David Schilling Given on January 31, 2016 The Old Meeting House of East Montpelier Center “How Could This Not Be God?” My father has been flying hot air balloons for the last 32 years of my life. My first flight was at age 4, and I had to peek through the spaces between the wicker of the basket to see the world beneath. By age 8, I was a regular on the balloon scene, and could do any job normally assigned to an adult crew member. One afternoon, I was chasing, as my father and a student pilot flew out of sight, in the student’s newly purchased balloon. Before the days of GPS-enabled iPhone apps and reliable 2-way radios, the entire job of the chase crew was to keep eyes on the balloon, and get there when it landed. So, with 8 years of constant balloon experience and no religious experience under my belt, you can imagine my reaction as when we realized the balloon was nowhere to be found, the student pilot’s wife pulled the van to the side of the road, knelt down in the back, and began to pray. Not wanting to point out the inherent time management issue here, coupled with my youthful inability to move the van to a more clear lookout point or access the lost balloon phone system, I sat silently and firmly declared religion the antithesis to common sense. B.F. Skinner once wrote “education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten”. Indeed, for me to become spiritually educated enough to feel God’s presence in my own life, I had some serious forgetting to do. My first impression of God wasn’t the greatest. My paternal grandparents were Catholic, at least in that they went to church, spoke certain words, said grace before meals and had crosses scattered throughout their house. Other than that, they were sad and bitter people, who treated their children with a toxic mix of apathy and disdain. Thanking the lord for our food and then in the same breath chastising whichever loser child happened to be closest to them at the table cemented the concept of God in my mind as something to be avoided. Kind of like bullies. Or carrots. “Not our way” was my parents’ explanation of saying grace, and I was glad to go along with it. Eventually, my grandfather decided he’d had enough of his miserable world, which at that point, consisted of sitting in a chair and listening to my grandmother remind him of his shortcomings. I can only believe that her first reaction was to yell at him for making so much damn noise upon hearing the shot that morning. As the entire family gathered for his funeral, she pulled me and my father aside to tell me that her greatest disappointment in life was that he never got his little boy baptized. I was 27, and if nothing had yet cemented my aversion to religion, it was that moment. There were, however, experiences that challenged my view. Attending and working for a Quaker camp connected my love for the outdoors with spirituality, and I can’t describe the feeling that I felt attending meeting for worship….other than something just worked. Later, when I moved to Vermont, I had the honor of working with and learning from Dick Spaulding, a retired school principal who was working in Cabot as a behavior interventionist. Dick and I spent hours

talking about just about everything, and he served as a good friend, moral compass and mentor. I knew Dick had been through struggles in his life and credited his faith with getting through it, but we didn’t discuss God much. One afternoon, Dick came to me with a story that he just couldn’t wait to tell. The past week, he had been vacationing on Cape Cod, and saw a poster about a missing diamond ring. On the final morning of the trip, Dick was walking the beach, having a conversation with God about his own life and family struggles, and paused for a moment to reflect on a seemingly insurmountable challenge. He looked down, and found the ring at his feet. He called the number on the poster, and after insisting that it was God’s intervention, reluctantly accepted a week’s stay the next year at the owner’s beautiful beach house. I clearly remember the topic of one of Elissa’s sermons, around the same time, being God doesn’t grant wishes, but does love a celebration. This made so much sense. Rather than my grandmother’s continuous one-sided requests for absolution or the balloonist asking for her husband to suddenly reappear in the sky, Dick’s actions and Elissa’s words seemed linked, and opened my mind to the idea that some things might just be worth believing. Two years later, Dick was in line to take on the interim principal position at Cabot, with me working as an intern. He died 5 months shy of that job’s start date, and I questioned what I would do next without his guidance. At his funeral, his stepson sang a powerful rendition of Wake Me Up, by Avicii. To this day, the presence of that song in my life has been a sign of God’s work, and Dick’s care. I can go months without hearing it, but it will, without fail, come on the radio or in public when Dick has something to say. The moment I crossed the Cabot town line after being selected as the school’s next principal. At the Jay Peak Waterpark when Marilla and I took our first mini-vacation in way too long. On the school bus when I rode with a student heading back to an unsafe world and handed him an emergency cell phone just in case… and again in a restaurant the next morning, at the time the student’s stepfather was finally arrested. The week after Marilla and I purchased our new land, and we were taking care of our good friends and now future neighbors children, so they could have their first night out in years. How can that not be a sign of God’s love and care? My first introduction to the Old Meeting House came from Erik Esselstyn. Some friends and I had just rented his house in Montpelier, and he joined us for dinner. Erik described a caring community, where even if you didn’t quite believe every word you were saying, you would feel true love in the room. When Marilla first convinced me to come, I was as scared as when I was 8 years old and got dragged along to Christ the King church with my grandparents...what if everyone knew I didn’t belong? I wasn’t convinced? I was an imposter? From the first day, similarly to what I felt in Friends Meeting, it just worked. I am thankful for this supportive community, for the presence of God in this space, and for the role you all play in helping me to explore, accept, and love the work of God in my own life. There’s still a way to go, though… maybe some day you’ll be able to help me tell my parents that I finally was baptized. How can this not be a sign of God’s love and care?