Heading West

The last couple of months, roughly since the last post, have been a sort of blur of activity for me.

In the course of the early part of this year the Order decided to purchase St. Mary's Retreat House from the Sisterhood of the Holy Nativity (SHN), and committed in a pretty definite way to remaining in the West, and in Southern California in particular.  This was quite gratifying to me, as I have spent 25 years of my life in California, first in Berkeley at CDSP for 3 years, then in Santa Barbara for 11, back to Berkeley for 2, and Anaheim for 9.  So I was happy when the process led to the decision for me to move back to Santa Barbara this summer.

Back to Santa Barbara.  Well, "back" in the sense of returning to the geographical location.  But of course everything else has changed.  Our former monastery there burned completely to the ground in the Tea Fire in November, 2008, and OHC has devoted a lot of our energies since then to discerning what to do in its wake.  I think that process, while lasting 4 and a half years, has been careful and responsible.

The first reality was that we lost everything in that fire except the people.  The data backup disk, the ancient tin painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the emergency suitcases of the brothers were basically all that was rescued.  I asked one of the brothers shortly after the fire what were his feelings about losing everything, and he said something surprising: It was a relief.  All that "stuff" was gone and he had none of the guilt or angst about deciding to get rid of any of it.  A form of liberation.  I think it is that sense of liberation that has made the remarkable progress of OHC in Santa Barbara since then possible.

The second reality was that SHN welcomed the brothers on that fateful day and opened their house and hearts to us in truly unexpected ways.  The sisters had already realized that because of their diminishing numbers they could not continue personally to run the retreat ministry there, and soon offered us St. Mary's as a new home to continue our monastic life and ministry.  The brothers who remained there - Nicholas Radelmiller, Tom Schultz, Laurence Harms, Roy Parker and Will Brown - worked hard and with success to re-establish the monastic life as OHC lives it and to rebuild the retreat business.  Roy eventually moved to West Park.  This work has proven that OHC can continue in Santa Barbara in our new situation.  

The third reality is that OHC as a whole had to come to a sense of what we wanted going forward.  At more or less the same time OHC opened a new school in South Africa, a kindergarten through third grade school for the disadvantaged rural children we have come to know and love around our Grahamstown monastery.  We have begun to face in practical ways the fact that many of our members are getting older and to do something about that.  We have finally found (we think) a satisfactory answer to the roof problems which have plagued the 1965 monastery building at West Park.  And we have been living seriously into our Benedictine commitments, which seem to be leading us in the direction of empowering individual houses to focus and grow more on the local level in terms of ministry, formation and finance.

The Chapter has considered the progress of the Santa Barbara situation in depth every year since, watching the various possibilities unfold and carefully deliberating what the course of our future there should be.  In 2012 we came to a consensus to remain if we could, and entrusted the process from that point to the Superior and Council.  A lot of hard work went into the details.  In January OHC bought St. Mary's from SHN, and in April the property "up the hill" was sold.  The cross from the old Mount Calvary garden has been brought down the hill, and after the numerous permissions required by the Santa Barbara civic entities have been obtained, it will be erected in the gardens of our new monastery.  The new monastery, for reasons of legal continuity, is to be called Mount Calvary.  The old Mount Calvary was always Mount Calvary Retreat House.  The new is Mount Calvary Monastery.  A subtle but important difference.

The erection of the cross and the the name embody a degree of continuity.  But something new is happening, something important for us and for our thousands of friends in the West.  The decision to remain in Santa Barbara is a decision not to replicate the past but to build something new.  I am excited to be joining our community there because we are in a process of rethinking our monastic life and practices: to be a monastery first, a monastery out of which retreat and other ministries grow.  At the former Mount Calvary it was the other way around: the community existed first to service the ministry.  We fitted our monastic life in and around the spaces left by that ministry.  I think our Benedictine identity is going to help us envision a stronger community and individual monastic life, and in that energy to realize that our retreat, preaching and teaching, spiritual direction and outreach ministries will grow out of our monastic life and reflect its values and energies. 

So I am charged up.  I am going back but not "back".  Back to that lovely part of the world.  But not "back" to what once was.  That is gone.  We are in a different place, literally and figuratively.  And so I expect are the many friends I enjoyed in California before I moved to New York in 2001.  My life has moved on and so have their lives.  It will be lovely to re-establish old bonds and make new ones.  It will be exciting to live into our monastic development. 

A Year in Sermons

For some years the Holy Cross sermon blog has been publishing sermons by members of the community at West Park.  I have been happy to be part of that enterprise.  In time there will be sermons by the community for most if not all the Sundays and occasions of the 3-year lectionary cycle.  It gives as well an interesting look at the thinking and expression of a spectrum of people preaching at West Park, though not quite all, since some of our best preachers don't always preach from a manuscript, and so their offerings are not able to be included.

