Serving as a college chaplain allows me to surround myself with other unapologetic bibliophiles. I love books that not only thrill, excite, and engross, but ones that are also illuminating. Kaveh Akbar’s The New York Times bestseller Martyr! taught me a new word—sonder. Akbar quotes from an online source defining the word as: “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.” The rest of the definition not contained in Martyr! continues, “populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness — an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.”
There is no better word to describe the work of the Chapel this semester. Our Chapel Singers put on a concert featuring music that centered experiences of the displaced and refugees. Our Chapel Council read Howard Thurman’s seminal word Jesus and the Disinherited. Our Interfaith Fellowship worked to humanize one another through storytelling and events that helped us to make visible our vibrant, internal worlds. Much of what ails our campus, our communities, and our world emerges from our inability or unwillingness to see and affirm the vibrant interior lives of others. We diminish endlessness complex human beings into political platforms and platitudes in order to make them easier to deal with. Diminished human beings don’t require our empathy and it’s doesn’t take long before diminished human beings become sub-human and then non-human. Once this happens, our own human integrity is in danger of nonbeing. What we need now is more complexity and empathy, not less. Not only is this work desperately needed right now, it is work that is naturally suited for Trinity College Chapel. This work—the work of sondering—is who we are.
Closing out the spring semester is always more difficult than the fall because this ending involves goodbyes. Wishing a fond farewell to students whom I gotten to know well over the past four years is bittersweet, and I hope that our time together has allowed us all to expand our worlds to include more color, variety, and shapes of human existence. Wherever our graduates go, I hope they go with a greater appreciation of beauty and diversity.
Closing out the spring semester is also a time to think about the future. I am excited to organize additional programs next semester that will further the work of sondering. In September, we will welcome the Rev. Leyla King, a Palestinian American Episcopal priest who will preach for our Chapel service and lead a discussion on her new book Daughters of Palestine: A Memoir in Five Generations. In October, the Rev. Margie Baker will join us as the preacher for our annual Pride Mass, celebrating the life and contributions of LGBTQ+ people in the Christian faith. In November, we’ll dedicate the new Barbara C. Harris window (donated by President Joanne Berger-Sweeney) in service that will feature a sermon by the Rev. Canon Stephanie Spellers. Abraham’s Table will be back, drawing our diverse students together around a shard theme. As we look into the spring, we have plans to offer an alternative Spring Break Trip to Philadelphia where we’ll celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and explore the roots of America’s multi-religious history. All of this is possible because of the generosity of alumni, parents, and Friends of the Chapel. Thank you.
There is much in the world that doesn’t work the way it should. Polarization in our politics, humanitarian crises and inhumane violence in the Middle East and around the world, and growing inequality all collude to turn us against one another. Sondering is an invitation to see past whatever it is the prevents us from engaging one another with curiosity and thoughtfulness. I am so glad to be a part of an institution that invites us to share this posture as we build toward a better world.
