The Cloister Walk (43 page)

I once visited a sister who, next to a shelf that held socks, underwear, and a sweater, had all the clothing she owned hung on several pegs: her spare habit and scapular, both made of denim, a simple kerchief she wore as a veil, a long winter cloak and a lightweight one for spring and fall. It took my breath away. “Thank God for the things that I do not own,” said Teresa of Avila. I could suddenly grasp that not ever having to think about what to wear was freedom, that a drastic stripping down to essentials in one's dress might also be a drastic enrichment of one's ability to focus on more important things.

—Martin Luther

—St. Augustine

Recent neurological research has shown that in religious rituals from around the world, poetry is generally chanted with a pulse of between two and four seconds, a pulse that the researchers now believe to correspond to an internal system in the human brain. This system, epitomized by the traditions of Gregorian chant and plainsong in the Christian West, seems to help integrate the workings of the right and left hemispheres of the brain in processing information. As a contemporary monk has written, this may explain why “the ritual chanting of sacred texts contributes in a unique way to a profound, largely subliminal, absorption and engagement having many more dimensions than mere rational understanding.” It also might help explain the current popularity of Gregorian chant albums among people who have very little ritual life, or who have grown weary of what the monk terms “poor talkative Christianity.”

Monastic people have long known—and I've experienced it in a small way myself—that the communal reciting, chanting, and singing of the psalms brings a unique sense of wholeness and order to their day, and even establishes the rhythm of their lives. This is why they keep going back to choir, even though it may seem monotonous. This is why Benedict termed the Liturgy of the Hours the “Work of God,” why Benedictines today still speak of it as the foundation stone on which they build all the other work that they do. Now it seems that their conviction has a neurological basis in the brain itself.

The scientists have also confirmed what Thomas Merton knew from experience, that “Gregorian is good, and it heals.” I know from my limited experience of singing chant that it fosters faith; I believe better and more thoroughly when I'm singing it. Like so many elements of monastic life, Gregorian is a matter of focus. It teaches us what we gain when we become simple, dependent upon the beauty of the unadorned human voice. It teaches us what we lose, in music, when we add a melody and a beat. It also fosters an appreciation for community. Gregorian can't be sung alone; you need people who are willing to blend their voices in such a way as to sound like one voice. In practical terms, Gregorian makes you extremely grateful for the other people who are singing with you. When you hit a note feebly, making more a groan than music, someone else will cover for you. When the time comes, you'll do the same for them. When you need to take a breath, someone else will keep going, making a continuous flow. The flow of Gregorian music reminds me of the pulse of ocean waves, steady and incessant, but never superfluous, a satisfying sound that may swell unpredictably before ebbing back into silence. It is a music in harmony with the body, and with the universe itself. It is also, always, praise of God.

Music is serious theology. Hildegard of Bingen took it so seriously as a gift God made to humanity that in one of her plays, while the soul and all the Virtues sing, the devil alone has a speaking part. The gift of song has been denied him.

It is the eve of the Assumption. Neither virgin nor mother, I lie by the vigil light of the electric alarm clock and dream of walking to a city through a field of flowers, Dorothy on her way to the Emerald City. A crescent moon rides high in the East, and Orion lays down his sword.

A place to be: this womb of stars, this windy dawn. Fir trees begin to sift the light, their branches hung with gold. The pregnant cat sleeps in the shadow of the abbey church.

The building itself, with towers and turrets rising dramatically out of the Plains, has always reminded me of Oz. And the monks in their robes do have the air of the wizard about them; they remind me to “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” but to focus on what lies beyond. The monastery has been a haven where I could come and stay awhile, and work things out; the monks will not surrender Dorothy.

It was here that I first learned of the baptism of desire, and the gift of tears, the purifying tears that the ancient monks said could lead us to the love of God. Once, when a little girl in a small town nearby, staring at the bright red boots I often wore to work with children in schools, asked me, “Do you live in a country?” I told her we lived in the same country. She looked dubious. But as I thought about it, the real answer came—it's our secret country, where evil spells are broken by a promise of love, and little girls can melt away the wickedness that's in them.

Once, when I spent Holy Week in a community of Benedictine women, I ended up working in the bakery with an older sister. It proved to be a happy arrangement for both of us. I'd been writing at home, so reclusive that my life there had been much like a silent retreat, and I found that the strenuous work of baking for more than two hundred women, and the sister's good company, were exactly what I needed. I had first visited the monastery bakery out of curiosity and was offered chicory coffee and a sweet roll. But it seemed that with all of the extra baking the sister had lined up for Holy Week, she needed help far more than tourists. I volunteered, and soon was working with her from 5:30 in the morning until noon or so, with time out for morning prayer at 6:30 or 7.

