The Cloister Walk (45 page)

—St. Augustine

 

 

Not long ago, I was asked by a college student how I could stand to go to church, how I could stand the hypocrisy of Christians. I had one of my rare inspirations, when I know the right thing to say, and I replied, “The only hypocrite I have to worry about on Sunday morning is myself.”

The church has had a hardening of the arteries in the sixteen hundred years or so since Ambrose, then the bishop of Milan, welcomed the convert Augustine into the body of Christ. Theological fine-tuning, some of it unfortunately inspired by Augustine himself, has led us to forget that Christian worship is not, in the words of Margaret Miles, “primarily a gathering of the like-minded” but a gathering of people “to be with one another in the acknowledgment that human existence originates in and is drawn towards love.”

Even when I find church boring, I try to hold this in mind as a possibility: like all the other fools who have dragged themselves to church on Sunday morning, including the pastor, I am there because I need to be reminded that love can be at the center of all things, if we will only keep it there. The worship service will most likely not offer an aesthetically pleasing experience, great theological insight, or emotional release, although any and all of those things are possible, and precious on the rare occasions when they occur. When I look at the way my life has unfolded, my presence in the Christian assembly is miracle enough. The congregation in Lemmon, South Dakota, has seen me come and go; mercifully, they've allowed my conversion to unfold in their midst without pestering me to see if I've been “saved” in just the right way, or if I know the Confessions in the
Presbyterian Book of Order
by heart.

And this is why St. Augustine is so precious to me. He helps me see, in the lengthy story of his own conversion—with its fits and starts, its meanderings and deep desires for faith—that mine has been a traditional Christian journey. When I'm at church at home, or worshiping as a guest in a monastery choir, I often think of the Augustines in our midst, who are still wandering in and out of the faith. I think of my own inconstancy in prayer, my own hypocrisies that I know by now are among the reasons I go to church: to burn them off in singing hymns, and in listening and responding to scripture.

And I am always grateful to the hypocrites around me, imperfect strivers like myself, because they're the reason I now have this freedom. I am grateful also for Aidan Kavanagh's comments on Augustine in his book
On Liturgical Theology,
which first led me to claim Augustine's story as an inspiration and model for my own. “Augustine was a wandering catechumen for thirty years,” he writes, “attending worship, backing off from it and the community of the church. But he kept returning, and the result was that Augustine found himself being baptized and communicated at Ambrose's hands in the midst of those whose singing and Amens had helped bring him home.”

I suspect that his gratitude to the worshiping assembly would allow St. Augustine to grasp more fully than many modern people the profound hospitality of Cecil Williams, the pastor of Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, who insists that “the church is not just for believers.” In his book about the church,
No Hiding Place,
he says, simply, “When people come to Glide, we don't ask them if they are atheists, Methodists, or Buddhists. We ask them what their names are and how they're doing.”

On Easter Sunday at Glide the pastor invites people to tell their own stories during the service. One year he said, “There's an empty tomb somewhere in this room this morning. I invite you to come forward now.” And people got up to speak of living two years with AIDS, nine months free from drugs. Then a man came forward who, Williams says, had a skittish look in his eyes “that told me he was still in the tomb . . . still tied up in the grave clothes of crack cocaine.” The man told the congregation that the drug counseling at the church had been enough to keep him off drugs for days at a time. He admitted that he had a little crack still in his system that morning, but he said, looking around the church, “I wasn't gonna miss this!”

A healing straight out of the gospels, in which repentance and healing happen simultaneously, as in a lightning strike, in which the desire to worship is a step from death into life. And a cause for celebration in the body of Christ, who welcomes all who seek him. Blessed be those who throw the church doors open wide.

I must live here because of the quiet. On my dawn walk last Saturday the world was so still that I began to wonder if the nearly full moon, still high in the western sky, was about to speak. Eventually I heard several vehicles in the distance—no more than three in the forty-five minutes I was out—and I caught a little movement to the south of the highway that turned out to be five mule deer. Stopped, watching me, wary. One stood behind a round hay bale so that just its ears showed—the Charlie Chaplin of deerdom. Back in town, the only moving thing was a girl delivering newspapers.

This morning we had our first snowfall, and the world was even more still, more drawn into itself as the sky fell. Tomorrow, sun is forecast, and temperatures that will bare the ground, bringing us back to fall. But the first snow of the season always feels momentous here. A seasoned television cameraman once told me that the light in our snowy plains and sky is uncommonly blue, and I sometimes think I endure Dakota winters because of this blue light. Ever since I was six months old and seriously ill, and had what people now describe as a “near-death experience” of wandering down a tunnel of light, I've been drawn toward blue.

