The Cloister Walk (21 page)

Not long ago I viewed an exhibition at the New York Public Library entitled “Degenerate Art,” which consisted of artworks approved by Hitler's regime, along with art the Nazis had denounced. As I walked the galleries it struck me that the real issue was one of control. The meaning of the approved art was superficial, in that its images (usually rigidly representational) served a clear commercial and/or political purpose. The “degenerate” artworks, many crucifixes among them, were more often abstract, with multiple meanings, or even no meaning at all, in the conventional sense. This art—like the best poetry, and also good liturgy—allowed for a wide freedom of response on the part of others; the viewer, the reader, the participant.

Pat Robertson once declared that modern art was a plot to strip America of its vital resources. Using an abstract sculpture by Henry Moore as an example, he said that the material used could more properly have been used for a statue of George Washington. What do poets mean? Who needs them? Of what possible use are monastic people in the modern world? Are their lives degenerate in the same sense that modern art is: having no easily perceptible meaning yet of ultimate value, concerned with ultimate meanings? Maybe monks and poets know, as Jesus did when a friend, in an extravagant, loving gesture, bathed his feet in nard, an expensive, fragrant oil, and wiped them with her hair, that the symbolic act
matters;
that those who know the exact price of things, as Judas did, often don't know the true cost or value of anything.

3:30 A.M.—Vigils

6:30 A.M.—Lauds

9:15 A.M.—Tierce

11:45 A.M.—Sext

1:45 P.M.—None

5:30 P.M.—Vespers

7:30 P.M.—Compline

I have a deep affection for Chicago, although I don't know the city well. In the 1930s, when they were music majors at Northwestern, my parents courted along Michigan Avenue, at the Art Institute, Symphony Hall, the old Opera House. My own memories of the city come from the 1950s, when my father directed the band at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center in nearby Waukegan. For a time during the mid-fifties he hosted a variety show on WGN-TV called “Your Navy Show,” which featured winners of regional Navy talent contests who sang, danced, did magic tricks, and unicycle stunts. Television was relatively new—my family had obtained its first set just a few years before—and it was cool to have a dad on TV. Best of all, I was sometimes allowed to accompany him to the studio in the Loop. Once, when I was nine years old, I sang a duet with another girl on the program, a piece of inspirational fluff entitled “Let the Sun Shine In.”

The programs were done live, and I don't recall much about our performance, except that the producer had sternly warned us not to wipe our brows or scratch our noses under the hot lights. I do have memories of our rehearsals, of being in awe of the studio itself, the stage with its vast contraptions—banks of lights, pulleys, and sandbags, one of which fell, loudly and spectacularly, onto the floor where the stage crew had recently been standing. “They could have been killed instantly,” someone said, and I had a new, terrifying concept to contend with.

I was also in awe of another new phrase, “stage mother,” and the forceful, incarnational way that it had became a part of my vocabulary. My own mother was at home with a new baby, but the mother of my singing partner took up the slack, fussing furiously over my tendency to leave my sashes untied and my sock cuffs unrolled. Mostly she fussed at the producer and my father, making sure they fully appreciated her daughter's talent, and which side “favored her,” another new concept for me. I had never met a mother like her and was appalled at the way her daughter caved in to her bullying. I tried to engage the girl in mild acts of rebellion, but to no avail.

I came to associate Chicago, the Loop especially, with new words and phrases: “child star” was another that came my way. I was fascinated by the Mouseketeers—the idea of a tribe of children appealed to me—and when my father took me into the city for what he promised would be a big surprise, it turned out to be the Mouseketeer Doreen signing copies of a book. I had a special affinity for Doreen—we both had buck teeth and braids—but the experience of meeting her disturbed me. She looked exhausted, her face greasy with makeup, her hands dirty. The signature on the book had been made with a rubber stamp. I mumbled something to her and she mumbled something in return, and then I took my book from the stack and pretended for my dad's sake that all of this had been wonderful. But I must have looked disappointed, because he began to explain to me what being a “child star” could mean.

My father's forays into the entertainment world supplied other startling words and concepts: “He'd sell his own mother down the river” was a comment he made about one star who'd been a guest on the television show, allowing me to ponder iniquity at a whole new level. My favorite of the new phrases was “killing time,” which is what my father said we could do every time we missed the train back to Waukegan. The violence of the phrase puzzled me, but not for long, as “killing time” turned out to mean that we went to movies, concerts, the Art Institute, the Field Museum, Kroch & Brentano's bookstore, and the Marshall Fields department store, where one year my mother trusted us to pick out a new winter coat for me. We lunched in restaurants that seemed elegant to me, but were probably not.

I especially loved the sense that I had crossed over into the adult world. One of the places I felt this most keenly was the shop where my father took his cello for repairs; on a second story, its Old-World smell of resin and wood contrasted sharply, and most pleasantly, with the busy streets below. Time seemed to move more slowly there, and I always hated to leave.

