Solemnity of Saint Benedict
Today we celebrate the grace
that has been present to us in our jubilarians.
Seventy, sixty, and fifty years ago,
our jubilarians professed their vows
in the presence of God, the saints, the abbot and community.
Truly, by the mercy of God,
they have offered their bodies as a living sacrifice to God.
We celebrate the grace of God at work in their lives.
Father George Wolf, in March of 2006 you returned to Saint John's
after spending nearly sixty two years of your monastic and priestly life
in the Bahamas.
Today you celebrate your 70th anniversary in monastic vows.
A tall and lanky fellow, a quick pace to your walk,
you were also a zippy driver along the streets of Nassau.
You have served in most of the parishes on New Providence
and other islands like Bimini and Freeport
over the course of those sixty plus years.
I think it is fair to say that you brought
Saint Augustine's College and Monastery back from the edge of bankruptcy
in the early 1970s by careful fiscal management.
As a pastor you are known throughout the islands for your pastoral work,
going weekly to the Exuma island for weekend Masses until 2006.
We are grateful to Archbishop Patrick Pinder for sending his representative
Monsignor Simeon Roberts to be with us,
as well as many others from the Bahamas to honor Father George.
Truly, Father George, your monastic and priestly vocation have been
a gift to us, to the Church, especially the Church of the Bahamas.
Father Hilary Thimmesh, you have long been a leader on this campus,
in the university and in the monastery.
A teacher of English in the university,
you are known to generations of students
as a skilled teacher of Shakespeare and Chaucer.
A skilled writer of beautifully crafted English sentences,
you have been called a "man of the word and a man of the woods."
You have also given of yourself in the service and toil of leadership
as administrator at Saint Martin's Abbey in Lacey, WA,
as prior of this monastery,
and as president of the university for nine years.
You edited our sesquicentennial volume Saint John's at 150,
that owes so much to your sense of aesthetics
and awareness of the human riches of the Saint John's community.
You have developed a passion for the Civil War
and continue to teach a symposium on that topic.
As you have done since the mid-1950s, serving as a faculty resident,
you will again live with 96 first year students in Tommy Hall this fall.
Surely there is a special place in heaven for this kind of service.
Thank you for your dedicated and creative fidelity
to monastic life for sixty years.
Brother George Primus, you hail from Melrose,
and began your work as a bookbinder in the library
and then moved to the Liturgical Press.
You then served as a missionary monk for five years
in the new foundation Saint Maur's in Kentucky,
an experiment in interracial living
in the early stages of the civil rights movement.
when you returned to Saint John's
you began your work as a tailor,
and you served us so wonderfully, so gently,
with such good humor, for fifty years.
For all kinds of reasons
I am sure that you have the resources to write a book
on the varieties and range of human temperament.
You also love the outdoors and cared for the garden
and especially the apple orchard.
You are also skilled at making diamond willow canes.
Thank you, Brother George, for your good zeal
and for your care for us through sixty years.
Father Charles Henry, you grew up in Saint Cloud
and are a proud graduate of the Saint Cloud Cathedral, class of '41.
After service in the war, you joined this monastic community
and then studied in Rome for priesthood and a licentiate in theology.
You then did what so many Saint John's monks have done;
you became a missionary monk, to Saint Maur's Priory in Kentucky.
There you served as a teacher of theology in the seminary college,
as prior for seventeen years and a as hospital chaplain.
Ultimately, this interracial foundation did not endure
and you are now a monk of Newark Abbey
but we honor you today in our midst,
remembering both your human and spiritual roots
in this area and this community.
Thank you, Father Charles, for your generous service
to the Church and especially to the people of Kentucky and Indianapolis.
Father Bryan Hayes, you were born in the south, in Clarksville, Tennessee.
Music, especially the composition of music,
has been the defining feature of your life.
You came to the abbey with a BA and an MA in musical composition,
and an armful of awards for composition,
including the Gershwin award, a scholarship to Tanglewood,
and two Guggenheim awards.
You have been a composer in residence since 1969.
To you we owe a vast collection of hymns --
you were always gifted at writing durable and memorable melodies.
You have written many psalm tones for us as well,
but you moved your major compositional effort to opera in the mid-1970s
and other more demanding forms.
You also taught French for many years
and the first year writing course for our students,
using the amazing fiction of a southern writer, Flannery O'Connor.
As a young monk, I still remember conversations
in the lunchroom with you on Thomas Merton,
and the relationship between Freud and Jung's work on the unconscious.
In a musical setting for one of our Sunday evening offices,
there was an eight minute organ interlude between psalms
that you referred to as a Jungian wandering through your unconscious.
Father Bryan, thank you for the musical legacy you given us
and for fifty years of sharing your creative gift with us in community.
Father Tom Gillespie, you came to us from the big city of Minneapolis.
From the beginning of your monastic life,
you were involved in pastoral ministry,
at Saint Bernard's,
as a missionary monk in Puerto Rico,
at Saint Mary's in Stillwater and Saint Joseph.
You then served as chaplain at Saint Benedict and Saint Scholastica.
But you also have a whole set of other skills,
including flying airplanes,
computer skills with graphics that you use to create signage,
both indoor and outdoor, for the entire campus.
Your shop -- (Signs R Us).
You have skills for constructing and maintaining websites.
You are also a sound technician for our liturgies,
and a fireman for many years who drove the pumpers.
And, of course, there is the skill for hitting a small white ball
on the fairways and putting surfaces that can be found in the local area.
May you some day get a hole-in-one!!
Father Tom, thank for all of your service over these fifty years
and for your faithful presence in our community.
Brother Andrew Goltz, you came to us from Milaca, MN,
after service in the navy.
Truly, you are jack of all trades,
with an array of practical and professional skills,
and the visual sense of a trained artist.
You have worked in the woodworking shop,
in the business office -- I think I met you as a gangly freshmen in fall 1963
but you seemed much more stern to me then!
For three years you worked with Brother Placid, Mr. Dick Haeg,
and the designer Bruno Bak, on the creation
and installation of the stained glass window in this church.
You served in our missions in the Bahamas and Japan,
earned a degree in nursing
and directed the nursing care in Saint Raphael Hall.
Since 1992 you have learned the skills
for the repair and preservation of books,
giving a second life to so many volumes in Alcuin and Clemens library.
Bookbinding and book repair are,
of course, ancient and noble monastic arts.
You are a natural solver of puzzles:
few play the 3-holer in solitaire,
or noodle through the Japanese numbers game Sudoku as well as you.
Thank you, Brother Andrew, for your creative service,
your ability to move across so many areas of interest with such expertise,
and for your presence in our midst for fifty years.
As a community we are constantly trying
to opening ourselves to the mystery of God's love,
and to what God is asking us to do
in following the Rule and the Gospel.
We want to jettison everything that is not part of this following.
None of us knows what will be asked of us along the way,
or what form the request will take.
We are confident that Christ is with us
to support and sustain us on this journey of faith.
Surely Christ's promise is being fulfilled in our midst.
We have been blessed a hundredfold
because of the graced commitment of these men,
who have preferred nothing to Christ.
We are also blessed
because of your presence and support for us.
May all of you, our jubilarians, confreres, oblates, and guests,
have a joyous and blessed Feast of Benedict today.
Abbot John Klassen, OSB
July 11, 2008
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