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NMH Magazine : Spring 2004

Places in the Heart

Building Jerusalem Across the River 

by Melissa Ray ’82 

I was ambushed at a movie theater. Seeking comic relief from January’s harsh weather, I decided to go see the British movie Calendar Girls. Little did I know that the song “Jerusalem” would be repeated in it five times, leaving me in tears with each singing. It’s not unusual for me to cry when I hear “Jerusalem”—it’s a standard response. The song means so much to me that I had it played just before my wedding ceremony. But this time the tears followed me home.

Days before, I’d received the news that major changes would take place 
at Northfield Mount Hermon—among them, the loss of the Northfield 
campus as I knew it. I lived as a student on Northfield for four years, but that wasn’t my first experience with the campus. 

I was the fourth generation in my family to attend NMH. My grandmother, my great aunt, and my mother were all Northfield students. Stories of their experiences filled my childhood.

I remember going with my grandmother, Margaret McKinney Weiri ’31, to her 45th reunion in 1976. We talked into the night in our shared room in Weston, and that weekend she gave me the grand tour of Northfield through her eyes. 

That campus was in my blood and I loved living there. During difficult times, its landscape, buildings, history, and soul comforted me. In good times, it was an accompaniment to my joy.

One night, walking from Meany Gym towards Merrill-Keep, I looked up at the sky. The clarity of the air took my breath away, and the openness of the fields allowed me to imagine the curve of the earth and my place on it. I sat on the side of the hill for a long time, unwilling to end the moment.

Perhaps I’m still unwilling to let go. Horror was my initial response to the news that students would no longer live and take classes on the Northfield campus. I wasn’t shocked: changes had rumbled below the surface for the past few years. Intellectually I knew the changes made sense. Maintaining two campuses with the attendant expenses always seemed like a grand, romantic stand against economic realities.

So why did the subject make my throat close up? Why did my family speak about it in hushed mutterings, as if someone had passed away? Because change often carries feelings of loss and fear of the unknown.

In the immediate panic, I thought, “What will happen to everything? Will I lose Northfield forever?”

Visits to the campus have always been an important part of my life. 
I try to go when classes are in session so I can feel the life of the school flowing around me. I seek out every beloved spot: worn thresholds in Stone Hall, the rolling hills around Round Top, the trees shading the Auditorium. 

With time to reflect, I realize that losing Northfield is an unnecessary fear. There will always be some part of the campus remaining: at the very least, the Birthplace and Round Top will be preserved. Even if some of Northfield is rebuilt or sold, most of us could re-create the campus as we knew it, from our memories. None of it can truly be lost.

Which brings me to another thought: the Northfield campus I experienced was not the one my mother lived in, nor was it my grandmother’s Northfield, or the Northfield that exists today. I’m sure many alumni feared the worst when it was announced in 1971 that Northfield and Mount Hermon would merge into one coed institution. Now it seems natural to have a coed campus.

Change is essentially positive and certainly inevitable, and this is just another step in the journey taken since D. L. Moody set his schools in motion. Because NMH has had the strength to be a flexible institution, it’s lived on to challenge new generations. The sooner we can embrace these newest changes, the better will be the future of the school and its students. I’d like my son to experience the unique life of NMH, whatever form it may take by the time he comes of age.

I’ve come to peace with the future of Northfield Mount Hermon School. The Northfield campus has been a glorious place to live and learn, but I have faith that Jerusalem can be built just as well across the river.

A graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts film program, Melissa Ray directed the award-winning documentary Guardians of the Spirit. Now a multimedia artist and stay-at-home parent, she lives with her husband and son in Sleepy Hollow, NY. 

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First Comes Denial

by Jane Thankful Smith ’58 

My first warning that the Northfield campus might close came by e-mail from our class secretary. She gave a heads-up in early January that there could be a vote on this issue. The official announcement on January 17 was more dire and harder to assimilate: the trustees had voted to phase out the Northfield campus by September 2005 and move the school to the campus in Gill.

So stunned was I that at first the words meant little to me. In her classic book On Death and Dying, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross writes about the five stages of loss: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Although I resist the thought that my feelings conform to an academic formula, I didn’t at first take in the import of this news: No, it couldn’t be that the trustees had decided to close the exquisite campus where I’d lived and learned.

That reaction was indeed denial. 

