The Cloister Walk (8 page)

When I was beginning to write poetry in college, in the 1960s, it seemed as if, for contemporary poets, madness and suicide were the primary occupational hazards. Religion itself was dangerous for some, a goad to the manic-depressive roller coaster. (John Berryman and Anne Sexton are tragic examples.) It seemed that the best one could do was to take what one of my teachers called “the artist's road to redemption,” and find salvation through writing. This worked for me for years.

That it worked so well for so long is a credit to the nature of the poetic call. Art is a lonely calling, and yet paradoxically communal. If artists invent themselves, it is in the service of others. The work of my life is given to others; in fact, the reader completes it. I say the words I need to say, knowing that most people will ignore me, some will say, “You have no right,” and a few will tell me that I've expressed the things they've long desired to articulate but lacked the words to do so.

By what authority does the poet, or prophet, speak? How dare the poet say “I” and not mean the self? How dare the prophet say “Thus says the Lord”? It is the authority of experience, but by this I do not mean experience used as an idol, as if an individual's experience of the world were its true measure. I mean experience tested in isolation, as by the desert fathers and mothers, and also tried in the crucible of community. I mean a “call” taken to heart, and over years of apprenticeship to an artistic discipline, developed into something that speaks to others.

The Oxford Companion to the Bible
suggests that the emotional power of Jeremiah 20, and several other chapters in the book that evoke the tensions of a prophet's calling, comes from the fact that “behind the apparently untroubled certainty of ‘Thus says the Lord,' there may lie a host of unresolved questions and deep inner turmoil.” It's no wonder. Jeremiah grieves—“Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored? O that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep day and night for the slain of my poor people!” (8:22; 9:1)—but if he grieves, he must also speak words of unspeakable violence—“[your friends] shall fall to the sword of their enemies while you look on” (20:4)—to the very people he loves; he must plead to God on their behalf: “We look for peace, but find no good; for a time of healing, but there is terror instead” (14:19).

In our own time we look for peace and healing, but our newspapers are filled with tales of violence and rage. And Jeremiah holds this world up to us, as a mirror. Hearing his words every morning, as personal as my response to Jeremiah sometimes was, I also recognized, in the months that we took his body blows at morning prayer, the public dimension of his prophecy and of our response. Jeremiah's lament over a land so ravaged that even the birds and animals have fled has a powerful resonance in an age in which species are rapidly disappearing, and the threat of nuclear warfare remains. His bleak image of death “cutting down the children in the street, young people in the squares, the corpses of the slain like dung on a field, like sheaves behind the harvester, with no one to harvest them” (9:20-21) could have come from a
Newsweek
story on Bosnia, or Rwanda, or inner-city America. Much as the people of Judah who worshiped at the temple, Americans tend to think of themselves as good, religious people, and their nation as morally superior. Yet child prostitution thrives, hunger and homelessness plague us, in many of our cities death by gunshot is the number-one cause of death for young men, and violent crime is such that people of all ages do not feel safe in their homes, or on neighborhood streets.

The contemporaneity of Jeremiah made me reflect on our need for prophets; I'd sit in the monks' choir and let the naive thoughts come:
it really is this bad, and if people heard it they would want to change; they'd have to change.
Of course it was Jeremiah himself who'd bring me back to earth, to the bitterness of his call, when God tells him: “You shall speak to them and they will not listen; you shall call and they shall not answer” (7:27). Yet a prophet speaks out of hope and, like all the prophets, Jeremiah's ultimate hope is for justice, a people made holy by “doing what is right and just in the land” (33:15). As the carriers of hope through disastrous times, prophets are a necessary other. And we reject them because they make us look at the way things really are; they don't allow us to deny our pain.

In the Book of Jeremiah we encounter a very human prophet, and a God who is alarmingly alive. Jeremiah makes it clear that no one chooses to fall into the hands of such a God. You are chosen, you resist, you resort to rage and bitterness and, finally, you succumb to the God who has given you your identity in the first place. All that fall, when Jeremiah's grief and my own impossible situation cast me into deep loneliness, I was grateful to be sustained by the liturgy that had brought me to Jeremiah and insisted that I listen to him.

And on the feast of St. John Lateran, in early November, a feast commemorating the dedication of a Roman basilica erected by the Emperor Constantine, and traditionally referred to as “the mother church of Christendom,” the words of Psalm 46—“God is within, it cannot be shaken”—suddenly revealed God to me as a place, both without and within. In my notebook I wrote: “In naming myself as a ‘necessary other,' I finally accept the cross of myself, a burden I've carried ever since childhood, and felt so acutely in my teens. The cross of difference, of being outside, always other. But now, I am free to take it on. It seems appropriate, on this feast.”

At morning prayer, we heard these words from Ephesians 2: “So you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus as the cornerstone.” The altar gleamed, bone-white, before the dark wood of the monks' choir, and I could dare to conceive of the Church as refuge, a place to find the divided self made whole, the voice of the mocker overcome by the voice of the advocate. It is still a sinful Church—how could it be otherwise?—but the words of its prophets and apostles had led me to this sanctuary, and I could dare to imagine it as home, a place where there is no “other.”

