Br. Sixtus with the Garvins, friends from St. Louis Abbey

Several of the monastic community traveled to Manhattan in early December for an important annual double event: the Board of Directors of Portsmouth Abbey School convening for an afternoon meeting, and the annual Abbot’s Reception held that same evening. This year’s gatherings were held on Tuesday, December 11, at the New York Yacht Club in midtown Manhattan, this historic venue made available each year through the generosity of longtime Portsmouth families with memberships. Besides the New York location, the club’s first permanent waterfront headquarters are located in Newport at Harbour Court, seven miles south of Portsmouth, overlooking Brenton’s Cove. The 1906 mansion was formerly the John Nicholas Brown residence. The Commodores’ Room provided the venue for the morning committee meetings, leading up to the principal session called to order at 1 p.m. sharp by Board President Christopher Abbate ’88. While the September and May meetings take place at Portsmouth, other meeting sites allow for alumni receptions to be scheduled at the same time, as with the annual February meeting at the Naples Bay Resort and Marina in Naples, Florida.

Holy Innocents Church on December 12Wednesday of that wet week in New York was pretty much business as usual. For me, however, as Portsmouth’s Director of Oblates, the following day, December 12, provided some much-needed spiritual sustenance before the afternoon train ride back to the Kingston Station in Rhode Island – which looks to be right out of a Currier & Ives print… except without the snow. I left the Iroquois Hotel on W. 44th Street at 6:30 a. m. and walked the seven blocks south to Holy Innocents Church on 37th Street for the 7:00 a.m. Mass. We have mentioned this special church several times before in “The Current,” but, as a refresher, it is the church where Servant of God Dorothy Day made her first Promise of Oblation in 1955, as an Oblate of St. Benedict, to the abbot of St. Procopius Abbey in Lisle, Illinois. It is said that she was attracted to the Procopius monks’ connection to the Byzantine liturgy. Although Holy Innocents is a parish church, the Lisle monks often traveled there to lead retreats in New York, which sharpened Dorothy Day’s attraction to Benedictine spirituality. On my own “business trips” into the city, Holy Innocents has become a refuge for me from the aural and visual noise of the city, which I used to find energizing, but now find it enervating. The church’s actual sanctuary in N.Y.C. is my metaphorical sanctuary protected by an altar rail, like the safe one of my childhood.

This December 12, it centered a day multilayered in import. First, it was the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. I was reminded of the Easter Sunday Mass I participated in at her shrine in Mexico City in 1983, particularly as I was drawn to the flower-laden side altar which had been lovingly arranged at Holy Innocents. It was a special day, as well, for our friend Heather King who, like Dorothy Day almost 70 years earlier, was making that day her first Promise of Oblation to a Benedictine Abbot – forty hours west of New York by car in the California desert north of Los Angeles. To the Portsmouth Oblates reading this, you might recall that at our Day of Recollection on the first Sunday of Advent, I passed along the prayer request to keep Heather in your prayers on December 12, as the monks did that very day in our community. Abbot Emeritus Matthew Stark, the keeper of the Mass assignments for Portsmouth and a close friend of Heather, made certain that her intentions were duly noted inside the monastery. In the hourlong call that Heather and I shared on November 19, I promised her that I was going to give her book Redeemed a much-needed second read after more than 10 years, a promise which I have fulfilled in honor of her oblation.
Heather KingHeather refers several times throughout the book to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, one of several writers (including Hank Williams) whom she includes in her “own personal communion of saints.” Dostoyevsky’s oft-quoted character, Father Zossima, advises at one point in The Brothers Karamazov, “Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.” Interestingly, each of Heather’s Redeemed chapters begins with a short quote. At the opening of Chapter 13, she quotes Dorothy Day, who refers to a different Father Zossima (in her book, Loaves and Fishes): “When I moved to the East Side, I went to a Salesian priest, Father Zossima. It was he who urged me to go to daily communion. I had thought this was only for the old or the saintly, and I told him so. ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘You go because you need food to nourish you, for your pilgrimage on this earth.’” Heather’s new oblate home is now St. Andrew’s Abbey in Valyermo, California. During one of my visits there in 2005, I spent a lot of time with Fr. Eleutherius Winance, O. S. B. (1909-2009), then 96, born in Belgium, a philosopher, and the last surviving founder of St. Andrew’s at the time. I have two of his books, both in French, and the simple inscriptions which he wrote in each copy have stayed with me: “That the Lord always be the object of your meditations, reflections, and prayers,” and “That the truth be the rule of your intelligence.” (Translations from the French by my soulmate, Michael Ivan Jones). Heather sent me a message which brightened my mailbox two days after her oblation. It expresses so much of her oblate commitment that I include much of it here:



To Heather’s beautiful message, I would only add: Merry Christmas to everyone, and a safe Jubilee New Year!

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