Mission Moment

Dear Covenant Families,

One spring in the early 1960s, a young Irish poet named Seamus Heaney heard a sound outside his window: the scraping, rasping sound of a spade in a flowerbed. He looked out his window to see his father digging, and was transported mind and soul to their old potato farm, where he had heard the same sound as his father and grandfather cut turf and harvested potatoes for their family’s livelihood. This event and the memories it evoked would inspire Heaney’s best-known poem, “Digging”--a meditation on past and present, on family and community, and on the importance of the daily labor that nourishes us and the people we love.

For me, “Digging” is an anthem and emblem for the work we do at Covenant. Our spring semester is full of ceremonies that celebrate this work, full of joy at the completion of a year and at the commencement of something new.

What exactly are we celebrating?

I like to think of Heaney at his desk, writing the first two lines of that famous poem: “Between my finger and my thumb / the squat pen rests; snug as a gun.” I think of the young poet, a future Nobel laureate, wondering about the meaning and purpose of his work–expecting, perhaps, that his poems would be like guns or bombs, instruments of aggression and revolution. I think of his father digging slowly, methodically, peacefully in the garden, and of how this simple act of turning the earth may have turned Heaney’s writing away from violence and revolution toward beauty, tradition, nourishment, and love. By the end of the poem, the pen in Heaney’s hand has transformed from a gun to a spade; reflecting on his family’s heritage inspires the young poet to beat his sword into a ploughshare.

I think of the countless days and nights our students have sat at a desk with “squat pen” in hand, a book open under a lamp, wondering what to notice, what to think about, what to ask, what to write. I wonder how often their reading reminds them of something in their own lives, or something in their heritage–something laborious, perhaps, like digging up potatoes, which is no less glorious or exalted for all the labor and sweat.

I think of my own grandfather, laboring late in his life with a spade. Grandpa and Grandma Schmidt got the call to ministry in their early twenties and sold the family farm to go to Bible college; but they never lost their love of a well-tended garden. They have a shed full of restored tractors that Grandpa fixed up in the short intervals between parsing Greek verbs and visiting his congregants in the hospital or the funeral home. I remember the day in 1999 when my father died, and we all went to Grandpa Schmidt’s house to mourn together. He pulled out his newly restored John Deere to cheer everyone up and took it for a spin around the property. Grandma stepped up and stood on the hitch on the back of the tractor, just behind Grandpa, and rode around for a good ten minutes or so, talking  and just passing the time. My Aunt Caroline leaned in and whispered to me, “That’s what she used to do when he drove the tractor on the old place. They used to love riding the tractor together and just talking until the sun set.”

I think of the generations of Covenant students. Yes, we have generations of students now: There are former Covenant students whose children are in the Grammar School. Just yesterday, I met the father of two alumni; his sons aren’t married yet, but they’re gainfully employed and in their twenties. The day is fast approaching when the children of the class of 2018 will be applying for admission as Explorers. I think about what it must mean for them to learn and grow through our curriculum, to know that their father or mother also enjoyed Living History Day and nature studies and living books and the daily recitation of chapters of holy scripture.

What must that be like? It must be like digging, like cutting into the turf of family memory and finding treasures hidden there–treasures of love and learning and worship and service–treasures of reading, writing, thinking, wondering–treasures of history and poetry, logic and geometry–of the beauties of God’s creation disclosed by the Holy Spirit through the efforts of expert teachers. These children will sit at a desk with a “squat pen” nestled in their fingers, wondering what to notice, what to ask, what to say and what to write. They will lose themselves in Homer’s epic similes or in the innards of a squid they’ve just dissected. They will laugh at their own surprising ability to love a long Latin sentence or to prove the Pythagorean theorem. They’ll kneel and pray before Theology class every day and struggle with Augustine or with the meaning of Luke’s parable of the prodigal son. They’ll learn to ask hard questions of God when they pray, and to be patient when he doesn’t provide an answer to their liking. They’ll be injured in an important game and miss playing in the championship, but show up anyway and cheer like their lives depend on it. They’ll design and build a model of a working, code-compliant museum or chapel–and present their models to real architects. They’ll sing Non nobis.

They’ll dig deep and discover the treasures of the past, treasures that their parents discovered at the same school (and, in many cases, with the same teachers) a generation ago.

Spring is the season of commencement–of celebration of the recent past, and hope for future endeavors. We’ve completed a year of study, labor, play, and creativity; and soon, we’ll certify to the Covenant community that our graduating seniors have completed a course of study that makes them lifelong Covenant Knights.

In this season of looking back and looking forward, I’m thinking about our founding families, our alumni, our current students, and the countless generations in the future who will learn, laugh, and worship with us. Future generations of students who will turn the earth, dig into the past, and discover the treasures that lie waiting for them.

“Between my finger and my thumb / the squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.”

Non Nobis,

Christopher D. Schmidt
Rhetoric School Head