Saturday, April 10, 2021

Br. Thomas Schultz, OHC - Requiem Sermon

I preached at the Requiem for Thomas Haines Schultz, OHC

Trinity Church, Santa Barbara, CA, April 9, 2021

Zoom video recording.  The sermon begins about 10 minutes in:  https://vimeo.com/535013687


    Very often one of the joys of preparing a homily for a requiem is the discovery that the life of the person being celebrated is much more complex than might have been thought at first.  Undiscovered or long-forgotten aspects of education and early employment, areas of special interest, hobbies, quirks of behavior and character, early ambitions serving as unlikely platforms for later pursuits: all of these serve to broaden our view.  In the Order of the Holy Cross, Roy Parker was originally going to be a mechanical engineer.  Nick Radelmiller was an accomplished water color artist who traded much of that energy to try to learn to play the cello, as best he might.  Fr. Parsell was shipwrecked off the coast of Africa during the Second World War.  Fr. Hughson wrote a book on pirates.  We love to find multiplicity in our brothers.

Like all of us, Tom had his quirks of behavior and character as well.  He was not an ambitious leader.  He was not much given to researching solutions to problems.  He was not a managerial type, though he did a pretty good job as Prior of Berkeley for some 16 years.  He willingly did whatever he was assigned to do, but did not himself seek to expand those tasks or make them his own.   He was especially happy when people helped him out.  He liked cooking the same thing over and over.  He loved clothing from REI and baggy pants with many pockets and Tilley hats and large plastic shoes.  He either could not or would not learn how to use a cell phone or a computer or an Ipad.  He loved little containers to carry things in.  He loved pictures of icons.  He loved driving our little Smart car around town.  He loved shopping trips to CVS for little things.  He loved a good gin and tonic or two on Sunday nights.

Sometimes we reflect on the complexities of the lives of people we knew. Alongside the quirks that made them human, we discover multiple facets which need to be viewed together to see them whole. But in some people we find a deep simplicity of character.  And when that simplicity is rooted in their search for God, we find something wonderful, something profound, something holy.  

Tom Schultz was that kind of person.  All his life what he wanted was to be a monastic priest.  He discerned that call early, took counsel with his priest and bishop, followed their advice, went to college and then to seminary, got ordained, and joined our monastic community.  In addition to Holy Cross Monastery in West Park, NY, he was variously active in our monasteries in Bolahun, Liberia; Grapevine, Texas; Tower Hill, South Carolina; Berkeley and then Santa Barbara, California.  Which sounds like a career.  But the word career, in the sense of an upward path of jobs and responsibilities, does not really describe Tom. 

His approach to stability was old school: he waited until the Superior told him he was to move.  Then when he got there he would set out making personal contacts through his priestly and monastic work: especially with spiritual directees and penitents coming for confession, people drawn to him because there was something in him and in their interaction with each other that opened up to them the presence and love of God.   

He really wanted to stay where he was, wherever that was at the time.  I can’t count the number of times he told me that he felt he had just begun to feel rooted in a place when he “had” to move.  This was especially true for him at Tower Hill in South Carolina and Incarnation Priory in Berkeley and then here in Santa Barbara.  He felt he was not a stable monk because of the times he had moved.  But actually, the second half of his life, from 1977 on, was a study in monastic stability. He was in South Carolina for 15 years and in Berkeley for another 18, then in Santa Barbara for 13 more.  How many of us have such “instability” in our lives?  In each case the reason he had to “leave” was that the community had decided to close those monasteries.  But he felt those moves deeply and personally.  In each case, he had to leave that holy place around which were centered those wide circles of friends he had created with his quiet confidence in the presence and love of God.   

Tom went through several stages in his journeys into spirituality.  He studied each of the ways he was drawn to and tried to put them into practice, within OHC’s monastic framework.  When I first came to know him in 1973 he was transitioning from the severity of Carmelite practice to Russian Orthodoxy.  Augmented by a late blooming interest in Buddhism, he remained on the orthodox path for the rest of his life, loving it especially for its quiet depths of hesychastic mysticism.  He deeply admired holy men and women of that tradition, especially their conscious choice of the path of holiness and their attempts to live a daily life devoted to it.  I remember once his delight when I shared with him an online video of Fr. Gabriel Bunge which followed Bunge’s daily life in all its visual particularities.  

I think Tom really wanted to be a starets.  He wanted to live a quiet holy life as a spiritual elder, enjoying the support the monastic community gave him, becoming a personal center of holiness.  He wanted, through his monastic life and friendship, to bring people into the presence and love of God.

The presence and love of God.  This, I think, was the center of Tom’s faith: that God is always present and that God’s love is pouring out on us always and everywhere and in such abundance that we can hardly imagine its depths.  

Our readings this morning express this quality of Tom’s faith, a life lived in the loving presence of God.  From the Book of Wisdom: “Those who trust in him will understand truth, and the faithful will abide with him in love, because grace and mercy are upon his holy ones, and he watches over his elect.”   From the Gospel of John: “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”  And from the First Letter of John: “When he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”

Abiding, a place being prepared for us.  

Being watched over, cared for.   

Discovering our true identity, which is to be like God.  

Seeing God as God really is.

That was Tom’s life.   It can be ours as well.