The Cloister Walk (22 page)

One difficulty that people seeking to modernize hymnals and the language of worship inevitably run into is that contemporaries are never the best judges of what works and what doesn't. This is something all poets know; that language is a living thing, beyond our control, and it simply takes time for the trendy to reveal itself, to become so obviously dated that it falls by the way, and for the truly innovative to take hold. I had great fun one afternoon going through the 1952 Presbyterian hymnal, looking for what would have seemed its most daringly modern hymns when it appeared. My favorite was “Remember All the People” by Percy Dearmer, a hymn I've never even heard; apparently it faded fast. In promoting Christian mission among the peoples of the world, Dearmer gives us “the endless plains / where children wade through rice fields / And watch the camel trains,” and also, most memorably, those who “work in sultry forests, where apes swing to and fro.” At least these images are vivid enough to have brightened up some youngster's Sunday morning; I can't say the same for a cutesy benediction I once found—“Go in peace, and not in pieces”—that I believe is from the 1970s, or the drearily abstract version of the Lord's Prayer that liturgical scholar Gail Ramshaw has dredged up from the 1960s, “Our Father, who is our deepest reality.” God is merciful, and most of us can now grasp how vapid these prayers are.

Metaphor is valuable to us precisely because it is not vapid, not a blank word such as “reality” that has no grounding in the five senses. Metaphor draws on images from the natural world, from our senses, and from the world of human social structures, and yokes them to psychological and spiritual realities in such a way that we're often left gasping; we have no way to fully explain a metaphor's power, it simply
is.
What I find offensive about some new Bible translations is the way in which they veer toward abstraction and away from metaphor. The new
Inclusive Language New Testament and Psalms
published by Oxford is an egregious example. The translation committee omitted metaphors of darkness as being too close to “darkies,” and therefore racist. Thus John 1:5 is rendered, dully, as “The light shines in the deepest night, and the night did not overcome it.” The question this new literalism raises for me is what
time
of night? 1 A.M., or 3? The fact that the translators imagine “night” to be an adequate substitute for “darkness” only proves that they have a seriously impoverished understanding of metaphor and the nature of language.

To abolish the metaphor of the treachery of darkness is to attempt to live in our heads, and not in the natural world. Darkness is a pain; it causes us to trip and stumble over objects that would be visible to us in the light. It is nature itself that these scholars would deny, and the metaphors that human beings, over thousands of years, have pulled out of the natural world in order to describe their religious experience. To a poet, such an “inclusive” translation feels very much like exclusion.

A friend who is a Cistercian monk once said in a letter that he had taken a book of contemporary poems with him on a hermitage retreat because of “poetry's ability to draw together sacred and secular, back to the oneness of it all that we Westerners split. This touches me where I live. Monks should not see divisions.” This monk does value abstract reasoning when it's appropriate and recognizes the human need to make distinctions. But when seeking to be at home in himself and with God in solitude and silence, he knows that metaphors, which insist on connecting disparate elements in ways that the reasoning mind resists, will be of more use than any treatise. His remarks encouraged me but also reinforced my sense of both poetry and monasticism as marginal enterprises, existing on the fringes of the mainstream culture, which educates us to think of metaphor as a lie. I sometimes get in trouble when I refer to the Incarnation as the ultimate metaphor, daring to yoke the human and the divine. To a literalist, I have just said that the Incarnation isn't “real.” As a poet, I think I've said that it is reality at its most alive; it
is
the new creation.

In a way, I imagined Mechtild before I learned of her existence. As I began reading feminist theology in the 1980s, I was haunted by the idea that women in the church's past might have been as critical and outspoken as those in the present, and conjured up a fierce medieval nun who had walked a fine line between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. When I began to read Mechtild, with her vision of bishops in the lowest circles of hell, her description of the corrupt clergy of her day as “goats [reeking] of impurity regarding Eternal Truth,” I knew I had found the woman of my dreams.

It was a Benedictine sister who first turned me loose with Mechtild, and I'll always be grateful to her for introducing me to a lively, observant, and witty poet whose work I might never have encountered. Mechtild's praise of a soul “[that] has cast from her the apes of wordliness” is typical. My husband was a bartender for years, and I can assure you, the “apes of worldliness” is right on. I found Mechtild's imagery to be extraordinarily sensuous and evocative, as when she describes herself as “a dusty acre” in need of “the fruitful rain of [Christ's] humanity, and the gentle dew of the Holy Spirit.” Another passage that endeared Mechtild to me is her description of herself as a mystic: “Of the heavenly things God has shown me, I can speak but a little word, no more than a honeybee can carry away on its foot from an overflowing jar.”

But Mechtild, like many poets, both resists and transcends categories. More orthodox than not, she nevertheless was frequently put on the defensive by church officials, no doubt unamused by Mechtild's criticism of the deadwood clergy of her day: “Stupidity is sufficient unto itself,” she wrote. “Wisdom can never learn enough.”

