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.