The Cloister Walk (35 page)

The same might be said about a commitment to monogamy. But what distinguished all the Benedictine women that I spoke with from most of the married people I know is how consistently they spoke of celibacy as being rooted in the religious, as “having gospel value,” or of “being a sign of the kingdom.” It may be that the churches, both Protestant and Catholic, do not adequately convey to married people the sacredness of a lifelong commitment to another person, whereas for sisters the religious nature of their vows is an everyday reality. As one sister said, “One needs a deep prayer life to maintain a celibate life. It is only through prayer that the hard choices get made, over time, only prayer that can give me the self-transcendence that celibacy requires.”

Self-transcendence is required in marriage as well, or in any lifelong commitment to another. But the culture does not encourage self-transcendence; just the opposite. Our cultural myths about love give witness to a comment Sören Kierkegaard once made about the “self-love of erotic love”; too many young people grow up understanding that “true love” means possessing and being possessed. Both are incompatible with celibacy, which seeks to love non-exclusively, non-possessively. This can be a healthy witness against the consumer model of love—the “If I can't have her, nobody will” psychology that spurs so many men to acts of violence. Nearly half of the murders in North Dakota, for example, are “domestic” in origin. Judging from the newspaper headlines, it seems that many men, and some women, can't give up the illusion of possessing another person. They can't allow a former boyfriend or ex-wife to be an independent human being.

When mature celibates talk about the value of celibacy, “freedom” is a word they commonly use. Freedom to keep their energies focused on ministry and communal living, freedom to love many people without being unfaithful to any of them. As celibates grow older, they tend to speak in terms of the “generative” qualities of celibacy. “We're not making babies,” one sister says, “but we can make relationships.” One reason so many celibates find satisfaction in working as teachers, spiritual directors, and pastoral ministers may be that it provides ample opportunity to help others grow. “To donate the self as a gift to others; that's the vow of celibacy,” one sister told me.

Sisters are keenly aware that for years church teaching emphasized celibate religious life as the most holy of responses to God, with marriage as a distant second, and they resent that as deeply as anyone. They're often quick to point out similarities between a celibate commitment and fidelity in marriage. “Both are a discipline,” one sister said. “Both can be a form of asceticism.” Still, they also feel the need to define their monastic call in its own terms. “Celibacy is just one of the ways God calls us,” one sister said. “It's another way, but not a better way.”

When one sister described to me what she considered a healthy celibacy, she said, “First of all, it means not focusing on ‘what I gave up,' but on what being freed by what I gave up has allowed me to do in terms of service to the church and other people.” She said that she'd learned the need for balance in her life. “For me, the discipline of celibacy means a commitment to grow, intellectually and in my prayer life, to engage in regular prayer, both privately and with my community, to engage in some form of meaningful ministry, to take care of my body, to seek out solitude at regular intervals”—this, she admitted she often felt too busy to do—“and to take pleasure in beauty.” Many sisters spoke to me of celibacy as something that had encouraged them to be sensitive to the many guises of beauty. “When I can enjoy a sunset, or a music concert, or a work of art, or people of all ages,” one sister said, “then I know that celibacy is working.” Having experienced the pleasure of friendships with many celibate men and women, it did not surprise me that all of the women connected the practice of celibacy with their ability to relate to others. “Celibacy,” one sister said, “has given me a good way to integrate my sexuality with my spirituality; I've come to realize that the goal of both is union with God and with others.” One woman put it very simply. “The fruit of celibacy,” she said, “is hospitality.”

—Octavio Paz

—William Butler Yeats, “ A PRAYER FOR MY DAUGHTER”

I know exactly what I was doing at 10:30 A.M. on Sunday, May 31, 1992, but have no idea where I was. The enormous church of St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, designed by Marcel Breuer, was familiar to me, as I'd gone there nearly every day for the previous nine months to join the monks in their Liturgy of the Hours. On that Sunday morning I learned how little I knew about the place.

I was walking down the center aisle, trying to keep to the slow, deliberate pace the liturgy director had established as we proceeded down the cloister walk into the church. But it was hard, because I was alone now, and had little to gauge myself by. As instructed, I was holding the scriptures, a big book of lectionary readings, out in front of me at a little more than shoulder height. Following me, walking two by two, were nearly two hundred monks in black habits, and bringing up the rear, two acolytes and a priest who would preside at this Mass on the Seventh Sunday of Easter. The congregation of several hundred had risen for the first hymn as I started slowly down the aisle.

An incongruous thought danced through my mind: even Mae West never entered a room followed by this many men. I seemed incongruous, too, someone with a checkered past, who until the last few years hadn't been to church much since high school. Breathing deeply, to get my bearings, I found that I was walking a path with a downward tilt much more steep than I had realized. By contrast, the altar loomed before me, brilliant white, a simple but powerful shape. The magnificent folds of concrete holding up the roof seemed weightless, and the expanse above me limitless, the ceiling lifted clean off by the sound of the pipe organ.

