A warm welcome back to the 2024-25 school year.

 

What a gift it is to be back at school, as we begin the new year with one of our most beloved traditions, with our oldest boys, our Sixth Formers, walking into the Cathedral with our youngest Bulldogs, our C Formers. It is a sign of the love and care that defines our community, of the trust we are placing in our oldest boys as leaders of this school, and of the importance of our C Formers – their flourishing, their well-being – as they begin their journey with us. This tradition also shows the arc of a boy’s time at St. Albans and reminds us of our mission to know and love every boy entrusted to our care.

 

I hope your summers were restful and restorative, filled with the pleasures of good friends and good books, time with family and time for oneself. Perhaps some time watching the Olympics, enjoying summer camp, preparing for fall sports season, and thinking about your goals and aspirations for the upcoming year.

 

A highlight of the summer for me was the opportunity to travel to London with my family and several colleagues to attend the annual conference of the International Boys School Coalition.

 

On the flight over, I read a wonderful book. It was a religious and literary interpretation of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, by the celebrated author, Marilynne Robinson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her 2004 novel, Gilead. Her new book Reading Genesis, which I highly recommend, explores the themes of agency, choice, and freedom – and how all of this unfolds as part of God’s covenantal plan – through the complex lives and characters we meet on the pages of Genesis.

 

I thought to myself that there might be something in this book about beginnings that would speak to us as we mark the beginning of a new school year. So I wrote a homily inspired by the book that I was planning to give today.

 

But several members of our faculty suggested I instead share with you a story that I told them last week as we were gathered for opening faculty and staff meetings – a story that, I hope, brings these themes of agency, choice, and freedom more vividly and meaningfully to life.

 

The story is one I encountered while at the International Boys School Coalition Conference this past summer. The conference was hosted this year by Harrow School, about 20 miles north of central London, one of the oldest boys schools in the world, founded in 1572 under a royal charter granted by Queen Elizabeth I.

 

Famous Old Harrovians, known as the “Giants of Old,” have their portraits displayed in a stunning room on Harrow’s campus modeled on the Globe Theater in London. Harrow’s graduates include statesmen such as Peel, Palmerston, Nehru (the first Prime Minister of India) and King Hussein of Jordan; and celebrated writers such as Byron, Sheridan, Trollope and Richard Curtis.

 

The school’s most famous graduate is Winston Churchill. During WWII, students at Harrow would often invite Churchill back to campus to sing for him, to lift his spirits during the darkest and most difficult moments of the war. And on one such occasion, on October 29, 1941, Churchill — after the boys finished singing to him – walked on stage and delivered his famous speech: “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never – in nothing, great or small, large or petty – never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.” Not a bad school assembly, I should say.

 

I also learned about another Harrow graduate while there, and it is his story I would like to share today.

 

In the early 1800s, a young man named Anthony Ashley Cooper arrived as a student at Harrow. He was from an affluent but somewhat complicated family. And he made his way about Harrow in his early years there, finding both success and setbacks, a somewhat unhappy child because of the austerity of his family upbringing, not entirely sure what he would do with his future life.

 

Then one day, as he would later recount, he saw something that forever changed his life.

 

He described witnessing at the foot of Harrow Hill a child pauper’s funeral. It was a grim Dickensian scene, with the poor child’s body in a crudely made coffin, as drunken pallbearers were stumbling about, singing lewd songs, and dropping the coffin repeatedly in ways that dishonored the child’s memory, carrying his unmourned body to its squalid final resting place.

 

Anthony Cooper, then 14 years old, described witnessing this with a sense of shame and pathos – moved by the degradation and indignity being visited upon this poor child’s body. Something changed in him that day – something that would change his future life and the entire course of the British people.

 

Cooper, after graduating from Harrow and Oxford, became a member of Parliament in 1826, bearing the title 7th Earl of Shaftesbury. In that role, still afflicted by the child pauper’s funeral he witnessed when a young boy at Harrow School, and feeling a calling from God to make a difference in the lives of others, he became one of the great moral and social reformers of his age, inspiring a generation of younger members of Britain’s Tory Party to address the human costs of the Industrial Revolution – by passing factory reform laws, anti-poverty measures, and child protection laws, and fighting to ensure that every child was afforded a measure of dignity reflecting their moral standing as a child of God, a being of infinite worth.

 

Through his legislative and philanthropic efforts, he enabled more than 300,000 indigent children in Britain to be educated for free and in countless ways devoted his life to the amelioration of suffering and degradation of those less fortunate. When he died in 1885, his funeral was held in Westminster Abbey, and thousands of London’s citizens, especially those from the city’s impoverished neighborhoods, filled the streets in pouring rain to pay tribute to this man who had made such a difference in their lives. And it all began when he was a student, witnessing one child’s suffering, as it filled his heart with the message from the Gospel of Matthew: “Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.”

 

On Harrow’s campus today, there is a plaque that inscribes this story into the history of Harrow School:

 

“Near this spot, Anthony Ashley Cooper, afterwards the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, while yet a boy in Harrow School, saw with shame and indignation the child pauper’s funeral, which helped to awaken his lifelong devotion to the service of the poor and oppressed. Blessed is he.”

