The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [127]
In his ritual response, the abbot reminds the candidates that the monastery cannot grant them an easy or quick admittance. “We must first determine whether you truly seek God, and are zealous for the work of God, for obedience and the practice of humility. We must also tell you of all the trials and hardships through which we travel to God. Are you willing so to live in our community?” The young men respond, “I am.” After a brief ritual of acceptance by the monks, the abbot says, “I offer you the habit of our Holy Father Benedict. As you wear it, see in it a reminder of our monastic heritage, a sign of our life together, and a pledge of our hope to be completely clothed in Christ.” The young men kneel to receive their habits, and when they stand again, the formation director assists them in putting them on.
It can be an amusing sight to observe a man working slowly, with nervous fingers, to button, snap, and smooth a floor-length habit, scapular, and cowl over street clothes, right in front of God and everyone. It is also a solemn moment in the liturgy, and in the life of any monastic community. There are men here who first put on this habit more than seventy years ago, as well as those who began to wear it just last year. They have this in common: the hope that they will wear this monastic clothing until the day they die, and even after. They hope to be buried in it, in the cemetery just up the hill.
It was this thought that disrupted my revery, as I recalled an article I’d read the night before, in the New York Times, about fashion’s current fad for “monastic” clothing. Entitled “Piety on Parade: Fashion Seeks Inspiration,” and accompanied by a photo of a runway model in dark, flowing robes, a pectoral cross slung across her hips, the article was replete with fatuous statements by designers and retailers on the subject of the new “spirituality” of fashion. It’s “a calming of the clothes,” designer Donna Karan said, “the antithesis of power dressing.”
The president of Saks Fifth Avenue admitted that the store had received some letters from customers, asking, “What is the significance of the cross?” “It isn’t the easiest image for the consumer,” she said, “and I think it’s gone a bit overboard.” The designer John Bartlett inadvertently provided amusement in monasteries across the country with his comment, “There’s nothing sexier than a monk . . . they’re so inaccessible.” No one has yet suggested that fashion mavens consult Hans Küng on skirt lengths, or, for that matter, the significance of the cross.
It’s easy to laugh, less easy to admit that the article not only annoys me but makes me sad. The beauty of this clothing ceremony is a fragile thing, even though monks themselves are fairly sturdy and have endured with their rituals through the depredations of many centuries. Real beauty is always both tough and fragile, and the way in which these people manage to give religious significance to something as necessary, as ordinary, as clothing gladdens my soul. I resent its misappropriation by the fashion industry, though I’m not concerned primarily with blasphemy, or even with the trivialization of religious imagery. Fashion designers are always trivial—that’s what makes their pronouncements on the deeper meaning of their clothes so deliciously ludicrous—and they’ll always appropriate whatever strikes their fancy. Traditional religious garb is elegant, and at the very least the new fashions are a relief from biker shorts worn under lace miniskirts.
I guess I’m sad for the rest of us. Even if we’re not likely to be suckered into believing, as Vogue magazine breathlessly exclaimed last summer, “spiritual equanimity . . . is only a credit card receipt away,” the fact that such a thing can be said at all should give us pause. Told (Vogue again) that