Opening of Winter Term Hall Address Headmaster Kerry P. Brennan January 3, 2019 HUMILITY and ITS ESSENTIAL EXPRESSIONS a Traditi
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Opening of Winter Term Hall Address Headmaster Kerry P. Brennan January 3, 2019 HUMILITY AND ITS ESSENTIAL EXPRESSIONS A traditional part of New Year’s recognition, the flip of one calendar to another, is a personal accounting. What was that year past like? How did I fare as a person, as a family member, as a friend? Were there things I meant to do, ways I intended to be, that I failed to accomplish? What ended up being surprising about the year past? How had I responded to unexpected challenges or pleasures? How did I do in the relationship department? Did I make new friends? Did I deepen relationships with family members? Did I get in touch with long lost people who had at one time been important in my life? Did I find a soulmate? Perhaps more important than the totting up of what may or may not have happened in the year past is the opportunity to look forward, to imagine ourselves over the next twelve months. The god Janus—the god of beginnings, for whom January is named—represents that dual nature: the one that looks both in the rear view mirror and in the windshield. Today I want to speak a bit about our New Year’s resolutions and propose a few simple but difficult phrases that will conjure up all kinds of images of what might be. It seems to me that these phrases suggest a way of being that is at once beneficial to us individually, and in the depths of our souls, and they are essential to others whom we encounter regardless of the nature of those relationships. These are indeed fundamental assertions that resonate within faith traditions and in civic practice, ones that are evocative of what it means to be human, what it means to be in full community. They are obvious and they are essential. But they are also difficult and frequently sorely absent. “I’M SORRY.” The first is “I’m sorry.” How necessary this phrase is but how difficult it often is for us to utter it. Several times each day we are confronted with situations in which it would seem appropriate to say “I’m sorry.” Do we say it easily? What gets in the way if we seem not to be able to say it? Do we mean it or has it become another verbal reflex that simply rolls off the tongue in the hope of making a difficult situation better and moving on? There are plenty of situations in which we find ourselves expected to say something we really do not mean. Is it better to offer the expected response even if we don’t mean it? Over the break I had occasion to see a four-year-old opening Christmas presents. You may have experienced that phenomenon when you have worked especially hard to find just the right present for somebody, and the gift falls flat. This little boy opened the box with gleeful expectation and then he pulled out a strange, holiday sweater. His parents were oohing and aahing, and he said, “I really don’t like it. It’s not very pretty.” The rest of us had all we could do to contain our laughter. But the dad said, “Oh honey, of course you like it. Aunt Mary picked it out just for you.” He replied, “No I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.” As we grow older we learn to mitigate our true feelings in order to not hurt the feelings of others. But there remains a bit of an ethical tension when one doesn’t feel the sentiment that is required to be expressed. One of my own examples of this occurred with the phrase “I’m sorry.” As we often did, my next-door-neighbors and I were playing in the snow in the alleyway between our houses with the ultimate goal of designing and building a world class snow fort. We were about eight years old and all had gone well for a couple hours, but for some reason my neighbor Paul at some point suggested that we didn’t want the fort to go over on “their property,” which amounted to about a two-foot slice of land next to their house. This business of “our property” and “your property” was a chronic preoccupation with him and especially his overly possessive grandmother who lived in the house as well. I think I said something like “You’ve got be kidding. We’ve built this fort and it’s on both of our properties.” He suddenly started to destroy part of the fort we had built together. I was not going to simply stand there while this happened, so I pinned him to his house and rubbed snow in his now tearful face. I expect that much worse might have happened but soon there was a rapping on my dining room window and my mother was wagging her finger to leave him alone. At that point his nose was bleeding, so there was even a more dramatic spectacle. He ran home and my mother beckoned to me to come in the house. I did. And I wasn’t happy. Neither was she. I imagine she saw most of the buildup to the incident and, in characteristic fashion, chose not to intervene (my parents were very much of the “kids should fight their own battles” school) until it looked like someone (in this case, Paul) might get hurt. She said, “I want you to go next door and tell Paul you’re sorry.” “But I’m not sorry. He deserved it. Did you see what he did?” “I don’t care. You hurt him and need to tell him you’re sorry.” “I don’t want to. That would be humiliating.” “Believe me,” she said, “it will be much more humiliating for you if you don’t march right over there and tell him you’re sorry.” Grudgingly I went next door, knocked on the door, and was greeted by his mother whom I told I wanted to see Paul. She said he was in the bathroom cleaning his face. But she would call him out. Out he came. Still with tears in his eyes. And I said, “I’m sorry.” He didn’t say a word. He just turned and shut the door. I had done what I was asked to do. But it wasn’t pretty. I did not feel sorry. Nor did I feel that I should be telling him sorry. As is often true in these kinds of disagreements, I thought he ought to tell me sorry. This was just one of many times in my young life that I was expected to say something I did not feel. A friend with whom I had discussed this moral challenge, of actually lying versus apologizing or offering a compliment, confessed his own recent ethical dilemma. He had visited his friends who had just had a baby. As you may know there is often plenty of cooing and exclaiming when someone sees a new baby for the first time. Usually newborn babies are not very attractive. They’ve been through a tough battle, and often their heads and features are a tad misshapen. My friend resolved he was not going to lie anymore about a baby who clearly was quite ugly. He wasn’t going to say the seemingly obligatory “What a beautiful baby!” Instead, when confronted with a new baby, he was always simply going to say, “Now there’s a baby!” and leave it at that. One place in school life that someone finds saying “I’m sorry” difficult is in a disciplinary situation. Over the years I’ve been part of dozens of hearings in which the expected denouement is the pronouncement by the student in question of “I’m sorry.” There’s an old vaudeville line when a particularly elusive joke has not elicited the expected laughs from the audience. It is “Wait for it. Wait for it.” It suggests that once the audience thinks a bit more about what you’ve said they will laugh uproariously. The inexpert vaudevillian will not know enough to pause and may even step on the ultimately satisfying gales of laughter. Often in discipline hearings, those gathered have had to “wait for it.” Eventually the guilty party will realize what it is he should say finally and he makes us all feel better by saying “I’m sorry.” The best response by a student at another school who had cheated on an English paper that I can remember was “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I cheated. I’m sorry I didn’t plan well enough and sit down and write this paper sooner than I did. I’m sorry I felt in a bind and didn’t ask the teacher for an extension or help. I’m sorry that all of you have to take time out of your days to deal with me and this stupid situation. I’m sorry to have put Mr. Smith, whom I really like, through this. He has been nothing but kind to me. I’m sorry mostly that all of you will think less of me for this, that my reputation is ruined and that I may never earn your trust back.” After that I not only didn’t want to suspend him for a day, I wanted to name him headmaster. I explained to him that given what he said and what I believe he felt that, in fact, my esteem for him had grown.