The Process of Growth
A teacher at my school was recently notified that he had been re-assigned to two different schools in our district next year. The news was tough to hear. As a third year teacher, he was just starting to feel comfortable—his classroom finally felt like his, he was getting connected to our school community, he had bought all the school gear and was regularly attending extracurricular activities. He even supervised a club or two. In other words, he was putting down roots.
When this teacher received the news, he came by my office partially to let me know, but mostly to process some of the big feelings he was having. I listened. He expressed guilt about letting down the students who forecasted for his class next year because they thought he’d be teaching it. He felt anger at the hierarchical system of seniority that jerks new teachers around. He was sad about the trust he had built with this year’s students and regretted not being able to check in with them next year. But most of all, he was overwhelmed about losing something that he had poured his head and heart into for three years.
As we (mostly he) talked, the conversation became emotional in a way that talking about switching job locations doesn’t often. There was real pain. It was clear that the loss he was feeling about moving schools was related to other losses in his life—personal losses—that he was still grieving. We talked about the grieving process, and how, unlike other processes, it doesn’t seem to have an end. I’m right there with you, I said. I disclosed that I am still grieving my mom, who I lost ten years ago, and am shocked at how frequently I am visited (and sometimes crushed) by the sadness of her memory. He seemed relieved that I had an idea of how he felt. As we continued to ruminate on the transformative process of grief, my office felt lighter.
Holding this space, it occurred to me that our conversation felt different from the conversations I have in meetings, hallways, and offices. It sounded different from what I hear in classrooms. High school is all goals. When we talk about student learning, it is often in terms of targets, as in what is the learning students are to accomplish during this lesson, this unit? School goals begin with “theories of action” before evolving into “improvement plans.” We help students set goals for themselves. We pore over data that indicates whether or not we are on track to achieving goals. We bang our heads against white boards when the desired results are not realized, before pivoting to other strategies, or other goals.
I don’t think my teacher friend had a goal when he stopped by my office that day. He said that he just wanted to let me know he would be leaving. And maybe he thought, on some level, there was something I could do about it (there wasn’t). And of course, there was probably the part of him that wanted someone to commiserate with, to share in his anger and sadness. But what he really needed was not someone to help him reach a goal, but someone to process with. He needed a safe space and a safe person to affirm his journey through a challenge that was bigger than his job. So he could move forward.
Sometimes, it seems, orienting to a goal demands that we shut down sensitivity to process, and even to learning. An experience I had early in life helped me to develop a way of thinking about growth that isn’t dependent on progressing toward a goal.
I was introduced to two religions before I was an adult, both in weird, circumstantial ways. Religion had played no part in my life. My mom’s parents were not religious at all. Dad’s father was a minister, but I wasn’t particularly close to my paternal grandparents. My parents were divorced soon after we moved from Southern California to a small, rural town in SW Washington and, as a way to start making connections with people in the community, Mom and I started attending a local Methodist church. I remember my first few experiences in church as being boisterous, loud, joyful–mostly due to the boundless enthusiasm of our pastor, Marilyn Littlejohn, whose name has somehow stuck with me all these years. And a pretty simple takeaway had formed in my small, four-year old brain: These people believed in God, and Jesus Christ, and that Heaven was possible for those who also believed.
If my mother were still alive, I would ask her all kinds of questions about this period in my early life–questions about the divorce, whether or not she felt lonely, how decisions about my older brother and I were made. And I would ask what drew her to the Methodist church? And why did we stop after attending only a few times? And how did she feel about religion?
We moved to Portland, OR. in 1983. I became close friends with the daughter of one of my mother’s friends, and when I was nine or ten, I went to spend the night at her house. It was a Saturday. They attended a Quaker church, or meetinghouse, each Sunday, so I was to join them the next morning. I remember being a little nervous. When I asked my friend about what to expect, she just shrugged in that “I dunno, it’s just church” way. We went, and the experience did not square with my barely-Methodist upbringing. Quaker meetings for worship were mostly silent affairs, where we all gathered in a room and no one spoke until they were “moved by the spirit.” There were no pastors or ministers, but there were lots of kids my age who were so welcoming to me that I went back the next week, and the week after, and so on, until long after my friend and her mother had stopped attending.
