Finding "Home" at Archmere

Some years ago I read Roads to Santiago: A Modern Day Pilgrimage through Spain by Gees Nooteboom, in which he quotes Julien Gracq who wrote La Forme d’une ville. Nooteboom paraphrases “ . . . when people think back on a city they have visited they take their mental image of a few buildings as reference points, the way a sailor searches out the beacons that will guide him to port. Yesterday, however, the city [Santiago, Spain] itself became a seaman’s memory, it was memory and reality at once, and I had drifted aimlessly along the beacons. Perhaps that is the traveler’s deepest melancholy, that the joy of return is always mixed with a feeling that is harder to define, the feeling that the places you have ached for since you first saw them simply went on existing without you, that if you really wanted to hold them close you would have to stay with them forever. But that would turn you into someone who stays at home, a sedentary being. The real traveler finds sustenance in equivocation, he is torn between embracing and letting go, and the wrench of disengagement is the essence of his existence, he belongs nowhere. The anywhere he finds himself is always lacking in some particular, he is the eternal pilgrim of absence, of loss, and like the real pilgrims in this city he is looking for something beyond the grave of an apostle or the coast of Finisterre, something that beckons and remains invisible, the impossible.”

Homecoming weekend just came to a close. It was a wonderful time of class reunions and campus activities, with some alumni and parents of graduates returning after many years to find that the former parking lot is now a grassy quad; the Justin E. Diny Science Building has an added floor and three-story physics lab; the McLaughlin-Mullin Student Life Center features the newest of three murals on campus highlighting the 80-year history of the Academy; and the Patio is now a classroom and administration building again, as it once was at the school’s founding in 1932. Former “reference points” of the traveler using Gracq’s term, have been changed for many alumni, yet the feeling of being at Archmere Academy, meeting with old friends and making new acquaintances created that unchanged feeling of being “at home.” The “familiar” was certainly present in the conversations and stories, the hospitality and sincere joy of being together with people who care about each other.

Saint Norbert was an itinerant preacher after his call to ministry. He needed time to discern the purpose God had for him in this life, and so he traveled through what is now Germany, Belgium, and France, visiting towns and preaching to the people. I am sure that he had “mental images” of these places and I wonder if he shared the feeling Gracq describes of a traveler – that tension between wanting to hold a place close by settling down as a “sedentary being,” and deciding to let go and experience the “wrench of disengagement” as a pilgrim who “belongs nowhere.” My sense of Norbertine charism is that it embraces the tension between living a “sedentary,” monastic, inward life of prayer and being a community of religious that moves outward, ministering to the people through sacramental celebrations of the Church as well as professional work and manual labor. That charism has been poured into the foundations of Archmere and helps us to understand how we, as Archmereans, can be people of “place” and people who go from this place to pursue our work in the world.

As I said in my opening letter to the Archmere Academy community when I became headmaster in 2010, Archmere is a place that never leaves you. You take the feeling of the Academy with you, and when you are reunited with fellow Archmereans – be it on campus or some other place, “Archmere’s presence” is palpable through the sense of hospitality and community we experience. Reflecting on the words of Gracq then, we are pilgrims on a journey that has as its end growing to perfection until we are with God – “something that beckons and remains invisible but not “the impossible.” As the psalmist wrote, “Restless is the heart until it comes to rest in you, O Lord.” (Ps. 90)