Shortly thereafter came rage: Who were these people, anyway? How is it that my school belongs to them to dispose of at will, and I have no part in the decision?

As these thoughts gained momentum, more pictures, fear-filled, flooded my mind. As a career social worker in Massachusetts, I’ve witnessed firsthand the state’s closing of most of its psychiatric hospitals, all located on lovely, 
desirable pieces of land. These enormous facilities have been abandoned and allowed to decay due to lack of care. I tried to remove the thought that Northfield might suffer a similar fate.

As I talked with other alumnae, both on the phone and via e-mail, I learned that they were going through a similar process. Each was outraged, but few of us knew what to do about it.

Ideas were floated: one suggested that a large gathering of Northfield alumnae attend Sacred Concert this year dressed in white, just as we were required to as students. Our presence would be our message. When the impracticality of this idea, as appealing as it was, became clear, the bargaining stage of the loss process began. 

Websites sprang up where alumni could vent their feelings and question the decision. On one, a former trustee and husband of a deceased alumna offered a generous contribution if the trustees’ vote was rescinded. Meanwhile our class secretary penned a letter to the trustees, giving full vent to our fury over their decision and demanding it be reversed. Many classmates assisted in editing the letter, fueled by the weight of our anger.

By then, the letters on those websites were beginning to support the decision and, in fact, to influence my initial outrage. As much as I hated to admit it, perhaps the time had come when two campuses could no longer be maintained, and the decision to close one was prudent.

“Please change your minds and close the Mount Hermon campus instead,” I bargained, even while I knew my last hope was futile.

When I recently made a very difficult move from my home of 32 years, my cousin told me, “Jane, you still have your home. It will be with you always in your memory.” I felt like screaming, “But I want to be in my house!” About Northfield, I feel the same way. I want my lovely campus to be there always for me.

Now several months have passed after the initial shock, and I discover, beneath my dwindling energy for the cause, that I cannot sustain my anger forever. In its place has come the enervating emptiness that nearly always follows deep grief. Accompanying it is a sense of powerlessness: a choice I never would have supported has been made, regardless of my wishes.
Clearly I am disappointed still. Heartbroken would be a more apt word to describe my feelings. But by this point in my life, I’ve lived through many severe losses, and I’ve come to know that this is the stuff of life, however much joy may also accompany it. 

I am tired; I can fight no longer.

Northfield, you are for the ages.

Jane Thankful Smith has worked as a psychiatric social worker, specializing in geriatrics, since 1975. She currently lives in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and volunteers in nursing homes.

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Beware the Edifice Complex 

by Richard P. Unsworth ’45

NMH has gone through many transitions in its 125-year history. The first took place almost immediately after Northfield was founded, when Dwight L. Moody somewhat reluctantly expanded his original vision to include a school for boys.
Ninety years later, the schools made the transition from single-sex education 
on each campus to coeducation on both, a development Moody had no interest in making during his lifetime, saying “I don’t want to add to my troubles.”

Throughout all of its changes, the constant has been Moody’s vision of an education of the head, the hand, and the heart—a vision with Biblical roots and no ecclesiastical connections.

Now comes another transition: becoming a single-campus school with a smaller student body. As important as it is, this transition is only about size and location, not about mission and constituency.

There are many alums whose feeling about the Northfield campus are very strong and positive; they find it hard to imagine a single campus as “the real NMH.” It’s easy for me to understand and share their distress.

I spent only one postgraduate year on the Mount Hermon campus, but I married a Northfield classmate, started my teaching at Mount Hermon, and spent many summers teaching in the Northfield Summer Conferences. Then came my turn to serve as headmaster of NMH, when for 11 years our home was on one campus and my office on the other, and the welfare of both was my wonderful job and daily experience. 

For me, the thought of losing either campus is something like the fear of amputation. But in the months leading up to the day of decision this January, and the weeks since, I’ve reminded myself that the soul of my school is not in its land and its buildings, but in its mission and its teachers, God bless them. It’s sometimes hard for me keep that perspective in the foreground because I, too, have strong emotional ties to spots like Round Top and buildings like Dolben. Nor will these ties ever weaken.

Still, the more I learn about the components of the decision our trustees made in January, the clearer it becomes to me that they did the right thing—difficult but right.

