(HOST) Writer, storyteller, and commentator Willem Lange just attended his 55th school reunion.
(LANGE) DL Moody had a gift for drama. A spellbinding preacher and storyteller, he became the 19th century’s most prominent evangelist. He also founded a school, where I recently celebrated my 55th reunion, and designated the hilltop on its campus as the site of the chapel. Built of stone on solid ledge, it commands a view of the Connecticut Valley. Its bell still rings the hours, and at night its lights are visible for miles.
DL had a gift for metaphor, too. He named his school Mount Hermon, after its namesake in the Holy Land that tradition holds is the Mount of the Transfiguration. He took in boys with promise, but almost no money, educated them, and set them to work. Then he sent them off with the adjuration to give back to the world at least as much as they’d been given.
In its early years, Mount Hermon graduated a native Alaskan who was in the first party to climb Denali, and a South African who founded the African National Congress. In later years, Mount Hermon and its sister school, Northfield (now combined on one campus as Northfield Mount Hermon) gave the world Bette Davis, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, David Hartman, Edward Said, and Laura Linney. Frank Shorter and I ran on the same cross-country team, but he ran twelve years later and light-years faster.
I took a walk the other morning to my old haunts – the stream where I caught native brook trout; the windows of my first room, in the attic of a faculty house; and the the old cross-country course, which climbs more steeply than it used to. I returned with my shoes soaked in dew and my mood steeped in nostalgia that lingered for hours.
Mr. Moody, raised in poverty, believed in educating head, heart, and hands. Each student put in ten hours a week at a job. I picked apples, shoveled manure, killed and defeathered chickens, and leveled silage that blew in through a chute far over my head. I scrubbed the swimming pool; mopped the chapel; and, leaping off a ladder like Tarzan on a vine, rang the big bell on Sunday. I can’t help but wonder if I still could. Luckily, the tower door was locked.
My classmates and I are dusted now with the talcum of time. But we share the mystique of this place, and most of us the impulse to give back, as we were told to. And we sing! Many years ago a tradition of choral music began here. There are an annual Sacred Concert, Christmas Vespers, and an alumni hymn sing. We’ve shared experiences here that unite us whenever we meet anywhere in the world.
We closed the hymn sing the other night with the William Blake poem that’s been sung here as long as I can remember. It ends: "I will not cease from mental fight; nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, till we have built Jerusalem in ev’ry green and pleasant land." It’s that vision, of a new Jerusalem, that’s kept us going all these years.
This is Willem Lange in East Montpelier, and I gotta get back to work.