The Cloister Walk (3 page)

I recall that on this day two years ago, I was in a hermitage, my marriage strained nearly to the breaking point. I felt as hard and dry as the bristly grasses of early fall, as exhausted as the drought-stricken trees around me. Then Gregory reminded me of the greatness of souls, how their true strength can emerge in the worst of times, when the known world is collapsing. “My mind divided,” he said of himself, “torn to pieces by so many problems.”

At vespers that night we had heard from Jeremiah: “I have loved you with an age-old love . . . Again I will build you, and you shall be built,” words that renewed in me the stirrings of memory and desire. As I walked back to the hermitage in the dusk, I was suddenly glad, and not despairing, that in just a few days I'd be back with my husband, to take up life in the ruins.

I did not know that it would lead us here, to this crisp morning, my husband asleep in the apartment on the river, myself hurrying up the hill to morning prayer. That I would go to my study after prayers and begin to write poems again for the first time in three years.

7 A.M.—Morning Prayer

Noon—Noon Prayer

5 P.M.—Eucharist

7 P.M.—Vespers

 

11:30 A.M.—Saturday Eucharist

10:30 A.M.—Sunday Eucharist

Few books have so strongly influenced Western history as The Rule of St. Benedict. Written in the sixth century, a time as violent and troubled as our own, by a man determined to find a life of peace and stability for himself and others, it is a brief (ninety-six pages in a recent English translation), practical, and thoughtful work on how human beings can best live in community. Its style is so succinct that it is sometimes taught in law schools as an example of how to legislate simply and well. But the true power of the book, as with the Gospel it is based on, lies in its power to change lives.

I met the Rule by happy accident, when I found myself staying in a small Benedictine convent during a North Dakota Council on the Arts residency at a Catholic school. The women were pleasant enough, and I soon learned that the convent was indeed a heavenly place to return to after a day with lively schoolchildren. I felt it necessary to tell the sisters, however, that I wasn't much of a churchgoer, had a completely Protestant background, and knew next to nothing about them. I said they'd have to tell me if I did anything wrong. In many ways my response was typical of a modern person with little experience of church as an adult; I had the nagging fear that people as religious as these women would find me wanting, and be judgmental.

The sisters listened politely and then one of them said, with a wit I'm just learning to fathom, “Would you like to read our Rule? Then you'll know if you've done something wrong.” “Sure,” I said, always a sucker for a good book. She found me a copy, along with a book on Benedictine spirituality that the women were studying. As I went upstairs to begin reading, several of the sisters settled down to watch television, and I appreciated the irony. I began to think that my stay with them would work out fine.

What happened to me then has no doubt happened to many unsuspecting souls in the fifteen-hundred-plus years that Benedictines have existed. Quite simply, the Rule spoke to me. Like so many, I am put off by religious language as it's manipulated by television evangelists, used to preach to the converted, the “saved.” Benedict's language and imagery come from the Bible, but he was someone who read the psalms every day—as Benedictines still do—and something of the psalms' emotional honesty, their grounding in the physical, rubbed off on him. Even when the psalms are at their most ecstatic, they convey holiness not with abstraction but with images from the world we know: rivers clap their hands, hills dance like yearling sheep. The Bible, in Benedict's hands, had a concreteness and vigor that I hadn't experienced since hearing Bible stories read to me as a child.

Benedict's Prologue has an appealing, familial tone, and indeed Benedictine communities function as families. Contrary to what one might expect, he writes: “We hope to set down nothing harsh, nothing burdensome.” (This, I later learned, is a far cry from earlier monastic rules, some of which are harshly, even paranoiacally, punitive.) Benedict is refreshingly realistic in his understanding and acceptance of people as they are. “The souls of all concerned,” he reminds us, “may prompt us to a little strictness in order to amend faults and safeguard love.”

The Rule surprises people who expect the ether that often wafts through books on spiritual themes, the kind of holy talk that can make me feel like a lower life form. Benedict knows that practicalities—the order and times for psalms to be read, care of tools, the amount and type of food and drink and clothing—are also spiritual concerns. Many communal ventures begun with high hopes have foundered over the question of who takes out the garbage. Over and over, the Rule calls us to be more mindful of the little things, even as it reminds us of the big picture, allowing us a glimpse of who we can be when we remember to love. Benedict insists that this remembering is hard work needing daily attention and care. He writes for grown-ups, not people with their heads in the clouds. “No one shall be excused from kitchen duty,” Benedict says, making exceptions only for the sick or those people engaged in the urgent business of the monastery. Today, that means that the Benedictine scholar with the Ph.D. scrubs pots and pans alongside a confrere who has an eighth-grade education, the dignified abbot or prioress dishes out food and wipes refectory tables after the meal.

