We begin our evening together, honoring this life with all its potentials and possibilities. We begin our evening with trust, knowing we are created for loving encounter. We begin our evening with hope, knowing the evening can hold love, kindness, justice, and joy.

 

Friends, it’s a delight to be with you this Back to School Night as your School Chaplain. We begin our evening with an opening intention—for life, for love, and for hope. It’s the way we begin our Seabury Remembers service to commemorate one year since the Maui fires. And it’s the way we’re starting many of our assemblies this year, as we seek to ground ourselves in the living waters that feed our islands and ourselves.

 

Living waters. An important and sacred thing in our days and in the myths and sacred stories of many traditions. Living waters, symbolizing life that continues to spring up, providing us with the refreshment of our whole selves—that which we sometimes (and somewhat clumsily) call “mind, body, and spirit.” Living waters. Waters that cannot be bought, or even taught, but which exist in perpetuity, nourishing us with truth, liberty, and justice, and with an abiding sense of aloha and connection. 

 

Yes. Living waters cannot be bought, or even taught, but we can teach our students and ourselves where to find this living water. Beginning with potential and possibility means being curious about the places living water might be found, and not just in the places—or in the people—we might most resonate or agree with. Beginning with trust, means an openness to the process, to the journey, to the encounter with the person or group of people that certain members of the public tell us to ridicule as unfit, unreasonable, or unworthy. Yes. Trust means living with integrity, integrity to offer all people the dignity of their inherent value, expecting that, in everyone, the living water of truth and beauty can be found. 

 

As you encounter newness tonight—new teachers, new rooms and locations, new students, new staff, new concepts, and new content—may we continue to invite each other to a journey of justice which means multiple leaps of faith: that love, kindness, justice, and joy will remain. Forever, and ever.