The Cloister Walk (39 page)

What does it mean to become simple? I think of the abbey of New Mellary in Iowa, the walls of its church long plastered over, until the architectural consultant the monks had hired to help them remodel discovered that underneath the plaster were walls of native stone. The monks themselves did the work of uncovering them, and now the church is a place where one can sit and wait and watch the play of sunlight and shadow, a place made holy by the simple glory of light on stone.

What would I find in my own heart if the noise of the world were silenced? Who would I be? Who will I be, when loss or crisis or the depredations of time take away the trappings of success, of self-importance, even personality itself? Could the trees of my beloved Plains, or the lack of them, help me to know? The first monks read the earth as the work and word of God, a creation that was spoken into being. “Study fish,” advises St. Gregory of Nazianzus. “In the water they fly, and they find the air they need in the water. They would die in our atmosphere, just as we would die in the water. Watch their habits, their way of mating and procreating their kind, their beauty, their permanent homes and their wanderings.” Look, Gregory says, “at the bees and the spiders. Where do their love of work and their ingenuity come from? Can you explain it and arrive at an understanding of the wisdom they point to?”

The wisdom of the few, struggling trees on the Plains, and the vast spaces around them, are a continual reminder that my life is cluttered by comparison. At home, an abundance of books and papers overlays the heavy furniture I inherited from my grandparents. A perfectly simple room, with one perfect object to meditate on, remains a dream until I step outside, onto the Plains. A tree. A butte. The sunrise. It always makes me wonder: What is enough? Are there enough trees here? As always, it seems that the more I can distinguish between my true needs and my wants, the more I am shocked to realize how little
is
enough.

Late one summer night, a front moves in and I awaken. A fierce wind stirs the trees. It's been hot for so long, I go outdoors to luxuriate in the newly cooled air. A friend from far away is sleeping in my studio, and it is good to have him as a guest, good to be a host, to be settled in at home again after our time at St. John's. I want to say the prayers that will protect our friend, give him needed rest. I want my husband's sleep to help him heal from the pain of recent surgery.

The trees that fan me are the fruit of others' labor, planted by an earlier generation of Plains dwellers who longed for trees to shelter them. The land resisted, but let them have these few. I am startled by something flashing through the trees. It is the Pleiades, all seven of them plainly visible to the naked eye. This is another's work, and a mystery. And it is enough.

It is, of course, a tangled history. It was my experience of monks in the present day that first led me to suspect that the old stereotype of the woman-hating holy man was only part of the story. I so rarely met monks who despised women, or even seemed uncomfortable around them, that I began to wonder, and to read. I soon found that even in the unlikeliest sources, such as a book about ancient Syrian monasticism, which expressed itself in the most extreme forms of asceticism, there was much evidence that relationships between monks and women were often surprisingly open and free. Theodoret of Cyrrhus's
A History of the Monks of Syria
is not a book for the faint of heart. It reflects a time, to paraphrase an old Montana joke, when monks were monks and Arians were scared. The death of the heretic Arius, as depicted in this book, “his inwards dissolved and ejected with his excrement,” is one of the most disgusting things I have ever read.

But in the midst of this praise of hermits “hoary in hair and hoarier still in thought,” there is also a remarkable sweetness. Theodoret himself came to know the monks through his mother. She had gone to the cave of a monk named Macedonius to seek his prayers when she was trying to conceive a child. And when she was in danger of miscarriage, she sent for him to come and lay his hands on her belly and pray over her. Theodoret later recalls the old monk exhorting him “to live a life worthy of this toil.”

When Theodoret was a boy, he and his mother went to visit several of the monks on a regular basis, which was possible to do because Syrian monks lived closer to cities than their Egyptian counterparts. Theodoret recalls of the monk Peter that “he often sat me on his knee and fed me grapes and bread: my mother [had sent] me to reap his blessings once a week.” His mother had met Peter when, as a young woman afflicted with a disease in one of her eyes, she had sought him out for healing. As Theodoret says, she was then “at the flower of age . . . content with the adornment of youth,” and she came to the monk wearing cosmetics, much gold jewelry, and an elaborate silk dress. The monk admonished her gently; “By supposing your body to require [all this],” he said, “you condemn the Creator for deficiency.” It is a remark that might be interpreted as misogyny, but in the context of the story—the monk pleads that he is only a man with the same nature as hers, and has no special access to God—it is clear that the monk believes the woman to be made in the image of God, good as she is, without unnecessary adornment.

I thought of this story not long ago when a friend who is obsessed with her appearance developed an ugly and uncomfortable rash on her face, and she decided to deal with it by switching the brand of foundation makeup that she wears daily. I longed to say—why not let your skin breathe? I thought of Theodoret's mother and wondered if it was her cosmetics that had irritated and inflamed her eye, a common occurrence, even now. If so, the monk had doubly blessed her, in steering her toward psychological as well as physical health. As Theodoret writes: “In quest of healing for the body, she obtained in addition the health of the soul.”

In many instances sterile women sought out these monks in the belief that their prayers would help them to conceive. And in one case a recluse, who would not receive a woman in the monastic enclosure, nevertheless takes pity on her when she pleads outside his door that her husband will have intercourse only with his concubine and not with her. Blessing a flask of oil that the woman has brought with her, he tells her to anoint herself with it. Theodoret writes: “Following these instructions, the woman transferred to herself her husband's love and induced him to prefer the lawful bed to the unlawful one.”

