 | | Rev. Edward Gleason |
Speech delivered on "A Common Fire Day" by Rev. Edward Gleason, Nobles' fourth headmaster.
Jonathan Kozol, Noble and Greenough School Class of 1954, wrote the following in the Foreward for his book, The Night Is Dark And I Am Far From Home:
"When I was sixteen years of age, in 1952 my closest friend and only rival in a secondary school not far from Boston died on the night before the first day of our junior year.
"I do not know, of course, exactly how my classmates felt. I know, for my part that it was a time of icelike horror. First days, then weeks, then a whole month glided by, before I started to come back to something like a state of calm perception. The next clear memory I have is of a day in late November when the skating-pond froze over and the hockey team began to
practice for its winter season.
"In the past few months, I have found a number of the details of that year returning to me when I try to sleep. I look back with sadness, sometimes with desperation, on the hours and afternoons when he and I used to...'skip out,' in only the most uncertain and most tentative rebellion, from the routine obligations of our academic lives, in order to talk with one another of our hopes and plans for all the years ahead. We used to go and sit up high against a hillside that looked down upon a river that ran through the woods and meadows of our school.
"I remember the physical elevation of the spot, the power that it held for both of us. In class, they talked of common matters, ordinary goals: Betsy Ross, the Panama Canal, Theodore Roosevelt ('carry a big stick!'). Up on the hill, we told each other our deepest dreams.
"He told me that he planned to be a priest, as well as artist, and a parish worker. He told me also that he planned to live his life among poor people. He told me that the model of his life had been, and would forever be, Saint Francis of Assisi. I did not know then who Saint Francis was; but it seemed wonderful to me that he had found his life's vocation when he was just sixteen years old. Later, he asked me what I hoped to do with my career. I told him that I hoped I could become a writer.
"I remember those times. I remember also how we always had to hurry back to class in order to do whatever it might be that we were scheduled for. All of the hours that mattered most to us, in terms of passion, high stakes, daydreams and ideals of justice: all of those hours were times 'sneaked-in, 'unlicensed, 'unpermitted.' We got no credit hours for them.
"He died. I lived. So did my classmates, with exception of one boy who died of cancer two years later. Each death allowed us to pause. Then we went back to lockstep labor, texts and homework, 'requisite sports, College Boards, then college, then (for most) a graduate school, then something which was later described to me as adult life.
"Now I am here: He isn't.
"I think back often on those afternoons, when we were both fifteen. Then, only then, were we the subjects, strong and active, of our own existence. I remember especially how we told each other what we planned to do with our own lives when they returned to us some day. He was trustful, never satirical, about my plan to be a writer. I remember his kind eyes.
"Now I look back, and I do not feel bitter for the way in which we were compelled to spend those years. Nor do I dream of saying that my teachers would have wished me or my friend to undergo that sense of terror, loss of blood and loss of life. I just think of it as a time when all of us, teachers and pupils, for some reason that we would never be told-- had been
condemned to live in prison. We made a couple of jail-breaks, as it were, out to the high grass and the hill above the stream. For the rest, we sat within our cells and did the work that we were told to do.
"I have a yearning to go back there now, to the same place and to the same hour, when we were students in our sixteenth year-- and start all over. We can't though: each for a unique but quite implacable set of reasons. My friend was named James G. MacDonald. If he had lived, he would, like me, be thirty-nine years old today."
Those words are important to me for at least two reasons. First, they describe a series of life-changing moments that happened right here in this school high on the bluff above the Charles River, where the Hendersons' house now sits, moments that formed and directed a life of service. What better thing can happen in a school - especially this school!
Second, Jonathan Kozol is, for me, one of the quintessential graduates of Noble and Greenough School, a person who has lived his life for other people, given himself away, done everything in his power to change the world he knows - for the better.
Jonathan Kozol entered my life in the late 1960s, when, as school minister in The Phillips Exeter Academy, I was responsible for establishing the curriculum for all six sections of an elective year long Religion course in ethics. The fall semester dealt with personal ethics and included a unit on sexuality. A novel was needed that dealt with adolescent sexuality: Jonathan Kozol's very first book, a novel. A Fume of Poppies, written while he was a senior at Harvard, was fresh, beguiling, honest and engaged students, who were but only slightly younger than the author.
