ARTICLES

Returns to Okie Roots--and Finds Monks

To the World Wide Web, she's "anchoress.com." To San Diego, she's the former associate editor of Catholic Answer's This Rock magazine. To Eufaula, Oklahoma, she's a native daughter who's finally come home. Watch out, Oklahoma, because Terrye Newkirk has plans for you. "I was born in Oklahoma and one reason I'm glad I'm back here is it's very much mission territory," she said in a recent phone interview. "My mother's hairdresser asked her if Catholics believe in Jesus. Prayer is my vocation," Newkirk, 53, went on, "and intercession for the Church in the diocese as a whole. I know prayer does things." Newkirk has faith in the power of prayer in spite of--or because of--several serious illnesses from which she has been suffering for years now. "I've got a number of things and they're still trying to figure out what it all is," she said. Her poor health constrained her to resign from Catholic Answers, the San Diego-based apologetics apostolate.

"Working at Catholic Answers was wonderful, it was fun, it was challenging and it was demanding," she said. "And I ran out of gas." Last year, Newkirk went home to Eufaula, Oklahoma to live with her parents--and with her pain and fatigue. "I have good days and bad days," Newkirk said, "literally days when I can't get out of bed without a cane. I have fatigue all the time. "This is gonna sound really strange," she went on, "especially to non- Catholics, but I look upon that as a blessing God's given me. Because I can offer my little discomforts to Him and hope it helps somebody. I'm bearing a tiny splinter of the Cross." Newkirk has beheld the cross of Christ in a more intense way ever since she spent three months in San Diego Carmel. Although she didn't become a nun, she's a member of the Third Order Carmelites which is for laypeople. She was also a candidate for a secular institute, Our Lady of the Way, where members live in the world but they live a consecrated life, having made the vows of religion. But she still hadn't found what she was looking for. "The more I thought about all this," Newkirk said, "the more I came back to my original inspiration which was to be a hermit."

Little did Newkirk know, as she retraced her steps back whence she originally came, that monks from the Benedictine monastery in Fontgombault, France were taking steps towards establishing a monastery in Oklahoma! Fontgombault is famous among those Catholics attached to the traditional Latin Mass and liturgy, and several Americans have become monks at the monastery in France. They will be return to the States to establish the new Benedictine monastery in Oklahoma. "And that will help, Newkirk said. "I don't think they're many francophones there." If not French, some Oklahomanians however will learn some Latin as they fully, actively, consciously participate in the Tridentine Masses and liturgical hours which the monks will chant. The inculturation has already begun with the new monastery's name, "Our Lady of Clear Creek." "That's a very 'Okie' name," Newkirk quipped. Newkirk has written a proposed rule, along Carmelite lines, which she has shown to the superior of Fontgombault, "and Abbot Forgeot read it and thought it was good," she said. But that was just one of many steps toward official Church approval of her plan to be a hermit. While Newkirk's waiting on the Lord, she maintains a website: www.anchoress.com. She's quick to reply to her email. Remembering San Diego, "two of the pluses for me were Catholic Answers and News Notes. I'm serious! "I discovered News Notes in a stand in Baskin Robbins in Pacific Beach," Newkirk went on, "and I immediately signed up for it."

--James McCoy