+JMJ

Dear Families,

Welcome back. It has been a joy to begin the year with your children. They have settled in happily, the school is at peace, and we thank God each day for the students entrusted to us.

A warm thank-you to the generosity of the Avila family and to all the families who came to movie night last week to watch David. David is the Old Testament prophet through whom God gave us most of the Psalms, and the Psalms are woven through the life of our school. They teach us how to pray, and our students chant them each day at Holy Mass and the Divine Office.

This week the Church keeps the feast of St. Gregory the Great, and there is no better place to begin. Each morning as our middle schoolers chant the Psalms of the Divine Office, the music they sing, Gregorian chant, carries St. Gregory the Great's name. Tradition credits him with gathering the Church's sacred song and setting it in order, and it has bared his name ever since.

The name, though, is the smallest part of it. When a student learns to read a line of chant and sing it back, they are already doing the work of the whole school day: listening closely, sounding each word, holding a phrase in memory, hearing how language moves. The Office is not time taken from the morning. It is the part that makes the rest make sense.

Below you'll find this fall's after school activities and other notes. Please reach out to me anytime. My door is always open.

With gratitude and prayers, 

Rachelle