The Cloister Walk (19 page)

Severe lethargy has set in, what the desert monks might have called “acedia” or “listlessness,” and in the Middle Ages was considered sloth, but these days is most often termed “depression.” I had thought that I was merely tired and in need of rest at year's end, but it drags on, becoming the death-in-life that I know all too well, when my capacity for joy shrivels up and, like drought-stricken grass, I die down to the roots to wait it out. The simplest acts demand a herculean effort, the pleasure I normally take in people and the world itself is lost to me. I can be with people I love, and know that I love them, but feel nothing at all. I am observing my life more than living it.

I recognize in all of this the siege of what the desert monks termed the “noonday demon.” It suggests that whatever I'm doing, indeed my entire life of “doings,” is not only meaningless but utterly useless. This plunge into the chill waters of pure realism is incapacitating, and the demon likes me this way. It suggests sleep when what I need most is to take a walk. It insists that I shut myself away when what I probably need is to be with other people. It mocks the rituals, routines, and work that normally fill my day; why do them, why do anything at all, it says, in the face of so vast an emptiness. Worst of all, even though I know that the ancient remedies—prayer, psalmody, scripture reading—would help to pull me out of the morass, I find myself incapable of acting on this knowledge. The exhaustion that I'm convinced lies behind most suicides finds its seed in acedia; the rhythms of daily life, and of the universe itself, the everyday glory of sunrise and sunset and all the “present moments” in between seem a disgusting repetition that stretches on forever. It would be all too easy to feel that one wants no part of it any more.

The first experience of acedia that I recall (although I did not know to name it as such) occurred when I was fifteen years old, a scholarship student at a prep school in Honolulu. The job I held in partial payment of my scholarship was a pleasant one; during the noon hour, I answered the phone and did secretarial work at the Music School. Not being in the school cafeteria gave me a chance to diet, and my normal fare, in what now strikes me as a comical parody of the monastic desert, was a model of severity: Metrecal wafers, a low-cal soda, and an apple or an orange. (For readers who have never tasted Metrecal, allow me to suggest fresh asphalt with a hint of chocolate and the bitter afterglow of saccharin.) One day as I was unpacking my lunch, a lunch that my mother had faithfully packed for me, I suddenly saw the future stretch out before me: days and days of lunches that one day my mother would not be packing for me, that I would be responsible for myself. Day upon day of eating and excreting, of working at this job or that, of monotony, the futile round.

When, in my thirties, I encountered the monk Evagrius's classic description of the “noonday demon,” I recognized my experience of many years before. He speaks of the depressing thought that suddenly “depicts life stretching out for a long period of time, and brings before the mind's eye the toil of the ascetic struggle, and . . . leaves no leaf unturned to induce the monk to forsake his cell and drop out of the fight.” At fifteen I had no “cell” but a small bedroom in Navy housing near Pearl Harbor (which was luxurious to me because until recently I had been sharing a room with my two younger sisters). I had no knowledge of monks, or of ascetic practice. But I had been visited by the noonday demon and, in ways I was not to become fully aware of for many years, my life was changed forever. The fear of the daily had intruded into my consciousness at a time when it could do real harm. A shy, pudgy teenager, suffering from the loneliness that so many teenagers feel, I had just become more lonely. My fearful thoughts of the future seemed so absurd I could not speak of them to anyone.

Some thirty years later, I am back in Honolulu, in fragrant Manoa Valley, not far from that school. A letter-press book has come for me in the mail, exquisitely made by a friend, full of poems I wrote during a year at St. John's. The book, and the poems themselves, are a great gift, I know, but I can't bring myself to open the box. After a few days, when I finally do unpack it, the book's beauty seems remote. My mother and sister-in-law admire it—yes, it's lovely, I say, agreeing with them. But I can't feel it. They know this, and it troubles them. But they're tolerant; we share the hope that I'll soon snap out of it. Drugs, therapy, someone might suggest. The last time it got this bad I did consult with a doctor. We discussed many options, and what she suggested to me I treasure still: exercise, she said, and spiritual direction.

I have promised to go to services this Sunday, at the modest but spirited Disciples of Christ church where my brother is a pastor. I still feel half-dead but do my best to sing with the congregation. One of the verses of “Spirit of God, Descend Upon My Heart”—“I ask no dreams, no prophet ecstasies, no sudden rending of the veil of clay, no angel visitant, no opening skies; but take the dimness of my soul away”—makes me realize that I'm praying for the first time in days, and that it's working. The rest of that service is a giddy blur; I felt alive again, appropriately enough, on a Sunday morning. In his sermon, my brother says, “God's language is silence; how do we translate it?” He speaks of gifts differing, gifts of the Spirit coming to each of us, for the common good. The title of the closing hymn, “There Is Sunshine in My Heart Today,” seems like icing on the cake. The melody is appropriately zippy, upbeat, the lyrics as thoroughly Protestant as the title would suggest, and I enjoy every bit of it.