This was a social time in my life. The young Quakers that I fell in with became a tight-knit group of friends. We were constantly going on trips to cabins in the mountains, other meeting houses across the state, and–most memorably–a week-long yearly meeting that was often in Idaho or Montana. These trips were all laughter and inside jokes, hiking, games of capture the flag, night swimming, getting crushes, hooking up, breaking up, and they were often spiritual, if not religious. We would attend meetings for worship, have vulnerable discussions about God (or The Light, as many of us preferred to call Him/It) and how He moved within us and connected us all together.
But really, it was never the God parts that I was drawn to. Our meeting house was liberal and what was known as “non-evangelical,” which meant that, though we all shared an understanding that there was a divine presence in this world, that divine presence 1. Existed within and communicated with all people, and 2. Could take many different shapes. So from a religious standpoint, it was less white-dude-on-a-cloud and more we-all-hold-the-light-in-unique-ways. That said, our chief concern was human rights, and caring for folks in our community. I participated in gay rights and racial justice marches long before I knew what LGTBQ+ meant, and long before Black Lives Matter. This was the “religious” work that resonated with me.
At the age of 17, I applied and was selected to be one of 23 young people from 8 different countries to attend the Quaker Youth Pilgrimage in England and Ireland. It was an opportunity for young Quakers to examine and deepen their relationship with God and Quakerism, and to learn about the spiritual journeys of Quakers from other parts of the world. It was to be an opportunity to grow spiritually.
For months leading up to the pilgrimage, I had to reach out to members of my small meetinghouse for donations in order to fund my trip. I received thousands of dollars, and suddenly everyone was invested in my trip and the spiritual journey I was about to take. This is a lot of pressure for a 17 year old–especially for one who, deep down, wasn’t sure he had ANY kind of relationship with God. Suffice it to say, it was a life-changing experience for me. I made intense bonds with the other pilgrims and the leaders, got to experience other cultures and other ways of being, and felt independent for the first time in my life. What persisted, however, was this growing emptiness within me that should’ve been filled with God, but wasn’t. The way the other pilgrims experienced the Divine, and the way the Quakers in England and Ireland experienced the Divine, was definitely God–not some ambiguous shape that could just as easily be called “light” or “energy” as I was used to. I did have several “spiritual” experiences, but I wasn’t comfortable calling them divine, or at least I was afraid to.
When I returned, I had to present to the people who had funded my trip in a formal meeting for worship that was very much focused on my homecoming and what I had learned and experienced. Sitting in the silence of that meeting, surrounded by all the people who, at least financially, had taken the journey with me, I was terrified. Eventually I got up the guts (moved by the spirit) to speak. I told the truth. I explained that I had had a transformative experience, essentially coming to terms with my inauthentic feelings about God, and that the pilgrimage had complicated my relationship to God in such a way that I would no longer be attending Quaker meetings.
As was often the case with Quakers, the response I received was not what I expected. There was an outpouring of love and support. Tears of joy. One elder with whom I had been close gave me a copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress with a beautiful note she had written on the inside cover. Others assured me that my pilgrimage had been successful, even though it didn’t lead to where I thought it would, or where I thought others expected it to lead.
That was the last day I was a Quaker.
One of the tenets of Quakerism is the belief that the truth is continually revealed. To me, this suggests a process of uncovering truths, deepening understandings, and shifting perspectives based on listening closely to oneself and to others. Those Quaker elders listened to and celebrated my growth, and recognized the Spirit in my process.
I take this lesson with me, and try to help others recognize the Spirit in their own process. To me, this is growth.