The Cloister Walk (11 page)

Advent began magnificently at St. John's. The long summer of Ordinary Time had dragged on and on, and several monks commented that they were ready for a change of season. For people who live by the liturgical year, the transition into Advent can be as physically invigorating as the shift from summer into fall, and on that first Sunday of Advent, in late November, the air was charged with expectation.

St. John's has a custom that I believe to be rare among monasteries; they always invite a person from outside the monastic community to do the first reading at their Sunday Mass. This person also carries the great book of scriptures into the sanctuary, and leads the liturgical procession. At St. John's, this includes all the monks who are in residence, well over a hundred, who walk in, two by two. The liturgy director had tapped me for the first reading that Sunday, and warned that the procession would be even longer than usual, as the abbots of over twenty European monasteries were visiting and would follow the St. John's community down the aisle.

I succumbed to the temptations of a minor demon, who suggested that with all of the basic black in evidence, a touch of color would be appropriate. I wore a scarlet dress. And just before the service began, as I walked with the liturgy director from the sacristy to the head of the long line of monks, one of them, a good friend, winked at me and whispered, “A scarlet woman—we'll give those abbots something to talk about when they get home.”

Walking at the slow pace set by the liturgy director, I soon felt the astonishment that often comes to me during worship, whether I'm with the congregation of a little country church, or Benedictines in a magnificent monastery chapel. It is the wonder that I should be there at all. My faith was non-existent, or at least deeply submerged, for so long a time, but liturgy pulled me back. As so often happens, on this day worship reinforced my conviction that
only
Christ could have brought all of us together, in this place, doing such absurd but necessary things.

My text that morning was from Isaiah and, as always, when I am granted the great privilege of reading him aloud in worship, I am grateful. Grateful that such poetry exists, that it tastes so good in the mouth, grateful that my messy, stormy life has led to this calm sea. Being a lector is a unique experience; it feels nothing like reading poems, my own or anyone else's, to an audience. And it's certainly not a performance; no emoting, or the monks would have my hide. The Liturgy of the Word is prayer. You pray the scriptures with, and for, the people assembled, and the words go out to them, touching them in ways only God can imagine. The words are all that matter, and you send them out as prayer, hoping to become invisible behind them.

The words on that first Sunday of Advent were from Isaiah 63: “Why do you let us wander, O God, from your ways, and harden our hearts so that we fear you not?” The passage is an honest rendering of the human condition, a desperate prayer for God's presence, a recognition that we fall apart, and our world falls apart, when God is absent from our hearts. Why
are
our hearts so hard? Can God rend them, like the heavens, and change us for the good?

The next day, when I had to fly to New York City, Isaiah proved a good traveling companion. He permeates the readings of early Advent, and as I walked in Manhattan, those words seemed to come to life before me: “The lofty city God . . . casts to the dust. The foot tramples it, the feet of the poor, the steps of the needy.” From a bus I glimpsed an old woman seated on layers of clothing on a patch of damp ground in front of the Plaza Hotel, an incarnation of Isaiah's judgment against another city: “Instead of perfume there shall be a stench . . . instead of beauty, shame. Your young men shall fall by the sword and your warriors in battle. And her gates shall lament and mourn; ravaged, she shall sit upon the ground.” Being in the city is good for my monastic soul. If anything, the desert monks' command to “pray without ceasing” seems easier there; the need is so obvious, so constant.

I had a number of obligations in the city, several of them public, and the next morning, when I realized that my last haircut, a freebie from one of the graduate students at St. John's, was growing out badly, I decided to go in search of an inexpensive beauty salon. I left my friends' apartment on West Eighty-first Street, and walking south, passed several places strong on elegant, spare decor, the false simplicity that merely means “expensive.” Finally, I found a place that was busy—moms with kids coming and going, along with elderly women who looked as if they'd lived in the neighborhood for many years. This was promising, as was the sign in the window, “Haircuts, $8.00 and up.”

Within minutes, the receptionist had handed me over to a middle-aged man—hyper, gay, extremely extroverted—who lost no time in sweeping me into a chair and fluffing my hair with his fingers. Immediately he scowled and grumbled, “Whoever did your last haircut?” I shrugged and said, “Ah, the price was right. It was given to me for nothing by a delightful young nun. I suspect she's a much better nun than she is a hair stylist.”

“A nun?” he said, and paused. Then he smiled, as if he suddenly thought much better of me and my unkempt hair. “Some of my best customers are nuns, and former nuns. I just love them. They're good people.” Then he asked, “Do you know the Trappists?” Bemused, I said, cautiously, “Yes, I know some Trappists.” “Well, have you ever been to Spencer, Mass? The monastery there?” “No,” I said. “I've heard of the place, but I've never been there.”

The man then began to praise the monks of Spencer, his tongue seeming to move as fast as his scissors. He'd been isolated, ostracized in his small hometown in the South, and made to feel unwelcome in the church he was raised in. So, years ago, he'd come to New York City. He'd written off religion, he told me. Then he met a Catholic priest who'd engaged him in a small group studying the Bible, and one year they went to Spencer for Holy Week. “Boy, did I love that,” he said, “just sitting in that church, the way they let you come to church with them. They don't preach at you, they let you experience it for yourself.” He stilled the scissors for a moment and said, “You know, I've never felt so close to God before or since. It blew me the fuck away.”

I caught his eye in the mirror and nodded, “Yes,” I said, “I know what you mean.”

The O Antiphons are verses that are sung or chanted preceding the Magnificat (“My soul magnifies the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior . . .”) at vespers during the last week of Advent, from December 17 through 23. Each one addresses Christ by a different title: “O Wisdom,” “O Adonai,” “O Root of Jesse,” “O Key of David,” “O Radiant Dawn,” “O King of Nations,” “O Emmanuel.” The chant tones are uncommonly beautiful, and combine with an uncommon wealth of imagery to fulfill one role of chant, that is, to engage us more fully, more bodily, with our faith each time we hear or sing them.

I seldom get to sing the O antiphons with a monastic community, but during one residency at St. John's, it looked as if I might make it nearly through all seven before I left for the family Christmas in Honolulu. I grew up only dimly aware of the Advent season. We usually had an Advent calendar, but even in the 1950s, before Christmas had become the consumer feeding frenzy that it is now, the push to celebrate Christmas overshadowed the subtleties of Advent. It is through my affiliation with the Benedictines that I've learned how much the Advent season holds, how it breaks into our lives with images of light and dark, first and last things, watchfulness and longing, origin and destiny.

It was my destiny, that Advent, to submit to my publisher's request that I stop in Los Angeles for a few days before going on to Hawaii. I set about looking for a place in Los Angeles where I could hear the O Antiphons. The publicist couldn't help me; his job was arranging interviews and putting me in a tony hotel in Beverly Hills, thinking, as he cheerfully put it, that it would make a nice contrast with the monastery, and give me something to write about.

I knew that the people most likely to be singing the antiphons would be Roman Catholic or Episcopalian religious communities that pray vespers every night. Through a friend I obtained the name of a professor of nursing at a Catholic college in Los Angeles, who said that she could take me to such a community.

When I checked into the hotel, the clerk told me, as if it were significant, that my room had a view of the Hollywood Hills. I had no idea what this entailed, but it sounded good and I was glad to see the sinuous horizon, the graceful folds of land. The hills became my companion, especially at twilight, and in the blue light before dawn, when their human habitations seemed far less significant than the subleties of changing light. I sang the O Antiphons, all seven of them, to the Hollywood Hills.

The woman hired by my publisher to escort me to my interviews picked me up in an old Buick convertible. I couldn't imagine a better vehicle in which to see the city. The woman explained that her public relations work was part-time, that she was a writer, too. “What do you write?” I asked. “Television game shows,” she replied. She was trying to sell her latest to one of the big networks. Her roommate, she told me, wrote unauthorized celebrity biographies. Bristling with gossip about the recent arrest of Heidi Fleiss for running a prostitution ring, she said she'd heard that Fleiss had paid several million in cash for a mansion. I said, “I didn't know there were that many fucks in the world worth paying for.” This seemed to shock the woman; apparently she'd been told I was a religious writer.

But I didn't much care. The sun, the ride in the open air, the California breeze after a cloistered Minnesota fall had put me in a reckless mood for my live interview on Pacifica radio. “Do you consider yourself a Christian?” my host asked. I sighed and said, “My problem with that is that so many people who publicly identify themselves as Christians are such jerks about it.” The woman laughed, as did the people in the sound booth behind her. “Especially now,” I continued, “when all that Christmas cheer is being rammed down our throats. It's enough to make a saint scream.” I said I often wondered if being a Christian was something we could, or should, claim for ourselves; that if being a Christian meant incarnating the love of Christ in my own life, then maybe it would be best to let others tell me how well, or how badly, I'm doing. I spoke briefly about what Advent meant to me, and then confessed that I had schemed for months to find the O Antiphons in the city. I doubt that it was the looniest interview the woman had all day, but it had its moments.

My guide and I left the radio station and went in search of Mt. St. Mary, the college where I was to meet my professor. I'd been given explicit directions, but as we climbed high above Brent-wood, the woman kept asking, “Are you sure we keep going? I don't think there's anything more up here.” Finally, as promised, we saw the nuns' retirement center ahead, and kept climbing until we had come to a tiny jewel of a campus. The L.A. woman was stunned; “Why, it's a whole little world up here,” she exclaimed, “I had no idea.” “Catholics are good at this,” I said, and we parted company.

The view was stunning—the entire L.A. basin, the channel islands and Catalina. I found the nursing school and not one but two friendly women who were planning to take me to the O Antiphons. Vespers was at 5 P.M., and it was not quite 4, so one of the women asked if I'd like to first take a brief hike further up the mountain, past the convent and onto the fire road. It seemed a fine idea to me, and we took off.

Soon we could see, far below us, a small section of what she told me was the Santa Monica freeway. Then we left the traces of civilization behind. The air was lively with the lingering scent of juniper mixed with that of other vegetation I did not recognize. We never made it to the summit, because at one turn we encountered two coyotes, a male and a female. We stared at them, and they at us, and then they slipped away, down the hill. We decided to turn back and leave them to their pursuits.

I was overcome with the wonder of having come all the way from western South Dakota, via Minnesota, only to find myself alone with coyotes in Los Angeles. Breathing in the delicious air, taking in the snow-capped peaks of mountains to the east and the breadth of the Pacific to the west, I understood for the first time the beauty of the place; why it was people had thought it was a paradise.

In the chapel, an elderly sister, who brought us booklets so we could follow the vespers service, whispered, loudly, “Who are you?” But when we began to answer, she waved our words away, “Don't bother, I'm hard of hearing,” she said, adding as she shuffled down the aisle, “It doesn't matter, we're all God's children.” The antiphon that night, December 21, was “O Oriens”: “O Radiant Dawn, brightness of light eternal, and sun of all justice; O come and illumine those who live in deep darkness, in the shadow of death.” It passed too quickly.