Two Worlds Made One
by Margaret R. Broad
From the March 2000 NAES Annual Conference
As I stand in the June sun on the commencement platform, the two worlds of school and church so clearly come together in “Katie”, the clear-eyed young woman walking toward me. For four years, I’ve watched her moving slowly in from the edges of our community, gradually contributing to our common life with more and more satisfaction. Only last week, I read her final leadership paper profiling her mother, a strong-willed, independent person, as the woman she most admires, the same mother she refused to speak with just last year when she insisted her struggling student give up soccer for her studies. As I hand Katie the diploma, she smiles widely and turns triumphantly toward this woman, now critically ill, just visible as she sits inside the classroom building. They share a moment of completion, acknowledging that while the one is ready to take up her full college athletic scholarship, finally confident in her academic and leadership skills, the other is ready to let her go and give in to the cancer which has dominated their last year together.
How did Katie grow to become the compassionate young woman we celebrated that morning? What happens when our schools are points of intersection for two very different worlds: the world of the independent school and the world of the Church? Are we trying to live in two worlds? Just as we have but one life, so we can only really live in one world. If that world is less than multi-dimensional, we will continue to test the assumptions of one part against the other, rather than work toward their integration. Our church schools are the best possible setting for fulfilling the missions that the majority of our independent schools set for themselves: educating our students for life, in body, mind and spirit. Just at the developmental moment when young people are expected to challenge life’s assumptions, we have the privilege of introducing new challenges and new assumptions.
Each of these worlds brings us its own structures, traditions, values, and goals, and they will previously have been experienced as very separate domains by most members of our school communities. Church has been church; school has been school, yet alone, neither has contained all the elements necessary for structuring a complete life. The tensions we introduce in Episcopal schools as we work to integrate the world of the mind with the world of the spirit become the balancing tensions that create and support the structure of our daily lives, integrating whole selves for whole lives.
Because we are schools we are allotted the precious hours, weeks, and years in our students’ lives. All students attend school! Like so many other schools, here we lay the beams that will support the structure intended to sustain a lifetime of learning: now, curiosity, creativity, content; later, college. Ideas can soon become their own ends, for there is an arrogance in the world of the mind which can be both exhilarating and isolating. How do we face this risk?
Like our fellow independent programs, Episcopal schools enjoy the unquestioned freedom to extend our courses of study to include both intellectual and spiritual subjects. The classroom becomes a point of integration where the tensions of our two worlds appear across the disciplines and inform our conversations and debates. Just as the comparative religion class picks up the tensions in the student body when world conflicts affect relationships in our school community, so the literature and history courses extend the moral questions echoing from the morning’s homily through the honor council meeting to this evening’s homework assignments. Those beams we lay down to support our students as they learn take on additional breadth and strength.
Katie struggled at the edges for years. Unsure of the learning differences that made school hard and resentful of those who offered help, she lived the tension of never finding enough time to integrate all the parts of her life that came within this structure. She loved sports, knew she needed to figure out school, tolerated chapel. Left on her own, she would have allotted her time very differently! Each year, each part of the structure made a little more sense. She discovered her gift for mathematics and her ability to teach others. She found classmates who could talk her through the reading which came with such difficulty. Each year her grade point average and her confidence increased, slowly but surely.
In Episcopal schools, the same hours, days, and years that contain school will also contain the cycles of the Church. All of our students live these two lives every day: the life of the mind, school, and the life of the spirit, Church. Against the ever-present refrain, “there’s never enough time,” we are challenged to remember that our strong commitment to both of these worlds must inform all of our choices. And so we structure our schools, blending the places and times for building habits of the heart with those that build the habits of the mind, remembering always that neither is complete without the other.
Although most of our church schools are multi-dimensional communities where, on the average, a quarter of the members bring an Episcopal tradition with them, Episcopal traditions provide the practical and theoretical structure for our daily lives. Morning devotions, evening Compline, feast day celebrations, each service is a literal gathering of the community, united, if only briefly, in thought, word, and deed. Our school’s own cycle of prayer holds each individual in prayer twice each year. Whether they contain moments of quiet reflection or personal petitions, the silent pauses in each chapel service allow us to reach inward and outward as individuals that are part of a larger whole. Chapel homilies explore larger societal issues within a context of faith. Never have we introduced one of life’s hard topics from the chapel pulpit without later hearing its echoes in conversations between teachers and students that had not taken place before.
Our chaplain is a member of our senior administrative cabinet: her role is far from ceremonial! Teacher, preacher, counselor, advisor, colleague, school representative beyond our campus, the chaplain embodies the Church within our school. The support she provides to the entire community, but specifically to me as Head of School is immense. Through the person of the Chaplain the community acknowledges another perspective on the structures and decision-making process which govern our lives together. When we are faced withby difficult life transitions, such as illness, death, family disruption, or the involuntary departures of students or faculty,- the Chaplain makes an invaluable contribution by reminding us of our obligation to seek out and celebrate what is of value both for the individual and the community. Our Episcopal tradition brings with it strong pillars which stand upon the beams we have laid down.
As her junior year came to a close, Katie was ready to look beyond herself to the community which had given her time and insight. She had learned a great deal about herself: her learning style and her lve for mathematics, the release found in exercise, the meaning of teamwork, the restorative values of times and places for quiet reflection, the need for patience, first and foremost with herself. She was now ready to accept the oppurtunities for leadership and service suggested by her teachers and her peers. She accepted the positions of senior prefect and athletic team captain where her confidence and practical good sense would be daily examples to those under her care. She was selected for the new Studies in Women’s Leadership class. Her course schedule finally reflected her strengths and allowed her to excel. She had selected a senior faculty advisor with whom she worked well. For all these reasons, her sudden withdrawal and frustration halfway through the fall term surprised us all. At this new level, we were challenging her to know herself, to lead with integrity out of her own beliefs, to reach out to others, and she was struggling. “Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it,” she implored. We refused. She asked to drop a class, and we said no. Although the winter months were dark ones for Katie, our Sunday evening Compline services included prayers requested week after week by this daughter as her quiet gift to the woman she honored. As she and her advisor started the year seated next to each other in chapel, neither knew they would both lose a parent to cancer that year. I feel that God’s wisdom and grace brought them to this point and I am confident that the formal structure of their times together throughout the year built ties across the beams of growth and learning. Katie quietly opened her heart and let us in. As a community we shared her struggles and through that sharing we explored our faith and our commitments.
By the very structure of the hours we share in an Episcopal school community, the lines of definition at this intersection of our two worlds blur and combine. At each point of tension, we are drawn out of ourselves and towards others. As we live out the blending of structures and traditions from these two worlds, our lives take on the rhythms that hold the power to shape all our days. The careful, deliberate, dynamic interplay of worship, reflection, intellectual exploration, exercise, and community creates the balance which our hurried culture so often devalues. In Episcopal schools, we lay down the beams, and they stand tall. The structure is complete.
Three days from this June commencement morning, when our Chaplain and Dean of Students participate in the funeral service for Katie’s mother , we will acknowledge the fullness of our mission and the magnitude of its reach.
