that there is something deeper and more profound at work at St. Albans that distinguishes us, that is ultimately at the heart of what makes this place so special, and that makes me feel so confident, so optimistic about our future. It is why St. Albans continues to resonate in the lives of our alums and our boys as the most formative and powerful experience in their lives.

The twentieth-century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once observed that we may be able to compel others “to maintain certain minimum standards by stressing duty, but the highest moral and spiritual achievements depend not upon a push but upon a pull.”

And so it has always been at St. Albans, where the moral and intellectual life we want our students to embody finds its truest and most meaningful expression less through codes of rules and formal programs than when students are drawn or “pulled” to that life by the example that we as adults set for them, by the way we make living a life of character, conscience, and integrity attractive to them.

Creating new programs and policies—and insisting that our boys take seriously certain fundamental questions and concerns—is an essential function of every school community. And at times, every school must “push” students to confront challenging issues, to think about difficult topics, and to hold moral insights for them they are not yet ready to hold for themselves.

But when we are at our best, when we find what is truly most authentic about St. Albans, we are not telling students what to think or over-rotating in response to the latest crisis of the moment. Instead, we are modeling for them—in community, in togetherness, and through our traditions—lives of continual thinking and questioning, lives of conscience and purpose, lives of thoughtful engagement.

As the Rev. Dan Heischman, director of the National Association of Episcopal Schools (and former head of our Upper School), observes: “Our standards, our rules, our expectations of students make no sense apart from the examples we set for them ... The heart of the process is the way in which teachers—through their visible, accessible example of being compassionate and honorable people—offer something to students that makes the moral path alluring,” prompting students to say, “I want to be part of that moral life.”

All that we want for our boys—integrity, curiosity, engagement, compassion, leadership—flourishes when it arises out of that attraction. Everything we do at St. Albans rests ultimately on that inspiring vision of education, created by our encounter with examples of moral and intellectual excellence that inspire and transform us, that earn our admiration, and that we then seek to make our own. We make our ideals not just intelligible to students, but inspiring and compelling to them through the examples that we set, the traditions we cultivate, and the vision of community we call ourselves to uphold.

This, I have come to believe, is the magic of what happens in our sacred spaces, in our togetherness: the turning of the souls of our boys in the direction of the good, the true, and the beautiful, not through indoctrination or compulsion, not through enforced orthodoxy, but by providing a space and a set of rituals that enable our boys to enter into lives of moral, spiritual, and intellectual depth in authentically human ways. By surrounding them with rituals of meaning and togetherness—and gifted teachers who inspire in students the desire to lead lives of purpose, conscience, character, and curiosity.
  

Our boys are watching us, looking to us as examples, watching how we respond to the great disruptions of our time: the grace and equanimity we are able to summon, the largeness of heart and generosity of spirit with which we live, the way we model for them how to live with conscience and courage during uncertain times. It is by living in this way, more than anything we say, that we give our boys the reassurance that everything will indeed be okay: that there are enduring values and enduring truths worth fighting for, that there are always models of human excellence worth striving for, even in our most challenging moments