The Cloister Walk (41 page)

After the reading, the two young men come forward with the formation director into the center of the sanctuary where they stand, backs to the altar and facing the abbot, who asks them, “What is it you seek?” That's a fruitful question for any of us, one that resists an easy answer. The ritual answer is anything but easy: “The mercy of God and fellowship in this community.” The words, like the hope they express, seem to hover in the air around us, climbing the vast upper reaches of the abbey church. It is an amazing thing to hear said aloud, at 7:15 in the morning, in front of well over a hundred people. Tears well up inside me.

In his ritual response, the abbot reminds the candidates that the monastery cannot grant them an easy or quick admittance. “We must first determine whether you truly seek God, and are zealous for the work of God, for obedience and the practice of humility. We must also tell you of all the trials and hardships through which we travel to God. Are you willing so to live in our community?” The young men respond, “I am.” After a brief ritual of acceptance by the monks, the abbot says, “I offer you the habit of our Holy Father Benedict. As you wear it, see in it a reminder of our monastic heritage, a sign of our life together, and a pledge of our hope to be completely clothed in Christ.” The young men kneel to receive their habits, and when they stand again, the formation director assists them in putting them on.

It can be an amusing sight to observe a man working slowly, with nervous fingers, to button, snap, and smooth a floor-length habit, scapular, and cowl over street clothes, right in front of God and everyone. It is also a solemn moment in the liturgy, and in the life of any monastic community. There are men here who first put on this habit more than seventy years ago, as well as those who began to wear it just last year. They have this in common: the hope that they will wear this monastic clothing until the day they die, and even after. They hope to be buried in it, in the cemetery just up the hill.

It was this thought that disrupted my revery, as I recalled an article I'd read the night before, in the
New York Times,
about fashion's current fad for “monastic” clothing. Entitled “Piety on Parade: Fashion Seeks Inspiration,” and accompanied by a photo of a runway model in dark, flowing robes, a pectoral cross slung across her hips, the article was replete with fatuous statements by designers and retailers on the subject of the new “spirituality” of fashion. It's “a calming of the clothes,” designer Donna Karan said, “the antithesis of power dressing.”

The president of Saks Fifth Avenue admitted that the store had received some letters from customers, asking, “What is the significance of the cross?” “It isn't the easiest image for the consumer,” she said, “and I think it's gone a bit overboard.” The designer John Bartlett inadvertently provided amusement in monasteries across the country with his comment, “There's nothing sexier than a monk . . . they're so inaccessible.” No one has yet suggested that fashion mavens consult Hans Küng on skirt lengths, or, for that matter, the significance of the cross.

It's easy to laugh, less easy to admit that the article not only annoys me but makes me sad. The beauty of this clothing ceremony is a fragile thing, even though monks themselves are fairly sturdy and have endured with their rituals through the depredations of many centuries. Real beauty is always both tough and fragile, and the way in which these people manage to give religious significance to something as necessary, as ordinary, as clothing gladdens my soul. I resent its misappropriation by the fashion industry, though I'm not concerned primarily with blasphemy, or even with the trivialization of religious imagery. Fashion designers are always trivial—that's what makes their pronouncements on the deeper meaning of their clothes so deliciously ludicrous—and they'll always appropriate whatever strikes their fancy. Traditional religious garb is elegant, and at the very least the new fashions are a relief from biker shorts worn under lace miniskirts.

I guess I'm sad for the rest of us. Even if we're not likely to be suckered into believing, as
Vogue
magazine breathlessly exclaimed last summer, “spiritual equanimity . . . is only a credit card receipt away,” the fact that such a thing can be said at all should give us pause. Told (
Vogue
again) that the somber colors and clean, even severe, lines of the new fashions constitute “a burial for the conspicuous luxury of the eighties,” we have to rely on brain cells battered for years by advertisers and politicians to recognize that this burial is false: we're expected to express our newfound austerity by engaging in still more consumption of ever more expensive clothing.

Christian monks have always been conspicuous by their dress but never concerned with fashion. A tale is told of one monk in fourth-century Egypt who sold even his treasured copy of the gospels. He said, “I have sold the book that told me to sell all that I had and give to the poor.” His radical conversion, like the radical way in which monks continue to shape their lives around liturgy, prayer, and simple living, can show us what is possible when we pay attention to the discrepancy between what we want and what we need.

In his rule for monks, written in the sixth century, St. Benedict is concerned that they have enough clothing but not too much, a concept that is all but lost in American culture. We think of shopping as a recreational activity. The fierce Anglican recluse Maggie Ross has described the story of Sodom as a “mordant satire on the idolatry of the great shopping mall at the end of the Red Sea, the consumer culture that can inculturate religion only as commodity.” Greed is at the heart of the story, greed expressed in sexual terms, which translates into rape. Consumerism is our idolatry, the heart of our illusions of power, security, and self-sufficiency, which translate into rape of the environment.

The fashion industry traffics in illusion, selling us images of the way we'd like to be. Any life lived attentively is disillusioning, as it forces us to know ourselves as we are. Benedictines consider this attentiveness to be best developed in the rough-and-tumble of community life, where one learns to put the needs of others before one's own. The God one finds there chooses to be revealed in other people: people we love and people we can't stand; people who are hard on us, who just might love us enough to demolish our complacency.

