We are what we love!

We are what we love!

While I’m always a bit sad at the end of the summer, I’m thrilled to be back in chapel with this amazing community!

The chapel theme for this year is “We are what we love,” and we’ll be exploring themes of how we orient our lives towards what we desire most.  As a Christian school which celebrates religious diversity, Saint Paul’s Academy is a wonderful space to be attentive to the ways in which we are formed by the things that we love.

Many centuries ago, a French Philosopher named Rene Descartes said something which is still famous today, “I think, therefore I am.”  Descartes and the philosophers of his era believed that humans are fundamentally thinking creatures, and that we orient our lives based on the way we think.  While there are aspects of his philosophy I can agree with, I don’t think it captures the whole picture.  I don’t have to think very hard or very long to come up with an example of a time when my actions don’t line up very well with my thinking.  Compulsive behaviors, conflicted silence, and the latest new exercise regimen all demonstrate that I can change my thinking without changing my actions.

As a child, I was certainly exposed to educational models that viewed students primarily as thinking creatures.  The student showed up, the teacher filled the mind with the correct information, and the student left.  The focus was on the life of the mind, and our bodies, souls and emotions were outside the scope of work.  How grateful I am that St. Paul’s takes a more holistic view of education!

Imagine the heart is a compass, which orients our lives towards what we love most.  In the Upper School, I passed out compasses and magnets, and asked the students to find magnetic north.  Then we moved the needle around the compass with the magnets, and asked them if the direction of north had changed at all.

The heart is a compass which moves us in the direction of what we desire the most, which is our true north.  For me as a Christian, I want my true north to be God.  And there’s also magnets in my life which can pull my heart away from north without me being aware of it.  In the Lower School we’re talking about how we live towards what we love, without the benefit of compasses and magnets.

Some questions parents can ask their student about chapel:

1. What is it you love the most?
2. What are ways you become what you love?
3. What are the magnets in our lives that pull our love away from what’s most important to us?