chapel talk
CHAPEL TALK
Remarks delivered by Gregory J. Schneider, Ronald M. Druker ’62 Head of School on January 11, 2021
When I first sat down to write this speech, I was only going to address optimism and excitement about the day when normal returns. To be honest, I wasn’t having that much fun writing it, and I worried you wouldn’t have much fun listening either. It felt premature. I suspect that optimistic clichés are wearing thin for many of you at this point; I know they are for me. Yet I did want to offer a sense of balance and perspective as we launch these next few months as a school – clearly our most immediate challenge. I found myself landing on the idea of disillusionment, teaching, and Bob Dylan. Let’s see how it goes.
Good morning, boys, and welcome back to Belmont Hill after what I hope has been a restful, if not unique, kind of winter break. 2021 has officially begun, and I think we all hope that it will be a better one for our world than 2020 seemed to be. We must acknowledge that much uncertainty still exists about the remainder of this academic year. On the one hand, we are encouraged by optimism surrounding vaccines and the sense of hope for the future. On the other hand lies the grim reality of the pandemic today and its immediate challenges. I know that I return to campus with a great sense of optimism and hope about the second half of our year together. But we are going to need all of you boys – especially our Form VI boys – to lead us to a brighter future. It is time to start working together once again.
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winter–spring 2021
www.belmonthill.org
Over the holidays, I was playing a board game with my family, and my oldest daughter offered the word “disillusionment” as a clue. Somehow the word stuck with me in connection to the sense of cloudy gloom and disappointment that the pandemic has brought to us this year. However, this is not the first time that a generation of young people has felt disillusioned. I was raised on the music of the ’70s even though I was a child of the ’80s and a young adult in the ’90s. To this day, bands like the Allman Brothers, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, and the Rolling Stones dominate my playlists. I had some awareness of Bob Dylan in high school as I was forced to do a rendition of “Blowin’ in the Wind” in my a capella group, and I remember an English teacher or two who referenced him as a poet. And yet Dylan’s presence didn’t speak to me in high school – he was somehow a bit too folksy and his guitar riffs were not nearly dramatic enough for my taste at the time.
