The Cloister Walk (5 page)

The ongoing Benedictine experiment demonstrates a remarkable ability to take individual differences into account while establishing the primacy of communal life. I find this most evident when a Benedictine community is deciding whether or not to accept a candidate. Questions that would be primary in the business world—what are this person's credentials and skills, what will they add to the organization's efficiency and productivity?—are secondary, if they're raised at all. Even the question of “acceptability,” which is so often a mask for prejudice, is muted. People are simply asked to consider whether or not this person has a monastic vocation for that particular community. The fact that you might not like the person, certainly not enough to want to live with them for the rest of your life, is not supposed to be a factor. The monastic value of not judging others, of giving them the benefit of the doubt, can become extremely painful at a time like this, because once a person becomes a part of the community, they are family.

Most monasteries now employ psychological screening methods for candidates, and the discipline of the novitiate tends to weed out the severely maladjusted. But I've often been touched by the way in which monastic communities, like strong families, can accommodate their more troubled members. Every monastery I know contains at least one borderline person, who may be socially retarded (or just extremely repressed), who has minimal brain damage, who suffers from a mental illness such as manic-depression, or who is ravaged by Alzheimer's, or even, in the words of one monastic friend, who may simply be “surpassingly strange.” And it is good to see the many ways that communities find to make room. While monastic people are not conventionally nice to each other—as family, they can be brutally honest, taking liberties that outsiders find shocking—I've often witnessed support for their more disturbed members in the form of prayers, and daily acts of patient, loving-kindness that would put many families to shame. Benedictines do make use of psychiatrists and drugs such as Prozac, but I sometimes wonder if the sustained love of a community doesn't help just as much.

Contemporary American Benedictines, like the culture they live in tension with, are struggling with questions of diversity. Communities founded by Swiss or German monastics a century or more ago are contending with the loss of old customs, as their newest members—of Mexican, Laotian, Vietnamese ethnicity—bring new customs with them. Several Benedictines who teach novitiate classes in both men's and women's communities, have said to me that one of the biggest problems monasteries currently face is people who come to them having no sense of what it means to live communally. Schooled in individualism, often having families so disjointed that even meals in common were a rarity, they find it extremely difficult to adjust to monastic life. “They want to be alone all the time,” one formation director said to me of his current novices. “I have to force them to do things as a group.”

Monasticism is a way of life, and monasteries are full of real people. In considering the great tensions that have always existed in the monastic imperative—between structure and freedom, diversity and unity, openness to the world and retreat from it—monks are better off when they retain the ability to laugh at themselves. One monk, when asked about diversity in his small community, said that there were people who can meditate all day and others who can't sit still for five minutes; monks who are scholars and those who are semiliterate; chatterboxes and those who emulate Calvin Coolidge with regard to speech. “But,” he said, “our biggest problem is that each man here had a mother who fried potatoes in a different way.” Differences between individuals will either be absorbed when the community gathers to act as one, or these communal activities become battlegrounds. As one monk, a liturgist, once said to me, “Go to the dining room and to prayers, and you'll find out how a monastery is doing.”

When I think of all that monasteries have survived in the 1500-plus years of their existence—pirate raids, bandits, wars and revolutions, political and social upheavals of all kinds, dictators, tyrants, confiscation, foreclosure, martyrdom at the hands of kings, as well as co-opting by the wealthy and powerful—I find it amazing that they're still here. “We're as persistent as weeds,” one Benedictine friend says. “We just keep springing up.” I suspect that it is the difference, the adherence to monastic bedrock, what one sister calls the “non-negotiables” in the face of changing circumstances, that makes monasticism so indestructible. Monastic communities traffic in intangibles—worship, solitude, humility, peace—that are not easily manipulated by corporate concerns, not easily identified, packaged, and sold. It will be interesting to see how monastic communities fare in a world which gives more and more power to large, multinational corporations.

I expect they'll survive, with their difference, the absurdity of faith that attracts people to a communal way of life and gives them the strength to persevere in it. “The basis of community is not that we have all our personal needs met here, or that we find all our best friends in the monastery,” I once heard a monk say. In fact, he added, his pastoral experience with married couples had taught him that such unreasonably high expectations of any institution, be it a marriage or a monastery, was often what led to disillusionment, and dissolution of the bond. “What we have to struggle for, and to preserve, is a shared vision of the
why,”
he said, “why we live together. It's a common meaning, reinforced in the scriptures, a shared vision of the coming reign of God.”

We hear from Jerome today, at morning prayer, a section of the Prologue to his commentary on Isaiah. He was a contentious man: “Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ,” he booms, and his words shatter our sleepy silence. Jerome was the hard-edged, brilliant fellow who first translated the Hebrew scriptures into Latin. And, judging from his letters and his life, he may have been one of the most irascible people who ever lived.

Jerome is a saint feminists love to hate, and to quote: “Now that a virgin has conceived in the womb and borne to us a child . . . now the chain of the curse is broken. Death came through Eve, but life has come through Mary. And thus the gift of virginity has been bestowed most richly upon women, seeing that it has had its beginning from a woman.”

