The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [109]
I was walking down the center aisle, trying to keep to the slow, deliberate pace the liturgy director had established as we proceeded down the cloister walk into the church. But it was hard, because I was alone now, and had little to gauge myself by. As instructed, I was holding the scriptures, a big book of lectionary readings, out in front of me at a little more than shoulder height. Following me, walking two by two, were nearly two hundred monks in black habits, and bringing up the rear, two acolytes and a priest who would preside at this Mass on the Seventh Sunday of Easter. The congregation of several hundred had risen for the first hymn as I started slowly down the aisle.
An incongruous thought danced through my mind: even Mae West never entered a room followed by this many men. I seemed incongruous, too, someone with a checkered past, who until the last few years hadn’t been to church much since high school. Breathing deeply, to get my bearings, I found that I was walking a path with a downward tilt much more steep than I had realized. By contrast, the altar loomed before me, brilliant white, a simple but powerful shape. The magnificent folds of concrete holding up the roof seemed weightless, and the expanse above me limitless, the ceiling lifted clean off by the sound of the pipe organ.
It was the reverse of an experience most adults have had, of returning to a place that had seemed vast in childhood, and finding it pathetically small. This church was a place I thought I knew, a big space I’d tamed by my daily presence there. Now I was discovering that it was wild after all, and could roar like the sea. Walking on the terrazzo floor, I was reminded of a recurring dream, in which I move through the galaxy, stepping delicately (and sometimes leaping) from star to star. This sunlit room now seemed such an expanse, my every step daring an enormous distance.
My mind chugged along: don’t stumble on the steps, remember to bow at the altar and put the lectionary on the ambo. Take the first choir stall on the left but don’t sit down, because the monks will enter there. They swept past me like small black clouds to take their places with me in the front row, and I found the voice to sing the last verse of the hymn as the liturgy began to flow in all directions around me. The quantum effect.
I did my reading, a text from the Book of Acts about the stoning of Stephen. “I see an opening in the sky,” Stephen said, and I thought, “Amen.” Good liturgy can act like an icon, a window into a world in which our concepts of space, time, and even stone are pleasurably bent out of shape. Good liturgy is a living poem, and ceremony is the key.
Any outsider writing about monastic life runs the risk of romanticizing it. I’ve simply described what I experienced one Sunday morning at St. John’s. I’m assuming, hoping even, that some of the monks were wondering what was for dinner, or thinking dark thoughts about a confrere who had annoyed them at breakfast, or regretting a sharp remark they’d made over the pool table the night before. Good ceremony makes room for all the dimensions of human experience in the hope that, together, we will discover something that transforms us. This is why I suspect that individuals can’t create true ceremony for themselves alone. Ceremony requires that we work with others in the humbling give-and-take of communal existence.
Monastic people seek to weave ceremony through every mundane part of life: how one eats, how one dresses, how one treats tools, or enters a church are not left to whim. Ceremony is so large a part of what Benedictines do that it becomes second nature to many of them. The monastic life has this in common with the artistic one: both are attempts to pay close attention to objects, events, and natural phenomena that otherwise would get chewed up in the daily grind. One of the things I like most about monastic people is the respect they