Spring semester -social ethics- a unit on educational reform. No book was better than Death at an Early Age, a best-seller, written after Kozol taught for a year in the Boston Public Schools. He was still not yet thirty years old.
Jonathan spoke at Nobles several times while I was headmaster. He was still young, passionate, full of fire and emotion, not always affirming about his Nobles experience, but clear that it had launched him. He and I tried several times to spend an evening together with our wives, but he was too much on the move - speaking, writing, working for educational reform.
After we moved to Cincinnati, nearly a decade ago, my contacts with Jonathan increased. I arranged for him to be the annual speaker for the Taft Lecture in Christ Church Cathedral. Kozol was older, more somber and reflective, quieter. As he began to speak that evening, he reflected on his Nobles experience, Eliot Putnam, his headmaster, who Jonathan said was "the most thoroughly ethical and moral man I have ever known."
After the speech, I asked Jonathan, in person and in writing, if what he has done with his life was not motivated by his experience at Noble and Greenough School and especially his relationship with James MacDonald. Kozol replied, "Without a doubt. He is with me constantly. I dream of him often."
Few persons have been more single minded in devoting a lifetime making a difference in public education for the greater and the common good. Kozol has a deep sense of his identity with his fellow human beings, those less fortunate, less well educated, less intelligent. Listening to him speak not so long ago in Cincinnati, I was struck by the echo of the prophetic, the tones of a truly holy person, born of a tradition of men and women, who have striven to change the world. Was I over identifying? Being too emotional? I asked one of the rabbis from Hebrew Union College what he thought. He replied, "I whispered to my wife while Jonathan Kozol was speaking that the ancient Old Testament prophets - Amos and Hosea - should move over and make room for this man."
What makes a person catch fire? Glimpse new and greater possibility and then devote a lifetime to making it happen?
Another story.
The late Don Cutler, recently deceased, was graduated from Nobles in 1932 and went on to Harvard College. When I was Headmaster, I kept the Cutler family tree in a folder on my desk. Nineteen members of the family had then graduated from the school, the largest number of any single family.
During my years at Nobles and in the years that followed I came to know Don Cutler well. He told me that when he was at Harvard he learned to drink and little else. Drinking nearly consumed his life for the next thirty years.
After one failed marriage and his very happy re-marriage, his second wife, Lloyd, told Don, who was then known as "the drunk of Hammond Street" that she would leave him if he did not stop drinking. Don didn't want to stop drinking, but he valued his marriage more than drink. He entered a rehabilitation and recovery program at McLean Hospital in Belmont and, when that was completed, became an active member of AA. But Don told me in one extended conversation sometime after I had left Nobles that in those days, while he ceased to drink, he had not truly entered recovery. One night, two o'clock, alone in his house on Woodland Road in Chestnut Hill, he got out the vodka bottle and a glass. Sitting in his living room in front of an enormous plate glass window, he got ready to pour, when a brilliant white light and a presence filled the room. Nothing more. No words. Light and a presence. It was all Don needed. He resolved not to drink again. Now, what to do with the life that had been given back to him?
What Don and Lloyd Cutler did was to establish Freedom from Chemical Dependence (FCD) a program of alcohol and drug education for young persons in schools. The first FCD class involving members of the Fifth Class, took place at Noble and Greenough School. Don Cutler and FCD provided the course, while Bill Chamberlin, head of the Middle School and committed to alcohol education, helped make it happen.
FCD has served literally thousands upon thousands of middle and upper school students in independent and public schools (especially in the City of Boston) and in many international schools. Don Cutler spent the final thirty years of his life serving the needs of students, who, like all of us, are prone to the dangers of alcohol and drug abuse. Single handedly, he and Lloyd devoted their lives to one purpose that will only be served unless we --many persons-- are bound together in common endeavor for the common good.
Some of my best conversations with Don came when I chose to mind his business. As a member of the FCD Board of Directors, I wrote to Don, then sat down with him for a full day, to urge that he take active steps to turn the management and direction of FCD over to another person while he was still alive and well and active. Otherwise, FCD could well die when he did. The task was not an easy one. It took two attempts, but it worked. Don Cutler is dead, but FCD is stronger than ever, and Bill Chamberlin is Chairman of the Board.
