Editor’s Note: These are the prepared remarks for the Three Taps of the Gavel Address, presented by Chautauqua Institution Interim Chief Executive Kyle Keogh, delivered prior to Sunday’s Service of Worship and Sermon in the Amphitheater. Due to the absence of the traditional gavel, Keogh’s closing remarks differed from what is printed below.
Good morning, Chautauqua.
My name is Kyle Keogh, and I’ve had the privilege to serve Chautauqua for the past year. But this morning, I want to be honest: I’m not just here as your Interim Chief Executive. I’m here as someone whose family life is deeply, personally woven into this place.
What a gift it is — truly, what a gift — to stand in this Amphitheater, on this sacred ground, at the edge of another summer together. Look around you. Look at the people beside you, behind you and in front of you. Take in the light as it breaks through the trees and falls across these familiar wooden benches. Feel, for just a moment, what it means to be here.
My daughter Daley does something I find beautiful. When she has trouble sleeping, she imagines biking around Chautauqua as a five-year-old. Not counting sheep — biking these grounds. That image tells you everything you need to know about what this place is. It is a place of peace. A place of joy. A place that lives inside you long after you leave.
I am so grateful to my parents for bringing my sister, my brother and me here when we were kids. And I am grateful every day that my wife Liz and I have been able to carry that tradition forward with our own children. Because what I’ve come to understand — what I think so many of you understand — is that the broad range of people, perspectives and communities you encounter here builds something hard to name but impossible to overvalue: a foundation for living a generous life.
Being here — choosing to be here — is itself an act of gratitude. And gratitude is precisely what this summer is about. Now, there are three ways I think about Chautauqua — and when I reflect on what makes this place worthy of our gratitude, these three keep coming back to me. They are simple, but they matter: this is a remarkable place, a remarkable program and a remarkable community.
Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns once said, “Things are different here. You feel it the moment you pass through the gates. Here, we have a glimmer, an active, muscular, American utopia — inquisitive, ecumenical, feeding mind and body and spirit.”
He is right. You do feel it the moment you pass through the gates. There is something distinctive about this place — a sense of calm, of energy and of possibility that is hard to explain until you’ve experienced it for yourself.
In 1874, Methodist Episcopal minister John Heyl Vincent and businessman Lewis Miller gathered people at Fair Point on the shores of Chautauqua Lake for the first meeting of the Chautauqua Lake Sunday School Assembly. What began there grew into something much larger: a bucolic place of uncommon beauty where people could come to learn, reflect and take their ideas and faith seriously. That place endures. And for that, we are grateful.
But a beautiful place alone does not explain why so many of us keep coming back, why we build our summers around these weeks and why we count the months until we return. What draws us, year after year, is the program.
For more than 150 years, Chautauqua has been a place where people gather to learn, reflect, grow and connect. The program — our Summer Season — is the living expression of that purpose and our mission.
This summer, our program will take us through nine weeks of big and timely questions — from iconic women who have changed the world, to the changing media landscape, to America’s 250th birthday, to the future of food and finally, in our ninth week, to the importance of gathering and what it means to remember, harmonize, move and grow together.
Nine weeks. Hundreds of lectures, performances, worship services, classes, concerts and conversations. All of it anchored by the four pillars that have guided this Institution since its founding: the Arts, Education, Religion and Recreation — challenging us to expand our minds, engage creatively, invest in our physical health and grow spiritually.
For a program built on that belief, in a world that needs it more than ever, we are grateful. And yet — as extraordinary as this place is, as rich as this program is — neither of them is what I find myself most grateful for. Chautauqua is a community.
Because the place can stand empty, and the program can be printed in a book, but without you — without the thousands of Chautauquans who return year after year or are here for the first time, who bring their children, their parents and friends, who carry this community in their hearts through every other month of the year — there is no Chautauqua.
We are what I like to call a community of communities. From the formal groups — the denominational houses, the Bird, Tree & Garden Club, the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, to name a few — to the informal gatherings of those who meet on the courts for pickleball, around the table for mahjong, on the fairways, the softball field or out on the open water, this place offers something rare: a home for everyone. It is our hope that every person who walks through these gates finds communities where they truly feel they belong.
For this community — for you — we are grateful beyond measure. And I think we need to sit with that for a moment — because the world outside these gates is hungry for what we have here. We are not gathering in spite of the times. We are gathering because of them.
People are hungry for real community, for trustworthy information, for ways to talk with one another across disagreement. We can feel that all around us.
America’s 250th anniversary is not just a milestone. It is a chance to think again about who we are, whose stories we tell and how we make room for more people in that story. Across the country, people are looking for places where they can slow down, think clearly and be with others in meaningful ways. Chautauqua is one of those places.
That has always been part of who we are. We believe learning matters at every stage of life. We believe faith can be a source of healing and hope. We believe the arts help us see more clearly. And we believe honest dialogue and real connection are essential to a healthy society.
From the very beginning, Chautauqua was not a place of passive retreat. You came here to learn, be challenged and be sent back changed. The question that greeted every arriving Chautauquan in 1874 is the same question that greets us today: What will you do with what you experience here? We truly have something real to offer everyone.
This may be one of those moments when what Chautauqua offers feels especially needed. And for the chance to meet that moment, we are grateful. The question of “What will you do with what you experience here?” brings me to the heart of what I want to say this morning. So why gratitude? Why did we choose that as the theme for this summer, this particular year?
Maybe because gratitude helps us hold two things at once: an honest awareness of what has been difficult and a clear sense of what is still good and worth holding on to.
Gratitude isn’t naïve. It doesn’t ignore what has been hard. It simply reminds us that even in difficult times, there is still much here worth honoring and protecting.
So much still endures here: the lake in the early morning, the Bell Tower reflecting across the water, the mission that remains as vital now as it was generations ago and the community that keeps returning to these grounds and to one another.
Chautauqua gives us a great deal to carry back into the world — ideas, perspective, renewal and a reminder of how we want to live in this world.
This summer, I invite each of you to carry gratitude as your companion through every week.
Be grateful for the thinkers who will challenge you. Be grateful for the musicians who will move you. Be grateful for the preachers, teachers, writers and artists who will show up each week ready to share their work and their gifts.
Be grateful for the stranger on the bench beside you. Be grateful for the child running across Bestor Plaza, still discovering what this place is.
That child might be your child. That child might be you, thirty years ago. And someday, perhaps, that child will grow up and bring their own family here — and when they can’t sleep, they’ll close their eyes and bike these grounds.
Be grateful, too, for the people whose work makes this place possible — the staff who care for these grounds, welcome you at the gates, usher you into performances, answer your questions, plan your season, sell your tickets and help bring each day of Chautauqua to life. What may seem effortless from the outside is made possible by a great deal of care and hard work.
So as we begin this 2026 Season — as someone who is deeply, personally thankful for this place — I want to ask something of each of you.
Please share your gratitude with others. Gratitude is a gift. But it is a rare kind of gift: it does not diminish when you give it away. It grows. Every time it is given, it multiplies. So share it freely this summer. Let gratitude guide all nine weeks.
The gavel I hold in my hands this morning has been held by many before me. The three taps signal the opening of summers of discovery, summers of transformation, summers of hope and summers of resilience.
Today, it signals the opening of a summer of gratitude. A summer in which we say thank you — to this place, to this program and to this community — and a summer in which we do our part to care for and strengthen what Chautauqua has been for generations.
Welcome home. Welcome to the 2026 Summer Season. And now — in keeping with a tradition, with three taps of this gavel, let us declare together:
[Three-two-one]
Chautauqua 2026 has begun.
