The Beginning of the End: Senior Vespers

It’s tradition, the all-School walk from formal dinner up to the Outdoor Chapel for the Memorial Day reading of the names of Thacher graduates and faculty lost to wars, the lists on plaques attached to the stacked stone-and-beams Memorial Pergola around and under which the community gathers. Ecclesiastes 3:1, as read the Head of School, reminds those listening of the inexorable passing of seasons, the rightness of that, even as we ponder the loss of these once-boys “who walked these paths, rode these trails, studied in many of these classrooms.” It’s always a sobering moment.

Then, the shift to the long benches of the chapel proper, seniors filling in the front seats for the first of the year’s ending touchstones, taking in the Valley and the last bit of the solar eclipse that maxed out at 6:38 p.m. (According to Griffith Observatory director Ed Krupp, “the best location for viewing the eclipse is an elevated spot facing the west with a clear view of the horizon.” Perfect.)

In addition to the three seniors who offered readings--Andrew Atwong, Christina Eilar, and Emily Jordan--English teacher and climbing and lacrosse coach Bo Manson, selected by the Class of 2012, spoke on the naturally occuring phenomena of “Babies, Thresholds, and a Solar Eclipse.” His address follows.

Good evening. It is an honor and a privilege to address you this evening, and, to the seniors, thank you for offering me this opportunity.

It’s obvious that I must begin my comments by acknowledging the extraordinary natural phenomenon that just occurred. Throughout history, solar eclipses have been seen as auspicious events, often accompanied by prayer, fasting, and the postponement of all significant business and community activities. Later this evening, Mr. Robinson will have to make a difficult decision concerning tomorrow morning’s start of exams. But for our Seniors tonight, clearly the Mayans predicted your success and the gods have recognized it. You are, after all, the class of 2012.

I must admit that I’m actually not naturally a fan of ceremony. I’ve always been a bit uneasy with formal group gatherings designed to inspire unity and instill community values. I actually skipped my own college graduation. Instead of spending three hours in a rented black robe on a folding chair, under the Virginia sun, I opted for the open road. By graduation morning, I was somewhere past Nashville on my return trip to California.

I do, however, remember with crystal clarity one event from my high school graduation. This moment didn’t occur at the graduation ceremony, but, appropriately enough, at our Vespers service, and it is the one vivid memory I have of my graduation festivities in June, 1975. Being a day school, our Vespers was scheduled, not in the evening, but mid-morning two or three days before graduation. It was held on the school’s front lawn and took advantage of the temporary seating and stage set up for graduation. Our head of school, Alexander Hamilton Bishop III, had just stepped to the podium when behind him Tad Summers leaped onto the back of the platform, sidestepped Mr. Bishop, and bounded down the stairs on the front of the stage wearing only a knitted ski mask. As Tad sprinted by the rest of the seniors sitting in the front rows, many of us immediately recognized him. I could tell you that it was my years of playing sports with Tad that allowed me to identify his graceful stride as he darted past us, down the center aisle, through the parking lots below the lawn, and into a car waiting on the shoulder of the highway that bordered the school property, but it was probably the years of group showers following all those practices and games that had more to do with it.

Either way, in those few seconds Tad managed to accomplish what the various gatherings and speeches and ceremonies that week did not, to leave a lasting impression in his classmates’ minds of what it was to be a high school senior, to be surrounded by friends, to feel connected to and embraced by classmates with whom we had accomplished much and experienced more than, as seventeen-year-olds, we probably realized.

Driving into Ojai a couple of weeks ago with the Tuesday evening Community Service crew, I asked Lucy Han how she was feeling about her upcoming graduation. I know, that’s a really unimaginative question, one clearly not worthy of a thoughtful response. Lucy, however, honored me—as she often does—with a memorable comment, one that caught me completely off guard.

“I feel like a pregnant lady,” she said.

After I pulled the Suburban out of the ditch and back on to the pavement, Lucy continued, “I want the baby but I’m not looking forward to the pain of birth. And then there’s raising the kid, which is probably a lot harder than you think it will be.”

