EULOGY FOR BROTHER SIXTUS ROBERT SMITH, FSC
Br. Donald Mansir, FSC

When James Smith was about 8 years old, he was learning to be an altar boy. On one occasion, his mother and a friend of hers, Catherine McNeill, were waiting for him to finish his instruction. When he came down form the sanctuary, he was introduced to Catherine who asked, “What are you going to be?” Now, Catherine came from the Island of Bara, just off the coast of Scotland. All the residents of the island were Catholic; all of them McNeills. Little Jimmy Smith said he wasn’t sure, but perhaps a priest. Catherine said, “you can’t be a priest because one of your fingers is cut off. But you can be a Brother.” [Catherine’s brother-in-law was a Holy Cross Brother.]

Two years later, Jimmy went to visit Our Lady’s Home, in Oakland, near his home. The Sisters of Mercy ran a Home for the elderly. He rang the doorbell and asked if he could visit the chapel. The sister who let him in asked, “What are you going to be when you grow up?” Jimmy now replied, “A Brother.”

The Sister of Mercy had gone to grammar school with Brother Gregory, the then president of Saint Mary’s College and later to become Visitor. She told Jimmy to come back in a couple of weeks. When he did, Sister gave him some cookies and informed Jimmy that the Superior General was coming to the area. So, when the Superior General, Allais-Charles, made his visit, the Sister of Mercy took Jimmy to the Visitor, Brother Gregory who was at Saint Mary’s College. The College was in Oakland at the time. The Superior General was in Martinez, but Brother Gregory asked Jimmy to stay and wait for the Superior General. When he returned, Jimmy told him that he wanted to be a Brother. The Superior General asked Jimmy to kneel down and blessed him, making the sign of the cross over him. He gave him a signed holy card of Saint John Baptist De La Salle, which he kept all his life.

There are many perspectives from which I might speak about Brother Sixtus Robert Smith: his life as a Brother, as a student, as a teacher; his time at Saint Mary’s College and Saint John’s College and his many contributions to them, his many friends, including Jacob Klein, Eva Brann, Michael Ossorgin, Elliott Zuckerman, Brother Brendan Kneale, James Hagerty, Douglas Allenbrook, Father Henry Wansborough, Chester Burke, Peter Gilbert, Bill Ney and Brother Raphael Patton.  Most of them are interesting and would provide an insight into Robert. Many of you are knowledgeable about them. To select one was, frankly, easy for me since I believe they all have the same focus: to live in the Love between the Father and the Son in the unity of the Holy Spirit.

Some of you are aware that Robert was trying to complete a book on the Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom before he died. Peter Gilbert, a former student of Robert’s at Saint John’s, Annapolis, Rali Christo, a tutor in the Integral Progam here at Saint Mary’s, and I had been working with Robert before he died to complete his work.

Robert’s motivation for his book was John Paul II’s apostolic Letter Orientale Lumen in which the Pope wrote that Catholics need to be nourished by some distinctive religious teachings as they are understood by the Eastern Church. He even goes on to say that this is our first need. Robert quotes the Holy Father:

Since in fact we believe that venerable and ancient tradition of the Eastern Church is an integral part of the heritage of Christ’s Church, the first need for Catholics is to be familiar with that tradition and to be nourished by it…

The Pope further writes:

[Since] the teachings of the Eastern Church are an integral part of what the Christian Church teachers, any account of our faith lacking this Eastern component is deprived of something essential to it, like a body missing heart or head.

“What John Paul II points out as distinctive,” Robert would say, “is the particular perspective of the Eastern Christian. The goal for the Eastern Christian is participation in the divine nature through communion with the Trinity.” Oh, it’s not that we Roman Catholics are deprived of this perspective, but it is much less part of our lives.

