The Cloister Walk (40 page)

I find it encouraging that there is a genre of monastic story that Columba Stewart discovered when translating fourth-century Egyptian material for his book
The World of the Desert Fathers,
stories which, as he puts it, “show how a tempted monk may come to recognize his confusion and learn that self-knowledge can free him from his obsessions.” These stories depict women who “strengthened, rather than threatened, monastic vocations,” and I value them for accurately portraying the world we live in, in which, as Stewart puts it, “relations between the sexes can be creative and maturing, even for monks, rather than inevitably dangerous.”

My favorite of these tales is humbling, as is much true comedy. It puts lust in its place better than any story I know. A beautiful widow suddenly realizes that her husband's best friend has fallen in love with her.

We are told that the narrator is Simeon himself, who has long been a monk and remembers with great tenderness the conversation between himself and the widow, who had told him that “with the protection of Christ, I hope to remain as I am, a widow.” He had replied, “Since the Lord has seen fit to oversee my salvation by means of your wisdom, what do you advise me to do?” and she suggested that he become a monk, and become “pleasing to God.”

All tribes have their origin stories; the Benedictines tell of emerging from a cave near Subiaco, Italy, where Benedict had lived as a hermit after leaving the city of Rome. Even after he had died, the story goes, the cave retained enough of Benedict's peace of soul to have a healing effect on those who came there. One of my favorite stories about St. Benedict in Gregory the Great's
Dialogues
concerns a woman who had lost her reason. She was wandering, Gregory tells us, “day and night over mountains, valleys, forests, and plains. She rested only where exhaustion had forced her to stop. One day as she wandered aimlessly, she came to the cave of the blessed Benedict and, without knowing what she was doing, entered and stayed there. In the morning when she left, her reason was as sound as if she had never been mad. And in addition, for the rest of her life, she kept the sanity which had been restored to her.”

I must confess that I like this story of a cave far better than Plato's; it's been of much more use to me. I, too, have a mind that often wanders, that doesn't know where it is. And I have found that monasteries have a way of bringing me back to myself. I am back at St. John's for a week, attending the Monastic Institute and also the Feast of St. Benedict on July 11. I've been asked to join some other women in the schola for the feast-day Mass and am overjoyed to be singing again in a choir. (Back at home, the church choir takes the summer off.)

The talk at the Institute has been strikingly honest. One sister presented a paper in which she said that when she considered her monastic life, the feelings that came were “disillusionment, discomfort, low-grade anxiety, depression, uncertainty, loss, sadness, anger, and above all,” she added, “dissonance; a keenly felt gap between the desire and the reality.” She said that she wondered if too much talk in recent years of setting community goals, too many high-minded sentences about maintaining a balance between prayer, work, and recreation, had effectively allowed people to deny how far out of balance things have slipped. “We're always talking about balance and integration,” she said, “a sign that we probably don't have it.” Workaholism, she felt, was to blame. “The truth is,” she said, “my best energy goes into work, and not into prayer, and it's been that way for years.” She said she'd been impressed that parents in recent years had often proved resourceful about working part-time or inventing “flex-time” jobs in order to spend more time with their children. Why, she asked, shouldn't monastic people be willing to do the same to allow more time for prayer, solitude, reflection?

She'd touched on a sensitive issue, and discussion was remarkably frank and lively. “The ideal that we so often hear,” one sister said, “is that monastic people are not defined by what they do, but I don't see us living up to that. The job, the profession, the career is the thing, especially for those of us who teach.” A monk said that a running joke in his community is that the Benedictines should change their motto from “ora et labora” (pray and work) to “ora et labora et labora et labora.” Another monk spoke up and said that he'd often thought that work had a tendency to destroy community life. “If we find our individual fulfillment in work,” he said, “does that mean that common living has become merely a common residence, a common dining hall, a matter of convenience? What I'd hope for,” he added, “is that we could find a common bond, common support for our diversity of work.”

Comments were made about the danger of allowing economic necessity to destroy the rhythms of community life, so that at any one prayer service or meal, a number of people are missing because of work; and about the need to put principles first and let work fit into them, rather than the other way around. One sister in a presentation on the liturgy spoke eloquently about workaholism being a symptom of the desire to control and to fabricate our lives. She said, “I find that Benedictine liturgy counters that desire very well. It speaks poetry every day, and it is not productive.

