The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [125]
She’d touched on a sensitive issue, and discussion was remarkably frank and lively. “The ideal that we so often hear,” one sister said, “is that monastic people are not defined by what they do, but I don’t see us living up to that. The job, the profession, the career is the thing, especially for those of us who teach.” A monk said that a running joke in his community is that the Benedictines should change their motto from “ora et labora” (pray and work) to “ora et labora et labora et labora.” Another monk spoke up and said that he’d often thought that work had a tendency to destroy community life. “If we find our individual fulfillment in work,” he said, “does that mean that common living has become merely a common residence, a common dining hall, a matter of convenience? What I’d hope for,” he added, “is that we could find a common bond, common support for our diversity of work.”
Comments were made about the danger of allowing economic necessity to destroy the rhythms of community life, so that at any one prayer service or meal, a number of people are missing because of work; and about the need to put principles first and let work fit into them, rather than the other way around. One sister in a presentation on the liturgy spoke eloquently about workaholism being a symptom of the desire to control and to fabricate our lives. She said, “I find that Benedictine liturgy counters that desire very well. It speaks poetry every day, and it is not productive.
“Our way of working should be different from the world’s,” she said, “and we can start by nurturing a biblical imagination. If you look at Genesis,” she added, “when God works, God creates.” She also discussed the element of play: “Wisdom,” she said, “is created at the beginning of God’s work, and is described in Proverbs as a ‘master worker,’ but also as God’s daily delight. I interpret that to mean,” she said, “that play is an essential part of work.”
I thought about how listening to Genesis once in a monastery choir, I’d suddenly heard Adam’s naming the animals as a form of play. God does not command Adam to name the animals; God brings them to Adam “to see what he will call them.” This implies that God wants to be surprised and wants Adam to play along in the continual surprise of creation. While I don’t know Hebrew, I suspect from what I’ve read about the language of the creation story that in its original tongue this scene is full of verbal play, little jokes that are intended to convey God’s delight in every aspect of the created world.
The sister compared the Liturgy of the Hours to housework, as repetitive work that is never done, but work that Benedictines keep coming back to because it forms the individual person and also maintains the fabric of the community. “But to do this,” she said, “we keep interrupting our own work.” Benedict termed the monastery’s communal prayer “the Work of God” and said that nothing is to be preferred to it. The example he gives in his Rule is of a monk or nun hearing the bell ring for the Divine Office and immediately setting their own concerns aside. “We come back to the hours of the liturgy,” the sister said, “to remind ourselves of how God is working.” She added that “like Wisdom itself, we are daily with God, playing with God in the world,” and said she hoped that this would keep Benedictines from being overly oriented toward productivity and efficiency.
As usual in gatherings such as this, the response to the rather exalted language of the sister’s remarks was