New Skete Monasteries News

By Brother David Over the altar in our temple of Holy Wisdom is a Cross in a circle surrounded by a band. When I first saw it I was stunned: it’s a double helix. I frequently take a moment to go and contemplate this figure, this strand of DNA, to reinforce the essential truth and necessity of the Christ’s humanity and the central truth and necessity of the Cross. But there can be the tendency to restrict Christ’s humanity as if he exists in some kind of vacuum contained in divinity – that he is so unique as to be separate. And yet the Gospels, by presenting the genealogies of Jesus, forcefully remind and teach us that this is not so. The eternal Word of God, the second person of the Trinity, becomes flesh in a context. The Anointed One of God becomes matter and spirit. He carries DNA from all of his ancestors, and he has a lineage. He enters into time and even more important, he enters into history. Families carry stories about themselves and their people: what does it mean to ...

Reflections by Brother Luke This season, our local choral society, the Battenkill Chorale, is singing Haydn’s Creation. What a glorious setting of the scriptural creation texts! I remember singing in a performance of this work in Washington, DC, long before I entered monastic life. The opening sequence leads in hushed voices to a burst of sound with these words: And God said: Let there be Light, and there was Light. During the darker days of winter, when light is at a premium, we often find ways to illumine our surroundings. The most seasonally obvious example is Christmas lights. These may festoon trees in our homes and the shrubs, trees, and eaves outside. At New Skete we have had a long tradition of decorating a Christmas tree in our living areas, sometimes in our recreation room and sometimes in our dining area. But, after 2000, I took a leap into the dark and convinced the brothers to hang lights outside on some of our buildings and trees. So we began a new tradition. Some bro...

By Brother Christopher “Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us  even in the leafless winter...” –Mary Oliver, Starlings in Winter I woke this morning to the realization that our world was covered with five inches of fresh, light snow. The snowplow man at 4 am first alerted me to that fact, and when I peered out the doorway while making my coffee I was treated to the most elegant of winter scenes. Light snow covered the various tree branches, and a shimmering glow was set against the surrounding darkness. The snow blanketed everything, and I could literally hear the silence a bit later when I stepped outside to do some shoveling. Such mornings are an appropriate prelude to Christmas, that great feast that celebrates the incarnation of God in the flesh in the humblest of circumstances. We cannot sufficiently grasp this mystery unless we first empty ourselves of the familiarity of so many Christmas celebrations of the past. As the world is ma...

By Brother Gregory For several weeks we knew that my dog Ombra was pregnant, and she was getting pretty big, but we were not sure how many puppies she was carrying. She lives with Lena, my other dog, and me in my bedroom. For the last two weeks Ombra was getting uncomfortable, and sleeping at nights was difficult. Ombra looking for a comfortable spot to nest. She would pace for about three hours before settling down for some sleep, but she would be awake again around 4 AM. Needless to say, my sleep pattern was off, too. I made sure during the day and night that she often had time to poop and pee and could have some exercise to move around. Ombra is such a sweet and gentle dog; she just wants to please and play all the time. I asked the other monks when the big day would arrive, and some of us started to take a pool as to how many puppies she would have. The final answer for the due date was sometime on Sunday. I waited and waited all day Sunday. Finally I decided to go to bed. ...

Reflections by Brother Luke Back in my government days, restructuring the bureaucracy was seemingly an unending activity. I suspect nothing has changed in that regard. Not only did elections followed by new federal administrations bring in new political appointees with new ideas about how to do practically everything, but in the world of the defense establishment and the military (where I worked), changes in leadership according to the usual rotational requirements of career advancements kept us constantly facing reorganization, downsizing, personnel transfers, and general uncertainly about job security. Spencer Johnson’s book Who Moved My Cheese? was all the rage in the 1990s. Now you can get it for 1¢ online (+ shipping, of course). It is in the same category as the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Both books deal with change and how to cope with it, or rather, how to turn what seems negative into something positive. During our years of transition at New Skete, we str...

by Brother David Technology has removed us, by and large, from the terrors of life even as it has intensified them. We read or watch news segments about atrocities and find that we have become observers who have exchanged fear for fascination and pity for information. I’ve even heard the term “gawker glut” to describe the traffic bottleneck that occurs when people slow down to better see an accident as they drive by. Our news media have taken to blasting us with constant repetition of disasters and atrocities in an attempt to be heard above the din of sit-coms, docudramas, police procedurals, and science fiction and horror programs. It is not so much that there is something wrong with such programming as much as it can be used to create passivity – observership. We become desensitized to suffering as well as to awe. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Ps 111: 10) and “Blessed are those who fear the Lord; who find great delight in his commands” (Ps 112: 1). Do we f...

