Tim Bleecker's 2006 Banquet Speech
Norm Nielsen is definitely one of those people with the gift of encouragement. When we heard the news that Dr. Kaiser couldn’t come, he said to me, “That’s a blow. He’s a mature Christian, a weighty intellect, and a dynamic speaker. . . . Well, we could try someone completely different and just have you speak.” So you can see why I’m extremely grateful to Pam Brady, who agreed to be our main speaker on just a few days notice.
I often say that Caritas is a community, and at that it’s less a community of individuals than of families. We have a lot of great families at Caritas, but I am especially fortunate, because I have the best family in the world. I want to thank not only my wonderful wife Sandie, and my delightful children Ian and Isaac for putting up with and supporting my Caritas obsession, but I also want to thank my dear parents, who are practically perfect in every way. Each year, moved by some mysterious impulse of love, they travel the eight hours from Pennsylvania to be here for our banquet.
My fellow teachers have less choice in the matter of attendance, but I don’t think you could find a group more devoted to their students and to serving God. Thank you, my friends.
We have grown again this year, from 21 full-time and 9 part-time students last year, to 23 full-time and 17 part-time students. We’ve had a German exchange student, the wonderful Niels of blessed memory, for two months, and more recently a student who came during her three-week vacation just for Algebra 2. We are nothing if not flexible.
We are glad to be growing slowly, because we want to keep our small classes and family atmosphere. That may sound like an ugly guy going around insisting that he doesn’t believe in polygamy, but it’s true.
It’s been a busy year so far, as we’ve had a lovely Christmas gathering, with music and a play; our annual classical guitar concert given by Larry Spencer; some soccer games; and our first ever Science Fair! Many of our students did impressive amounts of work for the Fair, and a large number of people came to see their results. Still coming up are the spring play, Pride & Prejudice, on May 12 and 14, Language Immersion weeks, and the spring trip to Montreal.
This is our fifth year, and our fourth graduation is approaching quickly, leading me to reflect on how well our graduates have done at getting into the colleges they’ve applied to. Our four seniors have been accepted so far this year at Boston University, Fordham, Eastern Nazarene, University of Colorado, Florida State, Arizona State, University of New Hampshire, and U Mass Amherst. Some of the schools our graduates have been accepted at include Gordon, Patrick Henry, Pennsylvania College of Technology, BU, Eastern University, La Tourneau, Northeastern University, Wentworth, and Concordia.
Our students represent at least 21 different churches and many denominations. And of course many of you come from still other churches. I love that Caritas brings the body of Christ together over the things that unite us.
Well, that’s the end of the “state of the school” part of my speech, except that I’d like to add something about our Tuesday, Out-of-the-Box series. As many of you know, on Tuesdays we don’t hold our normal classes in the morning, but instead take field trips or invite special speakers in. After a recent trip to the Museum of Fine Arts, we received this e-mail from the three guides:
When your students came in yesterday for their Contemporary Art tour, we, of course, had no idea what a pleasure it would turn out to be. We three guides agree that the students were outgoing, ready to try new avenues to looking at art, curious, smart and vocal (a trait not easily found in high-school students.) [She means students aren’t usually vocal when you want them to be.] In short, they were very easy to work with, and we do hope they enjoyed the experience enough to want to return next year.
A great class such as this one can only reflect the influence of their teacher. Many thanks for your stellar work.
I didn’t read that in order to take credit for the wonderfulness of our students, although I’m certainly not above doing that. I read it to point out that a good education is about much more than classes, more than grades. It includes mature conduct, and respect for others, and willingness to take an interest in things that don’t immediately strike one as interesting. How is such a well-rounded education in life possible at a school? Isn’t that asking a bit much?
I’d like you to imagine a place where teachers respond to difficulties with students by praying for them, where every need and problem is dealt with individually, because what motivates or discourages or helps one student may be different for another. Imagine a place where the teachers know all their students’ characters well—the good, the bad, and the non-pulchritudinous. Imagine a place where the teachers love their students because they, and we, are all of us immortal beings whom God is shaping for His glory. If you can imagine those things, you will see why teaching at Caritas is both incredibly rewarding and emotionally exhausting. You will see why I believe that Caritas is more of a community than a school. (The word school, by the way, comes originally from a Greek word meaning “leisure,” implying “leisure employment.” That’s ridiculous! A community, in contrast, is a fellowship of individuals who share important things like goals, beliefs . . . a Mr. Coffee.
One of the things I love about Caritas as a community is that we don’t have the divisions that often seem impossible to avoid: between the Board and the teachers or the administration and the teachers; between the teachers and the students; or between the parents and the administration. We are united by a clear vision for our community and by desire for the success of our students. If you can gird up your metaphorical loins and listen for a few more minutes, I’d like to tell you about that vision.
