Gratitude and Action: Wade Hughan's Chapel Talk

Joy Sawyer Mulligan
Thacher dad Wade Hughan offers his perspectives on the connections among gratitude, generosity, action, and leadership in his Big Gymkhana Family Weekend 2010 Chapel Talk.

The very first place called a “chapel” was a small medieval building, almost a tent, on the side of a road near the City of Tours in France. It was built to display a relic of St. Martin of Tours, his cloak or “cappella,” from which we now have the word “chapel.” This morning we too have stepped off the road for a moment to gather together so that we can pause, reflect, and consider first things.

 

Thacher is rather about first things. What might first appear to be “loose threads” of academics, riding, art, Saturday nights at the Mulligans’, athletics, music, and dance, are over four years woven together to become a single garment. Like branches of a tree, they are not merely related to one another; here, they spring from a common trunk, which is the formation of the person based on honesty, kindness, fairness, and truth. But I would like to reflect for a moment not on the trunk, but on the deeper root which sustains the whole and without which the branches never produce their fruit.

 

Gathering here we look out on the Ojai, a valley which over millions of years God carved with His own hand out of love, and then gave us the ability to see beyond the geology and to perceive the beauty of this place. Think what a gift that is, the ability to perceive beauty—and yet more generous, He also places within us the human desire to know Him in his work.

 

It is always God who acts first. Sacred texts such as the Torah and the Christian gospels are the record of God moving in history with love, revealing Himself, and calling us to know Him.

 

I believe that the key to our part of our relationship with God, and with one another, is a fundamental disposition of gratitude as the foundation of life. I’m not talking about the kind of obligation imposed by simple manners, that we recognize the kindnesses of others toward us; I am talking about something transformative, a thankfulness that changes us. It is the kind of thankfulness that calls one to action.

 

There is a test that truly thankful people pass and others do not. Think of crystal; if it is genuine it rings. We may claim that a glass is as lovely as crystal, but if it doesn’t “ring true” it is ordinary glass. That is also true of gratitude. The only true ring of gratitude is . . . generosity. We are grateful if we respond with the gift of ourselves.

 

Perhaps the most common daily enemy in our effort to live grateful, generous lives is the temptation to take one another for granted. Thornton Wilder, who knew this [spot] where we are gathered from his days here as a student, placed a scene in his play Our Town, which helps me imagine what God must make of how too often I treat other people. It is evening in a small New England town, early in the last century. A father is alone with his teenage son, to whom he says the following, very quietly and gently: “Well, George, while I was in my office today I heard a funny sound. What do you think it was? It was your mother chopping wood. There you see your mother – getting up early; cooking meals all day long; washing and ironing; and still she has to go out in the back yard and chop wood. I suppose she just got tired of asking you. And you eat her meals, and put on the clothes she keeps nice for you, and you run off and play baseball – like she’s some kind of hired girl we keep around the house but don’t like very much. I knew all I had to do was call your attention to it. Here’s a handkerchief, son.”

 

It is just about the only place in the play, otherwise an encomium to the strength and beauty of the American spirit, where a character speaks any word of criticism of another person. I wonder if that is because Wilder also believed that gratitude must be our fundamental foundation if we are to become whom we have been formed to be.

 

I have just returned from a week in France where I worked as a volunteer taking care of the sick in Lourdes. There is a tradition that 152 years ago the mother of Jesus appeared to a young girl there eighteen times over a period of six months. On one of these occasions, the young girl was instructed by the lady to kneel and wash her face in the dry sand at her feet. As she did so, a new spring appeared, and ever since, pilgrims have traveled to Lourdes, more than five million last year, to drink and bathe in the water from that spring, which continues to flow at a rate of about 30,000 gallons a day.

 

I go to Lourdes to serve the sick who travel there on pilgrimage, but I also go because Lourdes changes me. At first, one sympathizes with the chronically ill and the dying, one feels sorry for them in their difficulty and pain, but I have finally begun to learn what they are uniquely able to teach. They all come to Lourdes hoping for a cure, and immediate inexplicable seemingly miraculous cures continue to occur there. In my personal experience, the most recent remarkable instance is a man who deferred surgery to remove parts of his kidney, bladder, and prostate, the worst parts affected by the cancer that had riddled his body, in order to spend a week in Lourdes. When he returned to face the surgery, he learned that the cancer was no longer detectable in any organ. But beyond praying for cures, the sick also go to express faith, and hope, and gratitude. Yes, gratitude. They have succeeded where many of us have yet to arrive. They have accepted their limitations, they have come to accept their weaknesses, and they accept that they must rely on others, to trust others, to continue in life. And they are, as a group, among the most generous and grateful people whom I have come to know. They always give me much more than I can ever give them.

 

I was thinking about Thacher while I was working at Lourdes because I left on my trip from here after Senior Exhibition weekend and knew that I would be coming back right away to offer you these reflections. Actually, I left Thacher after one of those typically transformative moments for a Thacher parent, watching my 17-year-old daughter use her four years of academic training to prepare a 35-minute presentation on the translation of Latin pornography. Actually, that’s not a fair description. It would be more accurate to describe her “SrEx” as a 35-minute illustrated presentation on translating Latin pornography, during which she engaged her attentive audience, while I, and if I am not mistaken, the Head of School, once or twice silently shifted in our chairs.

 

Thacher unapologetically claims that its mission is to educate and form men and women to be leaders. But what kind of leaders? From its foundation, Thacher has rejected the temptation to form Promethean giants created to take their place in the Patrician class who attempt to rule this country and pursue the will to power. Thacher instead tries to inspire leadership based on a personal humility founded on true self-knowledge, self-knowledge found in moments of strength and in moments of weakness. And from my limited experience here, it seems to me that this unique ethos of the School is as strong as it has ever been.

 

And yet even at a school that celebrates, inspires, and seeks to develop all our human potential, there is I think still a reason to step off to the side of the road and gather here. Here at the side of the road we can take the next step, we can look out at the valley not with the trained eye of a scientist or the mind of a poet, but with the heart of a child who joyfully receives all things as a gift. To see all things as gifts is to reach a foundation of gratitude which changes us, which allows us, however, dimly, to begin to see with God’s eyes, to feel with His heart. This level of gratitude also inspires leadership, but the deeper kind of leadership, which leads by serving.

 

And my personal belief is that this realization of God’s love—that He is always acting first in our lives—and the gratitude that follows from this is the capstone that can be placed on top of the pyramid Thacher has built.

 

We recognize when this final step has been taken by others. The painter who created the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the composer who wrote Messiah stepped beyond human excellence, stepped through the last door, and with hearts bursting with gratitude for God’s love for them, created something supra-human, something that humbles and teaches us in its revelation of majesty which we cannot reach, but which God so freely offers as a gift.

 

My wife Jane and I, married 27 years, or 35 years if you count the wind chill factor, are grateful to our two daughters for the choices they are making here every day about the kind of people they want to become. We are thankful for the commitment and the sacrifices the faculty and staff have made, most remarkably to me the sacrifice of so much of their privacy, to support all of Thacher’s students as they educate and form themselves. And I am grateful to Mr. Mulligan for his invitation to share these reflections, and to you for your time and attention this morning. Thank you, and may God bless each of you and your families.

 

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