Time Spirals

I’ve awakened this morning to birdsong and sun streaming through the trees at Rolling Ridge Conference Center in North Andover, MA. I am here leading a retreat for Episcopal Bishops and Deans at the invitation of my ministry bestie Amy. The people and surroundings are lovely, and/but the space is bringing up a lot of memories and emotion for me.

The hall where I led our retreat’s first session yesterday was the same one where, during an Andover Newton faculty retreat in 2015, I had to make a terrible decision whose stresses stay with me now. I was at that time Dean of the Faculty and Vice President for Academic Affairs at the school I still serve, now Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School.

I had spent the summer on sabbatical, and all my colleagues thought I was researching and writing about cooperative — internship-centered — models for theological education. I was indeed conducting that research, but I was also working on a confidential project assessing the feasibility of our school relocating to New Haven and forming an affiliation with Yale.

The faculty retreat was to be the setting where we — our President and I — brought our faculty into the loop, but our President wasn’t there. Our negotiations with Yale had taken an unexpected turn around matters of governance, and all bets were off as to whether the deal would go through.

Speaking of bets, I was born without the poker face gene. Presenting a non-anxious presence at such a moment would have been difficult but possible. But I was actually getting ready to come clean after, by necessity, lying to my closest colleagues for months. I say “by necessity” in that the early phases of our feasibility research required privacy, and we’d all signed NDAs, so it wasn’t like I had a choice in keeping from the Andover Newton faculty what I was working on. I also believed in what I was doing: our mission’s continuation was going to require a new institutional model, and ultimately, we don’t work for a school but for a mission. That mission required of us research on possible landing places.

So back in 2015, our faculty gathered in a hall waiting for me while I talked on the phone with our President from the patio outside. He started our call with “the good news” that the deal wasn’t totally and completely dead. But it was in the ICU, and we had a big decision to make. Do we bring the faculty into the loop now, knowing it’s possible that what we were to share would both rock their worlds and be irrelevant before the end of the week? Or do we come up with another theme for the retreat in real time and hold off disclosing just a bit longer? We agreed to go with the former, held our pre-retreat faculty meeting, our President showed up, and we broke the seal.

And here I am again, back at the scene of the crime. Not that it felt like a crime to sequence what we shared with whom; in fact, I believe that our school’s prior merger negotiations had not worked out in-part because we’d put out half-baked ideas for public scrutiny, and our constituents responded negatively to them because that which is half-baked is sickening and unappetizing. We needed to build buy-in, and nobody buys into, “Maybe something like… this?”

Sharing news with our faculty after talks with Yale were farther along than they might have expected ran the risk of losing their trust, which I’d worked hard to earn. Going into the big reveal, I knew all of this, and I can retrieve the heart-pounding just writing about the moment.

The reveal itself went well; one might even say shockingly so. Our thought leaders on the faculty understood that desperate times were going to call for desperate measures, and they had been waiting on a new direction drastic enough to get our ship turned away from the waterfall. After the disclosure, one faculty member suggested we sing the Gloria Patri in praise of God who makes all things new. After the retreat, suffice to say, things got harder. And then they got better. And now they’re good; really good. It’s only taken… eight years.

These past few weeks, including the one in which I sit writing today, have been replete with time spirals. What I mean by time spirals is this: you go back to a place you once were, and although it’s different, and you’re different, your past and present selves cohabit the space and commune with one another.

Three weeks ago, it was the memorial service of my most important coach-teacher; last weekend it was my college reunion on the same campus where I now serve our fully relocated school. Today, I awake at the site of one of the scariest things I’ve ever done. I wonder what God wants from me in moments like these?

Reflective practice is the one answer I know for sure. I believe in a God who doesn’t just create us but recreates us throughout our lives. I believe God wants us to invest what we experience in our daily rebirth, our growth. God wants us to do better next time, which means understanding what happened this time.

Reflective practice is simple: consider a critical incident deeply and in the light of faith. Ask where God was in the midst of it. Commit to investing learning that emerges from that reflection in whatever comes next. See? Simple. Yet requiring so much of us by way of time, attention, and willingness to look — really look — at our choices, including our mistakes.

I didn’t schedule a trip to Rolling Ridge, but although I’m not a superstitious person, I believe God had a hand in placing the retreat I agreed to lead right here, right now. God’s calling me into exploration both without and within at this moment, the front edge of summer.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

TS Eliot, Four Quartets