The Cloister Walk (46 page)

I know there are several people in the home who appreciate hearing the Bible read, and they also like what they call a “good message” based on the scriptures. With the others, you can't tell how much gets through; in this regard, preaching at the home is a kind of reality check. While you have no idea how much, or even what, is getting through to people any time you preach, here that fact is simply more obvious, and more humbling. For my Sunday service, I had picked out some Bible readings in advance—a psalm, a gospel text—but didn't bring a written sermon to read, just a few notes scrawled on a bookmark. The lectionary reading for that Sunday was Luke 21:5-19, but I decided that there was too much apocalyptic gloom to read the whole thing. I did read the opening lines about the beauty of the temple in Jerusalem, and Jesus' dire prediction that “the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another,” and also the reassuring words that end the text, “By your endurance you will gain your souls.” I said I thought that they, of all the people in town, knew best about endurance, and about what it means to watch things come and go. I mentioned the lovely old department store on Main Street, built in 1906, that had recently been demolished. I knew that some of them had gone in a van to observe its coming down. And—I felt on risky ground here, but I thought it a risk worth taking—they also knew, more than most, what it means to have the temple of the body taken down, to live in bodies that no longer work as well as they would like. A few people nodded; a few smiled wistfully. “But you endure,” I said, “because you know God loves you.” And here, I surprised myself, and some of the residents, by adding, rather forcefully, “You know that you are still beautiful in the eyes of God.”

I hadn't thought about it beforehand, but the elderly don't often get told that they're beautiful. Not much that comes on the large television set in the corner of the recreation room tells them that; not much in the magazines on the reading rack. Even if I hadn't believed what I was saying, it would have been worth saying, just to see the expressions on their faces. It was an inspiring moment, for me and for them. Later, after coffee and visiting and lots of old-time stories, when I joined the Presbyterian women in cleaning up, and we were talking, one marveled at how her great-grandmother was able to live totally in the past. “I remember her as she was,” she said, “and it's hard on me, but she seems content to be this way.”

“It's a kind of mercy,” another woman said, and the poem of our conversation began to flow. Another added, “They make no distinction between the living and the dead,” and another said, “It must be like eternal life.” My flippant demons wanted to add, “And they'll never have to fill out another income tax form,” but I resisted.

I thought of a passage in Esther deWaal's
Seeking God,
a book that changed my life. She had helped me to understand what I loved so about Benedictine liturgy, and allowed me to see that it was also what I love about coming to the nursing home. “The geriatric ward in which so many older people now end their days is inescapably full of pain and distress. It would be absurd to pretend otherwise. Yet, bound as most of us are by the relentless demands of the clock and the calendar, we find here a world which accepts another kind of time, where requests and reminiscences repeated endlessly remind of us of something which the Orthodox liturgy knows with its continual repetitions again and again and again. These people [who] many would prefer to banish and forget, might be speaking to us . . . of that time outside time of which we need a constant reminder.”

Isaiah's seraphim sing “Holy, Holy, Holy,” and in the landscape of worship around God's throne, John, too, sees them, four living creatures, “full of eyes all around,” who are full of song. “Day and night without ceasing they sing, ‘Holy, holy, holy, the Lord God the Almighty, who was and is and is to come” (Rev. 4:8).

I first heard that Kevin was missing on the “Prayer Chain,” when I called home to get my phone messages. The “Prayer Chain” is a telephone tree of church members, and when there are deaths in the congregation, or when people have requested prayers before surgery, or for any other reason, the prayer chain goes into action. My husband and I were at a Benedictine monastery in North Dakota, not far from home, and we puzzled over the message: Kevin, a young, affable, devoted family man and hard worker, a truck driver, was missing. This was serious business, as it was early winter, and very cold, with snow on the ground and temperatures well below zero. I asked the monks to pray for Kevin and his family. Monastery bulletin boards are the ultimate “prayer chain.”

David and I assumed that Kevin's pickup had gotten stuck somewhere on a country road. We couldn't imagine why he'd be out on a country road, but that seemed the best bet. You learn quickly here—sometimes by having to spend a night in your car—that in winter it's not wise to drive down the roads that aren't on a school bus route, as they're the last to be plowed. When we got back to town, my husband went to the tavern where Kevin's wife worked, hoping to hear that he was all right. Instead, he learned that Kevin's body had been found, and that the police considered it a murder.

It's hard to convey the disbelief that I felt when David phoned me. Murder had been the last thing on our minds. In the twenty-one years that we've lived in Lemmon, South Dakota, there had been just three murders in the area. Two elderly men were killed for their money; in both cases the murderers were incompetent and foolish enough to be caught and punished. Another sad case involved several young men high on drugs—angel dust is what I've heard—who beat another to death in a dispute over drugs and money.