If monks could only market this skill, no one would ever again accuse them of escapism or irrelevancy. It certainly does not contradict my experience of contemporary monks to find their ancestors so pastorally concerned with the problems of married women. One of the reasons that people still go to monasteries for help with their most intimate relationships is that celibate men and women often make remarkably good counselors in sexual matters, and in matters of the heart.

While few people today would expect a monk to go to the heroic lengths of the unnamed ascetic who appears in a fifth-century compilation of monastic stories, Palladius's
The Lausiac History,
it would not surprise me to find a contemporary monk acting in a similar way. Identified only as “the Compassionate Monk,” he is said to have preferred, like many young monks today, not to be ordained to the priesthood. Rather, he lived a disciplined life of prayer in a city, and at night made the rounds of hospitals, prisons, and streets.

The impression we receive of the monk is appealing: “To some he gave words of good cheer, being himself stout of heart. Some he encouraged, others he reconciled; to some he gave bodily necessities, to others, clothing.” One winter night the monk hears a woman cry out near the entrance to the church where he is making his customary prayers. On finding that the woman is in labor, Palladius relates that he “took the midwife's place, not at all squeamish about the unpleasant aspects of childbirth, for the mercy which worked in him had rendered him insensible to such things.” Considering the blood taboos that many religions establish with regard to the reproductive systems of women, the monk's behavior is a radical act of charity. But in Christian monastic history, it is not that remarkable. Monastic stories often emphasize the primacy of love over legalism.

In Benedictine monasteries, it is often the demands of hospitality as set forth by Benedict—to receive all as Christ—that free monks to express the love of God in surprising ways. One monastery I know for a number of years hosted a regional meeting of the La Leche League. At first, the monks were startled by the sight of so many mothers breast-feeding in their refectory, but as one monk put it in the community newsletter, “It reminded us from whence we came.” And at St. John's one spring, when the daughter of a couple at the Ecumenical Institute was toilet training, the monks found a way to help. The family came to Mass nearly every day, and normally the toddler was quietly attentive. Now, however, one of her parents usually had to take her to the bathroom during Mass. When the monks realized what was going on, and that the parents were using the nearest public bathroom, in the basement of the church, they invited them to use the one in the sacristy instead, which was much closer. It came to seem a regular part of the Mass, little Maria and her mom or dad making a dignified procession behind the monks' choir stalls. When I complimented one of the monks on the abbey's new apostolate of toilet training, he nodded solemnly, and then made a joke of it: “And why not? We do just about everything else here!”

For all of the happy stories—the stripper left stranded when her boyfriend tosses her luggage out of a moving car, who finds that monks are men who will give her food, lodging, sympathy, and access to a phone without expecting anything in return—when dealing with the subject of monks and women it is necessary to confront the specter of fear, the fear women have that monks hate and reject them, the fear monks have that women pose a threat to their celibate way of life. It is painfully obvious that one method of coping with celibacy has been to denounce sexuality itself, and that celibate men have often projected onto women the more demonic elements of their lust. The grief this has caused is incalculable. Imagine, if you will, an eleven-year-old girl publicly humiliated by a priest, who, angrily summoning her out of a parochial school classroom, tells her that she is an “occasion of sin” for a boy she's grown up with, who for years has been one of her best friends. Unfortunately for her, the priest has his eye on the boy as a likely candidate for minor seminary, and he tells her to leave him alone, that she is an evil influence.

Now that responsible voices within the Catholic church are calling for the ability to build and maintain friendships with both men and women as a
requirement
for priesthood studies, that priest himself might be called an “occasion of sin.” As for the girl, now a married woman with teenage children, she has never gotten over being called evil on the verge of her adolescence. The hatred she experienced has turned into a lasting hatred of the Catholic church. Mention Thomas Aquinas in her presence, and she begins to sputter with rage.

Early monastic literature contains many tales of monks projecting their lust onto demons who appear in female form and advice to young monks regarding women in general that, while it may have served a practical purpose, also fueled the fires of misogyny: “do not sleep in a place where there is a woman.” “It is through women that the enemy wars against [the monks].” A much more complex picture emerges, however, where real women are concerned. When women approach monks for healing prayers for themselves and their children, they are not spurned but are blessed and prayed over. When Abba Poeman sees a widow mourning at a tomb, he speaks of her as someone from whom his young disciples might learn a spiritual virtue: “If all the delights of the world were to come, they would not drive out the sorrow from the heart of this woman. Even so the monk would always have compunction within himself.”

Often, when real women appear in the monastic stories, the message for the listener does not concern sexual temptation so much as the commandment to love and not to judge. When Abba Ammonas goes to a cell of a monk of low repute, after hearing that he has a woman there, and that a crowd of monks is on the way to chase them out, he sees the monk hiding the woman in a large cask. When the crowd arrives they find Ammonas seated on the cask, demanding that they search the cell. His anger is reserved for the monks who would dare to judge another: “What is this? May God have mercy on you!” To the monk he says only, “Be on guard, brother.”

After a woman accepts a dare that she tempt a renowned hermit in exchange for money, she appears at his door one night claiming to be lost in the desert. The monk allows her in out of pity, but when his lust is aroused he lights a fire, saying, “The ways of the enemy are darkness, whereas the Son of God is light.” The monk spends the night standing at the fire, burning his fingers as a way to overcome his desire, and the woman watches, petrified with fear. In the morning, her friends come to find her, and the monk tells them that she is inside his cell, asleep. Instead, they find her dead. The monk says, “It is written, ‘Do not render evil for evil,' ” and he prays over her until she is restored to life. We are told that she goes away “to live wisely the rest of her life.” Who wouldn't after a night like that?