Ann Sieben and Br. Sixtus at Vespers

Anyone who has spent time visiting Portsmouth Abbey in recent years, especially on an overnight basis, has experienced the hospitality of Br. Joseph Byron, the resident Guest Master. He not only handles advance bookings but also distributes parking passes, ensures that the rooms are supplied with the proper amenities, and patiently explains the monastic horarium, dining protocols and customs of the house. He extends the same consistently warm welcome to our friends, relatives, oblates, admissions guests, alumni, and visiting clerics and other religious. The latter category has included monks and sisters from other houses of the English Benedictine Congregation, priests on retreat, bishops and cardinals. He’ll even take guests on a climb to the top of the wind turbine, if they feel so “inclined.”

For almost a full week (February 10-15), we were happy to have a visit from Ann Sieben, the founder in 2016 of the Society of Servant Pilgrims. I first met this remarkable woman in May 2018 when I held the post of Guest Master at the St. Louis Abbey. She made contact with us through her friendship with the intrepid Fr. Finbarr Dowling of St. Louis and subsequently visited him there an additional three times. When I heard from Br. Joseph that Ann would be coming to Aquidneck Island, I thought back to the last time our paths had crossed. To be clear, I use that term metaphorically since while I remained stable in the cloister, she was always the pilgrim, the one literally walking a path, a highway, or a railroad track, to her next destination, whether domestic or abroad, whether to her home base in Denver or across Scandinavia to the Arctic Circle, in the dark and shod in snowshoes.

Almost a year later in early March 2019, almost exactly four years ago, I was spending some quiet time with two other monks at our retreat house, little more than an hour’s drive north of St. Louis. On 150 acres and called Apple Hill due to its earlier incarnation as a large commercial apple orchard, our 3-story log house was a perfectly idyllic getaway and only a short hike to the Mississippi River in historic Clarksville, Missouri. Ann was in St. Louis at the time visiting Fr. Finbarr, but her next departure point, on foot, was just north of Clarksville. She arrived at Apple Hill to a comfortable room which we had prepared for her, to a welcoming fire in the stone fireplace in the Great Room, as well as to a healthy home-cooked meal that evening. As for the last time I had seen Ann, it was the next morning as I drove her several miles up the Mississippi to Bowling Green which has a significant Amish population – the local Walmart has a large shed in the parking lot for buggies and horses, and the necessary horse-treats in 5-gallon buckets. We soon arrived at the dropping-off point which she recommended, said our goodbyes, and off she went. On foot. As a hitchhiker in my younger days, I was always the one being dropped off by a kind stranger at the foot of an entrance ramp to an interstate or a turnpike. It felt odd driving back to Apple Hill knowing that I could have just as easily driven her another hour or so and been happy to do so.

It's important to know and to remember that the ministry of the Society of Servant Pilgrims is spirituality-based, not competitive, not for health and fitness, like a volksmarsch or “people’s march.” As their website explains, “Our purpose is to encourage, support, and engage people in spiritual pilgrimage around the world. We are a response to the directive by Jesus Christ, ‘Love God above all things,’ and, just as important, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” Their homepage continues, “As pilgrims, we serve this message by walking village to village through the world, to meet others and build trust which is the foundation of peace. Simply showing up to say, ‘Hello neighbor, peace be with you.’ Nothing more, nothing less and then walking along to the next town in the morning.”

Brother Joseph Byron shows Ann the Abbey’s wind turbine

Whether by coincidence or Providence, Ann’s arrival at Portsmouth from Boston on Feb. 10, this time a short drive made through the kindness of friends with a vehicle, was heralded by a postal delivery of the The Tablet, the international Catholic weekly published in London. The January 28 edition contained a “pilgrimage special” with an interview of Ann by Peter Stanford with a contents-page teaser stating, “The solitary treks of the celebrated ‘servant pilgrim’ have taken her across the world, relying on strangers for food and lodging.” It is an excellent and insightful interview, conducted in January while she sojourned, she said, in “deepest south-west France…cosily ensconced overnight in an otherwise empty pilgrim house in a tiny town…here I’ve found canned food and pasta.” She recounted that in 2011-2012 she had traipsed across North Africa to Jerusalem. At that time, Libya and Tunisia were in a state of turmoil and “she wandered into armed rebels.” She spoke with them, but not of her Christian God. By showing and sharing faith in general with them, she said, if “my demonstration of faith strengthens a Muslim’s or a Buddhist’s faith, then that is not a bad thing. I don’t need to undo their world. I do my part and demonstrate faith and let them figure it out for themselves.”

By the time bedtime descended on the campus for Ann’s first night, hopefully “cozily ensconced” in a guest room in our Manor House, Br. Joseph had already forwarded the entire Tablet interview to the faculty and students for their edification in the anticipation that some might like to engage The Winter Pilgrim during her meals in the Stillman or elsewhere on campus.