Piecing the story together from all the talk downtown—wherever you went, people were talking of little else—we learned that Kevin had last been seen offering a ride home to a man who'd been in the area for a few weeks, working on a crew taking railroad ties from abandoned lines. A large, bullying man from Montana, he'd made his presence felt in the bars and cafes. A troublemaker, quick to pick fights, he stood out. People here can be plenty tough, but except for a few cowboys during their growing-up phase, they don't usually feel called upon to prove it. In the more than ten years that my husband worked in a popular working-class bar downtown, he very seldom had to break up a fist fight, and never saw a weapon drawn, a fact that is all the more remarkable because so many people here own and use knives and guns as a matter of necessity (if you're forty-five miles from town on a gravel road and a deer bolts from the ditch, breaking a leg on the front of your pickup, a gun is good to have).

David and I listened as people who had searched for Kevin told their stories; they knew his pickup truck had been found abandoned, and that they might have to abandon the search and wait for spring snowmelt to uncover him, but well over a hundred volunteers searched a 900-square-mile area in the subzero cold, on foot and horseback, in planes, and on snowmobiles. Two of Lemmon's largest employers, the livestock auction and a jewelry manufacturing plant, let their employees join the search at full pay. Food and fuel for the searchers were donated by the local grocery stores and gas stations. Gruff ranchers interviewed at the cafe on Main Street spoke of “a sense of being violated,” and lamented that their sense of trust was diminished. It occurred to me that in this region, which most of the world considers “Godforsaken,” we still have the grace of being able to feel the loss of one man. There are no “crime statistics” here, only people, and a crime such as murder is taken as a personal affront. Still, you know that the next time you see a car broken down at the side of the road, you'll stop and offer help. We don't know any other way to survive in these open spaces.

No one knows exactly what happened that night. Kevin was a peacemaker; out for a few drinks with friends on a Saturday night, he'd helped to break up a fight earlier in the evening. Maybe to show that there were no hard feelings, he'd offered a ride to the man who'd started the fight. Kevin was half-Lakota, and proud of it. I wonder if his murderer—who, we later learned, had a long record of violent assaults—thought that since he was killing an Indian, no one would care. He was wrong. He's in prison for life.

Here, we still know that murder is a momentous thing. We have no way to escape it; the man who finds the body, the policeman investigating the crime, the priest who prepares the eulogy are not faceless strangers but neighbors, people you know. And there is no way to avoid having your own heart broken; at the visit to the widow's house—you bring food, tears, hugs—the three-year-old looks up at you and says, “My daddy died.”

Here, you can still feel what the death of one person does to the world. It's a bitter luxury, but it's all ours.

—Peter Levi, THE FRONTIERS OF PARADISE

While monasteries are renowned for their sacred spaces, the imposing churches and cloister walks that speak eloquently of silence, their holiest places are often not silent at all, but resound with conversation. In the “retirement center,” “care center,” or “hospital wing”—pick your euphemism—where many of the oldest members of a community reside, the oral history of the monastery is most alive. Such places in the outside world are commonly called “nursing homes,” and are much dreaded. Monasteries cannot help but reflect their culture, and Benedictines are not immune from the fear of old age and lack of respect for the elderly that mar American society. Community life, as Benedictines practice it, is so intense that over the years a perceived slight or the abuse of power can become heavy baggage; thus you sometimes find middle-aged monks who feel they have a score to settle with an older monk, who years ago may have been their teacher, boss, formation director, or abbot. But when community works as it should, its elderly have the self-respect of people who have spent a lifetime listening and being listened to.

Monasteries also demonstrate, often in surprising ways, that when several generations of people are living together, the place of the very old is to teach about possibility. The monk or sister who can speak of planting the venerable trees in the cloistered garden or of building the stone fence that marks off the monastery enclosure may prove inspiring to a newcomer who feels stuck in the tedious, unglamorous tasks of the novitiate: cleaning and waxing floors, washing windows, working in the compost pile and flower beds, wondering what all of this has to do with a life dedicated to God.

The monastic retirement center is a place where one often encounters old people in whom pretense has been so stripped away that their holiness is palpable. Turn the lights off and you suspect that they might begin to glow in the dark, radiating the “openness to all” and transparency of heart that scholar Peter Brown tells us made Anthony of the Desert recognizable to fourth-century pilgrims even in a crowd of black-robed monks. The novices assigned to care for the aged and infirm members of a community frequently discover that this sort of holiness is most evident in people who have endured with patience and grace many years of debilitating illness and prolonged physical pain. This is not at all a romanticizing of illness but a recognition that people can sometimes transform physical sickness into health of soul. The example of a sister who is a calm, centered, quietly joyful and generous person, and who has suffered for years from a degenerative neurological disease, means more to a young nun than any book of theology or class on monastic history. In her own community she's found a woman who helps her to put many great souls of the Christian tradition into perspective: Hildegard, Julian of Norwich, Thérèse of Lisieux, all of whom converted their physical suffering into a love so profound that we are still reaping the benefits.