The Cloister Walk (49 page)

And so the Night became
—Emily Dickinson

—Thomas Merton, THE WISDOM OF THE DESERT

Compline, which means “complete,” is the traditional name for the night office. The compline Psalms, 4 and 91, remind us that we all need protection from forces beyond our control, even as they reassure us that protection is ours. The night will come with its great equalizers, sleep and death. It will pass over us, and bring us forth again into light.

“Ponder on your bed and be still,” Psalm 4 reminds us, “make justice your sacrifice and trust in the Lord.” One night I sat with a friend who had just learned of her sister's death in a suspicious accident. Beyond the grief over losing a sister much younger than herself, whom she had always looked out for, was an unbearable question: Had the husband, who had been abusive in the past, now committed murder? In the morning she'd be traveling to the city where her sister had lived, and would be interviewed by the detectives investigating the death. But for now, sleep was necessary and, of course, impossible.

I said, feeling helpless, that maybe I could read her the best bedtime story I knew. She smiled faintly and said that she would like that. So I read Psalm 4 aloud, catching my breath at the last lines: “I will lie down and sleep comes at once, for you, alone, Lord, make me dwell in safety.” We both wept, and were able to sleep a little, before the empty dawn.

The great desert monk Anthony once said that “the prayer of the monk is not perfect until he no longer realizes himself or the fact that he is praying.” Frank O'Hara speaks in a poem, “In Favor of One's Time,” of an angel engaged in an immortal contest, “which is love assuming the consciousness of itself . . .” Between these two poles, it seems to me, we seek to become complete: between shedding our self-consciousness and taking on a new awareness, between the awesome fears that shrink us and the capacity for love that enlarges us beyond measure, between the need for vigilance in the face of danger and the trust that allows us to sleep. Night comes, or as Miss Dickinson put it, it
becomes,
and we turn our lives over to God. We are able to rest, in the words of an old hymn, “on the promises,” we are willing to lean “on the everlasting arms.”

I would like to thank the Bush Foundation and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for supporting my work. I am grateful also for the friendship and support of Patrick Henry and Dolores Schuh, C.H.M., of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research, and for the many colleagues there who have become friends. The Institute has consistently inspired and challenged me in rewarding ways. My debt to the congregations of Hope and Spencer Presbyterian Churches, and the monastic friends who have contributed so much to this book is incalculable; I hope they'll accept the book as an expression of my gratitude. Among the Benedictines I owe special thanks to Josue Behnen, Jeremy Hall, Katherine Kraft, Dunstan Moorse, Julian Nix, and Robert West.

As always, it has been a joy to work with my editor, Cindy Spiegel, and my agent, Lynn Nesbit. I also want to thank Bart Schneider, editor of the
Hungry Mind Review,
who commissioned the title piece of this book, and first took a chance on me back in 1987, when I needed it most. To my husband and parents, my sisters Becky and Charlotte, to Marilyn and my brother John, who gave up two of his Thursdays at Mai'ili, my deepest thanks.

Thanks are due to the editors of the following periodicals and anthologies, in which versions of several chapters of this book were originally published, including:

“The Rule and Me,”
North Dakota Quarterly,
Fall 1990.

“Jeremiah as Writer” and “A Story with Dragons,”
Communion: Contemporary Writers Reveal the Bible in Their Lives,
David Rosenberg, ed., Anchor Books, 1996.

“Borderline,” in
Sister to Sister,
Patricia Foster, ed., Anchor Books, 1995.

“Paradox of the Psalms,” in
Out of the Garden: Women Writers on the Bible,
Christina Büchmann and Celina Spiegel, eds., Fawcett, 1994.

“Degenerates,”
Ploughshares,
Fall 1994.

“Between ‘Point Vierge' and ‘The Usual Spring.' ”
A Tremor of Bliss: Contemporary Writers on the Saints,
Paul Elie, ed., Harcourt, 1994.

“Road Trip,”
Northern Lights,
Summer 1992.

“Places and Displacement,”
Imagining Home,
Thom Tammaro, Mark Vinz, eds., University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

“The Cloister Walk,”
Hungry Mind Review,
Winter 1992/93.

“Celibate Passion,”
Hungry Mind Review,
Fall 1995.

“At Last, Her Laundry's Done,” first appeared as “It All Comes Out in the Wash,”
The New York Times Magazine,
August 22, 1993.

“A Glorious Robe,”
Parabola,
Summer 1994.

“The Lands of Sunrise and Sunset,”
The Earth at Our Doorstep,
Annie Stine, ed., Sierra Club, 1996.

Portions of the chapters on Hildegard of Bingen and Mechtild of Magdeburg were presented at the Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, Michigan, under the auspices of The American Benedictine Academy.