Joel: 2.28-29: And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even upon the menservants and maidservants in those days, I will pour out my spirit.

David Jeffery has written eloquently about how education at Woodstock is an "education that makes a difference". In reading those words, I was reminded of the Commencement address I gave in June, 1980. In that address, I spoke about how Woodstock had made them, the graduating class that year, different: mavericks, in a way, like myself; cultural misfits; often strangers in their own countries. And my message was, "Don't ever regret that you are different, for your strength lies in the very things that have marked you and set you apart here at Woodstock, and have made you the unique persons that you are."

..Woodstock is still a school that takes religion seriously; a place that turns out, not only exceptional students but ones who, religiously speaking, are also dreamers and prophets and visionaries, as well. I use the word "religion" advisedly. I am aware of how, for some Woodstock graduates, that word was, and still is, something of an anathema. All too often - or at least for some - we saw religion as being forced on us; to put it crudely: "stuffed down our throats." And, then, looking at religion from a very different perspective, when one looks out on the world today one wonders if there was ever a time in history when "religion" has been more discredited.

. The Woodstock dream, the prophecies and visions if you will, to be truly religious, must be an affirmation of all that is good and worthwhile; it is about honesty and integrity - yes, of course. But, more than that, it's about truth and faith and hope; about a commitment to peace and justice and equity. The dreams and visions have to do with forgiveness and reconciliation; they speak about compassion - a compassionate giving of oneself for the sake of others; and, of course, supremely, they have to do with love, whereby we ourselves, responding to God's love and grace, are able to love and be gracious to others. But religion goes even deeper. It isn't just the values we affirm, tremendously important as they are, it's where those values are rooted and grounded within us as human beings, as persons. This is what I mean when I say that Woodstock should make a difference in the hearts, as well as the minds of the young people who come here to live and to learn. Huston Smith, one of the well-known writers on the subject of World Religions, has a wonderful way of expressing this idea. "The primary work of religion," he says, "occurs in the depth of the human heart: That's where the switches of aspiration and hope are flipped."

When I look at myself and what has made me who I am - and who we all are, for that matter, as persons - I think of our parents and our siblings and our teachers; the books we have read; the ideas and values we have absorbed; our encounters with the physical world around us; the unfathomable mysteries of the universe of which we are a part; and all the varied and diverse cultures and societies into which we have emerged - hopefully, as responsible human beings. It is there, in the "depths of our hearts", where all this has happened, where God's Spirit is at work, molding and shaping us into who we are.

Woodstock, of course, has had a special place in all this for most of us who are here this morning. What affected me and shaped my mind and spirit when I was a boy I still see affecting the minds and attitudes and lives of students at Woodstock today: the love of mountains and forests, the enjoyment of spectacular scenery, the pleasure of exotic sights and smells, living in the midst of cultural and religious diversity, of never being quite sure whether one is Indian or American or Japanese or Russian - and all of this in a school that took, and still takes, the life and teachings of Jesus Christ seriously. With apologies to the class of 1947, and to others who may have heard me at that time, I want to repeat something I shared with them at a worship service held in our house at Oakville, in 1997. It was at the time of their 50th class reunion held here in Mussoorie.

. My story begins with an article written by a British writer, Simon Winchester, in the August 1997 issue of the Smithsonian Magazine. The year is important. His article, called "The Legacy", was one of the many articles about India that appeared in magazines and newspapers all over the world, marking India's 50th anniversary of independence. At the end of the article, Simon Winchester described a ceremony that comes at the close of Republic Day celebrations in New Delhi, held in January each year, called the Beating of the Retreat. "For 50 minutes," he wrote, "there is drumming and skirling and marching and countermarching, the wailing of bagpipes and the shrilling of coronets, and the coordinated crump of many thousands of steel-shod boots. Then, suddenly, the massed bands fall silent, and the crowd does too. Music begins, faintly, but swelling. For the first time in the evening it is not martial music.it is instead [he writes] Mahatma Gandhi's best-loved hymn, 'Abide With Me'. . "The camels are caparisoned; the soldiers' rifles are held at full salute, and they stand silent and rock still, camel after camel, against the gold of the evening. And all the while the hymn plays slowly to its end. 'Change and decay in all around I see; Oh Thou who changest not, abide with me.'

