How Shall We Live? Be Welcoming to All.

On the first day of September, our community gathered in Chapel to begin the school year with a simple but powerful invitation:

“How shall we live? Be welcoming to all.”

As we begin another year of living and learning together, Welcome Chapel offered us an opportunity to pause, center ourselves, and reflect on what it means to be a community. We come together as one body, learning, growing, and reflecting together, and each song, reading, prayer, and practice gives us another opportunity to embrace one another and our ideas.

The focus of our Welcome Chapel was hospitality.

Not simply hospitality as an invitation to join us, but hospitality as a way of being with one another.

We began with a centering practice, an ancient practice found across many traditions. We were invited to sit quietly, take a few deep breaths, and let go of the distractions that can keep us from being fully present. Each person also received a small seashell, a reminder to pause and consider a special quality, endearing trait, or gift they bring to our community. It was a fitting beginning to the year: before we can fully welcome others, we must first remember that we each have something meaningful to offer.

Our readings continued that reflection. One passage described what it means to practice radical hospitality: not simply saying, “You are welcome to join us,” but instead asking, “How can we be with you?” That distinction matters. Our community brings together people from different places, backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and traditions. We may not have chosen all of our neighbors, as one of our readings reminded us, but life has placed us together on this shared island of living and learning.

And in being placed together, we are invited to stretch—to understand one another, to listen to one another, and to grow because of one another.

Our Chapel also brought together wisdom from different faith traditions, reminding us that hospitality and care for others are deeply human values shared across traditions. We heard a reading from the Qur’an, which called us to kindness and responsibility toward our families, our neighbors, strangers, friends, and those who are in need. The Gospel of Mark offered another familiar and enduring call: love God with all that we are, and love our neighbor as ourselves. These words remind us that community is not simply about being together. 

It is about how we treat one another while we are together.

It asks us to notice.
To listen.
To extend grace.
To offer a helping hand.
To make room.
To be brave enough to love even when it is difficult.

Through the work of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gifts from the Sea and Douglas Wood’s Old Turtle and the Broken Truth, our community leaned into stories of truth, care, connection, and the messages we can find in the natural world around us. The seashells became a particularly meaningful part of that reflection. Each member of our community was invited to consider the quality or gift they bring to Chatham Hall and to hold that thought alongside their shell. Together, those individual shells became a beautiful symbol of our community.

As members of our community left Chapel, they had the opportunity to add their shell to our Gifts of the Sea Display, which will remain near the doors of Chapel throughout the month of September. Each shell represents an individual contribution, but together they create something much greater, a visual reminder of the beauty and strength of our community.

As we come and go from Chapel, may we remember the quality we thought of as we held our shell, and remember that each of us is a special gift to our community. And when we see all of the shells together, may we be reminded that it is the collection of our individual gifts, experiences, and perspectives that makes our community what it is.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote, “Each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid; each cycle of a relationship is valid.” There is something powerful in that reminder as we begin a new school year. Relationships have tides, too. There are moments when we feel close and moments when we need space. There are moments of certainty and moments when we are still finding our way. Every cycle is part of becoming a community.

And, as Lindbergh reminds us, “the sea recedes and returns eternally.” May our seashells remind us that we, too, have the grace and space to return—to one another, to our shared values, and to the work of practicing radical hospitality as a way of living together.

Our Welcome Chapel closed with a prayer asking us to have eyes to see the needs of others and hearts filled with compassion for our neighbors and every stranger we meet. We were reminded to listen, to smile, to be generous, and to offer a helping hand. We were asked to have hearts courageous enough to love our enemies and to welcome and include all who come to our door.

As a new school year begins, these are more than words for our community. They are an invitation.

An invitation to live our Honor Code not only as a set of principles, but as a daily practice.

An invitation to make our dorms, classrooms, Chapel, dining hall, playing fields, studios, and shared spaces places where people feel seen and valued.

An invitation to remember that the people around us are carrying stories, hopes, worries, gifts, and challenges that we may not yet know.

And an invitation to ask, again and again: How can we be with you? This is the work of community. This is the work of hospitality. And this is how we begin the year together.

Go in peace to love and to serve.