The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [110]
Ceremony forces a person to slow down, and as many of us live at a frenzied pace, encountering monastic prayer, or a traditional monastic meal—eaten in silence while a passage from scripture or a religious book is read aloud—can feel like skidding to a halt. My nine months’ immersion in the slow, steady rhythms of monastic life was a kind of gestation. But now that I’m back “in the world,” now that my husband and I have come home from Minnesota, I’m not sure what I’m giving birth to. At times I’m homesick for a place that isn’t mine, homesick for two hundred monks and their liturgy. Most people have the sense not to get themselves into such a predicament. What do I do now for ceremony, and community?
My instinct is to keep as much of the monastery in me as possible. Now I honor the coming of dawn with a long walk instead of going to church, but small difference, if I can turn it toward prayer. I keep some Benedictine practices, as best as I can: reading psalms daily, singing hymns, and also doing lectio, a meditative reading of scripture. Otherwise I suspect my world would go flat. And sometimes it does: sometimes I’m closed off from both beauty and pain, suffering from what the world calls “depression” but the ancient monks would call listlessness or acedia. Drought times, when I have to hunker down and wait for rain, for hope.
I keep in touch with my monastic friends at St. John’s, and at other, smaller communities in the Dakotas that I visit frequently. Above all, I try to remember where I am: a small town on the Great Plains that may not be here in fifty years. But even in this hamlet of 1600 souls, considered insignificant by the rest of the world, there is much that people need to tell. I became more reclusive over the last year, but when I’m with people I try to listen to them. Alice, for one. When the Presbyterian church recently held its Sunday service in the park, the minister sharing a flatbed truck with a local country-western band, Alice and I were standing over to the side. A country woman, the wife of a retired rancher in poor health, she was someone I’d missed when I was away. Her only child, a young man of thirty-five, had died unexpectedly the year before. She stood there, swaying to the music, the steel guitar whining through “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” and said, “I haven’t danced in three years.” “Well, it’s time, then, Alice,” I said. And so we danced.
THE GARDEN
My garden, even more than most, is an exercise in faith. And in failure. I inherited it when I moved to my grandmother’s house but scarcely knew what I had. Her perennial flowers were up and in bud in the wet spring when we moved into the house. I had memories of the garden as a child, of weeding and thinning the leaf lettuce that we would eat sprinkled with vinegar and sugar, of helping my grandmother pick tomatoes and string beans. Visiting her flowers, admiring the day lilies, lily-of-the-valley, painted daisies, columbines, and other flowers whose names I forget, was one of the joys of summer when I was a child.
In the first years I was in the house, I felt that I should care for the flowers but didn’t know how. Advice from neighbors helped, but not enough. Advice from books was sometimes of use, but often it only reinforced my sense of myself as a hopeless gardener. I’d weed around the flowers and usually pull some flowers by mistake. Often, in the spring, I was working away from home, and the weeds got away from me. I was mightily impressed that the columbines and painted daisies never failed to come