Kindness Matters

These are my remarks to students on Monday, September 30, during assembly.

Pope John Paul once said that a "society can be judged on how it treats its weakest members." 

That's not a bad way to measure the culture of a school, too. How kind are we as a school, particularly to the most vulnerable among us?

I knew a young man many years ago--for the sake of anonymity, let's call him Kevin-- a senior, who was really, really awkward. He had a very effeminate way of walking, which caused some people to whisper that he had gender issues. He was too often teased mercilessly, and because of his awkwardness, didn’t know how to respond appropriately,  so his responses just made his persecutors laugh at him even more. One day, as he was walking down the hall, some sophomore boys began tormenting him, knocking his books on the ground, laughing, and as he bent over to pick up the books, they slapped a “kick me” sign on his back and began running up and kicking him. A senior boy, an offensive lineman on the football team, came down the hallway and when he saw what was happening, he ripped the sign off Kevin's back, and then went to the the ringleader, pinned him up against the locker and said. “Kevin's a senior. He’s one of us. You mess with him, you mess with the whole senior class. You got that?” “Uh, yeah, we were just teasing”, the sophomore said, scared.  Then the football player helped Kevin pick up his books and walked down the hall with him to where a group of seniors had gathered.

I don’t know what happened to Kevin, or where he is now, but I am quite sure that he remembers that simple comment “He’s one of us,” with great gratitude.

To what extent do we stand up for the least among us? And if we come across someone being bullied by others, do we allow that to happen? Bullies, after all, need an audience. They need people to affirm what they’re doing by laughing with them. When people aren’t laughing, or when they sense disapproval from others, they usually quit.

All of us go through bouts of depression from time to time. We’re not sure why we’re depressed, but for whatever reason, we’re just down in the dumps. That’s normal. But the quickest way out of it isn’t to psycho-analyze ourselves or try to do something for ourselves. The quickest therapy is to go out of our way to do something nice for others—to give a random compliment, to befriend someone that needs a friend, to send a text and say something kind to someone that needs it. It’s the way God made us—we feel best about ourselves when we’re being kind to other people.

The excitement typical of the first month or so of the school year is over—and as the academic year progresses, it becomes stressful. When we’re stressed, we have a natural tendency to begin closing down to others, to circle the emotional wagons, to put ourselves first, to become selfish. I encourage you to do the opposite—simple kindness to others can reverse all of those trends, and make a huge difference in someone else’s day.

Fifty Years Later

Student assembly address:

There are a few seminal moments in our nation's history that everyone remembers until he or she dies. Your great grandparents certainly remember December 7, 1941, the date we were bombed by the Japanese in Pearl Harbor. Your grandparents likely will remember July 20, 1969, as the nation huddled around black and white TV's and watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon, saying "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." They also remember November 22, 1963, the date that our 35th president, John Kennedy, was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald. Your parents remember, and perhaps you remember, vaguely, September 11, 2001, the date five thousand Americans were killed when terrorists ran two planes into the Twin Towers of New York City, drawing us into a war that we're still fighting today. 

These events are etched into our corporate memory, partly because they shocked us, partly because of the power of what the event symbolized, partly because the event changed us as a country in some deep way. 

Last Wednesday, August 28, was the 50th anniversary of another event that is forever locked into our corporate memory: The civil rights march on Washington D.C., punctuated by one of the most famous talks in our nation's history, Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. I thought it appropriate, in place of my usual remarks at assembly, to honor this anniversary by listening to a portion of that speech this morning. As we know, Reverend King was assassinated less than five years later, on April 4, 1968. 

May we have the courage to live out the strength of our convictions and to stand against all forms of discrimination, wherever and whenever we may encounter it. 

Finding Your Groove (in a groove-less world)

Student assembly address:

I usually go to the 11 a.m. Mass at Our Lady of the Lake on Sunday—there were significantly fewer people there this week. If you live in Sumner County, you know why—Beech High School played Station Camp on ESPN2 beginning exactly at 11 a.m.

The natural order of things is that high school games are played on Friday, college football is played on Saturday, and pro-football is played on Sunday afternoon. There are a few exceptions to that—for the last 44 years, there’s been one NFL game on Monday night and some times there’s a high school, college or NFL game on Thursday night.  We’re playing Fr. Ryan on Thursday in October. ESPN has started airing some college games on Tuesday night, featuring two teams that the only people watching are the parents of the players. Never, ever, however, has there been high school football on Sunday morning. I understand a few area churches re-structured their entire Sunday schedules so that people could be at the game.

As I was coming home from Church, it occurred to me that we’re living in tough times. Times are “tough” not because we lack things, or lack things to do. Really, they’re tough for the exact opposite reason: we have too much, and there’s too much to do. Why is it, for example, that people feel compelled to text-message while they’re driving, even though they know it’s dangerous to do so? I think it’s because we live in such a culture of immediacy, and action, and noise, that we almost have an allergic reaction to silence, and if we sit down and drive somewhere without multi-tasking, we feel like we’re wasting time.

This crazy pace, this busy-ness, this unrelenting dash, creates imbalance in our lives. We can only juggle so many balls. We can only play on so many teams—some of you are playing one two teams right now, one for JPII, one for your club team. By Sunday night, having played in a tournament all weekend, you’re exhausted from a week of school and 4-5 games from the tournament, hardly in a position to do homework well or come to school alert and refreshed on Monday. Some of you are studying too much, giving yourself only a few hours of sleep each night—that’s an unsustainable pace. Some of you are near addicts with text-messaging and social media, spending hours and hours each day, constantly interrupted.

I’m the same way: I keep two email accounts active on this I-phone—a personal email account, and a school account, and when I see the red circle with the number on it, indicating I have that many emails, I feel compelled to open it. I also have three phone numbers feeding into this one phone.  So even when I am away from JPII, it feels like work is chasing me, as if I am always “on.”

Aside from saying “no” more often when people ask us to do things, I know of two remedies for being hyper-busy—just two. The first is exercise. If you’re an athlete in season, you get plenty of it. But if you’re not, and you have to wait 45 minutes for a bus, for example, why not run or walk a few laps around our track down there? Or why not do so before you drive home in your car? Take about 15-30 minutes each day, and you’ll feel the stress melting away.

The second is prayer. We have a wonderful chapel. If you have a tough situation you’re dealing with, or something is causing you worry, or if you just need to get out of the rat race for a few minutes, why not drop by the chapel and ask God to help you? Or if you can’t bring yourself to do that, turn off the radio and cell phone on your way home or way to work and bring those problems to God.

The big challenge for all of us in this ultra-busy, ultra-competitive, completely connected world is to find a groove for ourselves that allows us to keep our commitment to work, family, friends, school, faith in some sort of proper proportion. It used to be we could depend on social institutions to help us do that. We knew that when Friday came, we’d have the weekend to get away, without a phone call or email to suck us back in. When Sunday morning came, we could wake up a bit later and go to Church in the late morning without having to haggle with athletic schedules.

We can’t rely on the usual social structures anymore to help us find the right groove. We must make our own time to pray and to exercise and create that groove for ourselves.

God loves us. He wants us to be happy. But we’re not jellyfish that life happens to, floating wherever the waves take us. He wants us to be pro-active, to take charge of our lives, and to be very protective of our time and our commitments. Ask him for some help in doing so, get regular exercise, and I think this will be a great year for you.