The two young men have traveled far to this moment of asking for “the mercy of God and fellowship in this community.” One was a bank vice-president, the other a librarian. They now face a year of wondering whether the vow they've made today was salvation, sheer foolishness, or both. Although they'll no doubt complain about the cumbersome skirts and endure jokes about guys in long dresses, the clothing will help to make them one among many, indistinguishable from their brothers. It symbolizes their common goal, and is black to suggest a death to worldly concerns.

I wonder why I am weeping. For myself, I'm sure, and my concerns, which are all too worldly. Perhaps it is also that these few simple words can contain so much hope and trust. These men are fortunate to have found a community in which to say them. I am crying also because I was raised to believe that rituals were meaningless in the modern world, meant to be outgrown, like superstitions. I was educated to mistrust the rich ambiguity of symbols. Yet here is ritual and symbol that has meaning.

I wonder if the pace of modern life, along with our bizarre propensity for turning everything into a commodity, erodes our ability to think symbolically, to value symbols for their transformative power. This simple clothing ceremony, just one step in the formation of two monks, has nothing to do with the ephemera of fashion, and everything to do with that which endures. It reminds me that ritual and symbol are as necessary to human beings as air and water. They mark us as human, and give us identity.

Early in the Gospel of John, Jesus turns to two men who are following him, and asks, “What is it that you seek?” The answer he receives is ambiguous: “Where is it you are staying?” Jesus replies, “Come and see,” and the men go with him and become his disciples. The question, “What do you seek?” is one that is asked at all monastic professions that I have attended, including the abbreviated ceremony at which I became a Benedictine oblate. The ritual answer varies from community to community, but runs something like this: “I ask that I may follow Christ and persevere in this community until death.”

Such ceremonies mark all stages of entry into a Benedictine community, and on each occasion, a sign of the monastic vocation is received. A copy of the Rule of Benedict might be presented by the formation director as a woman enters the novitiate, keeping with Benedict's suggestion that people who ask to join a monastery have the Rule read to them so they'll know what they're getting themselves into. At first vows, the prioress might present a sister with a Benedictine medal, and at final vows the ring and/or pendant that will identify the woman as a member of a particular monastery. One striking thing about this process in most Benedictine women's communities these days is that the new member will receive no specifically monastic clothing. While most men's communities kept the Benedictine habit after the reforms of Vatican II, the women were quick to give it up.

The reasons for this reflect the complex history of Benedictine women in America, and their status (or lack of it) within the Roman Catholic church. Before Vatican II, while men received the habit and other signs of monastic profession from their religious superior (an abbot or a prior), women received theirs not from their prioress but from the local bishop. Often these ceremonies literalized “bride of Christ” imagery in ways that women found overbearing. “To join my religious community,” one sister said to me, “I had to borrow my sister's wedding gown. This was a common practice. But it made me feel as if I were marrying the bishop!” Women also resented the fact that before Vatican II, men were able to use the habit primarily as a church garment, as many Benedictine men do today, but they wore street clothes underneath, and could take the habit off for travel, visits to the dentist, or farm work. The women did not have that luxury. “We were expected to do everything in our habits,” one sister said, “from cleaning the kitchens and bathrooms to ice skating, teaching, cooking, milking cows, and driving a tractor. The situation lacked all sense,” she said, adding, “It was both dangerous and unsanitary.”

The men's Benedictine habit had the virtue of simplicity, consisting of a long-sleeved cassock-like garment, belt, scapular, and cowl, but the women's clothing was complicated, difficult to wear and to maintain. A slip made of cheap material with a wide black band at the hem. A sleevelet whose sole purpose was to avoid exposing the bare flesh of the arms, with elastic at the top and a cuff at the wrist that snapped onto the inner sleeve of the habit. The habit itself, long-sleeved and floor-length, usually made of black serge and later of dacron, and over it the wide belt of the cincture, and a floor-length scapular. For the head, a cotton cap that didn't show, upon which was attached a stiff linen coif which covered the ears and came under the chin, emerging as a kind of bib with 144 tiny pleats. (Sisters more or less affectionately refer to it as “the duck bill.”) Pinned to the coif was a boxy headpiece made of linen, and later of plastic (which, one sister has told me, served very well as a dam for perspiration), to hold a half-veil that covered the back of the neck and a longer, full veil that came halfway down the back. I'm told that the one advantage women had with all of this garb was that they could get by with undershirts instead of brassieres.

The elaborate headgear of the old habit is especially resented by many contemporary sisters because to them it symbolizes a subjection to the authority of the church that monastic men were never asked to make. “The veil, in many traditional societies, and in some cultures today,” one sister said, “is a sign that you're the property of your husband and no one else is to see you.” Another said, “In the Roman Catholic tradition, the veil represents a patriarchal interpretation of 1 Corinthians 11:10. It was used to keep us covered, invisible, in place.” Some women also found the experience of receiving the veil emotionally painful. One told me, “Having our heads shaved to receive the veil was so awful that my class of thirty-seven novices couldn't talk about it for months afterward. Even if one looked upon it as a cleanliness measure, or as renouncing all for the love of Christ, I could never put it together with the gospel. What ought to have been a day of great rejoicing,” she said, “instead was a traumatic experience.”

With sentiments such as these simmering beneath the uniform image of the placid nun, it is not surprising that when the lid came off after Vatican II, it flew off with a vengeance. Many Benedictine sisters have explained to me that as other, more active religious congregations of women, founded not as monastics but as teaching or nursing orders, began to look, as Vatican II directed them to, at “both the charism of their founders and the needs of the present day,” they felt that they had good reason to abandon the traditional monastic dress that they'd adopted along the way. These active orders sometimes called the process “de-monasticizing.”