The grief came first.

When I watched the video of the U.S. Men’s Olympic Hockey team, some of whom were alumni or had trained at Shattuck-St. Mary’s School, laughing along in a moment that diminished the women’s team, I was profoundly disappointed. More than that, I realized that if a boy formed by Shattuck could remain silent and laugh along with a “joke” made at the expense of not just women, but at the expense of one of his classmates, my alma mater was no longer an institution I recognized or wanted to be part of. I wish I could say the realization came as a surprise. It didn’t. It was a culmination of little things that had been building over the last several years. The hockey controversy wasn’t the cause of my grief. It was the trigger that revealed it.

To understand that grief, you need to understand the role Shattuck St. Mary’s played in my life and the place it holds in my heart. I arrived at St. Mary’s Hall in the early 1980s. The schools, and back then it was still plural, were in transition and struggling financially. Shattuck had retired it’s military school history. Classes were combined and co-ed, held on the boys’ campus. The girls still lived on the SMH campus. The campuses were separate, though within walking distance. Each had their own unique traditions and culture. Together, they formed young adults, many of them the children of clergy or diplomats living abroad, grounded in academic knowledge, personal understanding, and the Episcopal faith.

It wasn’t perfect. I recall an all girls meeting where we discussed the mental and social challenges of walking the hallway, lined with sofas occupied by boys, between Dobbins and Shumway, before the first classes started. A few days later, the sofas disappeared. Our shared formation in action. Formation that, as far back as the 80s, gave the girls space and dignity and it taught the boys how to honor that dignity. We learned how to sit together, breaking bread, and talking with one another. Shattuck-St. Mary’s Schools taught all of us that community is mutual, honor is communal, and dignity is non-negotiable.

That formation shaped me. It held me. It steadied me. Not just as a teenager looking for stability and direction while discovering who I wanted to be, but also as an adult when my life fell apart and I needed to rebuild who I was. I returned to the last point, the last place, I knew who I was and, starting from there, i created a new life.

Now, watching the hockey controversy unfold and looking at the recent rebrand where the bold Shattuck S takes center stage and St. Mary’s fleur-de-lis becomes an afterthought, almost a superscript indicating original references that no one ever checks, I feel unmoored. The school is thriving now, becoming the “Hogwarts of Hockey” and expanding globally, opening a campus in Malaysia even as a partnership with China was came to an end. Somewhere in that rise, however, something essential slipped. The Episcopal identity that grounded us has softened. The formation that once shaped our instincts has thinned.

The girls have lost ground.

Not because the school is hostile to them, but because the center of gravity has shifted toward national and global prestige, elite athletics, and a brand identity that no longer names them with the clarity or the equality it once did. In that shift, the boys have lost something, too. They have lost the formation that taught them how to honor women instinctively, how to see themselves as part of a community rather than the center of it. They have lost the sense of fairness and family that meant I could call a classmate out for celebrating violence against someone just doing their job (which was also the career I was in at the time) and that another classmate could point out flaws in my logic on gun-control. Lost that innate understanding that, whatever our online disagreements, we were there for each other face-to-face and in real life. The school community as a whole has lost something essential when classmates stop communicating and unfollow one another rather than having conversations or just waiting for emotions to cool before re-engaging each other. The hockey controversy revealed that loss—not as a moral failure of individuals, but as a symptom of an institutional drift I had felt in recent years but couldn’t put into words until today.

That is the grief.

It is a grief of losing a home I thought was permanent just over a year after losing my dad. The grief of realizing that the institution that once held me, no longer recognizes me. The grief of watching dignity become optional.

Then, almost in the same breath, came the relief.

Because the Episcopal Church, an institution that had once disappointed me, that once discouraged me from even imagining a vocation because I wasn’t male, has grown in the opposite direction. When I stepped back into parish life, as both an active member and an employee, I did not find the Church I’d walked away from in college. I found a Church that had grown into itself and its own best instincts. A Church where women preach and preside. A Church were LGBTQIA+ worship and serve openly. A Church where people of color lead with authority even as white congregants wrestle with our roles in Church history and systemic racism, sexism, ableism, classism, and other forms of discrimination. Today’s Episcopal Church has re-centered dignity as a theological truth, not a slogan.

White men still hold the center and a significant amount of power, but the landscape is vastly different compared to the Church of my childhood although it is still recognizable as the same faith tradition. The Church did not push me out or hold me away. It grew toward me. It became a place I could walk back into and find home.

That is the relief.

Relief that sits right beside the grief, not canceling it, not resolving it, but illuminating it. Because the attitudes toward women and community tells the story. Shattuck-St. Mary’s once gave girls space, identity, and dignity. It forged a family out of all its students together. Now we seem to have lost ground. The Episcopal Church once discouraged me from imagining a vocation. In fact, a bishop once told me, “not going to happen on my watch.” Now it is full of women, people of color, and LGBTQIA+ leaders and members that I never expected to see recognized or occupying the center in my lifetime, particularly back in the 80s when I was so angry over the injustice and cruelty I was just learning to see.

One institution moved away from the dignity and community that formed me. The other moved toward it.

Somewhere in that crossing, I found both grief and grace.

I’ve wondered whether my grief about Shattuck is so different from the grief some conservatives feel about the Episcopal Church or the Anglican Communion. The emotional structure is similar: the institution changed and something feels lost. The content of the values, however, differ. Their grief is rooted in a desire to preserve hierarchy, privilege, and exclusion. Mine is rooted in a desire to preserve dignity, mutuality, and the formation which shaped my moral imagination.

Still, the parallel humbles me. It reminds me that institutional change always creates displacement. It always creates grief. It always forces us to ask who we are becoming.

And that is why this is a personal theological reflection, not some kind of prophetic critique. I am not calling Shattuck to repentance. I am not claiming authority. I am simply telling the truth about what happened to my heart. Why I feel like crying just thinking about it.

This is testimony.

Testimony says:

This is what I lost.

This is what I found.

This is how God met me in the middle.

The grief came first.

The relief came as a surprise.

Both have become part of my story.