The college admissions process offers the potential for intense disappointment AND intense personal growth. The college process is always noisy, extremely volatile and often painful. Some of you will experience the feeling of being Snow White– a white knight rides up and snatches you up and away you go – off into the sunset to live happily ever after. Except that is not what is going to happen. Thank Goodness. Because real life - which did not start with the college admissions process but rather runs through the college process - is bumpy, fragile, triumphant, sickening, head-spinningly incredible, depressing, and characterized by moments of pure joy, useful contribution and, if you are lucky, ardent love.

Growing up, my Mom lived as if everyone possessed something of great value no matter what their circumstances might have been. She hated guns, despite being from a family of hunters. The worst thing I ever heard her call a man was "limited." I don't remember her ever saying a swear word. I was practically an adult before I learned that some people complain all the time. For her, the biggest mistake a person can make is to give up. I was raised to think that quitting is a sin. My Mom and Dad were on the same page in regards to all these matters. This was the best gift ever given to me.

Blog readers (I hope using the plural form is not too presumptuous) may note that I have been writing mostly about Quakers and our peculiar notions. There is a good chance that I will continue doing this for a while longer because, quite honestly, it feels good to give voice to thoughts and feelings that have been part of me for so long. But it is also time to introduce one of the values that has made Quakerism, for me, so disarmingly familiar, so sticky and so coherent. I'm going to revert to the first person and not try to speak for all Quakers with this next idea. For me, being a Quaker does not raise you up in God's eye. Quakers do not have a special covenant or exclusive relationship unavailable to others (who may or may not belong to a faith community). We are not saved because of our beliefs and others are not condemned for not participating in (let alone not knowing about) what our small group thinks or does. The Light is way too bright to be only in our Meeting Houses (or only in our schools for that matter), or only available to our small Society of Friends (the legal name for Quakers, thus Friends Schools). Maybe this is why so many of my friends have said to me: "if I weren't (fill in the blank - Episcopalian, Catholic, Jewish, Hindu, etc.), I would be Quaker." When I hear that, it always makes me feel the bond, the ardor of their faith, and I want to say back, "if I weren't a Quaker, I would love to have been brought up in your faith."

Quakers have a history of non-conformity. After all, our Society of Friends was formed out of a heartfelt calling to separate from a dominant, dominating, and very hierarchical culture which prevailed in 17^th Century England. It all springs from a fairly simple notion: that there is that of God within each person. From here, we can connect the dots to a few other basic Quaker principals. Since the Truth is within each person, it can be discerned by individuals without intermediation from priests or clerics. Divine revelation continues even after the publication of scripture. We’re not as smart as we thought we were. OK I made the last one up, but I still believe that whenever we think we have The Answer, it is a good time to look around and place great value on the experiences that others have had, even (or particularly) when that experience is different from our own. Just saying.

A couple of weeks ago, on campus, we celebrated our sports teams at our outdoor Spirit Assembly. It was a beautiful autumn day; warmer than normal. Almost everyone wore yellow and green. In their hair. As a matter of fact, there was a lot of hair dyed colors that do not appear in nature. But it all looked very nice with the face paint and fake tattoos. And I thought, this is radical. Of course, what makes Sandy Spring really different is not green hair. What does make us the incredible school that we are? Well, our team mascot is a really lovable Wildebeest; that’s got to be different. Maybe we should give our Wildebeest a name. I propose naming him George Fox (this is a Quaker joke). That would take us from different to, well, really different.

The prospect of change might sound scary but the absence of change is stultifying. Water is an interesting metaphor for change as it shares many of the properties inherent in change. Water moves, bubbles, crashes, drops and finds the path of least resistance. Water is both perpetual motion and unmovable force. Water creates currents. Still water can be tricky, confusing and deep. When water doesn’t move it is dirty, undrinkable, a breeding ground for illness, stagnant.

I figure that if you are not a little bit worried about the quality of the public discourse as it relates to many of the challenges that loom in front of our country, you haven't been paying attention. As a nation, or even as a nation of diverse communities, we struggle to have a civil discussion on tough issues (health care comes to mind--let alone end-of-life scenarios), even (especially?) when the option of doing nothing seems utterly unsustainable.

I was ten years old when my family moved to Sandy Spring. We had been living in the Boston area and when my Dad learned that he was to be promoted and transferred, he came down and picked out an old farm house not all that near his office in Clarksburg Maryland but only a mile or so from the Meeting House. He had grown up in Prague, a definite city boy, but thought my Mom, who hailed from a coal mining community in Southwest Pennsylvania would like it. Once settled in, we spent successive Sundays visiting different churches in the area. Perhaps it was because ladies with surnames that go back to the first days recorded in the Sandy Spring Annals called on my Mother, in a formal sort of way that she found charming, that we became attenders and then members of Sandy Spring Monthly Meeting. That was 47 years ago.

When trying to understand Quakers, one place to begin is to realize that Quakers didn't get rid of the priests, they got rid of the lay people. What that means, basically, is that we are all in this together. It is this community that we are all a part of where we are going to celebrate the specialness of the place, the wonder and the energy and the noise and the sense of sanctuary. But we are also going to reinvent it in order to make it our own, and by doing so we will craft our own narrative, develop our own vocabulary, give life to our own experience that will accompany the teaching, learning and growing that happens at Sandy Spring. As I am a new faculty and staff member, we will learn the ropes together.