At the beginning of a school year, every corner of a campus seems to move quickly. New students learn to navigate unfamiliar buildings and classrooms. Teachers establish routines, learn names, prepare lesson plans, and begin the patient work of building trust again. Calendars fill with chapel services, practices, meetings, rehearsals, parent conversations, and the many small responsibilities that make a school community possible.

There is real joy in this energy. It is a sign of life, hope, and renewed possibility. Yet the beginning of the year also brings a familiar temptation: to move so quickly from one responsibility to the next that we forget to notice where God is already present.

The crowds in our schools may not look like the crowds that followed Jesus through Galilee. They may look instead like a full inbox, a crowded schedule, students waiting outside an office, a colleague needing help, a family hoping for reassurance, or a task that cannot be postponed. These needs are real, and they matter.

In Episcopal schools, we rightly hope to be communities in which each person is seen, known, welcomed, and cared for. But the holy work of caring for others can quietly become a life of constant availability. We can begin to believe that faithfulness means always responding immediately, always doing more, and always being needed.

It is here—amid genuine needs and worthy responsibilities—that the rhythm of Jesus’ own life offers us a needed invitation.

Luke tells us that news about Jesus spread rapidly and that “great crowds gathered to hear him and to be healed of their infirmities.” It is precisely at this point of growing demand that Luke writes, “But he would withdraw to desolate places and pray” (Luke 5:15–16).

Jesus did not withdraw because the people were unimportant. Throughout the Gospels, he has compassion on the crowds; he teaches them, heals them, feeds them, and welcomes those whom others overlook. Yet Jesus does not allow the urgency around him to replace his communion with the Father. Again and again, he goes to a solitary place to pray: early in the morning, after teaching and healing, before choosing the disciples, after feeding the multitude, and in the shadow of his Passion.

Jesus’ time apart was not separate from his ministry. It was the place from which his ministry flowed. His withdrawal was not a refusal of the world’s needs, but a way of remaining rooted in the One who had sent him.

That pattern has led me to reflect on the kinds of spaces and practices that might help us cultivate a similar rhythm within the life of a school.

At ʻIolani School, where I serve as the upper school chaplain, I am also responsible for the newly opened Arrillaga Foundation Teahouse in our student center. As I have begun to introduce students and faculty to this unfamiliar campus space, I have found myself returning to Jesus’ rhythm of withdrawal and return.

Part of my hope is that the Teahouse might serve as a sacred space where students and faculty can step away, even briefly, from the pace of the school day and enter a moment of stillness. There, they may share tea, enter into quiet conversation, sit in reflection, or simply take a few minutes away from the constant demands of the day. It is not a place to escape the life of the community, but rather a place to receive the quiet that can help us reenter that life with greater attention and care.

The Teahouse also teaches that silence need not be empty. In a school day filled with announcements, instructions, conversations, music, bells, and screens, stillness can feel unfamiliar at first. Yet, as students settle into the practice, stillness becomes less something to avoid and more something to receive.

What begins as a pause from activity can become an opening toward a different way of being present. Silence can make room for gratitude, deeper conversation, a breath between one part of the day and the next, and sometimes prayer. The stillness of the Teahouse is not imposed upon students; it is offered as a gentle invitation.

I have watched students arrive restless or distracted and leave with a settled pace, having discovered that even a few unhurried minutes can change how they enter the rest of the day. Those moments do not solve every pressure students carry, nor do they remove the real demands of school life. But they can remind us that rest, reflection, and attentiveness are not luxuries. They are part of what enables us to live well with one another.

The Teahouse has become for me a small, daily expression of the movement we see in Jesus’ life: stepping away from urgency, receiving a moment of quiet before God, and returning to our work and relationships more grounded, attentive, and generous.

This is why the words of Psalm 46:10 feel both beautiful and challenging: “Be still, and know that I am God.” Stillness is not the absence of responsibility, nor is it an escape from the concerns of a school community. It is a faithful pause—an act of trust that God is God and that we are not. It is a way of returning to the source of our life, our vocation, and our capacity to love.

For schools especially, this may be a countercultural practice. In a culture that often rewards constant activity and immediate response, Jesus gives us another vision of faithfulness: a life that repeatedly returns to God.

Perhaps this is the question for us at the beginning of the school year: Where and how can we make room to withdraw—not permanently, not in indifference to others, but long enough to pray, listen, and remember? Where might students encounter an unhurried moment in which they are not evaluated, hurried, or expected to perform? How might faculty and staff be supported not only in accomplishing their work, but also in receiving the rest and quiet that sustain it? What simple practices might help our communities notice one another as gifts rather than interruptions?

Jesus withdrew from the crowds so that he could remain rooted in the Father and return to people with compassion, clarity, and love. Perhaps our moments of stillness can serve the same purpose. They can help us return to our classrooms, offices, chapels, dining halls, playing fields, and meetings more attentive to God’s presence and more available to one another—not because we have become endlessly busy, but because we have remembered whose we are.

The Rev. Hannah Sung is Upper School Chaplain at ‘Iolani School in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi.