The Cloister Walk (6 page)

This is the reading in the breviary for this day, and the text I had expected to hear at morning prayer. Instead, I am startled awake by Thérèse in another mode: “For a long time,” she says, “I have wondered why the good Lord has preferences . . . I was surprised to see the Lord give extraordinary favors to saints who had offended him.” (She may be referring here to St. Jerome.) Why these saints, she wonders, blessed all their lives by God's interfering presence, when there are so many people Thérèse considers to be unimaginably poor, “dying without even hearing the name of God . . .”

She finds her answer in the “book of nature” that Jesus has given her. Contemplating the diversity of flowers, she writes, “I have come to realize, that the radiance of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not take away the fragrance of the little violet or the delightful simplicity of the daisy.” She decides that “perfection consists in being what God wants us to be.”

It was a decision that was to cost her dearly. Emerging out of the narrow confines of nineteenth-century Jansenism, a thickly pious little girl, adored and spoiled by her parents and older sisters, she rushed headlong into the wide spaces of sanctity, only to be confined again by tuberculosis, a disease in which the lungs become brittle over time, and are finally coughed out. With a temerity equal to that of Paul (and Emily Dickinson), she addressed Jesus frequently towards the end of her life, saying “My little story, which was like a fairy tale, has turned into prayer.”

Thérèse was then twenty-four, and close to death. At Easter of 1896, the year before she died, she herself had become impoverished by the loss of a sense of God's presence that had been with her all her life. She saw this as grace, that God should permit her to be overwhelmed by impenetrable darkness. Again, she addresses God: “Lord, your child has understood your divine light: she asks pardon for her brothers, and consents to eat for as long as you wish it the bread of sorrow, and she will not rise from this table, which is filled with bitterness, where poor sinners eat, until the day you have appointed. Further, can she not say in their name . . . ‘Have pity on us, Lord, for we are poor sinners.' ” Thérèse concludes, boldly, “I told [the Lord] that I am happy not to enjoy heaven here on earth in order that he may open heaven for ever to poor unbelievers.”

Here a saint emerges, an astonishing brat who dares to speak thus to God, in a voice that Emily Dickinson might well recognize as kindred to her own. (I can hear them talking, perhaps in the Elysian Fields: “My business is to love . . . My business is to sing,” Emily says, and Thérèse replies, “My call is love . . . love embraces every time and every place.” From the confines of a room in Amherst, a drafty cell at the Carmel in Lisieux, each woman might be said to have traveled extensively.) I believe that Thérèse became a uniquely valuable twentieth-century saint, a woman who can accept even the torment of doubt, as she lay dying, as a precious gift, who turns despair into a fervent prayer for others. I think of her as a saint for unbelievers in an age of unbelief, a voice of compassion in an age of beliefs turned rigid, defensive, violent.

Late in the morning, I emerge from my study in the basement of the library to find buses of the Guardian School Bus company disgorging flocks of brightly dressed children, who with their wary-looking teachers and weary parents, are waiting—jumping, dancing, screaming, running, slapping hands and knees—on the steps of the abbey church. Soon they'll take a tour of the woods and no doubt collect some red and golden leaves. I notice in the courtyard by the guest wing of the monastery that tough little roses are still in bloom, despite the hard frost.

It has to do with us, this feast. What we long for, and see, and do not see. “And so the angels are here,” says St. Bernard, whispering like a child.

Two crows interpose themselves between me and the golden trees—ash, oak—between the blood-red maple and a full moon grown pale in a cloudless blue. Their cries, on the chill wind, come as mystery, much like the question Bernard tosses up to God: “What are we, that you make yourselves known to us?”

The Benedictine monks of St. John's Abbey practice what is known as
lectio continua,
reading through whole books of the Bible, a section at a time, at morning and evening prayer. They read through the entire New Testament in this way every year, and during the time I've spent with them—eighteen months over the last three years—we also listened to Genesis, Ruth, Tobit, Esther, Job, the Song of Songs, Hosea, Jonah, and large portions of the books of Exodus, Samuel, Kings, and Isaiah. The most remarkable experience of all was plunging into the prophet Jeremiah at morning prayer in late September one year, and staying with him through mid-November. We began with chapter 1, and read straight through, ending at chapter 22:17. Listening to Jeremiah is one hell of a way to get your blood going in the morning; it puts caffeine to shame.

The monastic discipline of listening aims to still body and soul so that the words of a reading may sink in. Such silence tends to open a person, and opening oneself to a prophet as anguished as Jeremiah is painful. On some mornings, I found it impossible. Like one of my monk friends, who had the duty of reading the prophet aloud through some particularly grim passages, I felt like shouting, “Have a Nice Day!” to the assembly. Easier to mock a prophet than to listen to him.

On other days, I became angry, or was reduced to tears, perhaps a promising sign that something of Jeremiah's grief had broken through my defenses. The command in chapter 4:3, “Break up your fallow ground,” stayed with me long enough to elicit a response in my journal. The ancient monastics recognized that a life of prayer must “work the earth of the heart,” and with their acceptance of the painful, and even violent nature of this process in mind, I wrote, “And as I take my spade in hand, as far as I can see, great clods of earth are waiting, heavy and dark, a hopeless task. First weeds will come, then whatever it is I've planted. I feel the struggle in my knees and back.”

