A funeral Mass for Brother Michael Symeon Gillette, OSB, was celebrated Nov. 15 at Saint Louis Abbey in Creve Coeur. Brother Symeon died Nov. 9 a month after an attack of shingles and Bell’s Palsy. He was 75.
Brother Symeon was born on July 15, 1949, in Hicksville, New York, into a family of six children and was given the name Michael. He studied in high school with the Marist Brothers and majored in art at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. After working for six years as an insurance underwriter, he entered the Saint Louis Priory in November 1977, and after discovering the medieval writer Symeon the New Theologian, took the religious name Symeon. He made simple vows in September 1979 and solemn vows in November 1982. He studied horticulture at Meramec Community College and was responsible for planting many trees on the Priory campus.
After profession, Brother Symeon became a faculty member of Saint Louis Priory School, teaching classes over the years in mechanical drawing, calligraphy, the painting of medieval banners, icon writing and mosaics. But his signature achievement was his work in stained glass and his teaching of the making of stained glass in the years around the millennium. He won the affection of his students with whom he created a guild of medieval arts, which resulted in large-scale projects now installed in the Priory School and Saint Louis Abbey, including a large Millennial Window (2000) and a Jubilee Window (2005) commemorating the 50th anniversary of the arrival of the founding monks of Saint Louis Priory, now Abbey. Students came to value his modeling of patience, precision and self-confidence.
His achievement was the more remarkable for his suffering from asthma combined with scoliosis, which left him with the use of only one lung. Despite this handicap and the need of a constant supply of oxygen in later years, he never missed attendance at community prayer and recreation, nor was it cause for complaining. In his last years, he delighted in baking new recipes of bread for the monastic community. His love for God was manifest in his spiritual arts, in his love for his students and in a seven-year period of living as a hermit on the Abbey campus.