Clearly Lucy was on to something fairly profound here. Graduation is a lot like an approaching birth. It has a due date—June 2—one that can’t easily be avoided, especially at this point, late in the third trimester. Graduation is a momentous occasion, one of those moments in our lives that becomes a mile stone for us, the us we are before graduating from high school delineated from the us we become as high school graduates, college students, and beyond. Sure, Lucy was overstating her point a bit, but, all of you—our soon-to-be-graduates—certainly want to engage the wide world beyond Thacher’s gates, but you also know that you know relatively little about the life that awaits you, besides the fact that it will, at times, challenge you in ways that, sitting here this evening, you can only imagine.

But enough about what we can only imagine beyond Frost’s “bend in the undergrowth,” the purpose of this evening’s gathering is to celebrate the here and the now. In fact, most, if not all, ceremonies are designed to encourage a pause for reflection prior to a moment of significant transition. Tad Summers’ streak through my Vespers service certainly caused all of us present to pause for a moment. Lucy’s comment also prompted my reflection. Our Vespers service, scheduled as it is just prior to the flurry of next-week’s activities, signals the rapidly approaching end of the year. It is a final check-up, as it were, before the big event.

My uneasiness about ceremony aside, our gathering here this evening offers us an opportunity to consider what we have accomplished this year as individuals and as a school, to recognize the unique community that we, as Thacher citizens, have managed to create. And most importantly, it affords us a moment to consider and to celebrate our Thacher relationships, those remarkable friendships fostered by the kindness and generosity and intimacy of our school community.

In her novel, To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf addresses this notion of composed community when she describes the setting for a dinner party. In Woolf’s description of an evening gathering, imagine a metaphor for the very real and meaningful sense of community we have created this year:

“Now all the candles were lit up, and the faces on both sides of the table were brought nearer by the candlelight, and composed as they had not been in the twilight, into a party round a table, for the night was now shut off by panes of glass, which, far from giving any accurate view of the outside world, rippled it so strangely that here, inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a reflection in which things wavered and vanished” (97).

This year has brought all of us together into the candlelight of our shared Thacher table. While our view of the outside world has, at times, been obscured as if through rippled glass, we have composed for ourselves a bit of “order and dry land.” Each of us, in our own unique way, has added to the annual communal endeavor that in The Thacher School.

Several years ago, I shared in a TOAD Talk the notion that there actually is no ONE Thacher School. Thacher, like all schools, is the unique combination of the individuals who occupy it at any one moment in time. What we choose to call “The Thacher School” is actually something we create every September only to then dismantle each June. In a very real sense, there have been 123 separate Thacher Schools since Sherman Day Thacher founded his school in 1889. A single year, therefore, is the life span of each school we create, embrace, celebrate, and then vacate in this annual cycle.

I hope this perspective will be somewhat reassuring for our seniors. You are, as it turns out, not the only one’s leaving Thacher this spring. In a sense, we all are. While it’s true that you will probably never again be active residences of this hillside community, in a way, neither will the rest of us…at least not of THIS Thacher community. This 123^rd Thacher School will cease to exist in just a couple of weeks because you, and Mr. Klausler and Ms. Loney, will depart, but also because our freshmen will become sophomores, our sophomores juniors, and our juniors seniors. The community we composed together this year will inevitably, naturally, become a PAST iteration of what we call The Thacher School, not only for you, our seniors, but also for the rest of us.

As the dinner party ends in To The Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay—the wife, mother and host of the family and friends gathered at the Ramsays’ summer home—pauses in the doorway of her dining room.

“It was necessary now to carry everything a step further. With her foot on the threshold [Mrs. Ramsey] waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Mina’s arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past” (111).

There, in her doorway, Mrs. Ramsay pauses for just a moment to look back and appreciate the unique community she and her guests have composed that evening. She, however, accepts what we all must recognize at the end of each school year, that, while we should pause to celebrate the unique community we have created, we must eventually take that inevitable step forward into a future, which requires that our present become our past.

For our graduates, this transformation from present to past is most poignant. But I remind you that, for each of us, the present is a transitory commodity, something to recognize, appreciate, and cherish, even as we anticipate our disparate paths forward and pause to remember our communal past here at our Thacher School.

Work Cited

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1927, Print.