A reflection in the usual format, for shared reading and brief reflection before the meeting begins …
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that a school can have excellent wellbeing programs, generous social justice initiatives and a genuine commitment to inclusion, while still having people who are almost invisible within its community.
It’s an uncomfortable truth of institutional life: We become very good at noticing the things we have organised ourselves to notice. But the difficult question is about everything, and everyone, that falls outside our usual field of vision.
The story of the month
This month Uniting Church communities will hear one of Jesus’ last public teachings in the Gospel according to the community of Matthew: the story commonly known as the sheep and the goats.
The scene is dramatic. Jesus describes a final judgment in which people are separated into two groups, according to how they have treated those who were hungry, thirsty, strangers, sick or imprisoned. To one group, he says that when they cared for these people, they were actually caring for him. To the other, he says that when they neglected them, they were neglecting him.
The surprising thing is that neither group recognises what Jesus is talking about. Both ask when they could possibly have encountered him in those circumstances. They hadn’t realised that their ordinary encounters with vulnerable people carried such significance.
The story is often read as a call to serve people in need, and reasonably so, but I wonder whether it also asks something about our capacity to notice?
This idea in some other places
The French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil regarded attention as a profound moral and spiritual practice. Really attending to another person means making room for their experience, even when it interrupts our own concerns and assumptions.
There’s an interesting parallel in the Japanese idea of ma, the meaningful space or interval between things. In art, architecture and everyday experience, the spaces between elements can be as important as the elements themselves.
A school chaplain recently described to me how some of his most meaningful encounters happen in the gaps between scheduled activities – walking through the schoolyard, lingering in a staffroom or simply being available can create opportunities that no carefully planned program could guarantee.
It takes some deliberate effort to make those encounters possible.
Back to school governance
The Uniting Church characteristic of “Courageously elevating difficult subjects and evolving responses” invites boards to examine things that may be easier to leave undisturbed. Perhaps one of those difficult subjects is institutional invisibility. Who rarely appears in our reports, surveys and conversations? Which families have – unknown to us – stopped engaging? What do we know about the experiences of people who find our school’s ordinary expectations difficult to navigate?
Good governance needs information, structures and measurable outcomes. But these can only tell us about the things we have learned to count. And there is another dimension to this. Boards inevitably make decisions about people who aren’t in the room. Some are represented through reports or the voices of others. Some may barely enter our thinking at all.
The people absent from our conversations can also become absent from our imagination. The challenge here is to cultivate enough curiosity, humility and genuine connection to discover what we have been missing, and then the courage to allow those discoveries to change how we govern.
As we begin today’s meeting … it may be worth carrying three questions with us
Who might be almost invisible from where this board sits?
What do our routines and reporting practices make easy to notice, and what might they conceal?
Whose absence from our conversations might be shaping the decisions we make?