The River that Sustains: A Convocation Greeting
Henry Listenberger, Chapel Field’s Academic Dean, speaks during the school’s third annual convocation at Goodwill Church in Montgomery, N.Y., on Friday, Sept. 5, 2025.
On Friday, September 5, 2025, Chapel Field held its third annual convocation at Goodwill Church in Montgomery, NY. Our Academic Dean, Mr. Henry Listenberger, welcomed attendees with a greeting, which we are pleased to share below as a Bell Tower article.
Transcript of Greeting – Academic Dean, Henry Listenberger
Welcome and good evening! It is my distinct pleasure and honor to greet you all at the beginning of tonight’s event. As the Academic Dean, and as someone who is still a relatively recent addition to the Chapel Field community and newly oriented to it, I am glad to have an opportunity to make a few remarks designed to orient us to this evening, which is of course ultimately an event to orient us to this school year.
And over the course of this past year, as I settled into the school and the beautiful Hudson Valley, I have found the most orienting element of Chapel Field to be the commitment in our mission “to cultivate a joyful community.”
The full mission statement of Chapel Field, which you can read on the front of your programs, is “to partner with parents to cultivate a joyful community of students who love the truth, pursue wisdom and virtue, and live for the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
As a whole the mission statement is a reference to the analogy of a tree (represented in our seal), indicated by the main verb “cultivate.” At Chapel Field, we consider the education of each individual student to be like the cultivation of a beautiful tree, and each point of our mission statement is an element of that tree in full glorious bloom.
The full green leaves swaying in the breeze are the visible habits and ways of life that our students learn to practice — loving Truth, pursuing Wisdom and Virtue, and living for the glory of Jesus Christ. This way of life, this beautiful bush of green leaves is supported by a sturdy trunk of ordered affections fed by roots of gratitude spreading deep into a fertile soil that is a curriculum of truth, goodness, beauty.
Most importantly, that soil owes all of its richness to the sparkling river flowing beside the bank where the tree is growing, just as the truth, goodness, and beauty in our curriculum find their source in the living water of Jesus Christ.
But the direct object of Chapel Field’s mission statement is not to cultivate individual trees, or single students who love the truth, pursue wisdom and virtue, and live for the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is to cultivate a community of such students, who take their love of truth, their pursuit of wisdom and virtue, and most of all their passion for Christ with them into their homes, their colleges, and eventually into the businesses and families they go on to build.
And so the image of a single tree zooms out to a beautiful grove that spreads up the sides of mountains, and ridges, and down faraway hills — a grove that owes everything to the eternal river of living water that flows through it. The mission of Chapel Field is not just to make trees, but to cultivate a full lush valley — not unlike the beautiful Hudson Valley in which it resides.
When I started at Chapel Field last year, I was starting a new job and moving to a new place at the same time. I was joining this joyful community of Christ-loving trees all while suddenly living in the most beautiful and historic community of literal trees that I have ever lived in before.
So it has been impossible for me not to see the connection between the community of this school that I have been so blessed to begin serving, and the beauty of this place that I was quickly becoming so stunned by. So tonight, we have the opportunity to reflect on and praise the Lord for this joyful community as a community, and we can do that just as one would look out over the beautiful scenes of a beautiful valley.
And for that, I am reminded of a poem by William Cullen Bryant that is written about the green beauty of this very valley, composed in Beacon, titled “A Scene at the Banks of the Hudson.” In the poem he beholds the beauty of the valley all at once; he says “from the green world’s farthest steep, I gaze into the airy deep.”
This is what we get to do tonight at the start of a new year. During the school year we walk among the trees in this community and we work hard to help them grow, nourished by the living water of the river that we know is flowing nearby. But tonight we stand out on a peak, like William Cullen Bryant on the top of Mt. Beacon, and we see a whole “green world” of trees cultivated to serve the Lord.
But what is most important, is to behold the thing to which that valley and that community owe everything:
“Cool shades and dews are round my way,
And silence of the early day;
Mid the dark rocks that watch his bed,
Glitters the mighty Hudson spread,
Unrippled, save by drops that fall
From shrubs that fringe his mountain wall;
And o'er the clear still water swells
The music of the Sabbath bells.”
From this peak, looking out on the valley, the community, and a new school year, the “glittering” and “unrippled” river of Christ is unmistakably present and undoubtedly responsible for it all, standing out as the most visible thing spreading throughout the scene, as the noise of worship music rings in our ears.
After tonight, we head down from the peak and, all of us — teachers, parents, students — will spend the school year walking in the valley again and not above it, amongst all those trees as the eternal river, the Living Water of Christ, works in so many unseen ways and across so much territory.
So tonight, we want to prepare ourselves to remember throughout the year the image of all of those trees all at once, and most importantly, the mighty river spread throughout the scene, nourishing and sustaining it all.
Henry Listenberger serves as Academic Dean at Chapel Field and teaches Elementary and Middle School Literature classes.
