Palmer Trinity School

HIGHLIGHTS Forty years is a long time if you are wandering in the desert, but it is no time at all if you are in love. The mere passage of time is no guarantee of success, happiness or meaning. As Jim Croce sang, "If I had a box just for wishes/ And dreams that had never come true/ The box would be empty/ Except for the memory/ Of how they were answered by you." The fulfillment of wishes and dreams is not a result of time passing, but of us. Wandering in the desert allowed the chosen people to grow up, to prepare themselves to receive the Promised Land, not for the land to get ready for them. Emerson claims that "Society never advances" in his essay "Self-Reliance." Only individuals can advance. If you don't believe him, just spend a little time studying history, literature, or your grandmother's diary. Things were not so different one hundred years ago, or four thousand. People are the same. Our hopes and dreams for ourselves and for our children are not born out of the technological inventions or discoveries of the day, whatever Apple would have you believe. Galileo lived over 400 years ago, but what he saw through his telescope did not change his love for his daughter. Has Palmer Trinity been wandering in the desert for forty years or are we in love? When I think of the past, present and future of this school, I can only think of an infinite number of moments—bits in time when something passed among people. I've said it often enough, that the school is not so much the land and the buildings, the fields and the labs, but the people who inhabit them, and more specifically the spirit of those individuals. But those infinite moments are swept into eternity as quickly as they come into being. We strive mightily to preserve them, but our clawing and grasping prevents us from bringing the next moment into expression. It is like playing tennis. If you stop to admire your excellent volley, the next one passes you by. Recently I watched The Dead Poet's Society with my senior English class. It is a tragedy, a cautionary tale as all tragedies must be. The title comes from a group of rebellious boys who, in the midst of a world that offers only conformity and quiet desperation, are committed to Thoreau's invitation "to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life" (Walden, "Where I Lived, and What I Lived for"). I do not want to wake up one day only to "discover that I had not lived." I am turning fifty this year. They say a midlife crisis is a problem of meaning. You can't take for granted the achievements and purposes of forty years or so. I am afraid we might take for granted the purposes of our school. We are here to get ready for college, right? No, we are here to create a beloved community of the sort that Dr. King proclaimed and that his son reiterated to us just a few weeks ago. Our intention to be an excellent Episcopal School is a high calling. I hope that in the next forty years we will keep foremost in our hearts, minds and backbones that mission. The Episcopal nature of our project is not a nice addition; it is the whole enterprise. At the beginning of Lent, we read Luke's account of the three temptations to remind us that the purpose of being led through the desert and to be given a life in the land of milk and honey is not to keep us well-fed, or make us more privileged. We cannot assume a long life or permanent favor. We must continually turn away from those temptations toward our highest calling—service to one another in the work of creating beloved p community. Everything else misses the point. Sean Murph Murphy Head of School W I N T E R 2 0 1 2 / 1 3 3

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