I live here because no one in Lemmon, South Dakota, thinks that being a writer is a big deal. They regard me with a healthy mix of pride and wariness. If my neighbor the cop is up early, ready to start the day shift, and he happens to notice that the light's on in my studio, I'm just another person doing my chores. If a rancher delivering calves to the local livestock auction sees me walking by at 6 A.M., he knows that in some obscure way, I'm working too, up at that hour because that's when the job gets done.

I live here because, after being out in what is purported to be “the real world,” after too much time in the literary hothouse, this is a good place to cool off. At its very best it becomes my monastery, which progresses like a river, by running in place, its currents strong and life-sustaining. This is my real world, where life proceeds at its own healthy pace, where I can revel in the luxury of paying more attention to sunrise and sunset than to clock time.

Yet I'm still a city person, at least by South Dakota standards, because I live in a town of 1600 that is by far the largest “city” in the enormous northwestern quarter of South Dakota. Country people are those who live on ranches forty miles from town, along gravel section line roads. In winter they stock up, because it may be a week or more before they can get to a grocery or hardware store. But in over twenty years of living here I've become enough of a prairie person to feel hemmed in by the houses and tree-lined streets surrounding me. Most of the trees in town were planted when my mother was a child, but I've become a throwback to an earlier generation. At least once a day I need to walk the three blocks to the edge of town and see the land, see how the sky is playing with the horizon.

I often think I live here because I'm a frustrated painter, drawn to painting this landscape with words. And even when I'm not writing about this place—when I'm writing a memoir of my twenties in New York City or trying to recapture the religious sense of the world I had as a child—it is the sunrises and sunsets here that ground me in the present. Not long ago, I spent three days immersed in grueling work, writing a personal narrative that seemed too personal, too painful to ever see the light of day. Sitting with my notes around me, gazing at a blank computer screen, I tried to forget that a deadline loomed, and I was still spending hours just sitting and brooding, letting the thing work itself out inside me.

When I finally finished shaping the first draft and knew that I was well on my way toward having a piece of writing, I glanced outside for the first time in hours. I noticed that the sky was doing glorious things. Quickly, I pulled on my boots and a jacket and began walking west, toward one of those sunsets in which both the eastern and western sky are vivid with color—dawn in reverse, gold gone to peach gone to scarlet. And as I walked I began to have a biblical sense of God's presence in the sky, of God speaking through the colors. It seemed a blessing not only on the day, and the coming night, but on the closure of this particular piece of writing, which I'd been trying to draw out of my heart and onto paper for nearly ten years.

As I've spent so much time immersed in Benedictine liturgy, which is centered on the psalms, I know many of their phrases by heart. One of the goals of monastic life is to let the psalms become so much a part of one's consciousness that they surface unexpectedly, in response to the circumstances of daily life. As I walked on that afternoon I suddenly recalled a blessing from Psalm 121: “The Lord will bless your going and your coming, your resting and rising forevermore . . .” It is the aim of contemplative living, at least in the Christian mode, that you learn to recognize a blessing when you see one, and are able to respond to it with words that God has given you.
Yes,
in response to that wildly colorful yet peaceful sky;
yes,
I could say back to God, with a line from Psalm 65: “The lands of sunrise and sunset you fill with joy.”

Every Sunday afternoon at 2 P.M. there is a worship service at the nursing home. The pastors in town share the duty, the Lutherans one week, Presbyterians the next, then the Catholics, then the Church of God. The pastors prepare a Bible reading and brief sermon, and church women bring cookies and coffee. It's a popular event with the residents of the home, those who are mentally alert and those who are less so. I always find it absurdly joyful, a restorative to the soul, but I don't attend as often as I'd like.

What I love most about the services is the Lord's Prayer and the singing. It reinforces my belief in the power of poetry, and also in the aptness of Auden's definition of it as “memorable speech.” People who may remember little else can still say all the words of the Lord's Prayer (the King James version they grew up with), and they also have a remarkable ability to recall the words of hymns. The last time I conducted the service there—our minister was out of town, and had asked me to fill in—we sang “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus,” “Blessed Assurance,” and “Amazing Grace.” One woman would not stop singing “Amazing Grace,” so we just let her go happily on, eyes closed, smiling and swaying in her wheelchair, while I said a prayer and a benediction. A pastor later told me that “Holy, Holy, Holy” has the same effect on her.