Oakwood School - Quercus Yearbook (Poughkeepsie, NY)

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TO THE CLASS OF 1954 I take my hat off Q yes, that bat- tered, familiar old gray hatlj to you. You have been a great class, and you have been in very large part responsible for a great year. You have meant so much to Oak- wood and to me that I could not possibly use this space without try- ing to say some of the things that are closest to my heart. I am writing during the Lenten season of your senior year. These days leading up to Good Friday and Easter have special meaning to me, because I am a Christian by conviction, and yet I believe they can have meaning for those of you brought up in other faiths, as well. Truth is universal, whatever sect expreses itg and I stake my life that these things to which Lent bears testimony are true. God is love: that is the reality of lifeof which I am most certain. I have seen many-dear God, too many-of those small crosses in rows along a foreign field. I have stood by them, feeling for- saken, crying in my heart. And then I have thought of another cross, a larger one, one with a Man on it, planted on a hill. The Man knew all about the toughest kind of luck a human being can have, or the most stubborn sin. It killed Him and put Him in a grave dug in the same earth with all those little crosses above those other graves. And still He carried out His way of love even to the bitter end, forgiving as He died. Surely the spirit of the universe was in Him, as it can be in us, and it reached all the way down into the depths of human misery and tragedy. Wherever there is wretchedness or sorrow, frustration or fear, there is the spirit of compas- sion to share and lift the burden. We in our darkest moments, our loved ones in their grief, our friends at their most difficult, our enemies how ever brutal-all are included in the love of God. We are not alone, we are not helplessg no one is hopeless. Love, through the ministry of any one of us willing to be its messenger, can be there to heal and to help. It is not strange, if God is love, that people like Jesus and Ghandi and St. Francis seem even more alive today than when they were alive. It is not strange-if God is love-that every- one of us, little people of the earth though we may be, whose names do not get into the history books, will find that our spirits expand in deepest peace and joy in those moments when we forget ourselves in bringing happiness to others. Members of the Class of '54, for whom I have so high a regard that I have said what is deepest in my belief, I am thinking of each one of you, individually and one by one, now, just before I have written these closing words. ,I WILLIAM W. CLARK