The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [112]
I’ve also taken great pleasure in the times I’ve been able to yoke my disparate worlds together in such a way that the congregation can benefit. I’ve found that the practical wisdom of the desert fathers and mothers, for example, is something that people here can appreciate. It’s biblically based enough for any Protestant, and it’s also great storytelling, which keeps people awake in the pews. People enjoyed the story about the monk who decided that he was making no spiritual progress in the monastery. He told the other monks that they were holding him back, constantly doing things that made him angry, which of course interfered with his prayer. But when the monk had left and was settling in a cave of his own, looking forward to perfect peace, he became frustrated over some trifle and threw a water jug against a wall, breaking it in pieces. Realizing that his anger was within him, and that it would be with him wherever he went, he returned to the monastery, apologized, and was taken back.
Dorotheus of Gaza has been a big hit; in fact it was people’s responses to quotes from him in my sermons that first led me to suspect that there might be a good many connections between monasteries and small towns. Anyone who has endured the pain of gossip at close quarters, the petty squabbles that erupt in church congregations, can appreciate the honesty of Dorotheus: “We remain all the time against one another,” he says, “grinding one another down . . . Each considers himself right and excuses himself . . . all the while keeping none of the Commandments, yet expecting his neighbor to keep the lot!” When I read this at Hope, the country church, people nodded; they saw themselves in it, even though Dorotheus had said it about monks living in sixth-century Egypt.
Only those who know how long resentments can smolder in the living memory of a congregation can best savor Dorotheus’s advice that prayer is the only remedy, particularly a difficult and humbling prayer such as, “O God, help my brother, and help me through his prayers.” In this prayer, Dorotheus says, we show sympathy and love for those with whom we’re in conflict, and also acknowledge our need for compassion in return. “Where there is sympathy and love and humility,” Dorotheus asks, how can anger continue to develop? He compares the ability to pray for our enemies to learning a trade such as carpentry. “Always [we have to] start by doing,” he says, “and doing it wrong, making and unmaking, until, little by little, patiently and persevering, [we] learn the trade while God looks on at [our] labor and humility, and works with [us.]” These words might make no sense at all in the world as most of us know it, but people who are committed for the long haul to either a monastery or a small-town church know how true they are. The Hope and Spencer congregations have also appreciated the pithy definition of anger by another monk, Abba Isaiah, who summarized it as quarreling, lying, and ignorance. And also, John Climacus’s evocative bodily image in his statement that “the man who claims to love the Lord but is angry with his neighbor is like a man who dreams he is running.”
I seldom quote from modern theologians in my sermons, although I’m often indebted to their scholarship, because I often find their language too theoretical to be of much use. The language of the theologians of the early church, however, is remarkably vivid, energized by metaphors so grounded in earthy reality as to still be effective after more than a thousand years. John Chrysostom, for example, one of the most learned men of the fourth century, often speaks in a way that is thoroughly accessible to country people today. “Pride is a rock,” he said, “where wild beasts lurk that would tear you to pieces every day.” In coyote country, that image has real meaning.
I have fun giving Chrysostom, old “Golden Mouth” himself, a good run