I imagine some who might read this blog also check out the Holy Cross Monastery website and link to the sermon blog from there.  You can also use the link above.  But for those who don't, here are links to my sermons from the last 12 months or so, which I thought might be of interest to those who might follow me here, and also to show that I have not been completely off the reservation during my long absence from this blog.

Easter 3B  April 22, 2012

Trinity Sunday, June 3, 2012

Holy Cross Day, September 14, 2012

All Saints Day, November 1, 2012

The Solemnity of Fr. Huntington, November 27, 2012
This was also published, with an introductory essay, in the Order's Holy Cross News edition for 2013, which focused on the topic of the desert.

Lent 3C, March 3, 2013

Easter 3C, April 14, 2013

Those who know me know that I love to preach. I hope that love comes through in these very different sermons.

The Rest of Geneva

Four months, almost to the day, since I promised to blog again.  I have an average of 7 hits a day on a blog that hasn't posted in four months.  Talk about faithful!  Or maybe (probably) they are set on automatic to see what might come up.

Today is Maundy Thursday, which, among other things, celebrates the community gathered around Jesus and continuing in fellowship ever since.  Not a bad day to take up the communication again, sharing with the little community of this blog. 

I promised to say something about the rest of my experience in Geneva.  It was wonderful.  I found more new friends and enjoyed the parish a lot.  I had dinner out several times.  I visited Lausanne and Bern.  I spent four nights in Zurich at a great-priced Priceline hotel and visited St. Gall and Einsiedeln.  I spent the better part of a day at the Fondation Martin Bodmer, one of the great collections of books and manuscripts in the world.  The parish had its annual picnic at the house of a member family that had a huge lawn running down to the lake. 

Particularly fun was the Sunday we celebrated the youth and children's ministries.  The gospel that day was the story about the disciples out in a boat on the lake in a storm and Jesus asleep on a cushion in the front of the boat.  We -- the kids and I -- acted out the story, forming a boat, putting Jesus -- our Jesus was nominated by the kids -- on a cushion in front.  We swayed and moaned and pretended to barf out the side of the "boat" and generally had a good time of it.  Then I asked the kids how they felt about Jesus sleeping through all of it, and one of them got up and kicked "Jesus" in the butt.  It brought down the house!  What fun that day was!

The last Saturday I was there I arranged to visit the ancestral village of some of my mother's relatives -- the Mohneys, my mother's mother's father's line.  I am named for that gentleman, Adam Mohney.  He was the male figure in my mother's early life, as her father had been killed (and the family left without pension) while he was working for the Pennsylvania Railroad a few months before she was born in 1919.  In their Swiss days they were known as Manni.  Busy family genealogists (online!) had traced them back to the village of Dotzigen, in the Canton of Bern, a little south of Biel, on the River Aar.  Apparently they left around 1685 or so, moved to the Alsace and then around 1710 emigrated to Philadelphia.   Parishioners of Emmanuel, Samuel and Helena Mbele-Mbong and their grandson, volunteered to drive and we had a perfectly wonderful day.  Samuel is a retired official of the United Nations weather service in Geneva.  I had contacted the pastor of the local Swiss Reformed parish, a combination of four villages with two church buildings, who could not spend much time with us (the mayor had just died and much pastoral work and planning needed to be done) but found us a terrific guide in the person of Manfred Baumgartner, retired from the Swiss telephone company and treasurer of the four-village parish.  He was absolutely wonderful, and guided us around Dotzigen and the area, and even introduced us to a couple there who had us in for coffee.  The husband grew up in Southern California, and had been to Mount Calvary as a teenager!  Talk about a small world.

As Manfred explained it, Dotzigen and the three other villages are on the edges of a roughly circular plain that used to flood every few years.  The soil there is rich, but the hardships on the farmers at flood time there were great.  The river was finally re-channeled in the 1890s, but I think I have an idea why these ancestors of mine left.  They were probably tired of the insecurity of it all.

What a wonderful time all of us had that day!  I owe a great debt of thanks to the Mbele-Mbongs!

One other thing deserves mention.  A member of the staff of the parish discovered that her Swiss visa was about to expire.  The severity of the Swiss government response to her application to remain in the country where she had lived, studied and worked for a long time came as a surprise.  Immigration is a huge issue in Switzerland, as in other Western European countries.  They, being Swiss, have a different take on this sort of process than we have in the US.  In my experience working in Hispanic ministry in Anaheim and East Harlem the US approach is draconian in theory but the INS is so slow in doing its work (I hesitate to use the word incompetent, but I only hesitate a bit) that often years go by and lives are established and processes have to be adjusted from time to time to accommodate the human realities of people's lives.  Not so in Switzerland.  One ignores deadlines at one's peril.  One makes a mistake in one's application and one receives that interestingly detached look that Swiss bureaucrats cultivate.  One receives a first response and then tries to change it and one discovers that rules are not meant to facilitate one's own life.