The monks are decorating the church and baptistry with vigil lights and greenery. The two who've been assigned to place relics in the baptistry are engaged in a bidding war: “Trade you one Lucy for two Saint Ritas, one Bonaventure for three Peter Damians.” I pretend to be shocked. “You
Catholics,”
I say, as I pass by, and they glare at me, pretending to be offended.

Photismos
is a word I've learned today, from Father Godfrey, an ancient word for baptism. I like the way it shares a root with photosynthesis, the way the saints might be said to have heeded the command in 1 John 3, to “come to light.”

At morning prayer, in the Book of Revelation, a new song is spoken of. St. Bernard laments, “The saints want us to be with them, and we are indifferent. . . . Let us long for those who are longing for us,” he pleads, and I think of human weakness turned into strength, human folly become the wisdom of God.

On All Souls, the mood is somber. We say the Office for the Dead, we ask for mercy. We pray for “the faithful departed,” but out of habit I add “and the unfaithful,” or, as one of the eucharistic prayers puts it, “those whose faith is known to you alone,” those whose stories are a messy, long departure. Louise Bogan, who said to a friend, “The gift of faith has been denied me,” Anne Sexton, who told a priest, “I love faith, but have none,” John Berryman, who wrote, “I would like if possible to be buried in consecrated ground.”

They told it well, but darkly. Now the feasts wheel round, in the dark of the year. All Saints, All Souls, all song and story.

It is good to be asked to dine with other people; I've had too little of that lately. But the Benedictine women at St. John's, who have come from monasteries as far away as Australia and South Africa to work or to study, have decided to celebrate the Feast of St. Gertrude in a big way, and I'm one of several Benedictine oblates whom they've invited for a festal meal followed by vespers in the grad school dorm. I've been looking forward to it for days.

At morning prayer we hear from Gertrude's Fourth Spiritual Exercise, a prayer I find as touching as it is various: “Deliver me from timidity of spirit and from storminess. . . . From all heedlessness in my behavior, deliver me O Lord.” I do not know Gertrude's writing well, but I know the story. In the year 1260, at the age of four, she entered the great monastery of Helfta in Saxony, and received an education there—she wrote in both Latin and her native German. But she was for years, as she later put it, a nun in name only: frivolous, vain, inattentive to the Divine Office.

When she was twenty-six, she endured a month of restlessness, with a deeply troubled mind. Then one night, as she was walking in the monastery at dusk, in the deep silence after compline, an older nun approached. Gertrude bowed to her, as prescribed in the Rule of Benedict: “Whenever sisters meet, the junior asks her senior for a blessing.” But when Gertrude looked up, she saw the face of the youthful Christ, a boy of about sixteen. “Courteously and in a gentle voice,” she later wrote, “he said to me: ‘Soon will come your salvation; why are you so sad?' ”

The older nun passed by, and Gertrude was changed forever. I have a busy morning, and race to noon prayer. On such a day, the brief reading and silent response is welcome, a door that opens onto the still point, where my heart is. Today we hear from the Song of Songs: “Arise, my love . . . let me see your face and hear your voice . . . For your voice is sweet, and your face is lovely.”

The word “lovely” resonates through the choir, poignant among the celibates. If Christ speaks to them, I suppose it is now, but this is beyond my grasp. I miss my husband—his voice, his face—though it's been two months since I have seen him, and his face has grown indistinct in my mind. Nevertheless, I hold him there, for a moment, and the distance between us is as nothing.

My afternoon is full of errands, annoying but necessary. It ends more pleasantly, at a lecture in which a monk, a historian, remarks that “church history for a long time was largely a cosmetic process, which,” he says, slowly, savoring the words, “if you were remarkably stupid, could be edifying.” In describing the environment surrounding the creation of the magnificently illuminated Lindisfarne Gospel in the seventh century, he says, “Everyone lived in the sticks, nothing was going on. They had enormous amounts of time and could enjoy figuring things out.” It sounds good.

I hurry home and change into a simple dress of bright green flannel. I add a scarlet and gold scarf made of sari cloth. God, the laughter. I hear it as soon as I enter the dorm. Women are cooking, chopping vegetables, washing paring knives and serving spoons, transforming the homely little communal kitchen into a place of feast. My offerings, homemade bread and a magnum of champagne, are accepted with joyful exclamation. One of the grad students pokes his head in the door and says, “My, Sister Julie, you're looking sultry tonight.” Julie, a highly spirited and pretty young woman, replies with mock confusion: “Sultry? Why? Is my face broken out?” as she good-naturedly shoos the young man out.

At dinner, discussion turns toward something I've noticed that Benedictines seldom talk about, that is, the angelic nature of their calling. Their Liturgy of the Hours is, at root, a symbolic act, an emulation of and a joining with the choirs in heaven who sing the praise of God unceasingly. To most people even to think of such things seems foolish, and Benedictines are well aware that their motives are easily misinterpreted, labeled as romanticist or escapist. “Anyone who knows us knows we're down to earth,” one sister says. “We have to be, to live in community as we do.”