As I've mentioned before, our comm- unity is celebrating this year the 150th anniversary of St. Benedict's Prep's founding in 1868. One of the events marking the anniversary is an original play written by our students in a couple of drama classes in recent years, that tells the story of the school from the mid-1800's through the present. It includes original songs written for us by Jeff Izzo, a professional musician, composer and professor.
The cast is made up of students from our Prep Division and our Middle Division (including one girl), two lay teachers, and five monks (including me). We've already done two performances (Thursday and Friday), and have two more -- tonight at 7:30 and tomorrow at 1:00 p.m.
I've never acted on a stage before, but being in this play isn't just acting some playwright's script -- it's literally living out on the stage some of the pivotal and most emotionally charged moments in my life. My experience of acting in the play is different from anyone else's, because I sat in those meetings where we fought and agonized over the fate of our school and even of our monastery. Many of the lines in the play are direct quotations of people at the time (taken from a doctoral thesis of Dr. Thomas McCabe, which he used as the basis of his book, Miracle on High Street). When I'm on stage in an imaginary meeting, I see the faces from 1972, and hear the voices and feel the whole range of feelings, from anger, disappointment, and fear as things fell apart, to hope, love, and exhilaration as we began to plan a new school.
It's really too early to describe what re-living those moments means to me since I'm still in the middle of it; the perspective of a few weeks will undoubtedly reveal a lot more of the meaning.
Here are a couple of lessons that might relate to your own life.
First, this is a story of the death and resurrection of St. Benedict's Prep, perfect for the middle point of Lent. Our faith assures us that death and suffering are part of every person's story, and a sharing in the story of Christ's conquering of suffering and death.
Second, acting in the dramatization of my own life-story helps me to appreciate once again that God is the one doing the work, even (especially) when we can't understand what is happening. St. Benedict's Prep closed when I was 29 years old, but in retrospect, that was an essential part of God's plan for the school and our monastery.
Let me leave you with an excerpt from a prophetic address given by Abbot Martin Burne, the abbot of St. Mary's Abbey (which included two monasteries, Morristown and Newark) to the friends, alumni and civic leaders at the centennial banquet at the Robert Treat Hotel on March 21, 1968 (four years before the school closed).
A teacher at St. Benedict’s today, lay or clerical, has to be either cynical or blind if he believes himself to represent human society, while ignoring the situation that is at his very doorstep. Which way St. Benedict’s you ask? Toward a deeper involvement in the society of which it is a part, toward an increased endeavor to help parents in the education of their sons. Can we, the Faculty at St. Benedict’s, begin to shape somewhat the situation at our doorsteps, by offering each year a college prep education to youngsters from the ghetto who need that type of education and who can well qualify for it? Or shall we turn our faces away from our front door, and pretend to the world around us that one really need not attend to his neighbor? The words of Christ are pure fiction! I propose to the business community of Newark, to the industry of Newark, to interested private citizens of Newark and its suburbs, the challenge of a lifetime…I challenge a society that talks a great deal about helping the underprivileged to let St. Benedict’s do just that.
It took a lot of time and a lot of suffering, but I believe that Abbot Martin got his dream.
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