"Seeking a Connection to Good Souls and to Meaning"
Ian Cron, the father of Aidan ’15, spent a week on the Hill in January as Episcopal’s Theologian-in-Residence.
Ian Cron, Episcopal priest and best-selling author, offered the message at a special Monday evening vestry service as well as at the day chapels on Thursday and Friday. His choice of topics ranged from the directly Biblical to the best and worst places on the body to use Icy Hot.
He also spent ample time visiting a variety of English, theology and music classes throughout the week, looking to gain direct insights into the students and the school culture beyond his understanding as the parent of a former student.
“You don’t know what’s needed in a place or by people until you see what’s needed and what holes need filling,” Cron said, when asked how he decided what to talk about to the students. “You have to look and listen and get a sense of the shared experiences of the group.”
Asked to mull the characteristics of the current generation of students, he cautioned, “Generational labels can be a little lazy,” but followed up with a focus on where they seemed stronger or better than past generations.
“This generation seems to be correcting some of the excesses of ours,” he said. “If you talk to lawyers and businessmen my age or older, they are so frustrated with this younger generation. They don’t want to work the hours, put in the sweat and time. Yeah well, these kids want a healthy life, a more balanced and sane life.
“The judgment aimed at them is coming through a lense of our own experiences and our own measures of success, and there’s this insinuation that we got all of that just right. But did we? I don’t think so.”
He worries that too many young people (not to mention full-grown adults) can find themselves chasing endless demands that can never be fully met, running themselves into the ground. One of his messages for the week centered around his belief that the community should find time to “Smile. Breathe. Go Slowly.”
Cron is quite rare as an author in that his three books cover three distinct genres: fiction, memoir, and now nonfiction with his latest, “The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery,” published in October 2016.
“The Enneagram is an ancient personality typing system. People throughout history have been very invested in finding explanations for their personality. We want ways to look underneath the waterline of our lives,” Cron said. “If you don’t have self-awareness, you risk just banging around from guardrail to guardrail in your life.”
Cron’s son Aidan is currently in his second year at Brown University. Referencing Aidan’s experience and growth as an EHS student, Cron said that spending those vital teen years at Episcopal can be a very effective way to help many kids get beyond that guardrail-to-guardrail banging and find deeper purpose and ties.
“This is a great place, Episcopal, it really is, and what you see in these students is a lot of people seeking a connection to good souls and to meaning,” he said. “It’s easy for people today to confuse connection with intimacy. It’s not the same. We see the problems with confusing the two. We see it in the kind of insensitivity in what people will write on social media.”
One of the great things here is that students must learn to navigate what it means to live together with a lot of different people, he said.
“You have to learn how to tolerate those you don’t like, how to support the friends and people you do like. It’s harder to isolate yourself here, too. Not impossible, but harder. And there are benefits to learning how to manage that reality. Humans develop and grow in a social context. We find identity in a relational world. If you’re not in the midst of others, you are bound to miss something vital in the growth process.”
“I feel a great debt of gratitude to EHS,” he said. “My son was a personality born for boarding school. It’s not for every kid, but the real sacrifice is on the parents, and it was a sacrifice we’re proud we made for him.”