When last I was home and attending church, the children's choir sang “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam,” a song I remember singing as a child. I suppose I loved it then. What made their song so marvelous in the context of our worship that day was that it was followed by a reading from Jeremiah 14 that made it clear that God did
not
want Jeremiah for a sunbeam. Gifts differing, I suppose. And I suppose that both of the hymns that have touched me today could be labeled “pietistic,” not sufficiently concerned with the larger picture, the larger world. But it's acedia that made my world small, a self-centered hell—“Is there no way out of the mind?” Sylvia Plath once asked, anguished, in a poem—and these hymns that have released me to live in the real world again. In the context of this worship service, both hymns seem fine to me, not un-caring, not irresponsible, but merely a glad response to grace. I wonder if Christians might be permitted a certain gladness on Sunday morning. Even if the universe is mostly hydrogen atoms, and the few human beings who exist in it are continually at war with one another, even if time and space stretch out into the void. Here, in this ordinary church service, I have gained the strength to live this moment, the present moment, for the first time in days. I recall something that I read recently in a book on monastic practices: “A life of prayer,” the monk Charles Cummings wrote, “is a life of beginning all over again.” Ashamed of my own unsteadiness, my lack of courage and, in the words of another hymn, my heart so “prone to wander from the God I love,” I have the strength to take it all up again. This is a day to begin.

—THE SAYINGS OF THE DESERT FATHERS

The young monk read from the Bible: “The Lord God called to the man, and said to him, ‘Where are you?' He said, ‘I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.' ” I have always found that to be a poignant summary of the human response to evil: I was afraid, I tried to hide. I thought I knew where I was, at an everyday monastery Mass. But I was distracted for a moment by a thought that seemed absurdly out of place; I recalled that I'd forgotten to put on my favorite silver bracelet, the one I usually wear. It was handmade by the husband of an old friend, who gave it to me when I graduated from college. In the crazed atmosphere of Bennington in the 1960s, when so many faculty were having affairs with students that it was easy to become cynical about marriage, this couple had always seemed remarkably stable to me, still in love after more than twenty years, and good to be with.

I tried to concentrate on the gospel reading, a peculiar one: after Jesus began to preach, to cast out demons and heal the sick, some people had assumed that he'd gone mad. They tried to convince his family that Jesus himself was possessed by demons and should be restrained. “How do we respond to the good?” the monk asked in his homily. “How do we respond to the presence of the good?”

Suddenly I remembered another silver bracelet, lost in the shadows of my life, one my husband had given me, or had tried to give me, years before. It was beautiful lying in its box, but I was disappointed to find that it was a cuff bracelet, a kind I've never liked to wear. I had suggested to David that we replace it, or ask the silversmith, the woman who'd made his wedding band, if she could modify it. He said that he would, but I never heard any more about it. Now, for some reason, I remembered this event, and saw it clearly for the first time. The gift was good, and I had rejected it. I know my husband well enough to know that he would have taken it as a rejection and also that most likely he still had the bracelet buried among his things. I resolved to ask him, and also to apologize.

David was surprised, but he did remember, and after a few days found the bracelet in its original box. He polished it, and I now wear it. And all because I heard two questions: “Where are you?” and “How do we respond to the good?” The other reading at Mass that day was from Paul's second letter to the Corinthians: “We do not lose heart . . . our inner being is being renewed every day.” My pride will resist any change I haven't chosen, but it's powerless against this force of which Paul speaks, the conversion that occurs without my even being aware of it, except when it erupts suddenly into my life. A statement of John Climacus, typically self-contained and bristling with certitude, suddenly made sense to me: “Men can heal the lustful. Angels can heal the malicious. Only God can heal the proud.”

—THE SAYINGS OF THE DESERT FATHERS

—John Climacus
,
THE LADDER OF DIVINE ASCENT

One night, many years ago, I was angry at my husband. He'd had good news—the galleys of his second book of poems were coming in the mail—but he'd responded to it by growing more distant and then driving off to God-knows-where. When he hadn't returned by evening, although I was worried about him, it was anger that woke me up in the middle of the night. Hoping I could get back to sleep, I lay in bed, my mind suddenly racing with all the things, great and small, that I held against my husband. As good as it felt to review this little catalogue of slights and injuries, it brought me no satisfaction; instead, I soon found that I was in a stew over someone else, a man who had treated me with contempt. Then it was someone else that I fussed and fumed over, a grudge I thought I'd forgotten. I was building an impressive storehouse of grievances, and I thought to myself, sleepily,
this could go on forever.

I sat upright, suddenly wide awake. Of course it could go on forever; that was exactly the point. I'd recently come upon the writings of a monk named Evagrius and realized that I had rapidly moved beyond any justified frustration with my husband, and was becoming possessed by what Evagrius would have called the “bad thought” of anger. If my husband was in trouble, anger was the last thing either of us needed. I got out my breviary and prayed the compline psalms 4 and 91, with their talk of peaceful sleep and angelic protection. Despite all I'd read in the desert monks about how prayer causes demons to flee, I was amazed to discover how quickly the anger dissipated. In its place, I found that what I was really feeling for my husband was fear. Somewhere in my reading of monastic literature, I had found the statement that anger is the seed of compassion; I began to realize the truth of it.