I first encountered the Rule in the mid-1980s, when my husband and I were barely hanging on as freelance writers in an isolated, rural area. We were not alone in our economic uncertainty; everyone in the region was severely affected by what was termed “the farm crisis.” The distress was not merely economic, but social and emotional as well, and the church I had recently, and reluctantly, joined was, like other local institutions, in considerable turmoil. Among its members were bankers as well as farmers going through bankruptcy, and tensions ran high. It surprised me to find that a sixth-century document spoke so clearly to our situation, offering a realistic look at human weakness, as well as sensible and humane advice for us, if we truly wished to live in peace with one another.

I was also surprised, as I hadn't read the Bible in years, at how much of Benedict's advice came straight from scripture. In his prologue, he takes that enticing question of Psalm 34, “Which of you desires life, and covets many days to enjoy good?” and states that God has already given us the answer in the very next verses of the psalm: “Keep your tongue from evil, your lips from speaking deceit. Depart from evil, and do good; seek peace, and pursue it” (Ps 34:12-14). It was good to be reminded, as I thought of the conflicts in my town and church and family, that peace is not an easy thing, but something that must be struggled for.

In a marriage, in a small town, in a monastery, it is all too easy to let things slide, to allow tensions to build until the only way they can be relieved is in an explosion that does more harm than good. Benedict's voice remains calm—persevere, bear one another's burdens, be patient with one another's infirmities of body or behavior. And when the “thorns of contention” arise in daily life, daily forgive, and be willing to accept forgiveness. Remember that you are not the center of the universe but, to use Benedict's words, “keep death daily before your eyes.”

“What I do not see I do not know,” Hildegard wrote to a monk late in her life. “I see, hear, and know simultaneously, and learn what I know as if in a moment. But what I do not see I do not know, for I am not learned.” At our first seminar I tell my colleagues at the Ecumenical Institute, mostly college professors on sabbatical, that this seems to me a poetic way of knowing, that poets are indeed at the mercy of what they see.

In a way, I tell them, it might also describe me, a poet who is “not learned.” I have no advanced degrees and have never worked in academia. When my first book was published in 1971, I turned down a job in a college English department, because I couldn't see myself as a teacher. I didn't know it at the time, but this was a vocational decision; I became a freelance writer instead. Some eyebrows go up. I explain that my “research” at the Institute will be primarily experiential, and will be centered on attending the daily Liturgy of the Hours at the monastery. The eyebrows stay up.

I talk about the way Hildegard captures in this letter the path of knowledge that I'm most familiar with, in which thoughts and images constellate, converging, sometimes violently, in the subconscious. The sounds of words and the silence of images are more important at this stage than sense or “meaning.” In composing a poem, one often seems to move directly from ignorance to revelation, instantly from a muddled sense of things to a clear picture, with only the vaguest sense of how it happened. Experience is the ground of this way of knowing. But if visionaries and poets are at the mercy of what they see, they are also called to articulate it. And this requires them to employ another form of knowledge, the linear thought that enables them to communicate their experience to others. As with most human endeavors, the key to employing these complementary elements of human intelligence is balance.

Cardinal Newman, in referring to the Benedictines as the most poetic of religious orders, has helped me to understand one aspect of their attraction for me. I've often sensed that the rhythms of monastic life, which now, as in Hildegard's time, are set to a liturgical pace, foster a way of knowing that values image over idea, the synthetic over the analytical, the instantaneous over the sequential, the intuitive and associative over the formal and prescribed. If, as Jean Leclercq has put it, monastic culture is “more literary than speculative,” it also reflects what I mean by a poetic way of knowing.

A line from Hildegard's sequence for the virgin martyr Ursula: “The girl has no idea what she means,” has great resonance for me. Although it is the crowd that speaks, mocking the young woman as she is put to death—as legend has it, for being a Christian and for refusing to become the concubine of Attila the Hun—I see the mockery transformed, in Hildegard's hands, into a statement of defiance. Poets understand that they do not know what they mean, and that this is a source of their strength. I wonder, if in our modern, literal-minded age, being able to declare “what I do not see I do not know” is a mark, even a cornerstone, of a poet's faith. I do not mean that we're pragmatists, like Thomas, who asked to see and touch Christ's wounds, but rather that writing teaches us to recognize when we have reached the limits of our language, and our knowing, and are dependent on our senses to “know” for us.

The discipline of poetry teaches poets, at least, that they often have to say things they can't pretend to understand. In contending with words, poets come to know their power, much the way monastics do in prayer and
lectio.
We experience words as steeped in mystery, forces beyond our intellectual grasp. In the late twentieth century, when speculative knowledge and the technologies it has spawned reign supreme, poets remain dependent on a different form of knowledge, perhaps akin to what Hildegard termed seeing, hearing, and knowing simultaneously. I wonder if what made Hildegard very much a twelfth-century person is part of what makes poets in the twentieth century seem both anachronistic and necessary.

I am not well received. Something is off, a tension I can't name. I won't know for weeks how disastrous it will be.