FROM THE RECTOR
The Meaning of Mutuality KATHLEEN C. GILES
In April, our Alumni Association held its annual meeting in New York, and I offered the following remarks. They have been edited minimally for print.
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ongratulations to Max King ’62 on his receiving our Alumni Association Award; his life and career certainly are, as the award stipulates, “a credit to the School and its teachings.” Max’s recent biography of Fred Rogers is a beautiful, loving biography of Mr. Rogers, and Max illuminates this story in ways that make reading it a great pleasure. The book is about someone we think we already know and love and now come to deeply admire in new ways. Thank you, Max, and congratulations. Thank you all, and special thanks to our form directors, form agents, and volunteers. There is no such thing as “free time” in this life, and that you choose to spend your time strengthening our people and our School is indeed service to the greater good. And thank you to the many people who care about St. Paul’s School, who have raised their voices and invested time and energy in demanding that we grow and learn and become better for our students. Thank you for sharing your own experiences to make the experiences of current and future students safer, better, stronger. We appreciate you, and we are grateful to you. Yesterday, we brought most of the School community into the path of totality for the eclipse. It was quite a trip to Johnson, Vermont, where we were guests on a farm for the event. We took 10 buses up, with 410 students and 45 faculty members, and it was everything we had anticipated — a beautiful day, excitement and anticipation, a lot of fun, and then the eclipse: the diamond ring, the 360-degree sunset, the cold, the ring of fire, and then the 360-degree dawn. We then got back on our buses, but probably not quickly enough — three of the 10 buses made it back to campus in five hours, while the other seven got stuck behind an accident in Franconia Notch and returned at 1 a.m., with sleepy students and teachers happy to be back on the grounds, none the worse for wear, and much the better for the adventure. And then this morning, at our usual time, we had a terrific chapel talk given by an upperformer (who professed to still be a bit sleepy) who told us his story about being a Sikh and deciding to cut his hair. He told us less about his decision and more about how hard it was to share his decision with his family, especially with his beloved grandparents. His story was his own, but his themes are familiar across decades of student talks in the Chapel of
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Alumni Horae | Issue III 23/24
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The School today is strong, healthy, and full of energy as we work on that concept of mutuality, of connection with our neighbors, contributing to the learning and well-being of others and of the community.
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St. Peter and St. Paul: Look on challenges as opportunities to grow, not as roadblocks but as steppingstones, he advised us. Think about the metaphor of people as matchsticks — deceivingly simple — “our fire, once lit, serves not only to light our ways but as a beacon to others, to help them find their way.” And finally, he talked about the importance of being open to getting help and to giving help; to using one’s own insight and experience to make another’s way easier and better. You all heard some version of this talk during your time at school; it is the quintessential coming-of-age chapel talk in a community