SPS TODAY
MICHAEL SEAMANS
Remembering Omar Brown SPS community mourns the loss of beloved humanities teacher. KRISTIN DUISBERG
W
hen Omar Brown was interviewing for a teach ing position at St. Paul’s School in 2019, he made a request of the Rev. Michael Spencer that the vice rector for faculty had never received from a job applicant. It was the end of the interview, and the two men were speaking by telephone. “He asked if he could pray with me,” Spencer recalls. It was the first glimpse Spencer would have of Brown’s deep faith, but it certainly wouldn’t be the last. Brown was hired to teach humanities and, very quickly, Spencer recalls, “his larger-than-life laugh echoed down the halls of the Schoolhouse, where he taught every day. That laughter and that joy were larger than life because they were fed by a deep reservoir of faith. When I needed to pray with someone, I would often go to Omar.”
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spshorae.com Alumni Horae | Issue II 21/22
During an employee Chapel service held to honor Brown, 31, following his death on Jan. 4 from a sudden illness, Rector Kathy Giles described him as someone who “pursued wisdom and understanding in the context of being a robust intellectual of deep and abiding curiosity and faith.” Recalling the many profound and wide-ranging conversations she and Brown had shared during his time at SPS, she added, “Perhaps so much of his good energy came, in part, from the ways he reconciled curiosity, intellect, and faith. These huge questions, the apparent and tragic flaws in our world, were not irresolvable conflicts for him. Rather, he seemed to me to be willing to regard what today seem truly like mysteries with an unblinking focus, an unwavering courage, and an open, questing, accepting heart.”
