Personae | People of Note
Parents enjoy the fall foliage on Parents Weekend. Below: Campus colors in the fall.
64 | Quarterly Fall 2009
Perhaps so, but if you read the original Latin carefully, you will see that it is talking instead about how to shirk a servant’s duties. “Serve God, and your days of service will be over,” it says. In other words, service is bad and rule is good. Even Augustine had his doubts, asking, “What is our motive in public service? Can our hopes in the court rise higher than to be friends of the emperor?”6 At best, service starts with a blank slate, and any black marks or prizes it receives will depend on who is serving whom, and why. We Grotonians aspire to public service—an ideal that is older than Latin itself—but we should be wary of it at the same time. Public servants are rulers, too, and their virtue arrives the same way all of ours does: by deed, not by affiliation. The purpose of these arguments, if I have not made it clear enough, is to get us to pause for a minute and consider our motives. Groton is a religious school, meaning religion underpins what it teaches. On Prize Day, Sixth Formers exit the Circle as religious thinkers in some way. But to think religiously means, first of all, to think: for yourself, about the meaning and purpose of what you do, about what the world is made of and where it came from, and what it says about how you should live your short life in the here and now. Religion is related to philosophy: the accumulation and synthesis of knowledge into a pattern, where the pattern reveals how to live. For godliness to appear, it takes an informed and conscious act, not a sleepwalk. Like that young African philosopher 16 centuries ago, we must ask questions, then mark everything as knownunknown, good-bad, and right-wrong. The answers will tell us our next move. Mr. Gula, another of my Greek teachers, might say that we should not assume! anything about the motto (I can see him grinding on the blackboard with his chalk, glaring from under those eyebrows, the grin spreading across his face as he declines the verb, “When you assume ... you make an ass out of u and me!”). The philosophy of the herd does not count as thought. Conviction does not spring from a crowd, but from the self. Leadership, which Groton expends so much effort to teach, is singular.7 Fittingly, the question begged by the motto is for each of us to answer, one at a time—not, “What is service?” but, “Who is God?” The Rector left God out, but I think he did that to draw attention to another nearby word in the Prayer Book: service. Yes, public service was his circular answer to the question, and it has been Groton’s standard since 1884. But that does not relieve us of our obligation to define the term, check that it is as godly today as it was back then, and if it isn’t, do something about it.