At the height of the Northeast’s fall color, ten students and two spouses arrived in the late afternoon of October 17 for an overnight visit. They are taking Dr. Paul Meyendorff’s Liturgy class on “The Sanctification of Time” and came to participate in the monastery’s observance of Vespers and Matins. The seminarians were able to sing with the monastics for some of the short refrains, and they sang their own arrangements for a couple of hymns. Professor Meyendorff, a long-time friend of New Skete, has brought students for such “field trips” numerous times over the past decade and a half. He is the Alexander Schmemann Professor of Liturgical Theology at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in Tuckahoe, New York, directly south of us by a little over three hours. He has also authored several books on various aspects of Byzantine and Russian liturgical history and practice, has translated additional works in the field, and has been Visiting Professor at Yale Divinity School a...

by Brother Stavros Brothers Christopher and Stavros spent Columbus Day weekend in Washington, DC as guests of St. Nicholas Cathedral parish and made slide presentations during the two-day Fall Bazaar festival. Br. Christopher, our prior and a priest-monk, also served the Sunday Divine Liturgy with the Metropolitan and cathedral clergy, during which he was blessed by His Beatitude to preach the homily. Our National Cathedral is small in floor space but was built in the lofty Novgorod-Vladimir style, and the entire interior is covered in very handsome early Russian style frescoes. It has a very prestigious location at the height of Massachusetts Avenue, a mere half block from the Vice-President’s residence at the Naval Observatory and a short walk from the Episcopal National Cathedral on Mount St. Alban, which has a commanding view of the Nation’s Capital, and across the avenue from St. Sophia’s Greek Orthodox Cathedral. The main campus of the Russian Embassy is also a short dista...

Reflections by Brother Luke      It is sometimes hard for me to believe as I think back that Roy Rogers and Dale Evans lived around the corner from us in Los Angeles when I was a kid growing up. My sister was in the same grade as their kids; I was two years behind. Those of you who were also kids at that time may remember the ending line of their TV show theme song: “Happy Trails to you until we meet again.”      When I take my dogs out onto our trails in the woods, they are truly Happy Trails for them. They have great fun running around, and these days I have to struggle a bit more to keep pace with them. But I’ve always enjoyed hiking our trails ever since I was first introduced to them back in 1980s during a retreat visit. In those days Brother Stavros put in many hours of work on the trails, grooming them and putting blazes on trees along the trails to help visitors enjoy their hikes. I remember one year a family was out on the trails and got to ...

An update from Brother Christopher We have come a long way, but the journey continues! As we approach the one-year anniversary of the groundbreaking for the Monks of New Skete Dog Training Center, Capital Campaign, we are so very thankful for the support, encouragement, progress, and accomplishments that we have been witness to during this exciting and challenging time. It is through the generous spirit of so many, including the Maurice Sendak Foundation, that we have been able to move forward on this important project. We are pleased to report that, with the help from many friends, the generous matching pledge/challenge by the Maurice Sendak Foundation for the Monks’ Capital Campaign has been met, and the foundation has very generously donated $250,000! This exciting challenge presented by the foundation ignited a call to action for many old and new friends of the Monks! In the months following the March 2014 announcement, we were humbled by the outpouring of generosity from the many...

Reflections by Brother Luke      From time to time, Bill Cosby’s comedy routine about Noah’s Ark will come to mind, and it always brings a smile to my face. “Noah…Noah!” God’s voice booms out, followed by a sheepish reply from Noah. The image of gathering two of all the animals of creation onto a boat to save them from the impending flood resides not only in the worlds of Biblical story and mythology but also in folklore. As a story of salvation it can warm our hearts to imagine all the wonder of seeing so many different kinds of animals all parading up to the Ark and joining in a colorful display of the variety and beauty of God’s creation. On the other hand, if it is an example of a lived experience of managing all those animals in a small space on a boat during an horrific storm at sea, the romance of it all may fade away in the face of the logistical reality of feeding, housing, and cleaning up after all those glorious (and anxious) creatures.      Back...

By Brother David Asceticism: severe self-discipline and avoidance of all forms of indulgence, typically for religious reasons.(Google) Depending on your point of view, the word asceticism evokes either admiration or dread. For many, it is virtually synonymous with fanaticism—certainly with deprivation. It conjures thoughts of heroic feats leading to the heights of holiness through the expiation of sins; images of monks emaciated by fasting, eyes red-rimmed from lack of sleep keeping vigils: a sea of pain that we mere mortals dip our toe into during Lent with the fast, giving up perhaps chocolate or dessert or cigarettes, only to retreat quickly (and perhaps with some sense of guilt) to the shore of ease come the Pasch. And yet… And yet the word itself gives us a different picture and perhaps a truer insight into the nature, purpose, and reality of what asceticism really is. We take the word asceticism from the Greek askesis, which is formed from the verb askeo: to form by art, t...

By Brother Stavros I received a present in the mail the same day I saw the new Irish film Calvary. Both made a serious impression.      Calvary is a story about passion: faith, love, disbelief, unbelief, pain and loss and ultimately sacrifice. The prominent Irish writer-director John M. McDonagh discovered, from all the media attention the film attracted (it packed theaters in the British Isles), that his title—once commonly understood in the Christian West as the site of Christ’s crucifixion—now needs a footnote; maybe it’s a metaphor for today’s Ireland, where the economic bubble has burst and the Catholic Faith has ebbed like the tide. While Ireland may no longer be a land of staunch religion, it remains one of stunning beauty and of vibrant theatrical talent.      The story unfolds in a village on the Donegal coast in the northwest of the island. It is a tale of struggle between and among its denizens for meaning and identity, dignity and hope, all wi...