The Cloister Walk (16 page)

The height and depth of praise urged on us in the psalms (“Let everything that lives and that breathes / give praise to the Lord” [Ps. 150:6]) can heighten our sense of marvel and awaken our capacity to appreciate the glories of this world. One Benedictine woman has told me of herself and another sister getting permission from their superior, in the days before Vatican II, to don army-surplus parkas and ski-patrol pants and go cross-country skiing in the early spring. Coming to a wooded hill, the women sank in waist-deep snow and discovered at their feet a patch of hypatia blossoms. “There'd been an early snow that fall,” she said, “and those plants were still emerald green, with flower buds completely encased in ice. To me this was ‘honey from the rock' [Ps. 81:16]. It was finding life where you least expect it.”

Sometimes these people who live immersed, as all Benedictines do, in the poetry of the Psalter, are granted an experience that feels like a poem, in which familiar words that have become like old friends suddenly reveal their power to bridge the animal and human worlds, to unite the living and the dead. Psalm 42, like many psalms, moves the way our emotions do, in fits and starts: “Why are you cast down, my soul, / why groan within me? / Hope in the Lord, I will praise God still” (v. 5). But its true theme is a desire for the holy that, whatever form it takes, seems to be a part of the human condition, a desire easily forgotten in the pull and tug of daily life, where groans of despair can predominate. One sister wrote to me: “Some winters ago, when ice covered all the lands surrounding our priory, deer came close in search of food. We had difficulty keeping them from eating our trees and even the shrubs in our cemetery.” Having been at the convent for many years, she had known most of the women buried there. One morning she woke to find that “each deer had selected a particular tombstone to lie behind, oblivious to us watching from the priory windows. The longing for God expressed at the beginning of Psalm 42, ‘Like the deer that yearns / for running streams, / so my soul is yearning / for you, My God,' has stayed with me ever since.”

True intimacy is frightening, and I was well into my marriage before I realized that I either had to seek it or live a lie. Intimacy is what
makes
a marriage, not a ceremony, not a piece of paper from the state. I have shared great intimacy with several people; my friend dying of cancer for whom I would hold (and later clean) the bowls in which she frequently had to vomit; the monk, homosexual and resolutely celibate, with whom I've shared the deepest confidences. But it is only with my husband that I feel the mystery St. Paul speaks of in Ephesians, our lives so intertwined that they feel like “one flesh.”

I had forgotten how much marriage imagery there is in this feast that ends the Christmas season. “On the third day there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee,” I read last night in my breviary. Cana again in the morning hymn, and “Here is my beloved” at morning prayer, and again at Mass. But why, at the end of Mass, a song about a wedding garment? Is baptism a kind of marriage? Why, to celebrate the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan, hymn verses that echo the Song of Songs, the lover knocking on a door that is locked against him, and the night?

It brings a flood of memories that exhaust me. For years I hated weddings. I used to think it was simply a cultural prejudice against a ceremony that seemed only to celebrate sentiment and money, the barbaric custom of “giving away” a woman, as if she were not a person but property. But it ran much deeper, a fear of giving myself to anyone. And then, one night, when my husband had hidden himself away, and was found by a gentle policeman (who later told me, “M'am, your husband was so
depressed,
I never saw a man so depressed as that”), I read myself to sleep with the Song of Songs and found us there, the beloved knocking, calling, “Open to me, my sister, my love,” and my own delayed response, the selfish thought, in the face of love—“I had put off my garment, how could I put it on again? I had bathed my feet; how could I soil them?” The comic scurrying, my bad timing: “I opened to my beloved, but my beloved had turned and was gone.”

That night I discovered, in the “Song,” a religious dimension to something I'd never fully understood. “When I found him whom my soul loves, I held him and would not let him go, until I brought him to my mother's house, into the chamber of her that conceived me.” I had, in fact, brought my husband from New York City to my grandmother's house in South Dakota, the house where my mother was born, and now I wondered if this had been an attempt to build a marriage, to free us from the distractions of the city so that we could get to know each other. Maybe love needs space around it, and time. Is love fostered by time as much as it needs and fosters intimacy?

