Number one in your life’s blueprint should be a deep belief in your own dignity,
your worth and your own “somebodiness.”
Don't allow anybody to make you feel that you’re nobody.
Always feel that you count.
Always feel that you have worth,
and always feel that your life has ultimate significance.
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in an address
to the students of Barratt High School in Philadelphia, October 1967.
St. Mark’s has reopened for the fall of 2020. Students are back on campus, in the houses, on the fields. And yet school life is a shadow of what it used to be, just like life outside the school.
I opened the school year with the above exhortation from Dr. Martin Luther King, asking the students to remember their own inborn, God-given dignity in the face of all that seems arrayed to undermine it: the coronavirus pandemic, the racism pandemic, the violating and divisive language we will be subjected to as another impassioned presidential election looms.
I urged them to follow the advice of conflict resolution specialist Dr. Donna Hicks: To recognize and remember their own God-given worth—as well as the worth of others; To recognize their own vulnerability to illness, to callousness, to hurt—as well as the vulnerability of others. May we remember, always, our responsibility to be humane. When the universe goes low, may St. Markers always go high.
-- The Rev. Barbara Talcott, St. Mark’s School
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