The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [121]
The trees that fan me are the fruit of others’ labor, planted by an earlier generation of Plains dwellers who longed for trees to shelter them. The land resisted, but let them have these few. I am startled by something flashing through the trees. It is the Pleiades, all seven of them plainly visible to the naked eye. This is another’s work, and a mystery. And it is enough.
MONKS AND
WOMEN
It is, of course, a tangled history. It was my experience of monks in the present day that first led me to suspect that the old stereotype of the woman-hating holy man was only part of the story. I so rarely met monks who despised women, or even seemed uncomfortable around them, that I began to wonder, and to read. I soon found that even in the unlikeliest sources, such as a book about ancient Syrian monasticism, which expressed itself in the most extreme forms of asceticism, there was much evidence that relationships between monks and women were often surprisingly open and free. Theodoret of Cyrrhus’s A History of the Monks of Syria is not a book for the faint of heart. It reflects a time, to paraphrase an old Montana joke, when monks were monks and Arians were scared. The death of the heretic Arius, as depicted in this book, “his inwards dissolved and ejected with his excrement,” is one of the most disgusting things I have ever read.
But in the midst of this praise of hermits “hoary in hair and hoarier still in thought,” there is also a remarkable sweetness. Theodoret himself came to know the monks through his mother. She had gone to the cave of a monk named Macedonius to seek his prayers when she was trying to conceive a child. And when she was in danger of miscarriage, she sent for him to come and lay his hands on her belly and pray over her. Theodoret later recalls the old monk exhorting him “to live a life worthy of this toil.”
When Theodoret was a boy, he and his mother went to visit several of the monks on a regular basis, which was possible to do because Syrian monks lived closer to cities than their Egyptian counterparts. Theodoret recalls of the monk Peter that “he often sat me on his knee and fed me grapes and bread: my mother [had sent] me to reap his blessings once a week.” His mother had met Peter when, as a young woman afflicted with a disease in one of her eyes, she had sought him out for healing. As Theodoret says, she was then “at the flower of age . . . content with the adornment of youth,” and she came to the monk wearing cosmetics, much gold jewelry, and an elaborate silk dress. The monk admonished her gently; “By supposing your body to require [all this],” he said, “you condemn the Creator for deficiency.” It is a remark that might be interpreted as misogyny, but in the context of the story—the monk pleads that he is only a man with the same nature as hers, and has no special access to God—it is clear that the monk believes the woman to be made in the image of God, good as she is, without unnecessary adornment.
I thought of this story not long ago when a friend who is obsessed with her appearance developed an ugly and uncomfortable rash on her face, and she decided to deal with it by switching the brand of foundation makeup that she wears daily. I longed to say—why not let your skin breathe? I thought of Theodoret’s mother and wondered if it was her cosmetics that had irritated and inflamed her eye, a common occurrence, even now. If so, the monk had doubly blessed her, in steering her toward psychological as well as physical health. As Theodoret writes: “In quest of healing for the body, she obtained in addition the health of the soul.”
In many instances sterile women sought out these monks in the belief that their prayers would help them to conceive. And in