Yes, I am married, but do I know how to love? Has my heart been shut for so long? I look up that passage in Paul. “The two will become one flesh,” he says, but only after sputtering on for a good long while, trying to make explicit the comparison between marriage and Christ's love for the church. Finally, he gives up; I hear exasperation as well as wonder in his voice when he says, “This is a great mystery.” I read the end of Ephesians 5 as an example of what happens when you discover a metaphor so elusive you know it must be true. As you elaborate, and try to explain, you begin to stumble over words and their meanings. The literal takes hold, the unity and the beauty flee. Finally you have to say, I don't know what it means; here it is.

A mystery indeed, elusive as prayer. For years I had chosen relationships that seemed safe, because I was choosing; in fact, I had chosen them because they didn't require commitment. It's hard to change old ways, to let myself be chosen, blessed by love, as if anointed. I don't know what it means, but after my husband had been missing for three days and I found him in the emergency room, I did not know him. Depression had turned him inside out; he looked as ravaged as the corpus on the crucifix on the wall behind him. (“I'm afraid all the time,” is what he told me, a few days later, when he could speak.)

Of course, it was a Catholic hospital, Benedictine; one of our best friends, a young monk, had just become a chaplain there. Here it is, a mystery: I carry with me still the photograph of the three of us taken the summer before. My husband, our friend (who had just been ordained), and me. David had left, but I went to find him and brought him back. The three of us smiling, in the abbey courtyard. And that night, in the wine cellar, when the celebrating was done, I helped Fr. Robert wash glasses. He's an older monk whom I had yanked out of semi-retirement to help me become an oblate, and wine tasting and washing up in his cellar were part of the deal. I'd been an oblate for a little more than a year and felt as lost as ever. Prayers were a torment, but what I knew I needed to do. My life was a hurricane, and our marriage, confused as it was, the calm at the center. “You are entering the deep, uncharted waters” is what he said to me.

Gregory is the fellow who gives us an unforgettable account of the way in which everyday fourth-century life was permeated with theology, particularly debate concerning the nature of Christ. Everyone had an opinion, it seems. As Gregory says about Constantinople: “Garment sellers, money changers, food vendors—they are all at it. If you ask for change, they philosophize about the Begotten and the Unbegotten. If you inquire about the price of bread, the answer is that the Father is greater and the Son inferior. If you say to the attendant, ‘Is my bath ready?' he tells you that the Son was made out of nothing.”

What people were discussing was the controversy that had arisen concerning the divinity of Christ and his relation to God the Father, which the first official council of the Christian church, held at Nicaea, had attempted to settle just ten years before Gregory's birth. Soon, however, even bishops who had signed the Nicene Creed found that they didn't always agree on what it meant, and competing philosophies—chiefly Arianism, which held that Christ was a created being, less divine than the Father—had much popular appeal.

Born into a remarkable family—his sister Macrina and his brother Basil the Great both founded monasteries—Gregory was the dreamer of the bunch. He appeals to me mainly because he seems equally a poet and a theologian. Discovering his
Life of Moses,
finding that Christian theology could contain such poetry, such wild and inspiring typology, was something I desperately needed at the time. I read the book slowly, not wanting to finish it.

What Gregory said of Moses, that he “entered the darkness, and then saw God in it,” that in God's sanctuary “he was taught by word what he had formerly learned by darkness,” seemed to me to tell an essential truth about poetry, as well as religion. It confirmed a sense that I'd held as a child of the holy as dwelling in deep darkness, despite being told by my Sunday-school teachers that “God is light.” They were nice enough grown-ups and brave souls; they did their best to teach me origami. But I always sensed that they weren't giving me the full story.

As befits a poet, Gregory is a theologian of desire; he looks at Moses and sees a “bold request which goes up the mountains of desire,” asking only to see the beauty of God “not in mirrors and reflections, but face to face.” Gregory's own search for God seems to have been fueled more by desire than a certitude of faith. (As the church historian William Placher has said of Gregory, “For a long time he drifted through life without either a career or much religion, but he eventually found a deep faith.”) I frequently take consolation in Gregory's sense that with God there is always more unfolding, that what we can glimpse of the divine is always exactly enough, and never enough.

(LUKE 2:34-35)