The words “school” and “stillness” don’t always go together. Our campuses are energetic: a cacophony of voices, play, activity, and bells. The adults in the building navigate endless decisions, e-mails, grading, and adolescent urgency. Running across a Psalm focusing on “stillness” feels very different from our daily experience in education.
I am a planner. I love having a roadmap or a script that I have developed and rehearsed. I suspect that many of you feel the same way! With each new week, we have a basic idea of what is waiting for us. And generally, that basic idea is thrown out the window before I’ve finished my first cup of coffee! Despite our best efforts, we really don’t know exactly what today holds. Perhaps, that’s a gift.
In The Episcopal Church, deacons are one of three distinct orders of ordained ministry (along with priests and bishops). In the early church, deacons were the ones who crossed boundaries—between the gathered community and the world outside, between those with enough and those without, between the sacred and the street. They were threshold figures. Further, they were the noticers—they would notice the needs of the world and identify the best ways to help.
Last week, we gathered in Montgomery, Alabama, for the Episcopal Identity: Equity and Justice Conference at the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). We had the privilege of hearing Bryan Stevenson—a moment that called us to reflect deeply on what it means to live out our baptismal covenant in pursuit of justice. His words continue to resonate as we return to our schools and our students.
Picture the last contentious conversation you witnessed—perhaps a faculty meeting where voices rose, a school board discussion where neighbors became adversaries, or simply the evening news with its parade of talking heads speaking past one another. Notice how there are no pauses anymore, no space between claim and counterclaim. We have lost what the Japanese call ma (間) —the meaningful interval, the pause that creates room for listening. Our political discourse has become all reaction and no reflection, all speaking and no hearing. This is not merely a failure of civility. It is a spiritual crisis.
No doubt that question has crossed your mind as we march through the long winter on our campuses. It’s easy to lose perspective during this stretch of the academic calendar that never seems to end. So, what is it that we are trying to accomplish day in and day out?
This past week, the NAES Governing Board gathered for our winter meeting at the headquarters of The Episcopal Church. Our Presiding Bishop—and honorary NAES Board Chair—the Most Rev. Sean W. Rowe, joined us for important conversations around Episcopal identity and how that identity informs our work with young people. Whenever we meet at the Church Center, it provides an opportunity to reflect upon the relationship between our schools and the larger ministry and mission of the church. I wonder if sometimes we lose sight of that in the busyness of our daily lives.
Last week, we hosted a webinar, focusing on the importance of nurturing mental well-being with our students. This is an area where Episcopal schools shine. We build communities that take seriously both the academic and emotional development of our students. We also lean into the role spirituality plays in our students’ health and wellness. Researchers like Dr. Lisa Miller from Columbia University (author ofThe Spiritual Child and The Awakened Brain) have researched and quantified what we already know well in Episcopal schools: spirituality can play an important role in keeping kids healthy and happy.
As we mark the anniversary of the California wildfires that consumed St. Matthew's Episcopal School in Pacific Palisades and St. Mark's Episcopal School in Altadena, we remember what it means when the ground itself shifts. We remember colleagues who watched their school buildings—those sacred spaces of learning and community—disappear into flame and ash. We remember the particular grief of losing not just a workplace, but a home for hundreds of children, a gathering place for families, a physical embodiment of mission and love built up over generations.
There's a curious etymology behind the word "mediocre." It comes from the Latin medius (middle) and ocris (rugged mountain)—literally meaning “halfway up the mountain.” To be mediocre is to find yourself between two summits, neither at the exciting trailhead nor at the triumphant peak.