It was the reverse of an experience most adults have had, of returning to a place that had seemed vast in childhood, and finding it pathetically small. This church was a place I thought I knew, a big space I'd tamed by my daily presence there. Now I was discovering that it was wild after all, and could roar like the sea. Walking on the terrazzo floor, I was reminded of a recurring dream, in which I move through the galaxy, stepping delicately (and sometimes leaping) from star to star. This sunlit room now seemed such an expanse, my every step daring an enormous distance.

My mind chugged along: don't stumble on the steps, remember to bow at the altar and put the lectionary on the ambo. Take the first choir stall on the left but don't sit down, because the monks will enter there. They swept past me like small black clouds to take their places with me in the front row, and I found the voice to sing the last verse of the hymn as the liturgy began to flow in all directions around me. The quantum effect.

I did my reading, a text from the Book of Acts about the stoning of Stephen. “I see an opening in the sky,” Stephen said, and I thought, “Amen.” Good liturgy can act like an icon, a window into a world in which our concepts of space, time, and even stone are pleasurably bent out of shape. Good liturgy is a living poem, and ceremony is the key.

Any outsider writing about monastic life runs the risk of romanticizing it. I've simply described what I experienced one Sunday morning at St. John's. I'm assuming, hoping even, that some of the monks were wondering what was for dinner, or thinking dark thoughts about a confrere who had annoyed them at breakfast, or regretting a sharp remark they'd made over the pool table the night before. Good ceremony makes room for all the dimensions of human experience in the hope that, together, we will discover something that transforms us. This is why I suspect that individuals can't create true ceremony for themselves alone. Ceremony requires that we work with others in the humbling give-and-take of communal existence.

Monastic people seek to weave ceremony through every mundane part of life: how one eats, how one dresses, how one treats tools, or enters a church are not left to whim. Ceremony is so large a part of what Benedictines do that it becomes second nature to many of them. The monastic life has this in common with the artistic one: both are attempts to pay close attention to objects, events, and natural phenomena that otherwise would get chewed up in the daily grind. One of the things I like most about monastic people is the respect they show for the holy hours of sunrise and sunset, and in these days when the horrors of sexual warfare fill the news, I find it nothing short of miraculous to be with a group of grown men who will sing at close of day: “Day is done, but love unfailing / dwells ever here.” The fact that Christian monastics, men and women both, have been singing such gentle hymns at dusk for seventeen hundred years makes me realize that ceremony and tradition, things I've been raised to distrust as largely irrelevant, can be food for the soul.

Ceremony forces a person to slow down, and as many of us live at a frenzied pace, encountering monastic prayer, or a traditional monastic meal—eaten in silence while a passage from scripture or a religious book is read aloud—can feel like skidding to a halt. My nine months' immersion in the slow, steady rhythms of monastic life was a kind of gestation. But now that I'm back “in the world,” now that my husband and I have come home from Minnesota, I'm not sure what I'm giving birth to. At times I'm homesick for a place that isn't mine, homesick for two hundred monks and their liturgy. Most people have the sense not to get themselves into such a predicament. What do I do now for ceremony, and community?

My instinct is to keep as much of the monastery in me as possible. Now I honor the coming of dawn with a long walk instead of going to church, but small difference, if I can turn it toward prayer. I keep some Benedictine practices, as best as I can: reading psalms daily, singing hymns, and also doing
lectio,
a meditative reading of scripture. Otherwise I suspect my world would go flat. And sometimes it does: sometimes I'm closed off from both beauty and pain, suffering from what the world calls “depression” but the ancient monks would call listlessness or
acedia.
Drought times, when I have to hunker down and wait for rain, for hope.

I keep in touch with my monastic friends at St. John's, and at other, smaller communities in the Dakotas that I visit frequently. Above all, I try to remember where I am: a small town on the Great Plains that may not be here in fifty years. But even in this hamlet of 1600 souls, considered insignificant by the rest of the world, there is much that people need to tell. I became more reclusive over the last year, but when I'm with people I try to listen to them. Alice, for one. When the Presbyterian church recently held its Sunday service in the park, the minister sharing a flatbed truck with a local country-western band, Alice and I were standing over to the side. A country woman, the wife of a retired rancher in poor health, she was someone I'd missed when I was away. Her only child, a young man of thirty-five, had died unexpectedly the year before. She stood there, swaying to the music, the steel guitar whining through “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” and said, “I haven't danced in three years.” “Well, it's time, then, Alice,” I said. And so we danced.

My garden, even more than most, is an exercise in faith. And in failure. I inherited it when I moved to my grandmother's house but scarcely knew what I had. Her perennial flowers were up and in bud in the wet spring when we moved into the house. I had memories of the garden as a child, of weeding and thinning the leaf lettuce that we would eat sprinkled with vinegar and sugar, of helping my grandmother pick tomatoes and string beans. Visiting her flowers, admiring the day lilies, lily-of-the-valley, painted daisies, columbines, and other flowers whose names I forget, was one of the joys of summer when I was a child.