An enigmatic headline in the June 4 Wall Street Journal proclaimed:

“Renters Go Rootless, Moving City to City.”

This appeared on page M1 of the weekly Friday Mansion section, rebranded that week as The Rentals Issue. It made me think immediately of Bedouin nomadic tribes in North Africa (that’s just how my mind works), and sure enough, the sub-headline below read,

“Call it ‘Nomadland’ for luxury-seeking remote employees.

Companies offer short-term leases in furnished units.

Winter in Austin, autumn in Boston?”

Ten days later on Flag Day, June 14, Fr. Michael Brunner and I were on a plane to St. Louis to meet up with Fr. Edward Mazuski, already there on holiday with his family. The next morning, we attended an Extraordinary Conventual Chapter at the Saint Louis Abbey. First on the agenda was a business matter which required a vote to be taken. Next was a report and an update from the three of us as to our work at Portsmouth Abbey. We each recited a perfunctory list of the jobs and activities in which we are individually and collectively involved. Then we made the rounds a second time sharing more personal reflections.

At that point we each made clear to the community our desire to transfer our vows of stability from St. Louis to Portsmouth. This is a very big deal in the Benedictine world. In fact, desire may be the wrong word to use here. We had initially been sent on a mission and this sending-out blossomed into something more like a call, a summons, on which we had prayed and pondered for a long time. Eventually we each knew that we were thinking along the same lines and, on that morning, at that chapter meeting, we became, if not nomads, at least “re-lo’s”, a real estate term used to describe people who are relocating their domicile.

Br. Sixtus Roslevich, Fr. Edward Mazuski, and Prior Michael Brunner

That might help to explain my own enigmatic headline attached to these notes. Reno, as you may have intuited, has a double meaning. In real-estate-speak it might refer to renovation, something which is happening as I write this, taking place inside the monastery of Portsmouth Abbey. All three levels of the East Wing are sheathed in layers of heavy plastic as workers replace outdated 60-year-old plumbing systems. In addition, 3 contiguous rooms having the identical footprint of monks’ cells are being combined and converted into two rooms with en suite bathrooms, complete with industry-standard grab bars and wider wheelchair-accessible doorways.

That explains the dust-laden practical meaning of “reno”. In a sense, there is a more metaphorical renovation happening at Portsmouth Abbey and at our School. With pandemic restrictions gingerly lifted and guidelines softened, we are praying for a return to normalcy in our lives and the lives of the students, faculty and administration, and of course, of our oblates. More about the latter in a moment.

A side note (that’s just how my mind works): Reno is also a city in Nevada which I visited once many years ago, but not for the expected purpose of gambling. The city of Reno has been on my mind lately because the impetus for that 1978 visit, a detour after a summer of living in Santa Fe, was to connect with a high-school buddy, Gregg. After school and college, our individual paths led us to many relocations and renovations, both practical and metaphorical. Frighteningly, 2021 marks our 51^st anniversary of high school graduation. During this month of July, Gregg will be in Boston for a week and is planning to drive to Portsmouth to spend a day with me. You can bet that we’ll be rehashing the good times, but all the while keeping the memory of lost classmates, other friends and family members in our peripheral vision.

In early June I was invited to attend the final vows of a Jesuit friend who graduated from Saint Louis Priory School. Fr. Paul Rourke S.J. and I lived in Rome at the same time in 2007-08. He professed his final vows at Fairfield University on June 11 in Fairfield, Connecticut, after moving, or relocating, from Georgetown University. It was in the Jesuit novitiate in Rome where Aloysius Gonzaga, the patron saint of youth, is said to have proclaimed, “This is my resting place forever; here will I dwell, for I desire it.” (Ps. 132:14). He died at a young age, but Jesuits ever since have been relocated for their work, to the Jesuit Refugee Service in Uganda or less farther afield to Fairfield University in Connecticut.

I was not able to be present for Fr. Paul’s special day. As personal penance to atone for my absence, I began to read the biography, Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life by Paul Mariani. Father Hopkins, the well-known 19^th-century poet and philosopher, had early on considered a vocation to the Benedictines, but was called more strongly to the Jesuits. Thus began his life of relocations and renovations. Mariani references this by quoting correspondence by Hopkins and writing, “He [Hopkins] has been assigned here [London], “but permanence with us [Jesuits] is ginger-bread permanence, cobweb, soapsud, and frost-feather permanence.”

As for life returning to something resembling normalcy for the Portsmouth Abbey: Oblates, please make a note of this date: Sunday, August 29, 2021. We have begun preliminary plans for resumption of our Days of Recollection on campus. Classes will not yet have begun, but the staff of the Stillman Dining Hall has assured me that they will happily feed and nourish us as they have in the past. Of course, we’ll be nurtured and nourished by the Sunday morning Eucharist with the monks, as well as being sustained by the morning conference, the topic of which will be announced in the August edition of The Current. We can’t wait to welcome you back. In the meantime, be well and stay safe, enjoy the summer wherever you are, and hydrate!