The School Principal’s Prayer

Photograph by Amelie Benoist / Alamy Stock Photo.

School leadership is built on interruption. The day unfolds in fragments. Someone asks for my keys. A student needs gloves from the lost and found. A teacher pulls me aside to check whether I’ve had a chance to read the email about the late bus. I haven’t, not yet. There are birthdays to remember, allergies to accommodate, a surprise fire drill to coordinate. And still, I walk.

It’s not glamorous. It’s certainly not efficient. But grace, I’ve found, doesn’t operate on efficiency.

One morning, I paused outside a classroom just as a student crouched to help a peer gather loose papers that had scattered across the hallway. No one else noticed them. There was no instruction to help, no reward offered. It was a quiet exchange, barely a few seconds long, but it stayed with me. A deeply human gesture of kindness carried out without fanfare.

These are the moments I watch for.

Down the hall, a first grader once asked if trees ever get lonely. I said I wasn’t sure, and they nodded solemnly, as if that made sense. Outside Room 203, a student taped a hand-drawn heart to the door with the words “For anyone who needs one.” In the stairwell, a seventh grader lingered to help a kindergartner tie a shoe, saying nothing, just assisting until it was done. None of these moments show up in strategic plans or progress reports, but they are the quiet curriculum that teaches us what it means to belong to one another.

The Benedictines had a phrase, ora et labora, pray and work. Not one in service of the other, but together, woven into one rhythm. They believed that if you sweep a floor with love, it is no less sacred than singing a hymn. I think of that when I stop to listen to a staff member vent without rushing to fix anything. Attention, when given freely, is already a form of prayer.

Over time, I stopped thinking of this walk as something I do for the school. I started seeing it as something the school does for me. It slows me down. It reorients me. It reminds me that leadership isn’t about being seen or heard, it’s about being present in the right ways at the right times. Not to manage from a distance, but to be near enough to notice.

To lead, I am learning, is not to ascend but to remain. It is not to speak first but to listen. It is to see without needing to be seen, to walk not toward control, but toward care. Some days, I forget. I move too fast. I check my phone during conversations. I hide behind tasks and let the day slip by in pieces. But then there are mornings like this one, when the heater hums softly, and the floors are freshly waxed, and the building feels like it is waiting to be walked with reverence.

There is something sacred in repetition. A way of saying, I’m still here. A way of saying, this place matters. A way of choosing, again and again, to return.

I think the monks understood this. That to walk the same path each day is not just habit. It is an act of becoming. The path, if you let it, will shape you.

These halls are imperfect. They echo with locker slams and pencil sharpeners, laughter and tears, sneakers on tile, and the distant crackle of announcements. But they are also full of grace. You just have to walk slowly enough to see it. In the child who gives half a cookie to a friend. In the teacher who rewrites a lesson after a long day because they believe tomorrow might be better. In the parent who arrives late but still kneels to zip up a backpack. These, too, are prayers.

I don’t burn incense. I don’t chant psalms. I carry a coffee I rarely finish and a crumpled list of reminders stuffed in my coat pocket. But I carry something else as well, something quieter. A belief that this work, done well and done with care, is sacred. That the repetition of walking, greeting, noticing, listening, and helping is not incidental, it is the point.

Holiness does not only live in cathedrals or mountaintop moments. Sometimes it lives in dropped papers and birthday boards, in the way someone straightens a stack of chairs or refills the soap dispenser without being asked. Sometimes it lives in the act of returning, again and again, to a small and noisy place, and saying with your body, this is worthy of love.

Even linoleum, walked with love, can become holy ground.