The Cloister Walk (44 page)

Stories from a monastery's more remote past are less a historical record than a repository of habits, hobbies, and trivia—like the attic of an eccentric aunt or uncle who never threw anything away. Over the years I'd heard stories of the two sharpshooters at one abbey who kept up an informal competition—one would shoot from an upper floor window, putting holes in a bucket of milk that the other was carrying up the hill—but I never believed them until I saw the impressive case of shooting medals in the dusty little abbey museum. I want to believe the story about the grave-side service that one of them once provided in a parish. When a rat was spotted at the bottom of the grave, the monk reached under his vestments for a pistol, shot the rat, and completed the service.

I know that there are stories behind everything in the museum: the seeds kept in tiny vials labeled in faded ink; the animals stuffed by a local taxidermist; the ballpoint pen collection that a monk is still adding to (all the pens have business logos, most of them from area businesses that have long since closed their doors); the wooden device that makes a hideous clacking noise, which was used in the abbey years ago as a crude alarm clock; the mannequin of a boy in slacks and a school jacket from the school the abbey closed in the 1970s; the mannequin of a girl in a tropical print blouse and a hula skirt. She may simply be one of the mysteries of the universe, but chances are, someone in the monastery knows the story behind her.

Sometimes being a guest in a monastery feels to me like falling, comfortably, into a den of playful storytellers. Monastic living gives the raconteur plenty of opportunity to refine the art. “The last time someone shot at me,” Fr. Francis says slowly, in his customary growl, “was in Iowa.” He has our attention, of course, a group of monks and guests who had been discussing the hazards of walking outdoors during hunting season. Francis puffs contentedly on a cigar. “A cornfield,” he says, finally. “I was behind a little rise. I stood up and said to him, ‘I wish you wouldn't do that.' ” And once, during my year at St. John's, I found myself in the waiting room of the doctor's office, a young woman doctor who serves the community of over two hundred monks, and whose medical specialty, naturally, is fertility in women. I was nervous because I was to find out if a knee injury I'd sustained in a fall had resulted in cartilage damage, but my fear was dissipated by the monks in the waiting room, two men in their eighties. The sight of a younger woman with a cane, and the story of my accident, triggered all sorts of stories in them, about falls they'd had, the falls that monks of community legend had sustained. It was an impressive collection: falls off roofs and falls from trees, falls over tree roots in the woods, falls into quicksand, or the lake. The two were wily, cagey, telling stories about each other that had obviously been well-polished over the years. “He fell down once on the ice,” one said, pointing to the other, “and he lay on the frozen lake for over an hour before anyone found him, and in all that time he never had one pious thought!” “No, no,” the other one said, “you've got the story all wrong . . .” A younger monk who was leaving the clinic stopped to ask me how I was, and if there was anything he could do for me. Gesturing to the two older monks, who were still arguing amicably between themselves, I said, “Look at the company I'm in. I'm not only fine; I'm in heaven!”

Heaven, of course, is the point of monastic life, and sometimes the stories Benedictines tell reflect the tragicomic ways in which we set rigid boundaries in our lives, only to have the prospect of eternity open them wide. Some Benedictine women I know relish the story of a monk, now deceased, who had spent considerable energy in the pursuit of misogyny, making life miserable for the sisters who taught with him at their small college. Much to everyone's surprise, however, in his old age he turned out to have a well-developed shadow side. One day the abbot received a call from the abbey nursing home; the monk was weeping inconsolably, and although he was in failing health, there didn't seem to be anything drastically wrong. The abbot had some difficulty ascertaining what the problem was and was startled when the older monk, still weeping copiously, blurted out, “My wife died.” The monk had been celibate all of his life, but the abbot was able to assure him that he would meet his wife one day in heaven, and the man calmed down. A story Jung would have loved, one that the sisters tell me confirms their belief in God's sense of humor, and a story that has now passed into the living memory of two monastic communities.

In any traditional society, stories are where the life is, where those in the present maintain continuity with those in the past. In the monastic tradition, from the fourth-century desert on, it is the stories that pass from monk to monk, long before they're written down, that have helped preserve the values, and the good humor, that lives on in the monastic charism.

Monastic humor is an acquired taste, so much so that monastic people themselves often spend a lifetime acquiring it. When I spent a week in a monastery as a reward for surviving my first book tour, the first person I encountered when I arrived was a dear friend who asked me what a book tour was like. I told him it was exhausting, and hard work, but not nearly as bad as I expected. “Maybe you were just too dumb to notice what was really going on,” he said, poker-faced, and I hugged him and said, “I knew there was a reason I missed you guys.”

The jokes continued. At vespers that night I discovered that the monks were reading from a desert mother, Amma Syncletica: “Just as a treasure that is exposed loses its value,” we heard, “so a virtue which is known vanishes; just as wax melts when it is near a fire, so the soul is destroyed by praise.” After weeks of interviews, an alarming amount of attention and praise, I'd just been kicked in the shin by a fierce fifth-century nun, and could only laugh at the delicious synchronicity that had brought us together.

The juxtaposition of the ancient and the modern in monastic life often helps monks to laugh at themselves. Not long ago a story circulated about a bear who had broken into a contemplative monastery in a remote wilderness while the monks were in church. The bear ransacked the kitchen, and probably would have left the living quarters alone, except that one monk had squirreled away a piece of chocolate in his room. “Private property, the old bugaboo,” one monk said. “Maybe we need a new desert saying: ‘If you try to hide a piece of chocolate, God will send a bear to find it.' ” Another monk told me that in a recent excavation of a fourth-century monastery in Egypt, a small pile of gold coins had been found under one monk's bed. “There is no hiding anything in this life,” he said, shaking his head, “but monks will always try.”