I was slow to learn the sister's method of forming cinnamon rolls, but I tried hard and she let me try. I soon learned that there was a right way to do everything, even flattening and storing twist ties. Had I been a much younger woman, a monastic novice only recently separated from parental authority or graduate school, this might have been hard to take. But I know so many women who have “sacred ways” around the house—I think of how I am about laundry and my own baking—that I surrendered. I felt a bit like an explorer, though, never quite knowing what wonder would next be revealed. How to pinch dough. How to fold plastic bags. Strong as she was, the sister's not a young woman, and she was happy to let me wash the heavy mixing bowl with a minimum of instruction. I learned a bit about her; a Louisiana native, she seemed shocked to find herself in Kansas—“Why, the ground here,” she scoffed, “it's nothing but clay. And they don't know how to till it,” she added. “They just scratch at it like chickens.” Her mother died when she was small, and she was raised by a grandmother. She still misses the cat she left behind in Louisiana; her monastery there had closed, and this is where she had chosen to come.

We worked well together, although she found me a bit clumsy in removing bread from the hot loaf pans. Still, we were mostly in tune: “Kathleen, come in here and help me think!” she called once from the oven room, and I was quick to obey. On Holy Saturday, we baked forty-five pans of cinnamon rolls. The caramel sauce burned our fingers as we struggled to place the hot rolls on waxed paper. “It's enough to make you lose your religion!” the sister exclaimed, and I replied, laughing, “Oh, anything but that! Not today.”

I was well aware that even though I was working, I was still a guest in the monastery, which meant that I was being treated with deference. Still, I wondered if I weren't experiencing, in a limited sense, a kind of monastic formation. The newest members of a community are usually made to work with older ones, to subject themselves to the authority of a monk or nun of an earlier generation who may or may not be sympathetic to them, who may or may not share their interests, hobbies, or political opinions. What the two of you do come to share is a fabric of stories about people, living and dead, that make a living history of the community. And you are daily adding to it.

Monastic storytelling is a form of gossip, and like the best gossip, it often serves a moral purpose. The stories that circulate often reveal the dangers inherent in the monastic way of life. Monks and nuns are not all sweetness and light—they're ordinary human beings—and I've been told by Benedictines that one of the greatest dangers in monastic life is to succumb to pettiness. Often it is the old in whom the fault lines are revealed, and others tell their stories wonderingly, both as cautionary tales and as humbling reflections on human frailty. There was the monk who became obsessed with how much toilet paper others were using; there was the sister who insisted on seeing her prioress, who had just returned from a grueling trip overseas, only to complain that some people were taking two hot dishes at dinner, both the meat dish and the vegetarian.

When younger monks and nuns tell stories about older ones, it is often with great pride and affection. I'm always finding out things I didn't know about the ministries that the “retired” members of a community have quietly practiced for years: that this sister spends some time every day recording books for the blind; that this brother makes frequent visits to the nursing home down the street. But sometimes the young take pride in the eccentricities of their elderly confreres, and the stories they relate are just plain funny. A young sister tells of being sent, with other novices, to search on foot for a car that another sister had lost. “She knew she couldn't drive any more,” the sister explained. “But sometimes she'd forget, and she'd take a car and drive it out in the middle of the prairie and then walk home, forgetting where she'd left it.” The sister is not making fun of the older woman, and this is understood by her audience, other Benedictines and oblates. She's making fun of herself; a former bank officer, she never imagined that a call to the religious life would lead her to wander over a prairie in search of a lost car, but why not, if this is what it takes?

A prioress tells of visiting a sister who was thought to have Alzheimer's. “We'd put her name in big letters on the door of her room, hoping that she'd remember it was her room. Sometimes she'd get stubborn, and wouldn't want to go in. The doctor had told us to ask her questions frequently, and once, when I was visiting, I asked, ‘Sister, do you know who I am?' She became indignant,” the sister tells us, “and shouted at me: ‘Well! You look old enough to me! If you don't know who you are by now, I certainly can't help you!' ”

I toss my own story into the conversation, about knitting a shawl for an elderly sister. When I presented it to her she held it close, happily exclaiming. “Oh, it's blue and green! I do love green!” She sighed and confided, “I get so tired of black.” Others in our group had stories of this sister, who was known for wonderful remarks. A monk from a neighboring monastery told us that when she was well into her nineties and in declining health, she once asked him if he thought that God had simply forgotten about her.