During our most recent Day of Recollection on October 13, I had the pleasure of meeting many of you for the very first time.  For others in attendance it was more like a reunion or a re-acquaintance, having met some of you in past years during the annual Portsmouth Institute.  I sensed an overwhelming desire among all of you to gather again during Advent for our next Day of Recollection, rather than putting it off until the new year when the mid-winter, post-holiday doldrums set in.  And so we shall.
 
The Advent Season was always a special time growing up in my family, a time of waiting, of anticipation, of becoming stronger in the virtue of patience.  Not an easy thing in a family with four young boys.  The culmination of our brimming excitement came on Christmas Eve, the holiest night of the year for Eastern Europeans, when my mother had somehow orchestrated the preparation (on a pre-microwave coal-burning stove) and the presentation of 12 special dishes, all meatless, which comprise the Wigilia Supper, also called the Star Supper.  Like the 12 dishes which represented the 12 Apostles, everything had a meaning.  On its simplest level this meal constituted a basic education in theology for me and my brothers, although none of us would have been able to frame it in that context at the time. 
 
Perhaps there will be time to talk a bit more about the wigilia when we gather on the Second Sunday of Advent, December 8, at Portsmouth Abbey.  Indeed, there is a direct connection between a part of that supper and the meaning and offering of our lives as Oblates, which I’ll explain then.  Attached is a flyer with scheduling details, most of which should be familiar to you by now.  You will notice that the 9:30 a.m. Mass that day is a school Mass, so we will be seating some Oblates in the monastic choir stalls.
 
Our conference, titled “ Christ is Alive,” will be given by Oblate Gerrie Beebe and will include some beautiful recorded musical selections as background.  There is a precedent for this type of program at the Abbey.  My research in the Portsmouth Archives shows that in the fall of 1993, one of my favorite contemporary writers, the late Fr. Henri Nouwen (+1996), spoke here on “Movement from Resentment to Gratitude” accompanied by meditative music unique to Buddhist monks.  A Japanese flute was played by a friend of Fr. Nouwen’s who was a psychotherapist with a theology degree!
 
As a side note, I shall be traveling to riot-torn Santiago, Chile, on Nov. 16-Dec. 2 for a fourth mission visit to my friends in the Manquehue Apostolic Movement, a lay Benedictine group which runs 3 excellent schools.  Accompanying me will be Fr. Benedict Allin of the St. Louis Abbey.  We beg your prayers for safety in our travels and fruitfulness in our work.  God bless all of you.