“Our way of working should be different from the world's,” she said, “and we can start by nurturing a biblical imagination. If you look at Genesis,” she added, “when God works, God creates.” She also discussed the element of play: “Wisdom,” she said, “is created at the beginning of God's work, and is described in Proverbs as a ‘master worker,' but also as God's daily delight. I interpret that to mean,” she said, “that play is an essential part of work.”

I thought about how listening to Genesis once in a monastery choir, I'd suddenly heard Adam's naming the animals as a form of play. God does not command Adam to name the animals; God brings them to Adam “to see what he will call them.” This implies that God wants to be surprised and wants Adam to play along in the continual surprise of creation. While I don't know Hebrew, I suspect from what I've read about the language of the creation story that in its original tongue this scene is full of verbal play, little jokes that are intended to convey God's delight in every aspect of the created world.

The sister compared the Liturgy of the Hours to housework, as repetitive work that is never done, but work that Benedictines keep coming back to because it forms the individual person and also maintains the fabric of the community. “But to do this,” she said, “we keep interrupting our own work.” Benedict termed the monastery's communal prayer “the Work of God” and said that nothing is to be preferred to it. The example he gives in his Rule is of a monk or nun hearing the bell ring for the Divine Office and immediately setting their own concerns aside. “We come back to the hours of the liturgy,” the sister said, “to remind ourselves of how God is working.” She added that “like Wisdom itself, we are daily with God, playing with God in the world,” and said she hoped that this would keep Benedictines from being overly oriented toward productivity and efficiency.

As usual in gatherings such as this, the response to the rather exalted language of the sister's remarks was to quickly turn discussion back toward the practical. “If we want to turn from our productivity model,” someone said, “then we should stop calling what we do morning and evening prayer, which are functional terms. Their right names are lauds, which means praising, and vigils, which means waiting.” A monk said, “As much as we know that scripture has the power to transform us, even monastic people have a hard time just sitting and being with scripture.” And on and on it went.

The heady talk has been stimulating, too much so. It is good to be sitting in silence, in the great abbey church, waiting for the feast-day Mass to begin. I seat myself in the choir with the other women as the monks gather in the baptistry. Soon they will sing an ancient chant, claiming their heritage as Benedictines. Soon they will emerge from the cave and process down the aisle, two by two, in a cloud of incense. We will celebrate, which is something Benedictines do exceedingly well. And I will be strengthened by another joyful liturgy, something to remember when my mind wanders or sinks in the slough of despond. Something to come back to.

Morning prayer, which can feel like sleepwalking, has an expectant air this morning. The faces around the choir seem alert, less drowsy than usual. Two black habits lie neatly folded by the abbot's throne. After the opening hymn the abbot addresses the community: “My brothers, today we welcome Joseph and John into our community to begin the year of novitiate. Let us fervently pray that during this year of testing they may come to know more fully the God for whom we are all seeking.”

We recite the psalmody as usual: two psalms, a canticle, a sung psalm. The scripture text that follows, from the Book of Sirach, is read by the abbey's director of formation, a lanky man with an affable air. “My son, from your youth choose instruction, and till your hair is white you will keep finding wisdom.” The image takes on a special poignancy in this context; although there are a sizable number of young monks here, men in their twenties, thirties and forties, most of the community has gone bald or gray.

This is a community of Benedictine men, one of over a hundred monastic houses in the United States—single-sex, or more rarely, coed, Protestant or Roman Catholic—who follow a way of life set down by St. Benedict more than fifteen hundred years ago. An anachronism to some, an object of romantic illusion to others, these people seem to me admirable bearers of tradition into the contemporary world, incorporating in their lives the values of stability, silence, and humility that modern society so desperately needs and yet seeks so relentlessly to avoid. Today this monastery celebrates the addition of two young men to its numbers. They have been living with the monks for three months as candidates, and as the community has recently voted to accept them for a year-long novitiate, we're now engaged in a rite for the reception of novices, or what is sometimes called a clothing ceremony.

The reading from Sirach continues, warning that wisdom requires patience, discipline, and strength in the face of testing. But there's plenty of romance as well; romance, and a promise of good things to come: “Search out and seek, and wisdom will become known to you; and when you get hold of her, do not let her go. For in the end you will find the rest she gives, and she will be changed into joy for you.” The reading concludes with an exalted image of clothing, of wisdom as clothing that no longer binds but frees and transforms us. “Her yoke is a golden ornament, and her bonds are a cord of blue. You will wear her like a glorious robe, you will put her on like a crown of gladness.”