The Current

November 15-21, 2020
- Oblate Gerrie Beebe's book
- The Search for Wisdom
  
  This month's exploration of "Benedictine Wisdom" turns to our extended Benedictine community and listens to the voice of one of our oblates. Mrs. Gerrie Beebe has been an oblate of Portsmouth since the late 1980s. Residing on Aquidneck Island since childhood, Gerrie has long ties to the Abbey community, including being a past parent and even managing the School's Tuck Shop one year while her son (Jonathan, '91) was in attendance. She and her husband, Bob, have four children. Gerrie began to study spiritual direction a few years ago, inspired by the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, and led to a program offered in Boston by the Sisters of Saint Joseph. Gerrie offers below a collection of reflections gathered from different days and different moments, but all centering on a reflection process that listens, as Benedict advises, "with the ear of the heart." Gerrie considers here pandemic anxieties, seeking God's guidance, discovering our authentic selves. She invites us to see in each day the miracles of God's presence and the opportunity to begin anew. These discoveries, related for her to the spiritual journey that is fundamentally the search for and the revelation of God, reflect a Benedictine spirituality attuned to the everyday, and finding the extraordinary in the ordinary (Read more in "Wisdom").
  Note: Gerrie has also published a book in the Kyrie series, Come, available through Amazon.
- Paul Zalonski and Br. Sixtus
  atop the turbine this summer
- The Vitality of the Psalms
  
  Paul Zalonski, a frequent visitor to Portsmouth and an oblate of Saint Meinrad Archabbey in Indiana, posted some of his thoughts on the psalms recently following a stay at the monastery. Paul, who resides in New Haven, Connecticut, follows the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation, and “works as a monastery farmer and a keeper of honey bees,” his blog notes. He looks into the unique power of the psalms to explore and express what lies hidden in the human heart.
  
  “This past week I spent some time at Portsmouth Abbey. My time at the Abbey was a beautiful time of grace. Following the rhythm of the house is vital: the silence, personal prayer, communal prayer, reading, Lectio, leisure, conversation, listening, enjoying a meal. While the life of the monks cannot be romanticized, it is worth noting that you grow in awareness in following it.
  
  “The point of this post, however, is digging more deeply into the psalms. Praying the Divine Office with the monks had me reflecting on importance of the place of the psalms in our lives.
- "When you pray the Office, you become very aware of how the day gives God glory and challenges us to attend to reality as it is. The unfolding of the day is God’s revelation to us. Psalmody dives into our humanity in a radical way that other literature cannot, because it is here with the psalms that we speak to God. The psalms speak to us of the Father, and they speak of Jesus, image of the invisible God, Who fully reveals the Father’s face to us. As oblates, I believe we need to be real people of the psalms.
  
  “The experience of prayer in community, whether with the monks or nuns, or with others, you come to see that 'the Psalms are both personal and communal. As Saint Augustine says: “if the psalm prays, pray. If it laments, lament. If it rejoices, rejoice. If it hopes, hope. If it fears, fear. For everything which is written here is a reflection of us.”' My own experience mirrors what is said here: '...the Psalms mirror human emotions and simultaneously reveal God’s heart for us.' (Giszczak)
  
  “Psalms express all human experience. As Pope Benedict XVI once said, ‘All the truth of the believer comes together in those prayers, which first the People of Israel and later the Church adopted as a special way to mediate their relationship with the one God, and as an adequate response to His having revealed Himself in history… Thus Christians, by praying the Psalms, pray to the Father in Christ and with Christ, seeing those songs in a new perspective which has its ultimate interpretation in the Paschal Mystery’.” (Catechesis of June 22, 2011)
- Dugdale prints here Wenceslas Hollar's etching of the north elevation of (Westminster) abbey church c.1654. It shows the chapel of St Mary the Virgin which is first mentioned in 1354-5 and as etched by Hollar has been assigned to the mid-fourteenth century on stylistic grounds. The chapel was demolished in the 1660s, and so Hollar did his etching just in time... (Barbara Harvey)
- The "Dies Memorabilis"
  
  Saturday, November 21, marks the "Dies Memorabilis" of the Benedictines in England. It is a remarkable testament to "the power of one." It marks the day on which Sigebert Buckley, the lone Benedictine remaining in England in 1607, welcomed into his Westminster community two monks, Robert Sadler and Edward Maihew, who were returning from exile in Italy. Fr. Hugh Diman, founder and former headmaster of the School here at Portsmouth, wrote in the 1940-41 Portsmouth Raven of this time: "Owing to the successive spoliations and persecutions of religious houses and their communities during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, and, after the respite of Mary’s reign, of Elizabeth, most of the monasteries in England had been seized by one or other of these monarchs and many of the monks killed or driven into exile... for a priest to say Mass in England or to preach or in any way to propagate the faith meant punishment by death." Despite the risks, on this day we commemorate how a living presence persevered and became reinvigorated in 1607, in this small community. You can find Father Hugh Diman's article here. See also this article on the EBC.