From the Editor (February 2022)

- Tests
  
  February 24, 2022
  
  Occasionally, the School calendar and the liturgical calendar harmonize in such a way that Ash Wednesday falls in the middle of term exams. Such is the case this week. The thematic connection is vivid: students entering the desert of academic discipline, that their intellectual worthiness might be tested. Believers now enter into Lent, a week of tests opening onto a season of tests. It is not uncommon to find a certain monastic enthusiasm arise in the face of these Lenten challenges. I have often wondered if Benedict required monks to submit penances for approval to the abbot not because they would do too little, but because they would take on too much. Hence, he cautions against “vainglory.” As we craft the spiritual challenges we seek to impose upon ourselves, what are we who are not vowed to obedience to do? How are we to avoid the “too much” or the “vainglory”? For me, honestly reviewing how well I am doing with such challenges, often after Ash Wednesday itself, is enough to knock me off my holiness pedestal. But perhaps Benedict’s call for approval of practices is designed to help the believer avoid two mistakes. One of these is to prevent thinking too highly of one’s own righteousness. Maybe another is to realize that these Lenten sacrifices are not about appeasing an angry God - as, hopefully, students do not do well on exams simply to satisfy a taskmaster-teacher. Whether they be academic or pentitential, I hope to be able to see all such tests as gifts, opportunities to grow, as the School’s mission statement reveals, “in knowledge and grace.”
  
  Pax,
  
  Blake Billings
- Rebuilding
  
  February 17, 2022
  
  I thought of the revelation to Saint Francis this week, “Rebuild my church!” It is a directive inspiring Pope Francis. It is a call that perhaps should guide the faithful in every generation. And around here, one finds the distinct feeling that we ourselves are in a period of rebuilding. Our recent installation of an abbot in the monastery has been shortly followed by the selection of a head of school. Our faltering emergence from our pandemic still points us to the future, to fresh air, to new growth. This sense of rebuilding also expresses some of the spirit of Lent, which we note in this issue is just around the corner. Yet, Lent also carries the reminder that the Lord must build the house, lest the builders labor in vain. A recipe for rebuilding that is wise to reconsider. So, whether that house be the house monastic, the house scholastic, or even the house of my own self, under whose roof I am not worthy to receive Him, let us pray that the Builder does not therein labor in vain.
  
  Pax,
  
  Blake Billings
- Time, and Time Again
  
  February 12, 2022
  
  The winter weather, what to say? We survived the 18” of snow of the “Blizzard of ‘22,” only to see the rain wash it away later in the week. I took a series of photos of my backyard to prove it to my relatives who live elsewhere. It leads the mind to consider the fluctuations, instabilities, temporality of life (my mind, anyways). We live in a time of variation, and persistence. Plus ça change... In one class, we have been discussing the experience of time in its subjective aspects, how a minute is never the same, one will fly by and another last interminably. Our lives shift gears from slow to lightning. And our ever-changing pandemic protocols leave us in a search for what we seem to recall of normal life. Around here, we live in a season very misleadingly labeled “Ordinary Time.” Still, we see Lent coming around the bend, which is actually really all about Easter. Benedictines, of course, return habitually to the persistent rhythm of the Divine Office. Its rhythm smooths some of the rollercoaster, in a life we call “Consecrated,” which we have celebrated this past week. Perhaps we should call it “Con-secuted”? Maybe this is what puts the conversatio in the morum? Let’s hope.
  
  Pax,
  
  Blake Billings
- With Gratitude
  
  February 3, 2022
  
  I noted this week Brother Sixtus’ remark that the Manquehue Movement has had a “major influence” on his vocation and life. My contact with the group began more than ten years ago, as the Portsmouth community, both monastic and School, began to encounter our visitors from Chile. I had a “front row seat” for much of this developing relationship, hosting the groups as Director of Spiritual Life for eight of those years. Manquehue has since been a steady “accompaniment” on my own journey, whether through its inspiring practice of lectio, its warm hospitality and friendship, its thoroughgoing embrace of the Rule of St. Benedict, or its generous dedication to pray with us and to evangelize. The group embodies so much of what is essential and beneficial in our inheritance from the Second Vatican Council. My understanding of the movement grew through several trips to Santiago, Patagonia, and a service “trabajos” experience in rural Chile. With this understanding has come an appreciation and a gratitude, and a personal devotion to lectio divina that has persisted through the past decade. It is heartening to see our fellowship continue and grow, now with more established lectio groups and extended engagement with our monastic community and the School’s lay faculty. May the Spirit continue “to kindle in us the fire” that this movement has been tending and which it so brilliantly manifests.
  
  Paz,
  
  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.