One year, when I was six or seven, my father took my brother and me to the Loop for Christmas shopping. We'd saved our allowance money to buy presents, but on reflection, my dad must have subsidized those gifts for our mother, little sisters, cousins, and best friends. It was a bitterly cold day, and when we passed by a Salvation Army band my father, who was wearing his Navy great-coat, stopped and offered to relieve the trumpeter for a few songs. A Methodist pastor's son, he knew all the hymns, and the Salvation Army coats looked so much like his own, he figured that no one would notice a Navy officer sitting—in this case, standing—in.

The bell-ringer asked if I'd like to ring the bell, which I did with great enthusiasm, beaming up at everyone who put in coins. On the rare occasions when someone put in folding money, I'd exclaim, “Wow—a whole dollar!” A few fives went into the bucket as well, and my boundless joy—buck teeth, pigtails, and all—made the passersby smile. My prepubescent brother, embarrassed by this display, hid in a store across the street.

I hadn't been to Chicago for many years when I received an invitation to give a reading in the Lenten lecture series at Fourth Presbyterian, a lively church in the heart of the Loop. The church had reserved a room for me in a hotel nearby, and when I arrived there, one night in early March, I was rattled from an hour spent in a cramped and noisy commuter plane and anxious to settle in, as the next day would be busy. When the bellhop opened the windowshades, I was surprised to find that I'd been given a corner room, the walls mostly glass. I had a stunning view of the city. There were the requisite bedside phone, mini-bar, and large television set. But the fax machine on the desk startled me, and I couldn't repress my giggles when the young man pointed out the phone and small television in the bathroom.

I apologized quickly when I saw his guarded look. Bellhops meet some exceedingly odd people in the course of a day; it was 9:30 at night and he had a woman on his hands who was laughing over nothing at all. “I'm sorry,” I said, “but this is all too much. I've just spent the last few days in a Trappist monastery, and it's just too funny.” “A monastery,” he nodded, and asked, “What was it like?” “Well,” I replied, looking around the hotel room, “it was more real, almost the opposite of this. It was a place you felt you could stay for ever.”

He sighed, gazed out the window, and said, “One of my best friends just joined the Capuchins.” Clearly bemused and with wonder in his voice, he added, “My friend, he says it's what he wants to do with his life.” “It must be a hard life,” I replied, “but maybe it's worth doing.”

He nodded, and we both relaxed and stood for a few minutes, looking out at the brilliant skyline, thinking about the hidden worlds into which friends disappear, seeking God in ways more intense than we can imagine. I wondered at the odd ways religion surfaces in America, in such tender, unhurried conversations between strangers.

The hurry-up world was all around us, and all the iniquity that the human race can provide. A comment of Ambrose Bierce came unexpectedly to mind: “You can't stop the wicked from going to Chicago by killing them,” as did the words from Deuteronomy that I'd heard that morning at the monastery: “The word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it.”

I once had the great pleasure of hearing the poet Diane Glancy astound a group of clergy. Mostly Protestant, mostly mainstream Lutherans. She began her poetry reading by saying that she loved Christianity because it was a blood religion. People gasped in shock; I was overjoyed, thinking,
Hit 'em, Diane; hit 'em where they live.
One man later told me that Diane's language had led him to believe she was some kind of fundamentalist, an impression that was rudely shattered when she read a marvelous poem about angels speaking to her through the carburetor of an old car as she drove down a rural highway at night. Diane told the clergy that she appreciated the relation of the Christian religion to words. “The creation came into being when God spoke,” she said, reminding us of Paul's belief that “faith comes through hearing.” Diane saw this regard for words as connected not only to writing but to living. “You build a world in what you say,” she said. “Words—as I speak or write them—make a path on which I walk.”

My experience with Diane and the clergy is one of many that confirms my suspicion that if you're looking for a belief in the power of words to change things, to come alive and make a path for you to walk on, you're better off with poets these days than with Christians. It's ironic, because the scriptures of the Christian canon are full of strange metaphors that create their own reality—the “blood of the Lamb,” the “throne of grace,” the “sword of the Spirit”—and among the names for Jesus himself are “the Word” and “the Way.”

Poets believe in metaphor, and that alone sets them apart from many Christians, particularly people educated to be pastors and church workers. As one pastor of Spencer Memorial—by no means a conservative on theological or social issues—once said in a sermon, many Christians can no longer recognize that the most significant part of the first line of “Onward Christian Soldiers, marching as to war” is the word “as.” (The hymn has been censored out of our new hymnal by the literal-minded, but we sing it anyway.)

The gulf between poets and Christians has long struck me as one of the fine ironies of the late twentieth century, and I've noted with a mix of amusement and distress the way that the war on metaphor reveals itself in the new Presbyterian hymnal. Verses of hymns employing language that suggests that faith might require struggle, particularly anything that uses military metaphors to convey this, have been excised. The awesome sense of struggle and victory (and even exorcism) in “A Mighty Fortress” and “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence” are still in, but I wonder for how long. This metaphoric impoverishment strikes me as ironic, partly because I'm well aware, thanks to a friend who's a Hebrew scholar, that for all of the military metaphors employed in the Old Testament, the command that Israel receives most often is to sing. I also know that the Benedictines have lived peaceably for 1500 years with a Rule that is full of terminology, imagery, and metaphors borrowed from the Roman army.