Shining Like the Sun
Everywhere I look at the moment I am seeing young people doing extraordinary things, leading with their hearts and allowing those same hearts to reveal their humanity, their compassion and their zest for life. Just as each of our individual hearts pumps life-giving blood through our bodies, so does the collective heart of our students pump life-giving energy through our School. It is a miraculous thing. I use the word miraculous advisedly, because as a Christian, I believe there is a spiritual source for our vitality as well as a physical one, another even more powerful influence that drives each beat of our heart. We all knew this when we were children. As the Persian poet Hafez writes:
Every child has known God,
Not the God of names,
Not the God of don’ts…
But the God who only knows four words…
“Come dance with me.”
It gets much harder to hold onto our faith as we grow older and learn to confuse self-reliance with strength. But it seems to me that as we lose our faith, we also lose that sense of our own luminosity, and when we lose this, we start doubting ourselves in ways that over time can begin to dissolve our sense of purpose. We start seeing things not as they are but rather as we are. The same poet, Hafez, writes:
“I wish I could show you,
When you are lonely or in darkness,
The Astonishing Light
Of your own Being.”
I am occasionally asked to give students a blessing during a chapel service. I try to vary them but one of my favourites is simply that I pray they may one day see themselves as God sees them. I pray the same thing for myself, because I believe that if we could just get the tiniest glimpse of how God sees us, then we would never feel inadequate, or lonely or lost again. We would rather understand what our life is for; we would take on the challenge of St. Francis of Assisi who said “Preach the gospel wherever you can and when all else fails, use words.”
Our students spread light and love throughout our School; some of them have been doing it for thirteen years. I read with longing the words of the great Catholic mystic Thomas Merton:
“As if the sorrows and stupidities of the world could overwhelm me now that I realize what we all are. I wish everyone could realize this. But there is no way of telling people they are all walking around shining like the sun.”
Our students wander around our school shining like the sun and we love them for it. Yes, there is a deal of sickness around at present; yes, we know many of our families our struggling with health, relationship, or financial issues; yes, we all have those days when we just seem a bit flat. When I’m having one of those flat days, I have discovered the perfect cure. I simply take myself down to the Junior School and wander through the entire school campus. (My PA has put ‘an ankle bracelet for tracking the Headmaster’ in her budget request every year for the past eight years!) Whether or not the sun is shining, I am invariably blinded by the light that shines from our young folk, warmed by their laughter, charmed by their friendly greetings, enriched by our conversations and ‘catch ups’ and restored by their innocent energy that hovers like a benevolent mist in our school. By the time I return to my office my bounce is restored. I wonder if you can imagine how grateful I am, how grateful all of us who work at All Saints are, for the gift of your beautiful children. Thank you.
Patrick S Wallas
Headmaster
