Br. Sixtus & Ab. Michael, oblate day of recollection

Over the Thanksgiving holiday I had the pleasure of speaking with an oblate and her husband, a couple I had not seen in quite some time though they live close by. This being a dedicated season of gratitude, we spoke of our mutual blessings. But as the conversation progressed, the reason for her absence from campus became clear: a sibling was in dire need of a caregiver. Our chat later turned to the topic of the Portsmouth Oblates and our joy at gathering for our Days of Recollection. She especially misses that sustenance of oblate spirituality and the camaraderie found in sharing and in praying together in person, breaking bread over lunch together with the monks. Stifled for a while due to Covid restrictions, especially in our school setting, we have managed to make some inroads into reconvening on our regular tri-monthly schedule. Unfortunately, the Oblate Pre-Advent Day of Recollection in mid-November turned into a day for the Religious Men and Women of the Diocese of Providence, an event scheduled for a year ago that had been canceled. When the monastery was approached by the diocese to finally hold the gathering, it had to fall on the very weekend we had hoped to host the oblates. There does remain a weekend, as we enter into February, which may allow us to gather, with the option of remaining in the Stillman Dining Hall for all of our presentations as we have done recently to everyone’s delight, given the vagaries of a New England winter. Stay tuned as plans develop.

Our conversation then turned to a book we both have read and recommended to many friends over the years: The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society by Fr. Henri J.M. Nouwen, a well-known author and theologian (Doubleday & Co., Inc., NY, 1972). The title reminded me of two things. First, it was on December 8, 2019, exactly three years ago this week, that Gerrie Beebe, the heretofore unnamed oblate, had given us the Advent presentation “Christ is Alive,” based on “a very special visualizing prayer time inspired by the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius.” Gerrie had then proposed what she thought was a radical idea: playing soft music in the background as she spoke. I allayed her trepidation, sharing a bit of trivia I had uncovered: not only did Fr. Nouwen give a talk at Portsmouth Abbey in 1993, a few years before his untimely death in 1996. The talk, “Movement from Resentment to Gratitude,” was accompanied by meditative music unique to Buddhist monks, Japanese flute played by a psychotherapist friend with a theology degree. So, a precedent had been set for Gerrie’s “radical” idea. Curiously, the same author came up in a chat with a dear friend of the monks visiting from New York City. Fred Negem’s Nouwen favorite for daily reading: Bread for the Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith (from 1997, published a year after Nouwen died). Fred was not at all surprised when I showed him seventeen Nouwen books and meditation booklets sitting on the shelf right here in my office.

The mention of Wounded Healer had reminded a second thing, a book written by my favorite philosophy and ethics professor at Saint Louis University in 2007, Fr. John F. Kavanaugh, S.J. The noted Jesuit, who died in 2012, wrote: Who Count as Persons? Human Identity and the Ethics of Killing (Georgetown University Press, 2001). His simple, two-line dedication on a page filled mostly with white space gets me every time I glance at it: To brothers and sisters at the margins – of society, of economy, of health. The very first line of his preface was prescient for me at the time. He writes, “An early draft of this work began with the words, ‘This book begins in Zimbabwe.’” Never did I imagine at the time that little more than a year later I would be making my first life-changing mission trip to Zim, in 2008. There I saw first-hand the brothers and sisters of whom he spoke and wrote, people living at the edges of a sickeningly two-tiered society, of the crumbled inflationary economy, and of the HIV/AIDS-ravaged health of the poorest. Things had not gotten much better when I went back in 2016.

Fr. Kavanaugh had spoken to us all semester long of the marginalized, not just in Africa but here at home. He liked the analogy I made in an essay dedicated to my mother, who had died of Alzheimer’s in 2005, a month before I entered the monastery, just before her 89th birthday (she never knew that I was making a major life-change). I had written that when I was in high school and at university, I often made pencil notes in the margins of my textbooks. These scribblings on the edges of the pages helped elucidate, illuminate, or explain the main body of the text I was attempting to understand. Spending time with my mother and the other residents of her nursing facility in similar circumstances helped me to better understand certain realities of life from which I had been sheltered, or which I had never come into contact with or, more likely, had chosen to turn my back on.

These interconnections lead me to the experiences of another recent guest, a young religious, who shared with me that in visiting a parish, wearing his habit, he was approached by an aggressive woman who wanted to engage him over the impending “red wave” of midterm elections. He avoided a confrontation, only later to be approached by a young African woman who handed him $7.00, wished him well, and told him to buy himself a beverage and some food. As Gerrie might say, “Christ is alive!”

Br. Sixtus & Sr. Theodora Ntuli, OSB in Zimbabwe