One beneficial effect of
lectio continua
is that it enables a person to hear the human voices of biblical authors. It becomes obvious, for instance, that Paul's letters are actual letters, meant to be read aloud, and in their entirety, to church congregations. The monks, in keeping that tradition alive, are also helping Paul's words to live in the present. Paul's theological wheel-turning can lose me—Oscar Wilde once described Paul's prose style as one of the principal arguments against Christianity—but hearing Paul read aloud in the monk's choir allowed me to take an unaccustomed pleasure in the complex play Paul makes of even his deepest theology. To hear the joke working its way through 1 Corinthians 1:21 is to get the point: “For since in the wisdom of God the world did not come to know God through wisdom, it was the will of God through the foolishness of the proclamation to save those who have faith.” Hearing the passage read slowly one night at vespers, I suddenly grasped the exasperation there, and God's good humor, and it made me laugh.

Listening to the Bible read aloud is not only an invaluable immersion in religion as an oral tradition, it allows even the scripture scholars of a monastic community to hear with fresh ears. A human voice is speaking, that of an apostle, or a prophet, and the concerns critical to biblical interpretation—authorship of texts, interpolation of material, redaction of manuscript sources—recede into the background. One doesn't forget what one knows, and the process of listening may well inform one's scholarship. But in communal
lectio,
the fact that the Book of Jeremiah has several authors matters far less than that a human voice is speaking, and speaking to you. Even whether or not you believe that this voice speaks the word of God is less important than the sense of being sought out, personally engaged, making it possible, even necessary, to respond personally, to take the scriptures to heart.

Taking Jeremiah to heart, day in day out, I got much more than I bargained for. I found it brave of these Benedictines, in late-twentieth-century America, in a culture of denial, to try to listen to a prophet at all. The response of the monks was illuminating, and sometimes comical. “Know what you have done,” Jeremiah shouted at us one morning (2:23), but before we could get over the ferocity of that command—it's so much easier to live
not
knowing what we've done—the prophet had gone on to a vivid depiction of Israel as a frenzied camel in heat, loudly sniffing the wind, making directionless tracks in the sand. This was imagery we could smell; the poetry of scripture at its earthy best.

Monks are not used to being compared to camels in heat, but they took it pretty well. I noticed eyebrows going up around the choir, and then a kind of quiet assent:
well, there are days.
Monks know very well how easy it is to lose track of one's purpose in life, how hard to maintain the discipline that keeps (in St. Benedict's words) “our minds in harmony with our voices” in prayer, the ease with which aimless desire can disturb our hearts. “Stop wearing out your shoes” (2:25), Jeremiah said, and we sat up straight. This was something a crusty desert father might have said to a recalcitrant young monk who thought that some other monastery might suit him better, or whose restlessness was preventing prayer: get hold of yourself, settle down.
Stop wearing out your shoes.
Good advice for us in America, in a society grown alarmingly mobile, where retreats and spirituality workshops have become such a hot consumer item one wonders if seeking the holy has become an end in itself.

One day, not long after we'd begun to read Jeremiah, and it was dawning on us that we had a long, rough road ahead, a monk said to me: “We haven't read a prophet for a while, and we need to hear it. It's good for us.” Another said he was glad to be reading Jeremiah in the morning, and not at evening prayer, when there are more likely to be guests. “The monks can take it,” he said, “but most people have no idea what's in the Bible, and they come unglued.”

Coming unglued came to seem the point of listening to Jeremiah. The prophet, after all, is witness to a time in which his world, the society surrounding the temple in Jerusalem, meets a violent end, and Israel is taken captive to Babylon. Hearing Jeremiah's words every morning, I soon felt challenged to reflect on the upheavals in our own society, and in my life. A prophet's task is to reveal the fault lines hidden beneath the comfortable surface of the worlds we invent for ourselves, the national myths as well as the little lies and delusions of control and security that get us through the day. And Jeremiah does this better than anyone.

The voice of Jeremiah is compelling, often on an overwhelmingly personal level. One morning, I was so worn out by the emotional roller coaster of chapter 20 that after prayers I walked to my apartment and went back to bed. This passionate soliloquy, which begins with a bitter outburst on the nature of the prophet's calling (“You enticed me, O Lord, and I was enticed”), moves quickly into denial (“I say to myself, I will not mention him, I will speak in his name no more. But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones”). Jeremiah's anger at the way his enemies deride him rears up, and also fear and sorrow (“All my close friends are watching for me to stumble”). His statement of confidence in God (“The Lord is with me like a dread warrior”) seems forced under the circumstances, and a brief doxology (“Sing to the Lord, praise the Lord, for he has delivered the life of the needy from the hands of evildoers”) feels more ironic than not, being followed by a bitter cry: “Cursed be the day that I was born.” The chapter concludes with an anguished question: “Why did I come forth from the womb, to see sorrow and pain, to end my days in shame?”