5, 6 & 7 September 2025, briefly back in London.
It feels like I have been leaving on this sabbatical for weeks, for months even, and although it is all exciting, the work of leaving has felt pretty wearying. You could say that in the end it is just about packing a case and getting on the plane on Monday and going. Why all the build-up? But that’s just ‘going away’. I’m talking about the process of ‘leaving,’ and leaving is more complex than just going away, especially if one wants to ‘leave well.’
There’s been the planning bit, of course: the logistics of working out where I’ll be, what I’ll be doing and where I’ll be staying from day to day, and there is the corollary of that stuff, namely planning what will happen here while I’m not around and who will do what in the gap: enough of the former to ensure that all eventualities are covered (which I think I have done, despite the vagaries of the International Date Line which I still don’t entirely understand but which I have to take on trust will allow me, in late September, to arrive in the USA before I have left Asia and to have an extra day in my life!), and sufficient but not too much of the latter so that things here are planned enough for there not to be too much uncertainty, but not so much so that there is no wriggle-room in which new things can happen on the initiative of others. All of that practical planning has taken time, but that doesn’t entirely account for the feeling of its having taken ages to leave, nor of the energy it has absorbed.
What has taken the energy and time, I think, is not so much the practical planning but rather attending to the emotional business of leaving. It was Aristotle who coined the term ‘horror vacui’. Nature, he said, abhors a vacuum, and he saw that surrounding material would rush to fill it. This is true of air and water. It is also true of emotional material. Systems hate vacuums. Leaving well means, I think, getting people ‘emotionally’ into a place where the gap left is felt to be an opportunity to be stepped gently into and not a vacuum that everything and everyone will rush impulsively to fill. It’s impossible to achieve this 100% of course, but I am blessed with colleagues who understand the challenge, and who are now poised to use the space this autumn provides rather than feeling that there will be a panic because suddenly there’s a gap felt at the top. This has meant taking time gently to position my associate as ‘the boss’ in my absence, and I hope resourcing her; gently naming the potential for unconscious rivalrous behaviour among colleagues, and setting the expectations of leading laity that’s lthey need to stand shoulder to shoulder with the interim leadership. Overthinking? Possibly. But unconscious acting-out is a reality, anxiety is seldom a driver of good human behaviour, and good leaders – I believe – not only plan and do logistics well but engage in mitigation for anxiety. I think I have done enough.
That’s all been about the emotional stuff of others. There’s been my own emotional stuff too. It took me ages when I was younger to understand why therapists are always talking about gaps and endings. It’s because, beyond needing to be clear about start and end dates for sessions, the emotional business of connecting and disconnecting, starting and stopping, being attached and feeling detached, closeness and abandonment, is huge in our lives. The sabbatical is only three months, of course, but I have felt, in myself, the anxieties of ‘relinquishing’ my position, and of someone else stepping into it; of being found wanting because I’m ‘abandoning’ people, or of being ‘found out’ in my absence; of panic that the things upon which I rely to shore-up my fragile sense of who I am will no longer be within reach, that the people I’m closest to will no longer be there to provide support, and (quietly) the guilt of looking forward to freedom from them! Such is the emotional stuff – seldom named – of being in interstitial or liminal space and of moving from ‘here’ to ‘there’.
So, leaving is a practical exercise, and an emotional one. And it is a spiritual thing too. A sabbatical is partly a time for rest, but also for work. It’s called ‘study leave’ both for tax reasons, and as a reminder that it is meant to be ‘generative’. And in contrast to its being a ‘holiday’, it is meant to be a time in which to reconnect with God and to be renewed in one’s sense of vocation. A sabbatical is a spiritual endeavour. R.S. Thomas – for different reasons but with a similar experience of liminality – reflected in one of his poems on what it feels like to spend ages in a place of transition, and then to step, spiritually, into a new space. He writes: “I have lingered too long on this threshold, but where can I go?…To look forward? Ah, what balance is needed at the edges of such an abyss…like Michelangelo’s Adam, put my hand out into unknown space, hoping for the reciprocating touch.”
Time to leave. Hand out, and off we go!