There is an upside to all this efficiency, of course.  Everything is clean.  Everything runs as it is supposed to run.  There is an awesome honesty to Swiss public affairs, and a real righteousness in public dealings.  I am not making fun of this.  I really loved it.  But.  The downside of public efficiency is that when it concerns one personally, one discovers how very thorough it can be.  My understanding is that she received a grace period and had to be gone last fall.

Back to Blogging

I've not shared anything on the blog since last June.  Apologies.  No excuses except the usual -- preoccupation and perfectionism leading to sloth.  So I will try to catch up in the next bit of time.

Meanwhile, here is a link to my sermon on the occasion of the Order's annual celebration of the Feast of Fr. Huntington.

Week One in Geneva

Well, I've actually been here a bit more than a week.  I arrived Thursday morning, after an ok overnight flight on a subsidiary (I think) of Lufthansa called Swiss International Airlines.  The only nonstop flights from NYC or Newark to Geneva.  Waiting to pick me up was Alan Wittrup, husband of the Senior Warden of Emmanuel Church, who kindly took some time off his work at the International Labor Organization to greet a nervous traveler. 

Denise Bénéteau, wife of the Rector, welcomed me to their apartment.  What a nice person!  After organizing me, for which I am profoundly grateful, she left the next day for a week of cycling down one of the major rivers of France with her husband, who is on sabbatical.  I spent the next few days orienting myself -- getting a transit pass (CHF 50 instead of 75 because I am now 65), etc.

I was full of plans.  But I gradually realized I had no energy for plans.  So I have spent the better part of the week doing little things and resting.  I had no idea how tired I was, especially after the runup to Chapter, with Finance Committee and other obligations.  Yesterday (Friday) I woke up from a nap and realized I had my energy back, and went out for a long walk.  But a week to recover!

Last Sunday was the first at Emmanuel.  What wonderful, welcoming people!  And afterward the annual Choir Picnic, at the lovely suburban home of one of the choir families.  My first social meal in Geneva, and it was hot dogs, hamburgers and perfectly divine ribs, with rhubarb pie for dessert!  And ice cream sundaes, served up by the kids, who were dressed as waiters and perfectly charming as they took our orders.  Though they were a little vague about all the topping options, the menu memory running basically to chocolate sauce.  They were great!

During my weeklong slough of exhaustion I did manage several interesting things.  A parishioner who lives on the floor above took me and her visiting daughters and their friends to a recital of vocal students held at the Auditoire Calvin, next to the Cathedral in the Old City.  The Auditoire was one of the places where Calvin held forth.  Fifteenth century gothic church, small, stripped of everything visually interesting.  Used weekly now for services by the Scottish Presbyterians, and less frequently by the Dutch Calvinists and the Waldensians.  The recital was interesting, and perhaps illustrative of a vocal teacher's life:  several youngsters of varying promise, wildly cheered by their friends and families.  Some older folk who seem to want to graduate from singing for their own benefit to something more public, again with varying promise.  And several really, really good voices, professional or near professional quality.  One of them was the reason we were there, Patty Solomon, youth coordinator at Emmanuel, possessed of a perfectly wonderful soprano voice.  She sang Gershwin's "Summertime" better than I think I have ever heard it.  The note at the end -- high and long, the signature of the piece -- was absolutely thrilling.  One of the older guys, whose first piece was so-so, sang for his second "Bring him home" from Les Miserables.  I love that song anyway (what does that say about a life as a monk --  the son I've never known, etc.).  He did it with amazing expression.  I was moved to tears.  A late night walk back made it a perfect evening.

I returned to the Vielle Ville to see the Cathedrale de St. Pierre.  The interior is what you would expect a fourteenth/fifteenth century gothic cathedral gone Calvinist to be --  essentially devoid of interest except for the architecture itself, which is standard issue medieval gothic.  But underneath is the real story.  There has been first class archaeological work underneath the cathedral, with walkways through the various zones of the site.  This tour carries you all the way back to ca. 100 BCE, when the site was essentially created with the burial of some tribal worthy, likely an Allobrogian chieftain, whose skeleton (I am supposing it really is his skeleton, and not a display copy) is a little more than half exposed.  Over him in succession were raised a sort of mausoleum, then a tribal temple to his genius (presumably), then a Roman temple, then a church, then another church, and then another and another, and so on.  His burial essentially defined the space as holy. 

