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Wrapping Things Up
May 22, 2021
As the school year’s end now rushes upon us like the wind, we are reminded of the Wind of the Holy Spirit. Our Ascensiontide novena continues to train our minds on the gifts of the Spirit. The week has also brought my way two funerals and the sudden death of a loved one. The ether of eternal life that draws me heavenward seems to interact with a laden gravitational pull of mortality. I am not entirely sure what to make of it all. But these events, and the interface of the liturgical season of Easter with the academic season of Spring Term, affirm a feeling that we are wrapping things up. Our lives seem to consist of one such moment after another: wrapping things up... and what is next? Wrapping up our terms, our seasons, our years, our careers, our lives. Am I just aging into what mortality really means? Is this about a loss of youthful exuberance and invulnerability? Is this just a weaker faith? Or does it foster a deeper faith? One in which death is no longer a hypothetical, is no longer a distant forethought. If there is no resurrection, our faith is in vain. But there is no resurrection without a death. An inexorable if disconcerting logic appears: without death, our faith is in vain. Sometimes it seems we can only wrap things up down here. But let us wrap them well, like a gift, and offer them to God. And let us then wait in the upper room, with the disciples. For if we are so wrapping things up, in faith, then our Pentecost is soon upon us.
Pax,Blake Billings
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Recension
May 15, 2021
I remember, years ago, Fr. Gregory Havill speaking of places where the membrane is thin between heaven and earth: he would remark about this when bringing students to see sacred spaces, such as our own church or sites on the school's Rome Trip. In such places, the heavenly and the earthly seem to meet; they are brought into a particularly close proximity. In his recent homily on the feast of the Holy Abbots of Cluny, Abbot Matthew spoke of the Cluniac practice of the removal of shoes at Communion, inspired by the Biblical passages directing Moses and Joshua to do so, as they were approaching God, on holy ground. I began to rethink this: is the removal of shoes to express that we leave the dirt of the world behind so as to not desecrate the holy? Or does the removal of shoes, rather, diminish the “membrane” separating our walk from its encounter with God? Is it that as we draw near to God, God desires to draw nearer to us? It is in fact part of the monastic ideal, the intention of the community life of prayer and work, precisely to enable a closer proximity to God, to the divine, to heaven. Not only through a sacralizing in space, but also in time, consecrating the hours of the day to the Divine Office.This led me to rethink the Ascension as well. We think of it usually as a departure, as underlining the distance between heaven and earth, as accentuating that Christ is no longer present – in effect, widening “the membrane.” But perhaps thinking of it this way is why I have always had trouble understanding this great feast. I sought clarity in lectio divina about the Ascension, its meaning and significance, and I was led to the following verse: “God has raised us up with him, and seated us with him in the heavens, in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:6) This discovery in itself was stunning to me: to seek clarity on the Ascension, to use ”random org” to choose a New Testament book, chapter and verse, and to end up with this one! The verse led me to consider the Ascension not in terms of Christ’s departure, but rather the opposite: God’s desire to draw close to us; Christ opening for us the path to our heavenly home. I begin to see now, with much hope, the Ascension not as a moment of departure and distance, but as a day on which that membrane of separation becomes remarkably thin, porous, even ethereal, as if taken up in a cloud. And I begin to re-imagine, and to await, the infusion of the very Spirit of God it opens within us.
