Mission Moment

Dear Covenant Families, 

Ever wondered where our school song comes from? 

The short answer is that it comes from a movie: Shakespeare’s Henry V, directed by Kenneth Branaugh (1989). But that doesn’t tell us much. Why would we get our school song from a 1980s movie, set in medieval France, starring only British actors? And why in the world do we sing it in Latin?

I don’t care for school songs, as a rule. Most school songs are the musical equivalent of a Hallmark card: vaguely sentimental, and fortunately unmemorable. (My apologies to the ten percent of UT alumni who actually like “The Eyes of Texas.” The rest of you know it’s a silly song, right? And don’t get me started on A&M.)

I kid. (Mostly.) But you can imagine my surprise and delight when, in the fall of 2019, after a lifetime of humming along to school songs that are all variations on “ain’t my school the best,” I attended my first Covenant Opening Chapel. I heard everyone–parents, teachers, students–singing Non Nobis. “Not unto us, O LORD, not unto us, but to thy name give glory.”  The opening line of Psalm 115–and in Latin! From the soundtrack of Branaugh’s Henry V–and everyone, including the first graders, seemed to know and love it!

The backstory from Henry V is important to our school song and to our school’s culture and history. Briefly, the young English king has invaded France to press his claim on certain lands and titles lost by his predecessors. He is deeply concerned about his own honor and glory, and about the fame of the English crown on the world stage. Many of his own countrymen, and most European nobles, think that his father was a usurper and he is an incompetent. He needs to prove both that he should be, and that he can be, king of England. In medieval Europe, the way to prove you’re a great king is to beat up on your neighbor. So he invades France. 

He scores several victories, all at great cost to his army. By act 4 of the play—that’s October 25, 1415, if you’re following the history—the English army is sick, weary, and depleted, and they are facing down a vastly superior French force. Against the odds, the English trounce their opponents, piling up thousands of French corpses and losing hardly any of their own company. 

Historians chalk up the victory to Henry’s shrewd deployment of superior technology. More than half his soldiers were Welsh longbowmen, well stocked with tens of thousands of arrows and able to fire from a stupefying range. (If you want to hear more about the battle tactics, I recommend the podcast The Rest Is History–though I should warn you that Tom Holland spares none of the gory details.) But Shakespeare makes an odd choice in his play: He hardly mentions the archers at all. There are Welsh characters, whom Henry honors with his friendship; but the longbows never appear onstage. Why?

I think Shakespeare wants to emphasize another part of the story that the longbows might obscure. A deep change of heart overcomes King Henry during his French adventures. In conversations with his troops, he learns the limits of his own fame and glory and leadership. He learns to honor and love his men as brothers, and he learns the true cost of their sacrifice on his behalf. Most of all, he comes to the conviction that the LORD does not save with sword or spear or bow. The climax of the play sees Henry on his knees confessing his sins and begging for God’s help: “O God of battles,” he cries, “steel my soldiers’ hearts!”–and he trusts that if the English prevail, it will be by the power of God. Shakespeare surely knew that Henry was a shrewd commander, and that the longbow was a powerful advantage. Yet the play’s climax features a king on his knees before the maker and ruler of all, who gives the victory to whom he chooses.

When Henry learns that the English have carried the day–that there are “ten thousand French / That in the field lie slain,” and “of all [English] men / But five and twenty,” he lifts his voice again in prayer:

O God, thy arm was here;
And not to us, but to thy arm alone,
Ascribe we all! 
[...]
Come, go we in procession to the village.
And be it death proclaimed through our host
To boast of this or take the praise from God
Which is his only. [...] God fought for us.

Then he commands his men to sing Non nobis as they dig graves for their fallen comrades and march toward the port of Calais, where they will depart for England. The psalm, sung in Latin, would have been a well known part of church services that both French and English soldiers had attended their whole lives. Both the defeated French and the victorious English would hear the chant, in a sacred language that they both understood, and remember to give glory to God—not to Henry.

In its early years, Covenant faced difficult odds. Starting a school is hard. How do you explain to parents in North Dallas that your scrappy little startup school, trumpeting something called classical Christian education and inspired by a 19th-century educator called Charlotte Mason, is a worthy alternative to the juggernauts that already dominate the market? What makes a place like Covenant worthy of the extra time, effort, and emotional investment that we expect and require? Why should elementary students paint watercolor landscapes while listening to Edvard Grieg, or middle school students spend a day at a Shakespeare festival? Why should a 9th grader read Homer’s Iliad? What’s the use of a high school curriculum that requires four years of Theology, where students read Kierkegaard and Nietzsche alongside the Bible? 

How do you start such a school from scratch, persevere through more than a decade of financial instability, then acquire a property at the intersection of two major highways–slowly but surely building one of the best schools in the metroplex–indeed, in the nation? 

I have to think that our founders foresaw these hard-won victories and chose a school song that would warn us not to congratulate ourselves (or them!) for our superior visionary leadership. 

Instead, we pause every October 25 to remember that “God fought for us.” And then we sing.

Non Nobis.

Christopher D. Schmidt
Rhetoric School Head