For about thirty years, as I recall, I avoided the quinquennial celebrations of our graduation. The school puts tremendous time and resources into reunions, for the obvious reasons of stimulating school spirit among the alums and, in case we should feel at any point more charitably disposed to its mission, to acquaint us with its needs. Until about the mid-80s, I didn’t feel very charitable; but after a calamitous bankruptcy from which numerous friends helped me and my family recover, I began to appreciate that some unknown alumnus, many years before, had given the money that made it possible for me to attend school here. That opportunity probably had saved my life. It was time to get over being churlish and stingy.

I came here as a sophomore in September of 1950, a refugee from the New York State Juvenile Justice system. My parents were deaf, and couldn’t easily keep track of my activity. My father was an Episcopal missionary priest, routinely away during weekends, which were my most creative periods. Casting about for a place to send their delinquent son, my folks found Mount Hermon School. Its attractions to them (if not to me) were threefold: It was inexpensive – $750 a year for everything; it had been founded by a famous fundamentalist evangelist, Dwight Lyman Moody; and all students had to put in ten hours a week at some sort of work job. There was nothing in that package for them not to like – even, I suspect, the fact that I’d be away from home for months at a time.

The school then was boys-only, under the aegis of The Northfield Schools, which operated a girls’ school on the far side of the river. We called it “coed with a five-mile hyphen,” and dreamed of the paradise across the valley as fervidly as once the conquistador Francisco Coronado yearned toward the Seven Cities of Cibola. I’ve often thought that if I could have showed the same creativity and energy in my everyday life that I exercised in my efforts to get over there, I’d’ve been a millionaire by thirty.

Some years ago the two schools were combined on one coeducational campus. The difference is profound and exhilarating. Dining has been transformed from assigned tables to cafeteria-style, and the level of sound in that old hall is ten times what it was in my day. The arts flourish without the need to bus students back and forth for rehearsals or performances. New buildings – in much the same late 19th-century red brick style as the originals, have popped up everywhere; a new science center is currently a gleam in the trustees’ eyes, and the campus is a masterpiece of green grass and ancient trees.

One thing, however, hasn’t changed: The school has long been, and remains, a singing school. Next year it will celebrate its 125th annual Sacred Concert, where choirs, orchestra, alumni, and faculty gather in a mass to raise the roof off the auditorium. The Founder’s evangelism was also marked by lusty hymn-singing, and services and gatherings here still are. There’s no cross in the chapel – I can’t remember there ever being one – and the hymns in the old “Northfield and Mount Hermon Hymnal” are clearly Christian if you look close enough; but the message of the ones we sang the other night was uniform: What a wonderful world we could make of this one if we only raised our eyes from the petty concerns and animosities that so consume us. The director was precise and cheerful as always, the organist intuitive and right with us. We sang each class’s class hymn – the themes were international, rather than personal – to tunes like that of tsarist Russia’s national anthem, Haydn’s “Austria,” and Martin Luther’s “Ein Feste Burg.” The whole gathering was familiar with them all , and sang them lustily. I was reminded of a line from Lowell’s “The Courtin”: “My! when he made Ole Hunderd ring, She knowed the Lord was nigher.”

Sitting in the front row with all that sound washing over us from behind felt like riding the cowcatcher on a runaway train. Every once in a while the combination of meaning and music seemed to cause a translucent curtain in front of my eyes to shimmer, as if it were about to part and reveal something too rarely seen: the real possibility of achieving something toward which we have forever been striving.

It might have been just an imagination overwrought by sentiment and nostalgia. But when at last we launched into our school hymn, Blake’s “Jerusalem,” I gave up; I couldn’t sing any more. I just listened, and leaked. “I will not cease from mental fight...till we have built Jerusalem in every green and pleasant land.”