When a theologian criticized one of Mechtild's early images of the Trinity (“I must to God—my Father through nature, my Brother through humanity, my Bridegroom through love”) by protesting that all God does in us is through grace and not nature, she responded boldly, appropriating language that Jesus himself used when preaching to his disciples. “Thou art right and I, too, am right,” she wrote. “Listen to a parable. However good a man's eyes may be, he cannot see over a mile away; however sharp his senses, he cannot grasp supernatural things, except through faith.” She continues with a Pauline image of the Godhead “[pouring] His own Divine nature into [the soul],” and concludes humbly: “What we know is as nothing, if we do not love God properly in all things.”

Mechtild had left the comforts of an upper-class home when she was in her twenties, joining a movement of women nicknamed Beguines who desired a religious life, but not in cloistered, contemplative communities. Living and praying in common, they worked among the poor and the sick in the burgeoning medieval cities. This was a dangerous life at a time when the church was becoming increasingly clerical, and the women were frequently attacked as heretics.

But Mechtild held on for nearly fifty years, sometimes protected by the Dominican friars who had become her confessors and friends. The story of the Benedictine women of Helfta, taking the aged, half-blind, and embattled Mechtild into their monastery, surely is one of the great stories of hospitality in monastic history. And when I began to study Mechtild's central eucharistic vision, “Of a poor maid and the Mass of John the Baptist,” I began to see hospitality as its theme. The “poor maid” is Mechtild, and the image is not simply a literary device. In the vision, as often happened in her life, she has been denied communion by church authorities, and asks God, “Must I be without Mass this day?” Because of her desire, God “[brings] her wondrously into a great church” in which she sees several saints, among them John the Baptist, who is about to sing the Mass. Mechtild is dressed in rags and does not think she should remain. But the Blessed Virgin herself invites her into the choir, “to stand in front of St. Catherine,” and Mechtild receives communion after all.

As church officials were becoming increasingly sensitive to any suggestion of anti-clericalism, Mechtild was attacked by a literal-minded churchman for suggesting that a “layman” such as John the Baptist could say Mass. Mechtild responded, typically, by referring to her critic as “My Pharisee” and raging: “No Pope or Bishop could speak the Word of God as John the Baptist spoke it, save in our supernatural Christian faith which cannot be grasped by the senses. Was he then a layman? Instruct me, ye blind!”

I first read Mechtild's vision on a Palm Sunday, at the abbey where I'm an oblate. By the world's standards, this was a most inappropriate place for me to be: as a woman, married, a Protestant, a doubter. It was my first experience of Palm Sunday in a monastery, and despite the hospitality of the monks, I was acutely aware of my otherness. Then the abbey's liturgy director asked me to participate in their reading of the gospel for that day, a group reading, in which the abbot took the part of Christ, another monk was the narrator, and so on. I had the part of the young servant woman who questions Peter following Jesus' arrest. By identifying him as a follower of Jesus, she precipitates Peter's denial of Christ.

The monks included me and a handful of other guests in the community's procession into church. In choir I sat in front of the abbey's farm manager, not St. Catherine, but small matter. Divine hospitality was at work, and it has the power to change everything. After that Mass, I found that my soul, to quote Mechtild, was “startled, but inwardly rejoicing.” Later that day, when I got around to reading some articles about Mechtild, one scholar charitably pointed out that “theology was not her strong point.” Thank God for small mercies, I thought.

Mechtild of Hackeborn, one of Mechtild of Magdeburg's sisters in the monastery at Helfta, once described the Order of St. Benedict as “standing in the middle of the church, holding it up like a column on which the whole house rests.” While the sense of monasticism as the center of the church may be lost on many people today, I think it still holds true, and hospitality is at the center of it all. In a world in which we are so easily labeled and polarized by our differences: man/woman, Protestant/Catholic, gay/straight, feminist/chauvinist, monastic hospitality is a model of the kind of openness that we need if we are going to see and hear each other at all.

The radical, incarnational nature of that hospitality hasn't diminished at all since Mechtild's time, or St. Benedict's. It still has the power to effect conversion and to work miracles. In the nearly ten years that I have been a Benedictine oblate, I have become convinced that hospitality is at the center of the Christian faith—the bread of the Eucharist is called the “host,” after all, and for good reason. But church hierarchies, in Mechtild's time as in our own, become inhospitable whenever they forget that they are not the center.

Mechtild's images of hospitality became more intimate as she aged. It does not surprise me that she grew impatient with the infirmities of old age, finding them “cold and without grace.” But God comforts her with words both homey and profound: “Your childhood was a companion of the Holy Spirit; your youth was a bride of humanity; in your old age you are a humble housewife of the Godhead.” In her last writings Mechtild reveals that the hospitality of the nuns of Helfta had helped her to transform what could be regret into thankfulness: “Lord!” she writes, “I thank Thee that since Thou hast taken from me the power of my hands . . . and the power of my heart, Thou now servest me with the hands and hearts of others.” Mechtild entitled this section “How God Serves Humankind,” and there is no better definition of hospitality than that.

I once gave an icon of Mary of Egypt to a woman who counsels teenaged prostitutes. They range in age from ten—a girl who'd developed early, and whose stepfather and brothers had put her on the streets—to a world-weary eighteen. Many are runaways, most often from abusive homes, most have grown accustomed to being treated like trash. My friend's job is to convince them that they aren't trash. She works hard—sometimes enduring threats from pimps—to help these girls see that they are good for something besides being bought and sold.