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Address Given by Father Ambrose

(Estimated to be from around 1992)


Published by C. Collins in Father Ambroses memory
May 4, 1930 - March 6, 2016

As you can easily tell Ive reached a time of life when many of my friends either
have retired or are about to do so. Unlike them, I find myself, instead, acquiring new
jobs and coming before you this afternoon to speak to you about the monastic life
is one of them. At least Ive never done this sort of thing before. And whereas it may
not be as awesome as, say, bungee jumping, I still find it a considerable challenge
and hope youll bear with me.
I was born in the Midwest Mason City, Iowa, to be exact of Protestant parents,
who were God-fearing. Because of my fathers job, we moved on the average of
once every two years; and no matter where we were living Kansas City, Omaha,
Milwaukee we usually went to church on Sundays. It didnt make much difference
which one as long as it wasnt Roman Catholic. I had been brought up to believe
that Catholics 0 and I did know a few were undercover agents for a foreign power.
But they could be your friends, even if suspect from a religious point of view.
Thanks to the kind generosity of an uncle (my parents did not have much money) I
was sent to two years of prep school at Exeter, followed by four at Harvard. It was
easy to get into Ivy League colleges in those days. My major was music. Following
graduation, I spent two years in the Navy, where I was communications officer on an
aircraft carrier, and two more years, after the Navy, teaching Latin and music at the
Choate School (Rosemary Hall was still a separate all-girls school farther down the
Merritt Parkway.). Then, I went to Portsmouth to become a Benedictine monk and
this is what I have been doing for the past 34 years.
My family, friends, and everyone else who knew me were surprised. They had
expected me to be a musician. My college roommates still remind me that one
night, during our freshmen year, when we were having a heated discussion about
religion, I banged my fist on the desk and said I could never become a Roman
Catholic. Yet it was only a few months later that my conversion happened. Anyones
vocation yours as well as mine remains to a certain extant a mystery, if not in
the reasons for the choices we make, then in Gods particular will for each of us.

It is easier to say, I think, why I became a Benedictine. There is an old story that
used to be told about a Franciscan, Dominican, Benedictine, and Jesuit who were
reciting the Divine Office of the Church in a room when the lights suddenly went
out. The Franciscan fell on his knees and prayed that the lights would come back on.
The Dominican launched into a philosophical dissertation on he nature of light and
darkness. The Benedictine kept on reciting the Office since he knew it by heart.
Whereas the Jesuit got up and put in a new fuse.
Though the Jesuit deserves credit for exhibiting the most common sense, it is
nevertheless true that communal worship at the altar of God in church at specified
hours of prayer throughout the day is an integral part of Benedictine life. Ill come
back to this point shortly. For now, I need to respond to Abbot Marks request that I
give you some idea of how our work as teachers in the secondary boarding school,
which we maintain at Portsmouth, is also an integral part of our monastic lifeand
how our ideals as monks imbue our approach to that work.
To do this, Id like to tell you about four pivotal experiences in my life as a
Benedictine teacher. They are experiences I dont believe I would have processed in
the same way if I had been cast in another role. They are quite different from one
another, yet each sheds a specific and essential light on the matter. You might think
of them as four reminiscences about faith: first, faith as an ideal; then faith as a
challenge; next, faith as a color; and finally, faith as a verb.
During the course of my teaching career, I was privileged to spend 18 years living
in the dormitories with teenage boys. It meant a lot of dashing back and forth, to
and from, church along with exposure to roughhousing, racket, and rock musicbut
we had our quiet moments, too. One of these was a voluntary religious discussion
group that I held every Wednesday night in my small room. We called it Forum
Night. There were twice as many comers as there were chairs to sit on: the free
Coke and Oreos were irresistible.
On one particular occasion we were discussing a story about the famous tightrope
walker Charles Blondin. It seems he was waiting to being a performance, when he
noticed a young boy standing and watching in awe. The circus performer pointed to
the rope and asked the admiring boy, Do you believe I can walk across that rope?
Without hesitation, the lad replied, Yes, I do. Do you believe I can carry you on
my back and walk across? continued Blondin. Promptly came the answer, Yes,
sure I do. Okay, then, said the boys hero, bending down, Hop on my back. But
the challenge was too great for the boy. He quickly disappeared in the crowd. The
group felt, and rightly so, that the boy believed in a sense. But he did not believe
enough to really act on his faith. He did not believe enough to really trust his life to
the tightrope walker. So the question naturally arose, What do you think faith is?
and, How does it affect the way you live your lives here at school?
The group wrote their responses down and presented them later that month at a
chapel service for the entire school. We dont have time for them all now but here
are just a few, just to give you a sample:
Faith is the ability to put all your hopes, fears, trials and conflicts I the hands of God;

