Borrowed Ground (part 1)
The Bury Garden
Borrowed Ground (Part I)
The Bury Garden
When I was in graduate school in Philadelphia, our family attended an old stone church tucked into one of the city’s older neighborhoods. Like many churches built before land became scarce, it sat in the middle of its own cemetery. Every Sunday we would pull into the parking lot, gather our three small children out of the car, and make the short walk to the sanctuary through what they affectionately called the “Bury Garden.”
Children have a way of stripping away the self-consciousness adults bring to places.
To them, the cemetery wasn’t eerie or solemn. It was simply part of going to church. They would stop to read names they couldn’t pronounce, trace weathered inscriptions with their fingers, and ask questions that adults rarely think to ask anymore.
“Who was Elizabeth?”
“Why did this man only live to be twenty-three?”
“Do you think these people knew each other?”
We never hurried them.
There was something fitting about entering worship by first passing through the company of those who had worshipped there before us.
Only years later did I realize that those walks had been quietly teaching me something about leadership.
Those stones marked people who had once occupied the very pews we now sat in. They had argued over budgets and building repairs. They had buried parents and baptized children. They had welcomed new pastors and mourned old ones. They had worried about the future of the church with the same urgency that every generation imagines is unique to itself.
Some of them had almost certainly believed that the future of the congregation depended on the decisions they were making.
Perhaps, for a time, it did.
And yet every Sunday their silent testimony remained the same.
The church was still here.
They were not.
That is not a depressing thought.
It is one of the most hopeful truths I know.
The measure of a healthy institution is not that it preserves its leaders. It is that it survives them.
That little church in Philadelphia had quietly outlived every anxiety buried beneath its lawn. Every crisis that once felt existential had eventually become a line carved into granite. Every indispensable leader had, in time, become a beloved memory. The life of the church continued not because those people had been unimportant, but because they had understood—whether consciously or not—that they were participating in something that neither began nor ended with them.
I have come to believe that this is one of the deepest differences between organizations that merely succeed and organizations that endure.
Successful organizations often revolve around remarkable people.
Enduring organizations eventually become remarkable because they are no longer required to.
That sentence may sound counterintuitive in an age obsessed with founders and visionary leadership. We are surrounded by stories that celebrate extraordinary individuals who bend reality through force of personality. The mythology of modern leadership is almost always autobiographical. We want to know who the founder was, what inspired them, how they overcame impossible odds, and what habits allowed them to succeed.
We are less interested in the quieter story that follows.
Who taught the second generation?
Who translated instinct into practice?
Who built the habits that allowed ordinary people—not just extraordinary ones—to carry the work forward?
Who made the institution resilient enough that it no longer depended upon the genius of a single person?
Those are less glamorous questions.
They are also, I suspect, the more important ones.
History has always loved founders.
Civilization depends just as much on successors.
The irony is that founders often understand this better than their admirers do.
Read the letters of Benedict rather than the tourist brochures about Monte Cassino. Read George Washington’s farewell rather than only the stories of Valley Forge. Read the closing chapters of Moses’ life instead of the opening ones. Again and again, the truly great leaders seem to share an instinct that our culture struggles to recover.
They know they are temporary.
