TRANSFORMED BY COMMUNITY by Dr. Alex Sundman, Head of the Middle School
On September 14, 2001, little Lucy Larkin sidled over to me: “Dr. Sundman, would you like to borrow some of my clothes?” Momentarily bemused by this gesture of compassion, I realized that my students had started to notice that I had been wearing my first-day-of-school outfit since Tuesday. I got it. Nine-year-old Lucy was doing what Sacred Heart educators hope all their children will do: look around and employ the heart of Christ as a lens to recognize the need and dignity of each person in their community. This moment has stuck with me. Aside from the fact that Lucy’s offer was somewhat incongruous (Lucy was a good foot-and-a-half shorter than I), her sincere kindness and perceptiveness humbled me. Four days earlier, my husband and I had become refugees of a sort when our apartment building had been declared structurally unsound from collateral damage caused by the fallen World Trade Center. Truly, at that point, I did not have access to my clothes, or much of anything else for that matter. And yet, figuring out wardrobe issues were quite the least of my worries in the blur of hours and days that followed 9/11. And still a child of the Sacred Heart noticed my plight and offered what she had. In November of that year, Middle School students at 91st Street planned a liturgy for the surviving firemen of Hook and Ladder 13. The memory of little girls walking down the chapel aisle holding the hands of men broken with grief for their fallen brothers still takes my breath away. That year, I saw children call upon the heart of Christ to minister to the suffering they saw and felt in their community. That year, 2001-2002, was my first teaching in a Sacred Heart school. And that year, that Sacred Heart community at 91st Street transformed me, my heart, and the vision I had for myself as an educator. For days, weeks and months, I watched my students witness the horrors and suffering in their immediate and wider circles and do something about it. Several years after the earth-shattering events of 9/11, my husband and I moved to Washington, DC, with a new baby. While settling into my new home, a cold call 12
Stone Ridge Magazine
from Sister Anne Dyer, then Headmistress of Stone Ridge, ended my stint as a stay-at-home mother. Stone Ridge had a sudden Upper School English opening, and might I, asked Sister Dyer, “be interested in returning to the Sacred Heart community?” I remember feeling that Madeleine Sophie Barat’s words were becoming prescient to me: “once a Child of the Sacred Heart, always a Child of the Sacred Heart.” In the fall of 2006, I began teaching at Stone Ridge. From first setting foot in Hamilton House and standing under the gaze of Mother Perdrau’s ubiquitous image of Mater Admirabilis, I had the uncanny feeling of returning home in this brand-new school. Working with much older girls—young women, really—and in a brand-new physical setting, I was enveloped by the sentiment of being part of something much greater than myself. With the advantage of a newcomer’s perspective, I began to distill the similarities of spirit between my new and former Sacred Heart homes. My Stone Ridge Upper School students welcomed me with warmth and generosity as I worked—and sometimes struggled—to juggle a new job, a new city, a colicky infant, a husband who was often on the road, and teaching a curriculum that I—frankly—knew nothing about! But it wasn’t just toward me that I witnessed manifestations of my students’ kindness and desire to connect. All Sacred Heart girls, I had begun to realize, are nurtured to center others in their lives. Through their cocooning of classmates and teachers who were struggling with illness and tragedies, their Wednesday Social Action work which touched all corners of the Washington DC metropolitan area, and their global awareness (marked by efforts such as the one to collect supplies and resources for victims in Myanmar of Cyclone Nargis) my Stone Ridge students engaged in acts that underscored their belief
Stone Ridge students, Sacred Heart women, see themselves and act as the connective tissues between both proximal and distal communities.
