Dear colleagues, 

I am, as I think nearly everyone I know is, exhausted and deeply frustrated and saddened and often enraged, by the disorienting division in the world right now. This isn’t helped by Covid isolation, or the uncertainty of what is to come, or being constantly on guard against an onslaught of unreliable information.

A recent article in The Atlantic by David Brooks posits that this feeling is a manifestation of something we are all witnessing right now: a breakdown of trust in the institutions of our society—governments, media, academia and science, and yes, churches. To his credit, he acknowledges that this is in large part because many of these institutions are not in fact trustworthy. Either they have changed and become corrupted, or we have realized that they have never really served all of the people they should have been serving. What he thinks we need, then, urgently, are some new institutions that we can trust, and that respond to the moral crisis we find ourselves in.

But when I read that, I thought, well that’s all well and good, but how do we do that? How do you build new institutions that are not going to be just as fractured and contested and divided as everything else in our world, when even what seems to be just obvious common sense is contentious? What ground do we build on?

This week on Sunday, I was able to reflect on Paul’s letter to the Philippians and was struck by verse 4:8 which reads, in the King James translation we use in my church: “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

Paul fervently believed that he was living in an apocalyptic age—the early Jesus movement was convinced that Christ’s return to earth was imminent. Paul did not understand himself to be founding an institution of any kind. On the contrary, he believed all institutions were about to come to a permanent end. But he left us, in his example of caring for his communities, something to go on. It was less than when he was talking about a coming cosmic order, than when he was talking to real individual people in the tenuous, fractious assemblies that became churches, that he hit on how to build an institution almost by accident. Reflect on what is true, just, lovely and gracious, he says. Keep on living according to those virtues, and that will stand you through. “The God of peace will be with you.”

If Christ is coming back tomorrow, that is what we should do. If Christ is not coming back tomorrow, that is still what we should do. Because keeping truth and justice, love and grace as the cornerstones of our decisions and our dealings with one another will ensure that those qualities are at the foundation of whatever new institutions we don’t yet know we are building.

Faithfully yours,
Beth

This message was written by Beth Reed, the college administrator, for this week’s Wingèd Ox, a weekly news digest distributed to the college community.