It has been a singular pleasure, over these past years, to share my experiences, reflections, and hopes for Episcopal schools through these Monday meditations. As I retire at the end of the month, this will be my last installment. How grateful I am for the responses so many of you have made, year after year, to the content of these meditations, and how satisfying it has been for me to learn that they have made some small difference in the weekly lives of those who serve Episcopal schools. Entering into the busy workweeks of all of you, indeed entering into the internal lives of many who have read these meditations with a great degree of loyalty, is an honor beyond imagining.
I had a fascinating conversation recently with a college professor and a commercial airline pilot. The professor reflected on the attitudes and concerns he has recently seen in his students, identifying a common approach many of them had to their work and their futures: “Fake it ‘til you make it.” This is not a new paradigm for dealing with academic or work expectations, but he was currently finding it increasingly prevalent among undergraduates: project, to the outside world, a demeanor of knowledge, confidence, and capability—even if you do not have it—until that moment when you have reached success. Then one might no longer need to “fake it.”
According to the Danish theologian, Soren Kierkegaard, there are two ways that human beings fool themselves. The first way is to believe what isn’t true. The second way is to refuse to believe what is true. I’ve been thinking about Kierkegaard’s depictions since the tragic shootings and murders in Uvalde last week. We fool ourselves into thinking, “This is not who we are,” when yet another mass killing occurs. But can we cling to such a response anymore?
We’re going through a rather discouraging news cycle, of late. The United States passed the million mark of COVID-related deaths this past week; a racially motivated shooting in Buffalo reminds us of the reality of gun violence, as well as the persistence of racism; the war continues in Ukraine; Wall Street has experienced its biggest plunge since 2020; inflation shows no signs of waning; and, now, the scarcity of infant formula has caught parents, indeed our nation, completely off guard. The summer may well bring a big challenge to our power grids, not to mention an eclipsing of the rights of women and a potential endangerment of the rights of many others.
This past week I had the opportunity to speak at the all-school chapel at Trinity School in New York, the first time the school community had come together in this way since the winter of 2019. It was an important moment for the school, it was also a wonderful, full-circle experience for me: as I come to the end of my time at NAES, one of my final speaking engagements was at Trinity, where I began my ministry in schools in 1979.
We like to think of our communities—church or school—as “big tent” places, where a wide variety of people are welcomed and included, and there is room for a diverse array of beliefs and practices. Of course, we find it more appealing to talk about the wideness of that tent, as opposed to the fact that even tents have boundaries and parameters,
We learned the sad news of the death of the Rev. Canon David Forbes, this past week, at the age of 96. David occupies a key place in the history of Episcopal schools, as well as the work of NAES. He was the founding head of school at the Cathedral School for Boys in San Francisco, and then later became the founding head of school at St. Paul’s Episcopal School in Oakland, CA. In addition to his leadership of these two institutions, David was active in the work of this association throughout the years—engaged with it well into his retirement.
In Elizabeth Strout’s new collection of stories, seventy-four year old Jack Kennison gets into his automobile and takes a drive from his home in Crosby, Maine to Portland. Why he is making the trip is not clear; perhaps he just needed to get away briefly from small town life. When he arrives in Portland, he walks around the harbor. There he finds himself thinking about his deceased wife, and the incompleteness of their relationship.
No book in the Bible is less understood, nor more easily prone to misinterpretation, than the Book of Revelation. It is, among more progressive Christian denominations, often assiduously avoided, given its frequent association with more evangelical interpretations and misguided attempts to link current events with first-century prophecies.
On March 9, the Episcopal Church released the results of a survey, done in collaboration with a polling firm, of the views of Americans on Jesus, as well as Christianity in general. Entitled Jesus in America, the survey elicited the views of a widely diverse cross section of Americans, including those who claimed to be Christian and those who did not.
