grant that those who teach and those who learn may find you to be the source of all truth;
For Schools and Colleges, BCP page 824
I am writing this on Ascension Day, remembering Ascension Day twenty-four years ago when I sat at Central Lutheran for the combined Episcopal-Lutheran Eucharist that evening and silently wept as the choir sang the Sanctus from the Faure Requiem. Ascension Day 1998 was the day of the Thurston shooting. I spent the day telling my students I didn’t know what to say to them, and wasn’t about to mouth empty platitudes just to say something. By the next day, after a mostly sleepless night, I had found my voice. I began each class by telling my students that unlike many people I knew who said they’d be afraid to even walk into a high school classroom, there was nowhere else in the world I’d rather be that day than right there with them. I loved my students, as I love the acolytes with whom I work today. I’d like to believe that like the Thurston teachers who ran toward the sound of gunfire, like the teachers at Sandy Hook and Robb Elementary and countless other schools, that I would have done whatever I could including sacrificing my own life, to protect my students. But why in the world should teachers be faced with such a choice?
After two years of trying to educate students during a pandemic our teachers are not merely exhausted, they are broken. The ever changing rules, the ever increasing demands that have been placed on them have left them as we near the end of this school year, barely able to hang on til the last day. As a result many are retiring, some early, others are walking away from their chosen profession mid-career because they just can’t go on. And now on top of all that, teachers are faced with trying to convince their students that it’s safe for them to be in school. Why in the world should that even be an issue?
We live in a country where firearms are the leading cause of death in those under the age of 19. Whatever your political persuasion, whatever your perspective on guns, I would like to believe that we can all agree that that is not okay. I had long since forgotten the rest of what I said to my students twenty-four years ago until a former student whose daughters are now two of my acolytes, posted it on Facebook on the twentieth anniversary of the Thurston shooting. It was that time-worn adage that I’ve tried hard to make one of the guiding principles of my life: “I am only one, but I am one. I can’t do everything, but I can do something. What I can do, I ought to do, and what I ought to do, by the grace of God, I will do.” It has been nearly a quarter of a century since that horrible day at Thurston, yet more children are being shot to death every year. We may all have a different something that we believe should be done to address this unspeakable horror, but whatever your something is, in the name of the children you love, DO IT!
