The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [120]
This brings me back to where I began, with Jim Burden’s reflection on scarcity. If scarcity makes things more precious, what does it mean to choose the spare world over one in which we are sated with abundance? Is this the spiritual dimension that Brave Buffalo leads us to? Does living in a place with so few trees bring with it certain responsibilities? Gratitude, for example? The painful acceptance that underlies Psalm 16’s “Happy indeed whatever heritage falls to me”?
Monastic men and women tell me that one question that bites pretty hard in their early years in the monastery is why anyone would choose to live this way, deprived of the autonomy and abundance of choices that middle-class Americans take for granted. We’re taught all our lives to “keep our options open,” but a commitment to monastic life puts an end to that. It is not a choice but a call, and often the people who last in a monastery are those who struggle through their early years reminding themselves of that fact. One sister told me that it wasn’t until she had entered monastic formation that the words of Jesus in John 15 had any significance in her life: “You did not choose me, I chose you.”
Stark words in a stark environment. A monk in his early thirties once told me that he’d come to the monastery not realizing what a shock it would be to suddenly not have to compete for the things that young men are conditioned to compete for in American society—in his words, “a good salary, a cool car, and a pretty girlfriend. When all of that was suddenly gone,” he said, “and held of no account, I felt as if my whole life were a lie. It took me years to find out who God wanted me to be.”
What does it mean to become simple? I think of the abbey of New Mellary in Iowa, the walls of its church long plastered over, until the architectural consultant the monks had hired to help them remodel discovered that underneath the plaster were walls of native stone. The monks themselves did the work of uncovering them, and now the church is a place where one can sit and wait and watch the play of sunlight and shadow, a place made holy by the simple glory of light on stone.
What would I find in my own heart if the noise of the world were silenced? Who would I be? Who will I be, when loss or crisis or the depredations of time take away the trappings of success, of self-importance, even personality itself? Could the trees of my beloved Plains, or the lack of them, help me to know? The first monks read the earth as the work and word of God, a creation that was spoken into being. “Study fish,” advises St. Gregory of Nazianzus. “In the water they fly, and they find the air they need in the water. They would die in our atmosphere, just as we would die in the water. Watch their habits, their way of mating and procreating their kind, their beauty, their permanent homes and their wanderings.” Look, Gregory says, “at the bees and the spiders. Where do their love of work and their ingenuity come from? Can you explain it and arrive at an understanding of the wisdom they point to?”
The wisdom of the few, struggling trees on the Plains, and the vast spaces around them, are a continual reminder that my life is cluttered by comparison. At home, an abundance of books and papers overlays the heavy furniture I inherited from my grandparents. A perfectly simple room, with one perfect object to meditate on, remains a dream until I step outside, onto the Plains. A tree. A butte. The sunrise. It always makes me wonder: What is enough? Are there enough trees here? As always, it seems that the more I can distinguish between my true needs and my wants, the more I am shocked to realize how little is enough.
Late one summer night, a front moves in and I awaken. A fierce wind stirs the trees. It’s been hot for so long, I go outdoors to luxuriate