“sauntering to the holy land”

We are in the throes of good-byes here at KA. On Friday our Gap Year fellows left on planes taking them to Greece, Spain, or the United States—in a couple months they will matriculate at their new colleges and universities. On Thursday we bade adieu to our students for the summer after a slide show (how professional do these things look nowadays with digital photography and music!) about our pioneering year at KA. As my dear friend Elizabeth and I walked our student Hamzah to the car, we all three cried. I laughed a little too, saying, “Hamzah—we are just saying good-bye for 10 weeks!” Still, it is a parting, and they are rarely simple and easy. Two days from now the faculty will take flight—to points in England, France, Spain, Thailand, Italy, South Africa, Croatia, Turkey, China, and the United States. Some will come back in two months and others will start new chapters in their lives. Like all of you, I am no stranger to good-byes. My tear ducts get a good work-out every June.

A school calendar is so helpful at putting a chunk of time in perspective. There is such an emphatic beginning to a school year, when, of course, hopes are never higher, and the contours of a school year are fairly predictable, and finally, there is that all-important modern phenomenon we call “closure.” There are hugs, gifts, promises and parties.

I have taught in four schools over the course of a so-far 20-year career, and I remember my good-bye parties with vivid relish. When I left Gaston Day School there was a great fried chicken party at the Walker house with smiles and memories to send me off to graduate school. BFF Mary and I had been touring diners in the county that summer of 1989 as a “summer project,” and in one diner we had laughed and laughed at the saw-blade art available for purchase at this one diner in Dallas, North Carolina. At my party, as I opened my fancy William and Mary box, nestled in the tissue paper was a prime example of this high art. Mary had inscribed on the back of the magnificent saw-blade art: “Memories of 1989.” In 1999 this treasure hung proudly on my set of Steel Magnolias, a tribute to those memories in the late 1980s in North Carolina.

At a good-bye party in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1996, a large group of my former actors sent me off with lines from their favorite plays we had done in our five years together. They presented me with a plaque that sits in the other room here in Jordan and always comforts with the words: Thank you for giving us the courage to believe, and ‘we are with you wherever you are.’ Another chapter finished.

Last year at this time I enjoyed many lunches and dinners with treasured friends from the Hackley years. The Khosrowshahi and Polcari families had a dynamite party for me with catered Jordanian food and Jordanian flags and scores of the people that had enriched me over my 11 years at Hackley. One former student and dear friend, Adam, flew all the way from California to join in the chorus of good-byes. These are moments to savor when the day-to-day stresses of teaching can wear on you.

Colleagues John and Suzanne came from Deerfield to KA for just this one year, this opening year of the school, as visiting scholars. It was always the plan and contract that it would be just one year and then back to their New England farmhouse and the 200+ year school in Massachusetts. I met John and Suzanne my first night in Jordan—we had a mutual acquaintance, and hit it off immediately. They are the kind of teachers we all hope to have and know—brilliant in scholarship, measured and patient in their crafting of curricula, demanding in their insistence on accuracy and precision, understanding and inspiring, and life-long educators. Suzanne gave the keynote address at the convocation of the school year, way back, 300 nights ago in August, to ring in the school year, and she exhorted us to remember the joys of this year, urging us to note our places as pioneers in this endeavor. It was our first night to meet His Majesty, and it was one of those glorious Jordanian dusky evenings, and the school year lay before us, unknown and untested.

Throughout the year, John and Suzanne led the way for exploring the region, leaving no rug store untouched in the kingdom! They created the finest faculty apartment I will ever know, with treasures and furniture and silks and rugs worthy of a spread in Architectural Digest. But more important than their “stuff”—they set a tone for the boarding faculty, to be involved in our students’ lives, to lift them up beyond a kind of wild dog-dom and create a dorm family. I am forever in their debt for their leadership and love of school life.

John and Suzanne decided to throw their own good-bye party! They invited all the faculty dorm residents to a weekend at Dana, a beautiful, unique nature reserve a couple hours away. They reserved for us the entire Guest House, perched on the cliff of the breathtaking Wadi Dana. We trooped down in seven cars and spent the afternoon and evening hiking through the reserve, enjoyed an Arab BBQ dinner, and then feasted on the I-have-said-it-before-and-I-will-say-it-again glorious Jordanian sunset.

This was not the entire faculty of KA, but John and Suzanne had wanted to say a special thank-you to those of us in the dorms who had lived with our students. It was an interesting contrast to our usual noisy accommodations in the dorm! The Guest House, wonderfully cozy and comfortable, is incredibly silent. It is not near any roads and your view is the still Wadi Dana, another slice of the Jordanian Grand Canyon. You see the lights twinkling on the Dead Sea at night, and the call of nightjars echoing eerily up the valley make for an unforgettably serene experience. Queen Noor once called the experience at Dana a “10-star” experience.

Dana is a unique experience as a visionary program combining scientific research, social reconstruction and sustainable tourism. In the 1990s a government agency reconstructed an ancient village, and revitalized a traditional farming/grazing community, while allowing low-impact tourism so not to exploit or ruin the vast reserves of flowers, fauna, animals in the area. As I walked along the trails, I wished for my friend Anne (okay, that would be a daily wish, anyway) to help me out with the names of trees and flowers.

This past Thursday at morning meeting, when it came time for the school to officially say good-bye to our departing John and Suzanne, Suzanne was a little too moved to speak, but John read one of his favorite passages. Teachers rarely will let a chance slide by to teach you something new! As a New Englander, it is not surprising that John likes Henry David Thoreau, and so John read to the school a passage from a Thoreau essay called, “Walking.” He shared:

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks--who had a genius, so to speak, for SAUNTERING, which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return-- prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man—then you are ready for a walk.


It was a beautiful moment—students and faculty listened intently (a skill we worried they would never acquire!) as each of us processed why Mr. John had read us this piece. I had never read the essay before, but here was this esteemed colleague, even after exams, urging his students—all of us—to be “saunterers”—walkers, explorers with purpose. Of course Thoreau did not mean the literal Holy Land, modern-day Israel, Palestine and Jordan, but whatever we have deemed “holy.” But what an added bonus for us as we realized we lived indeed, in that holy area famed from the stories of the Bible. I know John well enough to know that for all the teachers in the audience too, he was reminding us that the space in our classrooms is Holy Land. From around the world many of us came, ready to “go forth” in this educational adventure.

We are seeking the Holy Land, God’s kingdom on earth, not geographically but in justice and beauty. We are actively seeking to join in the process of our own sanctification. We must never sit back and let life happen to us. Even though sometimes we will feel like a meandering river we must remember that that river is, and must be “sedulously seeking the shortest course” to its destination or else it will dry up. Sometimes the shortest course is not an obvious straight line. And let’s also encourage ourselves by remembering Tolkien’s quote in the prophecy about Aragorn, “All who wander are not lost.” While we choose to trust God in where He will take us we must still saunter on. And when we feel lost in our sauntering we must turn our faces East, trust our guide even if we cannot see Him, and take another step toward the Holy Land.