The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [122]
If monks could only market this skill, no one would ever again accuse them of escapism or irrelevancy. It certainly does not contradict my experience of contemporary monks to find their ancestors so pastorally concerned with the problems of married women. One of the reasons that people still go to monasteries for help with their most intimate relationships is that celibate men and women often make remarkably good counselors in sexual matters, and in matters of the heart.
While few people today would expect a monk to go to the heroic lengths of the unnamed ascetic who appears in a fifth-century compilation of monastic stories, Palladius’s The Lausiac History, it would not surprise me to find a contemporary monk acting in a similar way. Identified only as “the Compassionate Monk,” he is said to have preferred, like many young monks today, not to be ordained to the priesthood. Rather, he lived a disciplined life of prayer in a city, and at night made the rounds of hospitals, prisons, and streets.
The impression we receive of the monk is appealing: “To some he gave words of good cheer, being himself stout of heart. Some he encouraged, others he reconciled; to some he gave bodily necessities, to others, clothing.” One winter night the monk hears a woman cry out near the entrance to the church where he is making his customary prayers. On finding that the woman is in labor, Palladius relates that he “took the midwife’s place, not at all squeamish about the unpleasant aspects of childbirth, for the mercy which worked in him had rendered him insensible to such things.” Considering the blood taboos that many religions establish with regard to the reproductive systems of women, the monk’s behavior is a radical act of charity. But in Christian monastic history, it is not that remarkable. Monastic stories often emphasize the primacy of love over legalism.
In Benedictine monasteries, it is often the demands of hospitality as set forth by Benedict—to receive all as Christ—that free monks to express the love of God in surprising ways. One monastery I know for a number of years hosted a regional meeting of the La Leche League. At first, the monks were startled by the sight of so many mothers breast-feeding in their refectory, but as one monk put it in the community newsletter, “It reminded us from whence we came.” And at St. John’s one spring, when the daughter of a couple at the Ecumenical Institute was toilet training, the monks found a way to help. The family came to Mass nearly every day, and normally the toddler was quietly attentive. Now, however, one of her parents usually had to take her to the bathroom during Mass. When the monks realized what was going on, and that the parents were using the nearest public bathroom, in the basement of the church, they invited them to use the one in the sacristy instead, which was much closer. It came to seem a regular part of the Mass, little Maria and her mom or dad making a dignified procession behind the monks’ choir stalls. When I complimented one of the monks on the abbey’s new apostolate of toilet training, he nodded solemnly, and then made a joke of it: “And why not? We do just about everything else here!”
For all of the happy stories—the stripper left stranded when her boyfriend tosses her luggage out of a moving car, who finds that monks are men who will give her food, lodging, sympathy, and access to a phone without expecting anything in return—when dealing with the subject of monks and women it is necessary to confront the specter of fear, the fear women have that monks hate and reject them, the fear