As a Christian, classical school, Caritas stands athwart the tide of contemporary culture crying “Stop!” Do I need to convince you that much in our cultural life—our movies, our music, our television, our books, our news—is like a quiet hurricane, a subtle tsunami inundating us with muddy, rubbish-filled water? We can say, “It’s just water, it’s just dirt”; we can let our children grow up immersed in it and hope for the best. Or, we can try to help them discover the fresh water and fertile soil that God wants for us. We can let our children grow up in Plato’s Cave, delighted with mere shadows of copies of reality, or we can pull them out into the sun, blinking and complaining (usually about the amount of homework), to help them see how much more there is to life than pleasure, money, and comfort.
We can learn a great deal from Plato and the other Greeks and Romans beside philosophy. Their art, logic, and drama still influence us greatly. At Caritas, we teach Latin, Euclid’s geometry text, and the old-fashioned rhetorical skills: giving speeches, debating, and writing compositions. We teach, in fact, the liberal arts. As Sister Miriam Joseph says in The Trivium:
The utilitarian . . . arts enable one to be a servant—of another person, of the state, of a corporation, or of a business—and to earn a living. The liberal arts, in contrast, teach one how to live. . . . They enable a person to rise above his material environment to live an intellectual, a rational, and therefore a free life in gaining truth. (5)
In the classical approach, which trains the mind for the study of matter and spirit by grappling with ideas, “even if one forgets many of the facts once learned and related, the mind retains the vigor and perfection gained by its exercise upon them” (7).
The classical approach to the liberal arts goes a long way toward educating students fully, but by itself it is not sufficient. At Caritas, education means teaching everything within a context of our love for and relationship with Christ, for “in Him we live and move and have our being.” Our mission statement begins with the line, “We teach from a clear, consistent, Christ-centered worldview.” We build our education on the classical tradition because the classical approach teaches logic, clear thinking, and elegant expression. We teach from a Christ-centered worldview because we believe that God has revealed truth in Christ, and because we believe that truth brings more than just knowledge—it brings wisdom.
It’s easy to feel you’re involved in something great and significant when you’re part of a huge work. Our 11 teachers and two staff members have chosen instead to make a difference in the lives of a relative handful of students, with whom they can have relationships that are academic, spiritual, and personal. Christian relationships, in fact, are central to everything we do at Caritas—to the way we educate, as well as to the community we are trying to build.
How do you shape a community and hold it together when people are so transient, when students graduate and even the most beloved teachers may move on to something else? It’s impossible to build it on people alone, brilliant and loveable as they may be. I know from close personal experience that it would be folly to build a community on the leadership of the current headmaster. Allow me to illustrate. When I taught at Concord Academy, during my very first class I began to sweat, from the temperature and the nerves, and I strode purposefully over to the window, unlocked it, grabbed the bottom sash and yanked it up, slicing my fingers between the two sashes. (Well, some of us only bleed metaphorically in the classroom . . . .) When I was headmaster at the Imago Upper School, at Orientation of my first year, it came time to lead my teachers out to our classrooms. I took a shortcut, leading us all into a dead end hallway from which we sheepishly emerged moments later. I won’t even go into my faux pas at Tufts.
Because Caritas is all about helping people grow in Christ, we have chosen not to build our community on the shifting foundation of people, but instead on a simple statement in the Letter of St. Paul to the church at Ephesus: “Speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow into Him who is the Truth, that is Christ.” Speaking the truth in love, our motto, is a simple but rich idea, and it’s even richer than it appears at first. In St. Jerome’s Latin version (I’m the Latin teacher, so it behooves me to quote in Latin at least once this evening), it’s “Veritatem facientes in Caritate,” which is neat because it doesn’t use the normal word for either “speaking” or “love.” Instead, it says something more like this: “doing the truth in loving kindness.” Truth isn’t just about what we say, it should also be about how we live. We can have all the knowledge in the world, but if we don’t extend it to others with the kindness of love, we’re like a trumpet blaring in the ear or the incessant tinkling of a bell.
All of you, as parents, teachers, students, friends, and supporters—and I know that some of you pray regularly for us—have more to do than you can imagine with our attempt to let God’s kingdom come in a little corner of Hudson, and in the hearts of young men and women from Wellesley to Hubbardston, Medway to Groton. Thank you for the encouragement you’ve given us just by being here. Tonight you are all part of our family. If I may speak for all of Caritas, in Robert Browning’s words, “Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be.”