This is typical of the way in which the Christian biblical interpreters of the late fourth century—Jerome and then Augustine, not long after—made a connection between Eve and Mary. We've lost the wonder that these words must have had for those who first heard them; now we sigh, discouraged, hearing only the seeds of our well-worn, ludicrous sexual double standard which dictates that women must be either virgins or whores, either blessed or cursed, while men are simply sexual athletes, slaves of lust. (And, don't forget, Christian boys and girls, everyone is a temple of the Holy Spirit.)

As with most of these writings from a time so distant from our own, it is difficult to read without reading into it our modern frustrations, difficult to discern the complexities that resist our simplistic interpretations. To me, this passage reflects a fear of women that is thoroughly comprehensible: if Eve is the mother of the living, she is also mother of the dead. One of the most astonishing and precious things about motherhood is the brave way in which women consent to give birth to creatures who will one day die. That they do this is an awesome thing, as is their virginity, their existence in and of themselves, apart from that potential for bearing life and death. That we all begin inside a woman and must emerge from her body is something that the male theologians of the world's religions have yet to forgive us for.

The truth about Jerome is that he was an equal-opportunity curmudgeon. He despised both men and women, but women fascinated him more. Maybe because he genuinely believed that in them, as in Mary, lay the beginnings of salvation. Jerome's friendships with women—Paula, her daughter Eustochium, Marcella—certainly saved him from much hardship. These learned, powerful women had taken their considerable wealth out of the Roman Empire's reach in order to found monasteries and scholarly enterprises such as Jerome's. Without their friendship and financial support, his translation of the Bible would not have been possible.

It is clear from Jerome's correspondence that his friendships with these women were abiding and deep. I like to think that they inspired him to give the women of the New Testament a theological import that is radical, even now. Whenever I hear of conservative seminarians (Roman Catholic or Protestant) who bristle at the mention of Mary Magdalene as a model for the apostles, I think of Jerome's typically tart comment on the subject: “The unbelieving reader may perhaps laugh at me for dwelling so long on the praises of mere women; yet if he will but remember how holy women followed our Lord and Saviour and ministered to Him out of their substance, and how the three Marys stood before the cross and especially how Mary Magdalene—called the tower from the earnestness and glow of her faith—was privileged to see the rising Christ first of all before the very apostles, he will convict himself of pride sooner than me of folly. For we judge people's virtue not by their sex but by their character . . .”

Jerome's own character was notoriously difficult. As Peter Brown has dryly noted, he was a man “of pronounced ascetical views,” not at all shy about advising his lady friends on the virtues of going without baths, of aspiring to “holy knees hardened like a camel's from the frequency of prayers,” and of sleeping on cold floors, full of groans and tears. Who wouldn't cry?

The hymn we sing in Jerome's honor is a pleasant, generic hymn in praise of the saints, entitled “Who Are These Like Stars Appearing,” and it amuses me greatly to envision Jerome, of all people, shining like a star, and hating every minute of it. As we're leaving the church, I mention this to one of the monks. “Ah, poor Jerome,” he said, “forced to smile and sing for all of eternity. Maybe that's his punishment.” One of the theology students has overheard us. “The feast of St. Jerome,” he says, “Wickedness is in the air.”

It's always a relief to come to St. Thérèse after Jerome: from the bitter to the sweet, from the brutally ridiculous to the offhandedly sublime. For a few years, in the 1870s and early 1880s, Thérèse and Emily Dickinson were contemporaries. Thérèse was thirteen when Dickinson died, and already determined to join the Carmelite convent at Lisieux.

As Emily Dickinson was known to be attracted to the company of children—they were the eager recipients of cookies and gingerbread that she baked and lowered in baskets from the window of her room—I love to think that she might have enjoyed a conversation with the four-year-old Thérèse, whose response to being offered a handful of ribbons from which to choose was to say, simply, “I choose all.”

Both Thérèse and Emily Dickinson did choose all, I think, and in doing so gave up almost everything. First Corinthians attracted them both; I suspect it is where each woman found her calling. Emily Dickinson, attracted to Paul's confession of “weakness and much fear and trembling,” his knowing “nothing but Christ crucified,” speaks in her poems of daily crucifixion, of “newer—nearer Crucifixion.” Near the end of her life, she wrote in a letter: “When Jesus tells us about his Father, we distrust him. When he shows us his Home, we turn away, but when he confides to us that he is ‘acquainted with Grief,' we listen, for that also is an Acquaintance of our own.”

Commenting on First Corinthians in her autobiography, Thérèse laments that for a long time she could not find herself in any of the members which Paul describes in the epistle—not a martyr (that's a matter of opinion), not an apostle, but an insignificant young nun who was known in her convent mainly for her tendency to fall asleep during the Liturgy of the Hours. Remembering, suddenly, to be the bold child who chooses all, she states, “I have found my calling: my call is love,” and writes: “In the heart of the Church, my mother, I will be love, and thus I will be all things . . .”