Another story.
Andrew LaBarbera is a member of Calvary Church, an Episcopal parish in Clifton, the part of Cincinnati that is home to the University of Cincinnati, Hebrew Union College and most of the hospitals. Once a neighborhood for beer barons and moguls of finance, who built pseudo castles, it is now marked by faded elegance.
Andy grew up in New Jersey, attended a Roman Catholic high school, akin to Catholic Memorial in nearby West Roxbury, then entered the monastic order that ran his high school, intending to follow the career of the Brothers who had taught him. He soon learned, however, that he did not want to teach high school students, left the order, entered Columbia where one degree led to another, and finally a Ph.D. and postdoctoral work. He taught at Columbia, Northwestern Medical School and now the University of Cincinnati Medical School in the fields of endocrinology and reproductive science.
But Andy remained drawn to a part of his former life that had never left him. When he describes it, he uses the language of his classical Christian tradition. "All human beings" he says, "All human beings are one in the Body of Christ. One Body, one creation. We come from one source and return to the same source. It is more than merely important for me, it is essential that I express my oneness with my fellow human beings --all of them. I do this through my work, but that is not enough.
"John, my partner, who is a soft ware engineer and a film maker, and I have sought for a parish church, where members actually reach out and are involved with the lives of those in our community who are less fortunate. We found that in Calvary."
Andy and John run the feeding program for Calvary for Tender Mercies, an effort to feed the many homeless people in "Over the Rhine" an area in Cincinnati not unlike some parts of Roxbury and Dorchester. They also manage the parish's involvement in the International Hospitality Network that operates in many cities to feed and house homeless families. And one more thing. On Saturday afternoons, after working at the medical school in the morning, Andy helps staff Mary Magdalene House, a complex of houses in Over the Rhine that offers homeless people facilities for a shower and a shave and a clean set of clothes any time during the day. I am told that it is the only program of its kind in the United States.
As Andy says, "We belong one to another. Therefore, it is natural, even necessary, for me to be involved with the lives of those persons who are my neighbors and are less fortunate than I."
Early in the winter of 1974 the faculty was meeting on a Tuesday evening in January in the Castle Study. The evening was one of many when we spoke of plans to co-educate and enlarge the school, starting in September 1974. Plans had been underway for literally years, but that evening it was suggested that we needed a "position paper" to set forward what was envisioned and would be accomplished in a changed school. This proposal evolved into the suggestion that what was truly needed was a new mission statement for a new school.
The school's mission statement throughout the years had been murky at best, for a school that had been started as one man's effort to train and tutor students for admission to Harvard College. A "new mission" statement was an attempt to state both what the school had been and intended to become in the years ahead. I told the faculty that I would prepare such a statement, spread it before a small review committee and return with it for faculty review at our next meeting.
That evening before I went to bed, I wrote an initial draft. I sat down at the electric typewriter (this was in the old days), and the statement appeared on the yellow foolscap paper before me. Small changes were made by the review committee and the faculty as a whole --Olga Beekman of the Development Office changed a semicolon to a colon-- but essentially the mission statement was what I wrote that evening.
Growth, knowledge, the discovery of value and personal worth all come from the family: not only the family into which we were born, the family into which we may marry, but other families as well. Noble and Greenough hopes to be such a family in which each member cares and to which each member contributes, a family of interaction and respect, personal integrity and
commitment to excellence, a family where one may develop the mind, the body, and the spirit for a life of service.
What I wrote was what I believed Noble and Greenough School was, had been and would be more and more in the future. The operative word, the dominant symbol of the statement, was "family," repeated seven times. The image I had in mind was that expressed in the famous photographic essay, The Family of Man, first published as a book in 1950, whose message was that we all belong one to another, no matter who we are, from where we come, or whither we go.
Perhaps the statement said that the idea family really is a myth. A myth is a reality or an event that is common to the experience of every human being.
A myth is never literal (by which I mean precisely factual) but always true.
