Remembering Our 40th Anniversary Celebration

Reflections by Brother Luke

The year 2016 is our golden jubilee, marking 50 years since the founding of New Skete in 1966.  On our web site and our Facebook page you will find announcements of events commemorating this milestone in our community’s history. These include a benefit concert that was held on the day of our Open House, June 4 (see article by Br. Stavros), a new icon painted by Sr. Cecelia featuring the Transfiguration surrounded by other images of our life and work, and our annual Pilgrimage on Saturday, August 6, which will include a visit by our bishop, Metropolitan Tikhon, and a lecture by Fr. Michael Oleksa on the Alaskan roots of Orthodoxy in America. A new CD of a collection of New Skete recordings made over those 50 years will be available at the Pilgrimage. As a community renewal event, the monastics will gather on August 11–14 with Columba Stewart, OSB, who will lead a four-day conference. A new book of articles assembled by friends of New Skete on the theme of the Future of Christianity will also be published this year. A major feature of this celebration will be a complete renovation of our Transfiguration Temple, originally built in 1969—1970. For this we have invited our friends and benefactors to join with us to make this iconic symbol of our community once again an architectural jewel that will sparkle for decades to come.

As we worked to plan and organize these 50th anniversary events and celebrations, I was reminded of our experience in planning for our 40th anniversary in 2006. We started working on that celebration in 2005 when we decided to hold our first pilgrimage. In past years we had always considered the Feast of the Transfiguration on August 6 as a special celebration for the communities because the Monks’ monastery was dedicated to that feast, as was our first church. Now we were taking a new step to raise the profile of the celebration and to move it to the Saturday within the festal octave—which in 2016 actually falls on the feast day itself. We had no idea how the first pilgrimage would turn out. Happily, it was a success, and we were encouraged to go ahead with the second pilgrimage in 2006 to mark our 40th anniversary. As is the case this year, in 2006 we invited our bishop, then Metropolitan Herman, to celebrate the Divine Liturgy. The agenda for the day was a bit ambitious, with three lectures, a training demonstration, and a food court organized by our Chapel Community. Exhibits featured vestments produced by the Nuns, liturgical articles and icons, photos of our history, and photos of our puppy program. The guest speakers that day were Fr. Alexis Vinogradov, who spoke about Alexander Schmemann and New Skete, and then Dr. Roberta Ervine and Fr. Robert M. Arida, dean of the OCA Cathedral in Boston, who spoke about Liturgy and New Skete: Roots in Jerusalem and the Great Church of Constantinople. We also had an illustrated presentation on the history of New Skete given by members of New Skete on Friday. In subsequent years we realized that the Friday component was adding too much to the pilgrimage, and the number of lectures was reduced. Our enthusiasm in 2006 was moderated in later years as we realized the event offered more information and activities than could be absorbed by the attendees.

But the 40th anniversary year was more than just the pilgrimage. We also had a concert at which Kevin Lawrence played several of Bach’s solo violin sonatas, a retreat in May on the theme of spiritual direction, the Open House in June, and a Blessing of the Animals on October 4. Earlier in the year, Dr. Richard Schneider gave a lecture, “Do Icons Create the Church?” which included an analysis of the icon plan in our Holy Wisdom Temple. Since New Skete was founded in February, we even pushed the 40th celebration into January 2007, when we scheduled a retreat for the community members at Christ the King Retreat Center in Greenwich in which we reflected on our individual and community journeys in faith. Also in 2006 we issued our new recording of the Presanctified Liturgy.  Some of our plans never came to fruition, such as a retrospective issue of Gleanings, a mosaic icon for the new Welcome Garden, and an Ecumenical Symposium.  We were getting our feet wet in a new kind of opening to our community and region. All that activity served to launch us on a path of reaching out to broaden our witness and ideally embrace more people in the work and spirit of the community.  The next ten years would see many of these initiatives grow and bear more fruit. The 50th anniversary celebration is the latest blossoming of that earlier experience.

This reflection is the last in the series I offered to write on the 13-year period I served as prior of the Monks of New Skete. They were intended as a contribution to our 50th anniversary celebration.  As we near the culmination of our present celebration with the Pilgrimage on August 6, we can look to the future and focus on our dreams for the next 50 years for New Skete.