 

Today, the influence of this story continues to shape Harrow School. Inspired by the heroic work of this Harrow graduate from the 1800s, Harrow has formed in his honor the Shaftesbury Enterprise, which is the school’s principal philanthropic and service program that exists to serve the local Harrow community and to improve the lives of local children who face significant barriers to their progress. Under the umbrella of the Shaftsbury Enterprise, Harrow School runs more than 150 outreach and service programs in the local community.

 

While we were attending the conference at Harrow, a group of local children whose lives have been touched by the work of the Shaftesbury Enterprise appeared on stage to share their stories and testimonies. It was one of the most moving moments of the entire conference, prompting one of Harrow’s student Prefects, who was introducing the students, to say: “That was one of the most beautiful and inspiring things I have ever seen. To see the joy in these children’s faces – and to know that Harrow has perhaps played some small part in the extraordinary people they are becoming. It leaves me humbled.”

 

The prefect then prepared to introduce the next speaker (a panel of retired heads of school) and said, with impeccable comic timing, “Now on to something less inspiring ...”

 

As we begin the new school year, this story is a reminder that we have the gift of working with our boys during one of the most formative periods of their lives. What happens during their time at St. Albans makes an imprint on them that continues to resonate for many years after they graduate. Among our students this year will be men like Anthony Cooper who, in ways we can only now imagine, will be transformed by something they see or experience during their time with us, moved by a text we are reading together in class, changed by a Chapel talk, stirred by a question we help them ask of themselves, who will then take that experience and do extraordinary things with it in their future lives.

 

In the reading for today, Paul is writing several decades after Jesus’ death, speaking to the young Christian community in Corinth. They are struggling with the issue that in some ways is at the heart of our human condition, our relationship with one another, and with God – the question of freedom – what to make of it, how to understand it, what it all means.

 

Like us as we begin a new school year, the Christian community in Corinth has questions. And they tend to frame these questions in ways that are still familiar to us: They want to know what they are free to do. What rights they have. What is permitted and not permitted. In the passage from Corinthians, it happened to be about food (they wanted to know about whether they could eat a certain type of food – whether the law permitted it). Given how prominently food figures in the life of a St. Albans boy, I’m sure the boys can relate (Are we allowed to go to Chick-fil-A or Chipotle during a free period? Or who has to refill the food at our lunch tables? Or can we eat in classrooms and hallways – Mr. Hansen can answer that!).

 

Or perhaps a question about the contours of what is and is not allowed under our new cell phone policy.

 

Or “What do the rules say about my freedom to really get into a debate with a classmate about the upcoming presidential election or a contested political matter. To really let someone have it – to own them – if I think their ideas are wrongheaded.”

 

Paul helps the community in Corinth – and by extension us – to see that they are asking an important question, but not the most important question.

 

Paul concedes that, in many areas of our life, we are indeed free to do many, many things. We have a right to do many things. And that matters.

 

But then he pushes us to ask a deeper question: Why does freedom ultimately matter to us and to God? Are the things we do with our freedom always good simply because they were done freely? Or is there another more important question we always need to ask: To what end am I exercising my freedom?

 

As Paul says, we are free to do many things, but not all things are helpful – not all things “build up” others – build up community – build up ourselves.  

 

In our school Philosophy Statement, we speak about cultivating boys who can exercise “agency” – which is a big word for boys who can be free, independent, autonomous.

 

But this is not agency for its own sake; it is agency in the service of a very particular moral end: Building agency in boys who will enter a world which will “benefit from their knowledge, compassion, and character.” Building boys like Anthony Ashley Cooper from Harrow School who will embrace their agency and do extraordinary things with the gift of their freedom and their education, using their knowledge, compassion, and character for the benefit of others. 

 

In life, asserting our freedom and our rights is important business. But the longer I have lived, the more I’ve come to see that the real work of being human tends to involve something more.

 

It’s in those moments where the question is not about whether we are free to do something, but about what we are going to do with the freedom that we have. Do we use our freedom (to think, speak, act) to build others up? To build trust? To show grace and generosity of spirit? Or do we use our freedom in ways that make it harder for these virtues and values to take root, in our own lives and the lives of others?

 

The lesson of the Bible – including Paul’s words to the Corinthians – and of our own lived experience – is that freedom is a complicated business. If imperfectly understood, if not connected to a higher moral source that gives it meaning and purpose, it can drive us further from the things that most matter – from God, from one another, from the spiritual and moral depths we possess.

 

But God made us free for a reason – and that means our freedom is essential to our humanness – and is the place where God takes up a dwelling place in our lives. God’s grace enters our hearts as a question: What are you going to do with this gift of freedom I have given you? It is an invitation to begin walking with God, however haltingly, towards the path of knowledge, compassion, and character, the path of love, mercy, and justice.

 

With that, I wish you a blessed year, one filled with great discoveries, friendships,

moments of joy and brotherhood, but also a year in which, I hope, your lives and your hearts grow full with the great question at the heart of this school and of God’s covenant with us:

 

What will you do with the gift of your education, your freedom, your humanity?

 

We have faith in all of you to answer this question, this call, in ways that make St. Albans worthy of its highest ideals, a source of light and hope in a broken world, but a world we insist remains filled with God’s promises and the enduring possibilities of our mission, if we have the courage to seek them.

 

May God be with you.