Today we began another academic year at The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology.
Not with syllabi. Not with enrollment numbers. Not with strategic plans or learning outcomes.
We began by gathering.
Each year, before our new and returning students arrive, our staff and instructional team gather for what we call Sacred Assembly. It is a chance to remember who we are, why we are here, and to whom this work ultimately belongs. We gather before G-d to reorient ourselves, to pray, to listen, to tell stories, and to co-commission one another again into the strange and beautiful work of being an integrative and formative learning community.
I have been part of The Seattle School for more than two decades now, and I continue to need this ritual. Because institutions can forget.
We can become so preoccupied with the work of keeping a school running that we forget the life toward which the school is meant to run. Calendars fill. Meetings multiply. Budgets demand attention. Classes need preparing. Emails keep arriving. There is always something urgent.
Sacred Assembly asks us to remember what is important. And this year, remembering felt especially significant.
We are entering a season of considerable transition. Our president, Dr. Derek McNeil, is preparing to retire at the conclusion of this academic year, and our community is in the midst of discerning and searching for our next president. Derek is not the only beloved colleague whose vocation is carrying them toward retirement. A number of people who have helped shape this school—its culture, imagination, practices, and peculiar way of being—have retired recently or are preparing to do so.
Transitions like these carry many things at once.
Gratitude and grief.
Possibility and uncertainty.
Celebration and letting go.
Perhaps this is part of what it means to be a living community. People come. People stay for a while. They give themselves to something larger than themselves. They leave fingerprints on the work, and eventually they entrust that work to others.
The question becomes not simply, How do we preserve what has been? The more interesting question may be: What is G-d inviting us to become together now?
Which made this year’s Sacred Assembly theme feel particularly fitting: Better Together.
Throughout the day, we heard stories bearing witness to that truth—not as an institutional slogan, but as lived experience. Again and again, people described work that became richer because someone else entered it. Ideas became more imaginative. Burdens became more bearable. Questions became more interesting. Courage became more possible.
Rose Swetman and I had an opportunity to share a little about our work addressing Christian nationalism. Rose works through our Center for Transforming Engagement; I work primarily within our Graduate School. Our roles are different, our perspectives distinct, and the work each of us carries is particular.
And yet this past year has reminded us that we really are better together.
Christian nationalism is far too complex—and its wounds far too deep—to belong to one discipline, one classroom, one center, or one person. It asks for theological imagination and psychological wisdom. It asks for careful research and pastoral attentiveness. It asks us to understand systems and power while never losing sight of actual human beings. It asks for courage without dehumanization, conviction without contempt, resistance without surrendering our humanity.
This, it seems to me, is precisely the kind of work The Seattle School was created to undertake. Theology and psychology in conversation. Formation alongside information. Interior life inseparable from public life. Love of G-d intertwined with love of neighbor, stranger, enemy, place, and world. Better together.
I also loved having some unhurried time with Dr. Joel Jin, who has just joined our core faculty, and reconnecting with Dr. Adam Schneider, Christina Bergevin, and so many others whose presence makes this community what it is. There was laughter in the room. Tenderness. Memory. Hope. And the unmistakable awareness that none of us carries this work alone.
Then came one final sacrament… Meatballs.
At some point – a few days back – Rose and I had gotten talking about cooking, and she had offered me a glimpse into her love of the kitchen and the Italian family stories carried through food. Today she sent me home with some of her legendary homemade meatballs, red sauce made from her grandmother’s recipe, and fresh Parmesan.
They were, I should report, extraordinary. And somehow they seemed like the perfect ending to a day called Better Together.
Because perhaps communities are ultimately built this way. Someone remembers a grandmother’s recipe. Someone makes more than they need. Someone brings it to work. Someone else carries it home. A story crosses generations and finds its way onto another family’s table.
Shalom rarely arrives as an abstraction. It arrives embodied.
In classrooms and conversations. In prayers and disagreements. In colleagues sharing work across departments. In retiring leaders making room for emerging ones. In new faculty bringing gifts we do not yet know we need. In someone noticing that another person could use a meal.
Maybe this is one of the great gifts of an integrative and formative learning community: we are continually reminding one another that knowledge is never merely something we possess. Knowledge lives between us. Wisdom emerges relationally. Formation happens through encounter. We become ourselves in relationship with G-d, one another, our places, our histories, and the more-than-human world.
Which means that “better together” is more than a strategy for organizational effectiveness. It is a theological anthropology. We belong to one another.
And perhaps this is also part of what I mean when I speak of shalomic imagination: cultivating the capacity to glimpse the world as it might become when relationships are being made whole—when difference need not mean domination, when power can be shared, when strangers become neighbors, when institutions serve flourishing, when the gifts of each are received for the good of all.
Shalom is flourishing for all and everything. We do not manufacture it. We learn to notice where it is already trying to emerge, and then we join in.
So here we are. Another September. Another Sacred Assembly. Another generation of students preparing to walk through our doors. Another year of people we love preparing to say goodbye. Another president yet to be named. Another faculty colleague pulling up a chair. Another classroom waiting for conversation. Another grandmother’s recipe simmering somewhere on a stove.
There is so much we do not know about what this year will hold. But today I found myself deeply grateful.
Grateful for Derek and those who have carried this school across so many years. Grateful for those arriving. Grateful for colleagues whose work makes mine better. Grateful for students we have not yet met and returning students whose stories continue to unfold alongside ours. Grateful for the strange, imperfect, courageous community that is The Seattle School. And grateful for the possibility that perhaps G-d’s Shalom often begins exactly here: when we discover again that we were never meant to do this alone.
We are better together.
Peace, dwight
