“Let us consider how to
stir up one another to love and good works.” Hebrews 10:24
If there
were websites that allowed students to review boarding schools, I imagine that
most of you would have a few complaints to air.
It may be that a few of these slip out from time to time when you are
calling, or texting, or face booking a friend back home who hasn’t had the
fortune of ending up in this exotic place called Saint James. When I taught here, I was always very careful
not to look over the shoulders of my charges who flocked to the computers after
study hall was over, but I had some idea what was being said: can you believe
they give two hours of homework in this place?
You can’t imagine what they serve in that dining hall. I’ve never lived this far from a decent mall
in my life!
Last week, I
happened upon a letter written by a boarding school student to his father
nearly two hundred years ago, and believe me, next to him your life here is a
walk in the park. Young Henry describes
rations of black bread, mattresses stuffed with wheat chaff, all the boys
washing once a week at a long horse trough, with never enough soap to go
around. The headmaster, Henry said,
inspected all the letters, so he had to slip this one to a friend of his
father’s at church. When the lights were
out, in the dormitory, it was every man for himself. He begged his father to
let him come home for Christmas, if God permitted him to live so long. He closed the secret missive with these
words: “I assure you we are used more like Bears than Christians and believe me,
my dear Father, I would rather be obliged to work all my life time than remain here
another year.[1]”
Now, this
does sound a bit like a third former’s email to his overprotective mother the
second closed weekend of the year, so I was little suspicious. But as I read more, it turned out things were
pretty much as bad as Henry had said. The
letter and others like it were circulated in the British presses, there were a
few lawsuits and Dickens wrote Nicholas
Nickelby. Gradually polite society
came to reckon with the fact that it just wouldn’t do to use little boys “more
like Bears than Christians.”
William
Augustus Muhlenberg, for whose life we thank God today, set out create a school
as much unlike Henry’s as possible. In
1826, just four years after Henry’s letter, he took charge of the Church
Institute, a high school attached to the parish he was called to serve at
College Point, in Queens, New York. The
combination of church and school was common then, and nearly all schools
included religious instruction. Indeed,
much of the brutality was justified on religious grounds, the assumption being
that unruly passions needed to be beaten into submission, and that because children
lacked fully developed consciences, they were by no means to be trusted.
Muhlenberg
believed otherwise, placing emphasis on the dignity of the child and his
authentic capacity for spiritual insight.
Children were created in God’s Image, he believed. God was already at work in them, and if
teachers learned to trust them, they would flourish. Children could reason, he urged, and wise
teachers would form their characters through persuasion, stirring them up, as
the author of Hebrews says, to love and good works. Muhlenberg taught his
teachers to befriend the boys, and he ensured good food and time for exercise,
and almost never used the switch.
Common
wisdom then held that children were best instructed in the faith through long
sermons of moral advice or emotional manipulation that would lead them to seek
the Savior from fear of hell. But Muhlenberg
appealed to his students’ appreciation for beauty and trusted in the power of
the liturgy instead. His school’s altar
was decorated with candles and flowers, and the students kept the cycle of
church feasts and fasts together.
Many of
Muhlenberg’s boys would go on to serve God as priests. One among them was John Barrett Kerfoot, who
first knew Muhlenberg as his Sunday School teacher. Kerfoot would eventually be sent here by
Muhlenberg, to found a new school on the same model, continuing the best of
what he had learned about treating boys like Christians instead of bears.
This is your
legacy, a school which is rare these days as it was then, and for some of the
same reasons. Here you are served by
teachers and priests, who care for your spiritual and moral development. Here, in a bit of welcome isolation from the
outside world, you keep and fasts of the church in a religious life that aspires
to worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.
Here, there is trust that God is at work in you, drawing you to Himself,
and that as you come to love Him and one another, you will realize your true
potential, doing the good work He has prepared for you.
[1] “Henry at Boarding School.” Historical Association. https://www.history.org.uk/resource/3690
10 Dec. 2010.
No comments:
Post a Comment