I then visited the Musée de la Reforme, and was fortunate to latch onto the English language tour.  It is housed in a very fine 18th century house built over the former cloister of the cathedral.  Books, books and more books, lots of paintings, lots of letters.  I located a copy of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, but not the Edict itself.  And something curious about the bookshop: tons of Calvin, of course, but not a single Bible in sight.  The charming attendant told me there was a Bible store just down the hill.  Curious.  Not enough Bible business for two shops selling the scriptures?  In Geneva??

The music director at Emmanuel is a seriously gifted woman named Shauna Beesley.  She is a singer and composer.  She recently composed an opera on Michael Servetus, the proto-Unitarian who was burned at the stake on Calvin's instructions.  Le procés de Michel Servet.  Major blot on Calvin's historical copy book, perhaps the biggest blot.  The opera was produced in Geneva, but ran into various roadblocks. Apparently the City of Calvin is still quite protective of his memory.  Shauna and her husband invited me to dinner, with the purpose of reading through Shauna's adaptation of a novel as a libretto.  I won't say which novel so as not to step on her fame when and if it is composed and produced as an opera.  Fascinating!  There we were, reading as best we could, Shauna changing things on the spot, and all of us discussing how this or that worked.  She is amazing.

Tomorrow, Sunday, is Youth Sunday.  The kids are doing basically everything except the sermon (which I will key to the younger ones -- the calming of the storm, perfect for child participation) and the consecration of the elements.  Then the Church picnic, held at a grand maison in the country belonging to one of the parishioners.

Eastertide and Ministry

Holy Week and Easter have came and gone. It was glorious here at the Monastery. The community gave quite a lot of thought to what went well and what didn't go so well last year and made a few adjustments. Nothing major, but they worked pretty well. For the last few years I have been asked to be the confessor for the clergy before the Holy Tuesday Mass of Collegiality at which the clergy renew their ordination vows at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. I regard it as a great privilege, and think the Order is honored to have one of OHC's priests do so, and march in and sit up front and all that sort of glorification. Not that the whole clerical order is lined up for the sacrament of penance. But I am always moved by those who do.

 The monastery's Library Volunteers were with us again at the beginning of May. This is a working retreat program that has grown in its three years or so into a real community of people. I can't express how wonderful it is to have their help in the never-ending work of improving our library collection.

The last two Sundays (May 27 and June 3) I took the service at the Spanish language congregation of La Virgén de Guadalupe, which meets at Christ Church, Poughkeepsie. I was cheered to find that I could still officiate and preach in Spanish after some years away from that ministry, which has been such an important part of my life. The service on June 3 began with a baptism and then 8 first communions, so it was a very family affair. There is a wonderful sort of background noise that babies and little ones make in church that I realized I have missed -- sort of like the waves of the sea at the shore, rising and falling, sometimes soft and sometimes not so soft, but continuous. I love it, and it was such a joy to be in it again. Those making their first communions ranged from about 6 or 7 to 22, all dressed in white, as is customary. The lay leader of the congregation, Dominga Jimenez, was marvelous leading me through a ceremony I had not performed in some years, and which is always a little different in each church.

June 3 was also Trinity Sunday, and I preached at the Monastery. The sermon is posted here.

This week is Chapter for the Order of the Holy Cross. The brethren are gathering. The Finance Committee, of which I am chair, meets today. I have spend days getting the information packets ready -- statements and budgets from all four monasteries (West Park; Santa Barbara; Toronto; Grahamstown, South Africa), the Holy Cross School, the OHC Corporation and our financial advisers, various grant requests, as well as matters relevant to this meeting of Chapter. It's a lot, and it will have to move along fairly briskly in order to do everything we need to do. I'll be glad when it is accomplished.

Next week, when Chapter is over, I will fly to Geneva, Switzerland, to be one of the priests who will take Sunday services at Emmanuel Episcopal Church there while the Rector, John Beach, is on sabbatical. It is a working vacation. I'll be there the Sundays of June 17 and 24 and July 1 and 8.  I've never been to Switzerland, and hope to travel around a bit. Many adventures!

Have a Holy Triduum and Easter

The Monastery is in the midst of our preparations for Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter. I presided at the Eucharist on Palm Sunday, and seem to be free to worship for the rest, except possibly for Easter Sunday, for which the duty list has not yet been published. What a privilege!

I spent 16 years organizing liturgies, presiding and preaching for this holy season at St. Michael's, Anaheim and at St. Edward the Martyr, East Harlem. It was a joy and a privilege each and every year to do so, but it is also a joy and privilege to be a simple worshiper.

May the Lord's Supper be our supper. May his passion inform our passion. May his death be with us as we die, and may his resurrection lead us on the way to new life.