The Cloister Walk (48 page)

At Kalamazoo, Benedictine men and women responded to this presentation on medieval funeral practices by commenting on the rituals surrounding deaths in their own communities, and it was fascinating to watch the response of scholars both shocked and intrigued to learn that so many medieval rituals were still alive and well. A monk commented on the medieval practice of not leaving a dying person alone, but staying with them, and reciting scripture in order to keep the devil at bay, by saying that while modern Benedictines didn't talk a great deal about the devil, the medieval bedside vigil sounded much like the ones in his own community. A nun said that in her monastery, when a sister dies, it is the job of the prioress to wash and dress the body. As a former prioress herself, she said that having to do this had been a forceful reminder of how deeply she'd loved these older women, and also compelled her to confront her own fear of death. Another monk, a Cistercian, commented that while the habit was no longer used as a burial shroud, as in medieval times, in his monastery another ritual—the monk's cowl being closed over his face—served much the same purpose.

In the
Lives of the Desert Fathers,
it is said of the monks of Abba Isidore's monastery that they were so attentive to God's will that “when the time came for each to depart, he announced it beforehand to all the others and then lay down and fell asleep.” The going of monks from this world is not usually accomplished with such tidiness. What one does often find is that a lifetime of listening to the Bible, of celebrating on a daily basis the rituals of the Christian church, leads monks to call on the Bible in their last moments, and to identify more completely with the Jesus Christ they've been seeking all their lives. A retired abbot told me of the last words of a dear friend, words that he said were spoken suddenly, and with clarity, by a man who'd been suffering for days, in and out of consciousness, apparently unable to speak. “I didn't know,” the dying monk said, “that the agony in the garden of Gethsemane would last so long.”

I first began to understand how different monasteries were from any places I'd known when the monk who was training me as an oblate said one day, “It's time for you to meet the rest of the community.” We walked to the cemetery, and through it, and as we passed each grave, the monk told me stories about the deceased. Having been at the monastery for over sixty years, he'd known nearly everyone buried there. A hundred years ago in America, in many small towns, such a cemetery tour might have been possible, led by an old-timer, or the town's amateur historian. Such practices as tolling bells to announce a death and holding an all-night vigil in the church were still common. Now, I suspect that monasteries are about the only places in which these traditions are kept alive.

Hospital chaplains in large cities have told me that the number of people who die without family or friends is increasing. Often, it's the hospital staff who arranges for the disposal of the body, and the chaplain who conducts the funeral for a person he or she may never have met. Monasteries couldn't be more different. The vow of stability, which places people in a particular community, in a particular place, means that Benedictines live their monastic lives knowing exactly where and how they will be buried. I once asked a young monk how this felt as we walked back to the monastery after a graveside committal service. He said that he seldom talked about it, because most people found it morbid. But to him, it was one of the strengths of monastic life. “My friends are there, my mentors and guides in the religious life,” he said, gesturing back at the cemetery, “and one day I'll join them.”

The funeral we'd just attended had been for a monk I'd never met, but after the eulogies felt I knew, a man from a tiny Montana town who'd become a scholar of medieval literature and had been baptized at the age of thirty-six, entering the monastery six years later. After retiring from a career as an English professor at a Benedictine college, he'd founded an AIDS hospice. In preparing his eulogy, the abbot had raided the abbey archives, and in quoting from letters the monk had sent home he made his voice come alive for us. “Having lost all my family in the last few years,” the monk had written to his abbot, “I've had to sort a few things out, and it is comforting to know that I have another family which has been very good to me.” A self-assessment made at the time of his retirement from teaching brought many smiles around the choir: “I am a sixteen-stone monk-medievalist enthusiastically arrived at the mid of my seventh decade. I am tolerant, compassionate, and bossy—probably the result of having been lucky all my life. I have, since childhood, always felt the strong support of family and friends—so strong that it has prevented my dwelling on my numerous shortcomings because it's shown me that my shortcomings are acceptable to those I care about.”

After one Holy Week, the monk had written to the abbot, “My sense of renewal this Easter was highly emotional. . . . As I prepare to enter my seventh decade I am unreasonably happy. . . . Please convey to Fathers Alexander and Hilary my experience of gloriously humiliating joy! They will both know I have done absolutely nothing to deserve it.” And of his AIDS hospice he'd said, “The first person who lived with me weighed seventy-five pounds. . . . But I was in awe of how he functioned, how he never lost his sense of humor, his capacity to enjoy things. I couldn't imagine myself functioning that way with what he had to bear. You can't pity someone you're in awe of.”

Many people said that the monk, a humble man, would have been highly amused at the drama of his funeral. Right at the prayer of consecration, during Mass, an enormous thunderclap sounded—it had been a sunny day—and several monks saw lightning arc through the upper reaches of the church. A gentle rain came just as we began to sing the Agnus Dei, but it had stopped by the time we were following the casket through the church and out the back door of the monastery. The storm was marching away from us, through the eastern sky, which looked like a scroll from the Book of Revelation; I half expected to see angels tugging at its edges.