Robert never thought he was an expert in Eastern theology or the liturgy. He did, however, believe that his life experience provided him with something to offer us. It was his hope, as it might be all of ours, that after death he would come to know and live with the Three Divine Persons in the fullest manner. He believed that this knowledge and love begins in this life. For Robert this meant a person’s true biography tells how that person by successive steps grew closer to knowing and loving God as God knows and loves us. Robert thought this was what metanoia was about - being significantly changed because of this dynamic relationship between himself and the Divine Persons. It was startling; even frightened. He was so convinced about this understanding of metanoia that he had me go to Geneva to speak with a Greek Orthodox bishop I knew and ask for some particular texts that he was not able to find. Of course I did. We all did what Robert asked. At one of his famous gatherings in the President’s Dining Room, which included Norman Springer, Alan Pollock, Mariedi Anders, Natasha Gutman and Winfrid Smith, Robert said “my life is a theological elaboration of what I believe.” The entirety of our life, therefore Robert believed, is sacred, whether we are conscious of it or not. God wishes to dwell in us and moves us to wish to dwell in the midst of the Divine Persons.

Robert wanted to write this book to provide us with insights into how to become more conscious of our dynamic relationship with the Divine Persons. Our love for the God-Man, Jesus Christ, or His Mother are much easier for us to comprehend. The East, Robert believed, offers us a way into the life of the Divine Persons.

It was both Robert’s participation in the Byzantine Liturgy over his last sixty years and his study of the liturgy that led him to the conviction that the culmination of is life was to live in the midst of the Father’s Love for the Son.

In Beginning was the Word
And the Word was - pros ton theon - face to face with the Father
And the Word was God

Robert’s life was punctuated by a number of important moments, by persons who he believed God sent to him: a fellow graduate student who was an Ukrainian priest and who introduced Robert to the Eastern Church; those who with the assistance of some of the Brothers at Saint Mary’s College like Brother Myron Collins helped sustain the growth of the newly founded Russian Catholic Center in San Francisco; the professor at the University of California, Berkeley who had been prepared for the French Baccalaureat by the De La Salle Brothers in Istanbul where his mother had settled after the Russian Revolution and who taught Robert a great deal about icons; the colleague and graduate of the Institut Saint Serge in Paris who introduced Robert to the Russian intelligensia in Paris, and meeting a Russian Orthodox priest, Prince Volkonsky. Most of these connections Robert attributed to his being a De La Salle Brother. His meeting with every significant person in his life was the direct result of a connection made through a Brother, including Prince Volkonsky Robert became an intimate of the priest-prince who wanted to meet Robert because he was a De La Salle Brother. The Brother’s sister was in the French resistance and was imprisoned with the wife of the prince. They remained in the same cell together until the priest’s wife was taken off to be guillotined. She had entrusted a final message for her husband to her companion. Before she too was executed the Germans were defeated and the message was delivered to the priest. Robert spent an entire Lent with the prince before the prince died gossiping about the Russian nobility and clergy, but more importantly about their spirituality and participation in the liturgy.

Though Robert spent many years outside of the District and was engaged in work other than those established or sponsored by the Institute, he was first a son of Saint La Salle. He was brother. Saint John’s, Annapolis tutor Howard Zeiderman recalls Robert’s participation in the Touchstones Project, a program for the conducting of seminars for prisoners. On one occasion the prisoners were reading a selection from Teresa of Avila. Robert didn’t wear his collar and was quiet for the beginning part of the conversation. Then, Howard recalls, Robert began to talk about forgiveness. The prisoners were transfixed. None budged when the bells sounded and the guards finally had to move them along. From that first meeting the prisoners simply referred to Robert as ‘the brother,’ a phrase no one had ever heard the prisoners use before. He simply, even when looking like everyone else, without religious garb, became Brother Robert.

Robert championed the Catholic intellectual tradition which integrates the liberal arts with our Catholic faith. The Integral Program, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year and which he founded, is the result of the sort of courageous creativity in education John Paul II called for during his tenure as Pope. Robert drew many of us into his tradition, into this life which he believed moved us into the life of the Trinity. His life-long vow to the Trinity was taken seriously and he spent his life trying to increase his knowledge of God and his love for the Divine Persons. His last work, his book inspired by John Paul II and the result of his life’s journey to know and love God, is his gift to us, a strategy to live in the midst of the Love between the Father and the Son in the unity of the Holy Spirit.

Blessed are they whom Thou hast chosen and taken, O Lord.
Their memory is from generation to generation.
Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

Given by Brother Donald Mansir, FSC
Saint Mary’s College of California
16 September 2006