"Although it is the most British of hymns [Winchester writes], here it is performed by Indians - it is played by soldiers in an Indian army in front of a Hindu President, before a cabinet whose members include Muslims and Jains and Sikhs and Buddhists, too, and before a throng in which all religions and all castes and outcastes, from Brahmans to Harijans alike, are sitting and listening. It is probably performed with more feeling here, at the base of this low Indian hill, than anywhere in the rest of the world." Every time Ellen and I have heard that hymn played in that setting, it sends shivers up and down our spines and brings tears to our eyes. It is an amazingly dramatic moment, and it is done very well. You can sense that the crowd is carried along by the emotion of it, too. But, what can it mean to those who are listening? Very few know the words, or even have a clue as to what the hymn is about. Its meaning is, obviously, far more symbolic than the words of the hymn itself. . For me, personally, the playing of that hymn epitomizes who I am. Here is a Christian hymn, a part of me that is thoroughly Western - and not only Western, but the white, Anglo-Saxon, Calvinistic, Protestant, Christian, male American that I am; and yet I hear that hymn in the context of another part of me that is as Indian as any Indian (or, at least, I try to think it is!). . None of us can escape our having lived in India; and none of us can escape the fact that we also received our education in a school that takes its religion seriously.

. And it is all this that takes us back into the "depths of the heart", where, in Huston Smith's words, "the primary work of religion takes place", where we flip those "switches of aspiration and hope." It's there, in the "depths of the heart", that we are able to recognize the voice of nonviolence silencing the crashing sounds of war and military might. It's there, in the "depths of the heart", where those eerie sounds of a lone trumpeter remind us that the peace and silence of an unruffled soul can, at times, free us from the intrusiveness of a tumultuous world. . It's there, "in the depths of our hearts", where we are able to look behind the façade of all our seeming diversity, to the ground of our common being, to the one who is ultimately real, the one who is of ultimate worth, who is also closer to us than we are to ourselves - who, to use the words of Paul, "intercedes" on our behalf, "with sighs too deep for words." There, too, "in the depths of our hearts" is where we respond to the beauty and awesomeness of this incredible place; to the mountains and rivers and valleys that surround us; which speak of a reality that transcends everything we can possibly know and experience; where, with the psalmist "we [are able to] lift up our eyes to the hills" and ask, "from where will our help come?" And from where we hear with the psalmist, an answer articulated in those wonderful paraphrased words of the 90th psalm: "O God our help in ages past / Our hope for years to come / Our shelter from the stormy blast / and our eternal home." It's also there, "in the depths of our hearts", where we hear the words of St. Paul: "Have this mind among yourselves which you have in Christ Jesus.": the one who emptied himself, who took on the form of a servant, who became obedient, obedient even to death, to a death on the cross. It's all this that we find and experience "down deep in our hearts", where those switches we switch are the switches that make us different - the mavericks and misfits that I talked about earlier; but also the switches that give us the strength and vision we need to live out meaningful and significant lives in today's tragically chaotic and divided world.

We have a memorable past, one that we are here to honor and celebrate; we have reveled in our memories, as we should. But we are also here to celebrate a new beginning; and, in that sense, like Israel, we stand ready for a fresh outpouring of God's spirit - yes, down there in the depths of our hearts; one that will lead on to new prophecies and new dreams and new visions on the part of our sons and daughters, the young men and young women who go out from this school; and even, God willing, on the part of some of us who are the old men and old women that Joel also wrote about. After all, the fact that we are a little older, and hence a little closer to eternity than the young men and young women among us, does lend some credence to our dreams.

May God grant all this and more to Woodstock; and to us who are here this morning; as we move on into an unknown future and to things that we have yet to know and experience.

Click here for a biography of Bob Alter