The psalm we sang as we walked—“I rejoiced when I heard them say, let us go to God's house, and now my feet are standing within your gates, O Jerusalem”—gained new resonance, as did the other psalms we'd sung all day, doing the Office for the Dead instead of our regular prayer services. I realized that the familiar words—“My soul takes refuge in the shadow of your wings, I take refuge until the storms of destruction pass by,” or, “Awake my soul, awake lyre and harp; I shall awake the dawn”—carried a new poignancy in the presence of death. And I suspected that the next time I encountered them in the ordinary, four-week cycle of psalms, I'd find them to be more deeply textured, changed by this day of mourning, which opened onto eternity.

One never has so strong a sense of what monastic community means as at a funeral; it is the apotheosis of monastic storytelling. And it also reminds us that monks seek to live this life with hearts focused on eternity. As my friend Patrick Henry, director of the Ecumenical Institute at St. John's, once said to me, “Monastic funerals always blur the line between this world and the next; one feels that the present is just a moment in the continuum, between this community, and the community of the saints.” The “rest of the community” turns out to be very large indeed, and in the funeral liturgies, it makes itself known. Monks do not flinch from the reality of death—during the night-long vigil and Office for the Dead, the coffin lies open near the altar—but there is also a powerful sense of Benedict's vision of monks here and now being brought by Christ “together into everlasting life.”

Anyone with a sacramental understanding of the world knows that it's the small things that count. And in a monastery, the gestures, songs, antiphons, prayers, and scripture readings that unify a monastic profession service, the Holy Week and Easter liturgies, and the funeral become small things writ large. In one community I know, the lines from Psalm 119—“If you uphold me by your promise, I shall live; do not disappoint me in my hope”—that a sister repeats three times when she makes her profession of monastic vows, are also sung three times by the community at her death: at the reception of her body, at the beginning of the funeral service, and at the grave. In another community, the hymn called the “Ultima” that is sung at the end of all feast-day meals is also sung at the end of a monk's funeral. The goal of a monastic life is to let oneself be changed by community ritual, ceremony, and the repetition of the psalms, until, in the words of one hymn, our lives
become
a psalm in praise of the glory of God's name. The connections that Benedictines painstakingly thread through their everyday lives reinforce my sense of monastic life itself as a great poem, one that honors and celebrates Jesus Christ, who, Oscar Wilde tells us in
De Profundis,
“is the poem God made.”

—Hebrews 12:22

When Thomas Merton first encountered the Abbey of Gethsemani, where he was later to live as a monk, he wrote: “I had wondered what was holding the country together, what has been keeping the universe from cracking in pieces and falling apart. . . . This is the only city in America—and it is by itself, in the wilderness . . .” A monastery is a city in the ancient meaning of the word, as “civitas,” a place which stands for human culture in the largest sense, and exists to serve the common good.

I have often had the odd feeling that the monastery is the real world, while the dog-eat-dog world that most people call “real” is in fact an artifice, an illusion that we cling to because it seems to be in our best interest to do so. The true city, the holy one, allows us, in the words of Paul Philibert, an alternative “vision of human relationships where beauty is more desirable than financial profit, friendship more precious than advantage, and solidarity in a common vision of human dignity more compelling than self-fulfillment.” A simple paraphrase of Dorotheus of Gaza—I'd much rather do things with others and have them come out wrong than do them by myself to make sure they come out right—demonstrates the distance between a monastic perspective and the modern American individualism that allows us to ignore a basic reality: human beings are remarkably dependent on one another.

A city is a place where the worst and best about humanity come to the fore, where we're forced to be realistic enough to lock our doors even as we rejoice in being able to celebrate the greatest achievements of our culture. The Christian vision of heaven is of a city, the New Jerusalem, and Christian theology suggests that the Godhead itself is a kind of city, a community of three persons, or in the Benedictine Aidan Kavanagh's words, “a collective being, with unity.” Kavanagh laments that in contemporary society the city's sacred potential as a symbol of community has been “invested in sovereign individualism,” which allows us to retreat into a myopic unworldliness. “[Our] icon is not a city,” he writes in
On Liturgical Theology,
“whether of man or God, but the lone jogger running through suburbia, in order, we are told, to feel good about himself.”

Cities remind us that the desire to escape from the problems of other people by fleeing to a suburb, small town, or a monastery, for that matter, is an unholy thing, and ultimately self-defeating. We can no more escape from other people than we can escape from ourselves. As Basil the Great wrote to a friend after leaving the city of Caesarea in the fourth century, “I have abandoned my life in the town as the occasion of endless troubles, but I have not managed to get rid of myself.” Images of the city are impossible to avoid in the monastic choir, as scripture is full of them. You're reminded, over and over, that in fact you have come here to be a part of the city of the living God, and you're challenged to make something of it. Do you reflect Benedict's belief that “the divine presence is everywhere”? Do you work, as Jeremiah reminds us to do, for the welfare of the city to which God has sent you? Can you say, with Isaiah, “About Zion I will not be silent, about Jerusalem I will not rest, until her integrity shines out like the dawn, and her salvation flames like a torch”?