A myth is not a photgraphicable event --something that actually happened.
Rather a myth is something that is common to each person's experience.
Or was the word 'family' really a metaphor --a term that points beyond itself to something different and greater. Even if I grew up in a foster home and never knew either my biological father or mother, I belong to a family that is far greater than anything that either you or I has ever known
But no doubt the concept of family must be all of these things --symbol, myth, a metaphor-- in order for Noble and Greenough School to be a family in which each member cares and to which each member contributes, a family of interaction and respect, personal integrity and commitment to excellence, a family where one may develop the mind, the body, and the spirit for a life of service.
Here at the beginning, when we are in school, we must, as far as we are able, embrace the reality of all that life can be and will be by setting standards and striving for goals that embody the best that is and that will be.
Hard work, for some of this means that we shall have to care for one another, right here, really care, even as if we loved one another. And you know what? We don't. We don't But it really is ridiculous to think that there will be the possibility of caring for others elsewhere --in the future-- if we do not do so here and now.
From time to time I heard of students who said or wrote, "I thought Mr. Gleason just imagined all that stuff about family, made it all up, until my mother died, and I discovered my advisor, my teachers, and even my classmates really were my family."
Or, when Sam Dawson, Class of 1983, was tragically killed in an automobile accident on Thanksgiving, no one asked the members of his class to gather in St. Paul's Church on Sunday evening that weekend, they just did --all of them. And when they were all there, they telephoned me, of all people, and asked that I join them. No agenda. It was important to be together, for we were one.
Or, when the father of twin boys in the Fourth Class died suddenly one December of his sons' first year at Nobles, and there was no older man in their family, they found those men right here. They appeared, and twenty years later, they have not left.
Family. Not an easy concept to understand or to model or to be part of. But, it is not unlike the world that surrounds Jonathan, wherever he goes. It is similar to what Don Cutler created in FCD, and it has similarity to Andy LaBarbera means by the Body of Christ.
Family is what many people can find in a team, or a community, or a town or a class or a school. The Family of all human beings. An exhalted concept, like common fire, the commons, the understanding that we are not placed on this earth to live all alone, just for ourself --good old number one-- but with and for one another.
Soon after I became headmaster the Trustees hosted a large dinner meeting for the new headmaster to declare his hopes and dreams to the gathered community. There was a star-studded cast to help me look good. The President of Amherst College, the former headmistress of Concord Academy, the
President of the National Association of Independent Schools. The title of the evening was SPES SIBI QUISQUE.
As I set up the evening, I contacted by father-in-law, recently retired from a life-time olf teaching Latin at St. George's School. "Give me a translation for SPES SIBI QUISQUE," I asked. "But one that says what I want it to say?"
"OK." He replied. "Give me a week. I'm on vacation."
When he called back he said, "Don't translate it. Leave it as it is, SPES SIBI QUISQUE. But if you press me, I'll tell you that "sibi" is plural, and you can translate the words, 'We find our hope in one another.' "
You may have heard that this is not what the words literally mean as taken from Virgil's Aeneid (Book 11, line 309), but this is what my beloved and only father-in-law told me they meant. Very soon after our conversation, he died, making it abundantly clear to me that SPES SIBI QUISQUE means "we find our hope in one another."
Which is precisely why we are all here today. Here today in the realization that we are bound to one another. Bound not only to those persons in this room, but to those who live in our greater community, wherever that may be and however we may define it. It is essential for our well being and for theirs, for our common and greater good, to share our common lives in the
expression we call common fire.
Three questions. Name:
1. The five wealthiest people in the world.
2. Five Academy Award winners for best actor or best actress.
3. Five Heismann trophy winners.
Now name:
1. Three teachers who have supported you
2. Three friends who have helped you
3. Three people who have made you know you are special
These are the people who matter. These are the people you are and will become.
Growth, knowledge, the discovery of value and personal worth all come from the family: not only the family into which we were born, the family into which we may marry, but other families as well. Noble and Greenough hopes to be such a family in which each member cares and to which each member contributes, a family of interaction and respect, personal integrity and commitment to excellence, a family where one may develop the mind, the body, and the spirit for a life of service.
Now, go and do likewise.
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