Monks are quick to seize on the humor of their situation with regard to the rest of the world. Their habits, while they symbolize the serious matter of a religious vocation, do have a comical side. I once witnessed monks using their scapulars in an impromptu fly-swatting competition. And the long skirt can be quite a look on a man. Once, when I happened to compliment a monk on his choice of attire—he'd put a heavy sweater on over his habit—he struck a model's pose, hand on hip, and said, “Yes . . . classic, yet casual.” I once witnessed several teenage girls staring moon-eyed at a handsome young monk they'd developed a crush on when they were counselors at a camp for the handicapped. The monk, being kind, had stopped by their table to visit during lunch on the last day of camp. As he walked away, one girl sighed and said, dreamily, “Oh—he looks so good in black.” The monk, overhearing her, said to me, “That's fine, because I'm going to have to wear an awful lot of it.”

Popular culture sometimes interacts with monastic culture in comical ways. When my sister-in-law became an Episcopal priest, and I told a monk friend that her young daughters were playing “mommy priest” with their Barbie dolls, he offered to make them vestments from scraps in his abbey's sewing room. It felt odd to deliver a Barbie doll to a monastery—he needed one for a model—but the results were spectacular: a linen alb (made of the same material that the monastery priests wear) and chasubles made from old chalice covers.

Not all monks are so willing to embrace the absurdities of American culture. When the abbot of one monastery was contacted by someone on David Letterman's staff to see if he'd allow a monk to come on the show with an item from the abbey's museum (an enormous hairball from the stomach of a pig, rumored to be the largest hairball ever retrieved from the stomach of a pig), the abbot refused. The monk who told me the story shook his head sadly, as if the abbot had failed to comprehend the momentous nature of this opportunity. Sighing in an exaggerated manner, he said, “He lacks vision,” and then added, gesturing with his arm to include the monastery building and grounds, “
We
lack vision.”

For younger monastics, especially, the popular culture provides ample opportunity for play. Skits and satires have a long history in monasteries; the sister I know who wrote several parodies of pop songs to celebrate her first vows—she sang them at the community party after the church ceremony—was, in a sense, being a traditional Benedictine. To the delight of her sisters, she sang, “Don't know much monastic history/Don't know much theology/But I do know all my vows by heart/Especially that celibate part/What a wonderful world it will be.” Her version of “Pistol-Packin' Mama” (“I was drinkin' beer in a cabaret/havin' lots of fun/and then one night He got to me,/and now I am a nun”) brought the house down. Benedictines in Alabama recently welcomed monastics from the rest of the country to a conference by singing “Dixie” as a Gregorian chant. They also had what I'm told was a hilarious collection of redneck jokes—“You know you're a redneck liturgist, monk, nun . . . when . . .” Unfortunately, no one I spoke with could recall a single one of the punch lines. Monastic humor tends to be of the moment, and in-house, which seems appropriate for people who build communities set apart from the world.

I once heard young Benedictine sisters threatening to put their monk friends into a “Hunk Monk” calendar. And several monks and I once made up an elaborate series of names for Punk Monk bands. Some were of the “you-had-to-be-there” variety—“Theodore and the Studites and their Monster Hit, ‘Circumscribed' ”—was funny only if you'd sat through the reading at morning prayer during which Theodore used the words “Circumscribed,” “Uncircumscribed,” and “Circumscribability” for what seemed like a hundred times. It would have made even Emily Dickinson's head spin. “Abbot Pons and the Gyrovagues” was another we liked, gyrovagues being a restless kind of monk of whom Benedict did not approve; of Abbot Pons, the less said, the better. “Monks with Attitude” was our favorite, because we all know some. When the movie
Jurassic Park
came out, I happily participated in the invention, during lunch in a monastic refectory, of “Monastic Park,” a fantasy monastery in which the fourth-century desert abbas and ammas had been brought back to life. (Some monks said it gave them a whole new outlook on the monastic life to think of their abbey as a kind of theme park. Others said they felt that they were already living in “Monastic Park,” dinosaurs and all.) Sometimes monks speak of casting their own monasteries, trying to figure out who would play them. The choices range from Clint Eastwood to E.T. One middle-aged monk insists that he would best be portrayed by Angela Lansbury, and he may be right.

What I treasure most about monastic humor, however, is not the elaborate constructions that monks frequently engage in, but the little remarks, the simple pleasures that add spice to the day. When, after I'd had a bad fall and was limping along with a cane, feeling a bit sorry for myself, I was cheered up by a monk who greeted me with an enormous grin, and asked, “Did God
finally
strike you down?” When, after the first time I'd been asked to participate in a liturgical procession and reading at St. John's, I told the abbot after Mass, “You guys sure know how to show a woman a good time,” he shrugged and said, “Practice, years of practice.” What he meant, of course, is centuries. He was also making a play on the Greek word “praktike,” long significant in monastic history as a term for asceticism.

But I believe that my favorite instance of monastic humor came as I arrived for a schola practice during Holy Week at St. John's. As I took my seat among the other women, I noticed that the monk behind me, a friend, was gazing at the ceiling. I said, “Ooooh, a monk in rapt contemplation, something I have longed to see.” He replied, “It was just an erotic fantasy, Kathleen.” “Oh, is
that
all,” I said. Another monk said, “What he means by ‘erotic,' Kathleen, is what most people mean by ‘eremitic.' ” The schola director, more amused than impatient, waited for the laughter to subside. And then we began to sing.