The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [124]
My favorite of these tales is humbling, as is much true comedy. It puts lust in its place better than any story I know. A beautiful widow suddenly realizes that her husband’s best friend has fallen in love with her.
She was wise, and knew what was going on, and said to him, “Master Simeon”—for this was his name—“I see that you are thinking about something: tell me what you feel and I will reassure you.” At first he was hesitant to speak, but later he confessed to her and pleaded with her to become his wife. She said to him, “If you do what I command you, I will accept.” He said to her, “Whatever you command me, I will do.” She said to him, “Go into your workshop and fast until I summon you, and in truth I will not eat anything until I call for you.” He agreed, but she did not tell him a specific time when she would call for him.
He went off for one day, then a second, then a third, and still she did not call for him. But he persevered, either out of love for her or because God had arranged matters and provided him with endurance. . . . On the fourth day she sent for him. He had little strength, and being unable to come on foot due to his suffering, he had to be carried. She for her part prepared a table and a bed and said to him, “Look, here is a table and there is a bed: where do you wish to begin?”
We are told that the narrator is Simeon himself, who has long been a monk and remembers with great tenderness the conversation between himself and the widow, who had told him that “with the protection of Christ, I hope to remain as I am, a widow.” He had replied, “Since the Lord has seen fit to oversee my salvation by means of your wisdom, what do you advise me to do?” and she suggested that he become a monk, and become “pleasing to God.”
July 11
BENEDICT’S CAVE
All tribes have their origin stories; the Benedictines tell of emerging from a cave near Subiaco, Italy, where Benedict had lived as a hermit after leaving the city of Rome. Even after he had died, the story goes, the cave retained enough of Benedict’s peace of soul to have a healing effect on those who came there. One of my favorite stories about St. Benedict in Gregory the Great’s Dialogues concerns a woman who had lost her reason. She was wandering, Gregory tells us, “day and night over mountains, valleys, forests, and plains. She rested only where exhaustion had forced her to stop. One day as she wandered aimlessly, she came to the cave of the blessed Benedict and, without knowing what she was doing, entered and stayed there. In the morning when she left, her reason was as sound as if she had never been mad. And in addition, for the rest of her life, she kept the sanity which had been restored to her.”
I must confess that I like this story of a cave far better than Plato’s; it’s been of much more use to me. I, too, have a mind that often wanders, that doesn’t know where it is. And I have found that monasteries have a way of bringing me back to myself. I am back at St. John’s for a week, attending the Monastic Institute and also the Feast of St. Benedict on July 11. I’ve been asked to join some other women in the schola for the feast-day Mass and am overjoyed to be singing again in a choir. (Back at home, the church choir takes the summer off.)
The talk at the Institute has been strikingly honest. One sister presented a paper in which she said that when she considered her monastic life, the feelings that came were “disillusionment, discomfort, low-grade anxiety, depression, uncertainty, loss, sadness, anger, and above all,” she added, “dissonance; a keenly felt gap between the desire and the reality.” She said that she wondered if too much talk in recent years of setting community goals, too many high-minded sentences about maintaining a balance between prayer, work, and recreation, had effectively allowed people to deny how far out of balance things have