Editor's Note

- Regrouping
  
  June 2021
  
  While much of our pandemic experience challenges and stresses us, other moments seem all the more packed with meaning and purpose. This two-directional experience has been heightened, at least for me, with the celebration of Pentecost culminating the Easter season, our upcoming commencement exercises, and our upcoming celebration of Corpus Christi with its easing of restrictions in worship in our state. It all calls for decompression, for prayer, for long walks, for fresh air. I for one feel the need for some sort of rehabilitation. I have never felt so much the need for the return to “ordinary time.” I may take a liberty here in speaking for most if not all of us at Portsmouth Abbey – it is a time to regroup. And around here, I think, it is also a time to recognize and appreciate the vitality of Benedictine life: its emphasis on perseverance, its offering of structure and stability, its call to conversion. As we move into the summer months, and hopefully move further away from pandemic life, may we hear more fully, with “the ear of the heart,” what it is God has been calling and continues to call us to, through this potent mixture of challenge and grace.
  
  Pax,
  
  Blake Billings
About
- 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, Farifield 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.