What Makes a Life Good.

A short homily for the opening prayers of this year's Teaching and Learning Institute put on by the Southwestern Association of Episcopal Schools (SAES).

Let me just say again how grateful I am for the invitation to be with you today. I should make two disclaimers at the outset, though: my wife is a Montessori teacher for adolescent students, and my four kids, ages 2 through 14, likewise all go to school every day, one at an Episcopal school, and they’re all of them resident experts on formation and remarkably perceptive about what happens in the community of a classroom. But you did not get any of them today. Instead, you got me. Better luck next time.

The second disclaimer is that the E in the acronym SAES of course stands for Episcopal. And Episcopalians are notoriously people of the lectionary, the cycle of readings assigned to each day and each week. The lectionary means that the same readings are given to everyone who prays today, whether they are on vacation at the beach or have the better luck of being here at the Teaching Learning Institute. I would have liked to have picked you out some happier readings.

Case in point, from Ecclesiastes this morning: Remember your creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come, that is, before you get old. Before your knees begin to creak and a new layout at the grocery store counts in your life as major news. And terrors are in the road, and you call your kids to troubleshoot the newfangled devices they got you for Christmas, which are obviously defective, and your desire fails; because all must finally go to their eternal home. Remember your creator, before the silver cord is snapped, before the golden bowl is broken, and the breath returns to God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher; all is vanity.

As far as classroom motivational posters go, you might steer clear of Ecclesiastes. But it has a way of cutting through the fluff, amirite? What’s it all for? After the GPA. After admittance to the school of my dreams. After the six-figure job that my program’s completion either did or did not land me. After the promotion and the sacrifices that got me the promotion. After the unexpected life change that is as inevitable as it is unpredictable in the life of each of us, after, after, after, at the bottom of the well, when it’s all stripped away, what is it all, after all, for?

What is a good life? What makes a life good? It was Socrates who first said that life wasn’t enough, you didn’t make your life, it was given to you, it’s just the starting point: a good life should be the goal. He said it came through happiness which wasn’t an accumulation of fancy things but a right ordering of existing things toward worthwhile ends. But what makes an end worthwhile? How does a person come to learn that kind of thing? Where did you get your own ideas for it? Maybe this reading is not such a bad fit for a gathering of educators, after all.

As educators, where do you begin to look for an answer to the question when someone comes up to you, between classes, after hours, before meetings, at impossible moments, and asks about the ideal world you would like to see? And can you imagine the privilege of walking alongside a person asking these questions, forming their own answers, as informed in part by your presence and the ways you live your life. Of course you can. You do it every day. Your work is sacred work.

And I get it. Some days it doesn’t feel sacred. Some days it’s just managing challenging parents and figuring out what skibidi Ohio means. But even your patience in that moment is as much a part of the pedagogy you pass on as anything else your student remembers. Our New Testament, then, offers hints toward the good life possible for those whose ends Christ has shaped: marked my a spirit of gentleness, bearing the burdens of others, not growing weary of doing what is right, but imagining in the space of lives whose default setting in the year 2024 can’t help but be myopically individualistic the radical possibility of beloved community and shared belonging. What Montessori calls being citizens of the world. What the letter of Galatians calls living as the family of faith.

Pope John Paul II one time said that the feast of Pentecost, when Episcopalians all wear read, there's fire, languages, crazy stuff, St. Peter swearing he wasn’t drunk yet, JP said that that feast really belongs to the educators. To teachers. To you. Because the miracle wasn’t all the stuff and commotion. The miracle was that in a world of stuff commotion, in a world of my and mine, a new space was opened for deeper and mutual understanding. Each one understood in the language of each. A new community was born! And this, he says, is what you make possible, and as that great educator Fred Rogers might add, just by being you.

So if I am not an expert educator like many of you and literally every other member of my family, let me be a stand-in for the whole church today and simply say, Thank you. God bless you. Thank you for saying yes to your part in the miracle. And let me be your permission today to remember that this miracle is what your work, on less sexy days, is really all about. It’s what all the the work is for. For the fruit of this work in the lives of those you reach is nothing less than the life that really is life.

 

Nothing is Wasted & Everything Belongs

From this week's James Journal, available here. 

This past Saturday, the beautiful day in the neighborhood journey took St. James to Our Savior Community Gardens, where Deacon Joey shared two things he had learned about gardening from his short time at the small farm: “Nothing is ever wasted, and everything belongs.” 

Short and sweet and essential in its truth. It was a twin reality impossible for us to miss, even in our few hours spent in the gardens: how, on the farm, one person’s trash becomes another person’s compost. How compost in a garden is like gold! How every life assists the others and the end that decomposition is so often thought to be becomes the lifeblood for every new thing that happens.

 

In fact, the garden’s founder, Ms. Becky, showed us a small, thriving field of pumpkin plants that is the literal fruit of leftover pumpkins acquired from - where else? - our own October pumpkin patch! The leftovers here have become rich soil there, and seeds in that rich soil there have, in turn, sprung up to become fruit-bearing plants of their own. There’s a piece of St. James growing on a garden in Pleasant Grove! 

 

From the gospel this coming Sunday: Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.”

 

How wonderful, I am continually reminded, that the flourishing we are a part of is not limited to what we see. Not confined to that for which we might be tempted to claim ownership. Not limited by what I counted as my failures. How marvelous, that pumpkin seeds and other seeds, like faith, bear fruit far beyond our understanding of the work. Perhaps you look back on your own life and recognize fruit of blessing that “stem” from a love planted in you by saints who could have no idea what the seed of their love has become in and for you. 

 

Nothing is ever wasted. And everything belongs. 

 

With a twinkle in his eye, Deacon Joey looked up and rhetorically wondered out loud whether this might be true for more than just gardens.

 

In the love of the Vine whose life makes us one,

Jonathan