Faith very simply is trust in God a trust that he will help you through everything
you do;
Dont be afraid to be seen going into the church by yourself to pray during free time
in the morning, afternoon, or at night;
Discuss religious matters openly among close friends. Dont preach at agnostics or
atheists, but express your faith in both word and action;
Influence others by stopping the harassment of the underdogs, but inviting
someone eating alone to come to your table, by singing hymns in church anyway,
even it fit isnt considered cool, by using peer pressure in a positive manner.
This was not the first, or only time, that I have been impressed and strengthened by
the example of students. Someone has defined teaching not so much as the
communication of knowledge as the impact of one personality upon another. If this
is so, the Rule of St. Benedict speaks to the very heart of education, for it teaches
the monk lessons in charity and humility, which are the soul of human relationships
as well, and the best place for learning these is a school a school of the Lords
service.
At no time in any life, young or old, I think, is faith more greatly challenged more
severely tested than when a family member, near relative, or close friend dies.
Two years ago at Portsmouth, on a night in late September, we had such a death
within the school community. It rocked our very foundations, causing weeks and
months of grieving, regret, soul-searching and anguish. From it all, monk, lay
person, and student learned a lesson in Christian growth that would change our
lives forever.
A group of five students had, without permission, driven to Newport on a Saturday
night to attend a party in a private home. While racing back to school to make the
11 oclock curfew, their car hit a telephone pole. Four of them were injured more or
less seriously; but one a blond-haired 62 junior called Doug was killed outright.
It would take us too far afield now to try to do justice to Dougs personality and
character by describing him in detail. Suffice it to say that he was world-class. And
the hardest thing to bear the moment his death was announced to the whole school
at Mass the morning after was the open weeping among the students.
Support groups formed. Prayer meetings were held. Private counseling went on at
any hour of day or night. There was the school memorial service. There was the
family funeral Mass and burial in Old Greenwich. And everything that happened
during the rest of the year was tainted by the tragedy. And after the winter had
relaxed its strangling grip and spring began to stir, our thoughts, which had never
left him, turned in again to Doug. His classmates wanted to plant a tree in his
memory. On the sunny, balmy May morning when this was done, the whole school
along with guests and Dougs parent assembled at the site and the senior class
president gave the principal address. He said that we should learn from Dougs
death not to take people for granted, but to tell them here and now what is in our
hearts while we still have them with us. For St. Benedict the strongest kind of monk

is not the solitary, but the cenobite; for the cenobite lives with other monks and the
fund of our common humanity the human condition itself provides the raw
material for our lessons in the school of the Lords service.
Maybe faith is not so much a fabric of one color as a crazy quilt a patchwork of
shreds and pieces of multifarious hues come together through divine providence.
One morning in late spring I was temporarily relieved by the assistant proctor at a
final exam in order to finish class reports in my office. I had no sooner sat down to
do the reports than the phone rang. It was the librarian, saying that the overdue
library book checked out by a student in my dorm had still not been returned and
she wanted it immediately. So forsaking the reports and the examinees a little
longer, I walked to the students room. He wasnt in, bur the book was plainly visible
on top of his cluttered desk, and I decided to run it to the library myself. As I was
circling the dormitory on the way back from the library to the exam room, fire
alarms honked and screeched. They were coming from my dorm. Into the dorm I ran
to see if the emergency was genuine, when the phone in my room began to ring off
the hook. As I fumbled for my key and got the door open, fire trucks rumbled up the
drive and seconds later the heavy tramp of boots were clumping in the corridor. I
had turned to answer the phone: a sweet voice said, Would you please give us
another piano concert at the Sunrise Home next week? while a rougher voice
behind me, whose breath I could feel down my neck, boomed Wheres the fire?
My last reminiscence is more of a biographical sketch than it is any one experience.
Rather, it is the ongoing experience of one personality, a confrere, Fr. Bede Gorman,
who died in 1985. His whole life of 73 years might well be regarded as a paradigm
for faith as a verb.
Fr. Bede was a tall, slender man with a handsome, though heavily corrugated, face.
In his old age he resembled a wizened Gary Cooper. While attending St. Johns
College, Brooklyn, as a young layman, he was a star basketball, squash, and tennis
player. For 30 years, no students ever passed through Portsmouth who could beat
him on the courts. But instead of turning to the world of professional sports for a
career he had chosen to become a monk. The reason he gave was that there would
be more opportunities to practice charity. He was, of course, athletic director and
trainer for many years and mended countless sprained muscles and broken bones in
addition to teaching Latin, repairing wristwatches or clocks, lettering signs in Gothic
script, and king whatever gadget you required.
One day a boy accidentally put his elbow through the glass upper half of an outside
door. An artery was severed and the elbow spurted so much blood, that the boy,
terrified and in panic, began running about wildly. Fr. Bede, who had seen his
happen from an upper window, dashed down the stairs, charged across the lawn,
caught up with the boy, tackled him, immediately applied a tourniquet and so saved
him from bleeding to death.
An avid reader of mystics, Fr. Bede was intensely fervent in his spiritual life. While
trying to get you to relax at sports practice, he would be shouting Loosey-ducy!
or Feetsies! into one ear and the intimate revelations of Juliana of Norwich into the
other. For he believed that Spirit and body have a great deal to do with each other.

To stay in shape, he would always run, not walk, from building to building. The black
streaker was a well-known sight on campus. Fr. Bede was always in motion until a
stroke and chemotherapy treatments for cancer struck him down. How to get up
again became, for him, just another problem in kinetics; i.e., how to move
efficiently. So, with good cheer and the aid of a golf cart donated by some kind
alumnus, he was once again zooming around campus faster under motor power
than if he were under his own. Indoors, a chair elevator and wheelchair would get
him where he wanted to go. And this was usually the church. There, day or night, he
could be found praying along, or saying the Divine Office with the community.
For all his movement, Fr. Bede had never left his spiritual home. The monastery is
not usually not referred to as a home. Once or twice Ive heard it referred to as a
hospital a hospital of grace. One must remember, though, that hospitals are for
the well. The terminally ill do not want to go. St. Benedict once refers to monks as
an army in which to do battle. But his phrase of choice appears to be, again, a
school of the Lords service. Like the school in which we teach, we learn to do the
bidding of love. Unlike the school in which we teach, the lessons are never fully
masteredand no one ever graduates.

Editors note: I made slight changes in punctuation to improve clarity, but the words
are Father Ambroses own.
A nice tribute to Father Ambrose online from someone else:
http://www.dailykos.com/news

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