Part of what has persuaded me of the wisdom of this move was a series of conversations with faculty members on Founder’s Day weekend. They, more than any of us, understand the possibilities this move has opened up for NMH. They are clear-eyed and realistic about challenges that will have to be met if the school is to realize the full potential of this consolidation. And they have at least as much affection for the Northfield campus as do the alumni. But they also know from daily experience how difficult it has been, under the “one school, two campuses” configuration, to keep alive the vigorous program and strong sense of community we associate with NMH.

I dearly hope alumni will pay careful attention to their school in the years immediately ahead. I hope, too, that they will make this move a moment to renew their appreciation for the role NMH has played in their lives. Hard as it may be for many, I hope they will understand that the school’s lands and buildings must always be used in a way that best supports its mission and enables its teachers. That is, finally, what this transition is all about.

The famous preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick often reminded his congregation 
in New York’s colossal Riverside Church that they must guard against the “edifice complex” that can divert a church from its mission. That is a fair caution to raise for a school as well, especially when its buildings are handsome, its outlook beautiful, and yet prudence demands that some of each be given up.

The Reverend Richard P. Unsworth was headmaster of NMH from 1980 to 1989, then president until 1991. He retired from academic life in 1999 and is currently at work on a book about French resistance leaders of World War II. He lives with his wife, Joy ’45, in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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Life, Loss, and Impermanence

by Jed Byrom ’93

I grew up in Northfield as a fac brat. 

My first residence after the hospital was Hillside, and my first steps were on the lawn there. I remember performing plays with other faculty kids as a five-year-old and throwing Frisbees on Siberia as a student. 

I’d guessed at the trustees’ decision for some time before it was announced, but I still took it hard. A part of my childhood is gone now, in all likelihood forever. I’ll miss the vitality of NMH’s two campuses, and I’ll miss the connection I had with the Northfield campus. It’s a sad decision, one that didn’t come easily to anyone involved.

Without Northfield, what am I left with? I’m left with memories that cannot be destroyed. I’m left remembering what it felt like to go careening down Northfield’s chapel hill in the rain or on the ice, how the grass on Siberia felt under my toes on the first warm day of spring. I’m left with a fondness for the place and an ache in my heart.

I’m also left with the life I lead and the opportunities NMH gave me. I’m left with a network of friends doing amazing things with their lives. I live in Cambodia now, and it suits me. Had I gone to another institution I would never have studied Chinese, most likely never have come to Asia. I would never have seen the wonder of life here and in the other countries my life has brought me to. And if somehow, by chance, I’d managed to reach this point without the help of NMH, I would not have had the same group of phenomenal people to share my experience with.

Living in the East, I see connections to things in a different way from many of my peers. America has a deep connection with the tangible; Asia a connection with the spiritual side of things. Life is about impermanence in so many ways. NMH is an incredible physical space, a blessing in our lives. Yet it was and is much more than that. It is a community of people with vision, spread worldwide. That vision is, to me, what NMH has to offer to humanity.

The world is becoming smaller yet more complex. NMH produces alumni with a tremendous understanding of the globe, and the school is prospering intellectually, if not financially. If continuing the tradition of excellence and social responsibility requires the sacrifice of a physical space we value, so be it. Can you truly say that the dorm you lived in, or the field you played on, means more to you than the lessons you learned while at Northfield?

I recently spent time with a man who left Cambodia as a child, fleeing the violence that engulfed his country. He ended up at NMH. He’s back in Cambodia now, working on a project to revive its traditional arts and music. Without NMH, he might never have done this, might never have learned about what should be valued in life.

Here’s one of the alumni statements that spurred me to write this essay: Who wants to attend a reunion when the places we loved and lived in are no longer there?

I answer thus: I attended my most recent reunion to see people, people who taught me that a better world is possible, that pursuit of something greater is necessary to happiness. I was not disappointed. I will not be disappointed in the future, at a gathering on the Hermon campus, to be among incredible people doing amazing things—not because of a physical place but because of an ethos and a set of values that were instilled in them, nurtured not by a building or a patch of land, but by people. 

Jed Byrom splits his time and interests between Vermont and Cambodia. He graduated from Wesleyan University in 1997 with a focus in Chinese studies, then traveled in Southeast Asia for a year. In 2002 he bought land in Cambodia and settled down to write and do development work.