Pax,
Blake Billings
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Remote Life and its Discontents
May 8, 2021
Our internet went down last Saturday morning. We do have classes here on Saturdays, and class met “as usual.” Our online students could not join, unfortunately. But it was delicious. It was a revelation: to be back in the class, for the very first time this year, without an online component. It was a revelation of living, breathing, interpersonal community life. I had not realized how distracted I actually have become. It opened an awareness of something superficial, ephemeral, incomplete, in the semi-cyber-world we have been living in during the pandemic. It is, despite the connection, remarkably isolating, lonely. Saint Benedict says that the life of the hermit is for but a very few. For the rest of us, the life of the cenobite, real community life, is much better. I thought I discerned something of that in our internet outage. Has our cyber experience forced us into a kind of eremitic life? I need our living, breathing, cenobitic community. Freud spoke of our civilization’s “discontents” with new technologies, which make the extraordinary possible only to exclude ordinary experiences we did not realize how much we valued. So, yes, Zoom is a wonderful thing. But I will not miss it. In the church, we have had to rely much of late on the gift of “Spiritual Communion,” and it is a blessing. But it is not “Cyber Communion.” The winds of WIFI are not the breath of the Holy Spirit (even if I do not understand how either of them really work). Yes, I am posting this message by internet. I do still, and must, use the technology that leads to my discontents. So please pardon my complaint, but please allow me to look forward to the return of the cenobitic.Pax,
Blake Billings
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Re-generations
May 1, 2021
A Form III student asked me the other day if I lived with the monks. She did not know my daughter, who graduated just last year. She did not realize I’ve had four children pass through the School over the past ten years, sometimes three at a time. Of course, because of protocols and restrictions, she could not know I have often attended meals here with my wife, that we have lived on campus since 1996, that we used to be in dorms. Four years after Father Ambrose passed away, I was stunned to realize our students began to not know who he was, a quiet presence and pillar of the community for as long as I could possibly remember. I had once thanked him for having been offering prayers in this monastery all of my life, as he entered the community in 1958. In researching some of our history this week, I discovered the 1960 Yearbook dedication to William Griffin Kelley, having no idea who he was despite the School's annual award in his name. I read more about him, a beloved lay faculty member who came to the school in the early 1930’s shortly after its foundation, teaching here for twenty-five years until his death in 1960, which had a big impact on the entire community. It seems that for a collective community, experience comes in overlapping time capsules. We experience life in generations and re-generations. Our monastic community’s memory now, a hybrid of Saint Louis and Portsmouth, carries forward a new periodicity as time in its oscillations makes its mark. This weekend, we anticipate the introduction of two novices, opening in staccato a new chapter of our shared history.People often ask me if things “are different” here now. It helps me remember my French, “plus ça change…”: the more things change…, the more they stay the same. For there is an abiding continuity in our community, despite the chunks that fall out in our temporal periodicity. I am still working out just what it is. I don’t mean simply the continuity of mission, the visible continuity of institution, nor even the passing on of traditions. I am trying to grasp, to articulate, something deeper at work here. I would like to call it a continuity of Spirit, which holds together the community as a unity, even to the point of being Apostolic. I would like to say that it resides not in our church building, with its chapels and their altars and memorials, but rather, I begin to glimpse, in the host that is consecrated there. The Letter to the Hebrews speaks of Christ offering his sacrifice “once and for all”, ephapax, uniquely. But faith tells us that that singular iteration, by all rights lost to collective memory which has oscillated through wave upon wave of generations, is reiterated, regenerated by Christ, through us, on the altar. As the candle in the tabernacle remains lit until Good Friday, when it dies, only to be lit anew at the Easter Vigil. Iteration, and continuity; re-generation.
The same student asked if I go to Mass each day. I try to. But much more importantly, I am grateful He does.
Pax,
Blake Billings
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About
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Blake Billings '77, Ph.D. is a graduate and current faculty member of Portsmouth Abbey School. He received his undergraduate education at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, then joining the Jesuit Volunteer Corps to assist in an inner-city parish in Oakland, California. From Oakland, he went to Leuven, Belgium, receiving degrees in theology and philosophy. He returned to the Abbey in 1987, teaching for three years before getting married and returning to Leuven to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy, which he was awarded in 1995. Having taught in higher education at various schools, including St. John's University, Fairfield University, and Sacred Heart University, he decided his calling was at the secondary level, gratefully returning to Portsmouth in 1996, where he has resided ever since. He became an oblate of the Portsmouth community ten years ago. His four children were all raised on campus and graduated from the school, the youngest in 2020.
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