The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [128]
Christian monks have always been conspicuous by their dress but never concerned with fashion. A tale is told of one monk in fourth-century Egypt who sold even his treasured copy of the gospels. He said, “I have sold the book that told me to sell all that I had and give to the poor.” His radical conversion, like the radical way in which monks continue to shape their lives around liturgy, prayer, and simple living, can show us what is possible when we pay attention to the discrepancy between what we want and what we need.
In his rule for monks, written in the sixth century, St. Benedict is concerned that they have enough clothing but not too much, a concept that is all but lost in American culture. We think of shopping as a recreational activity. The fierce Anglican recluse Maggie Ross has described the story of Sodom as a “mordant satire on the idolatry of the great shopping mall at the end of the Red Sea, the consumer culture that can inculturate religion only as commodity.” Greed is at the heart of the story, greed expressed in sexual terms, which translates into rape. Consumerism is our idolatry, the heart of our illusions of power, security, and self-sufficiency, which translate into rape of the environment.
The fashion industry traffics in illusion, selling us images of the way we’d like to be. Any life lived attentively is disillusioning, as it forces us to know ourselves as we are. Benedictines consider this attentiveness to be best developed in the rough-and-tumble of community life, where one learns to put the needs of others before one’s own. The God one finds there chooses to be revealed in other people: people we love and people we can’t stand; people who are hard on us, who just might love us enough to demolish our complacency.
The two young men have traveled far to this moment of asking for “the mercy of God and fellowship in this community.” One was a bank vice-president, the other a librarian. They now face a year of wondering whether the vow they’ve made today was salvation, sheer foolishness, or both. Although they’ll no doubt complain about the cumbersome skirts and endure jokes about guys in long dresses, the clothing will help to make them one among many, indistinguishable from their brothers. It symbolizes their common goal, and is black to suggest a death to worldly concerns.
I wonder why I am weeping. For myself, I’m sure, and my concerns, which are all too worldly. Perhaps it is also that these few simple words can contain so much hope and trust. These men are fortunate to have found a community in which to say them. I am crying also because I was raised to believe that rituals were meaningless in the modern world, meant to be outgrown, like superstitions. I was educated to mistrust the rich ambiguity of symbols. Yet here is ritual and symbol that has meaning.
I wonder if the pace of modern life, along with our bizarre propensity for turning everything into a commodity, erodes our ability to think symbolically, to value symbols for their transformative power. This simple clothing ceremony, just one step in the formation of two monks, has nothing to do with the ephemera of fashion, and everything to do with that which endures. It reminds me that ritual and symbol are as necessary to human beings as air and water. They mark us as human, and give us identity.
WOMEN AND
THE HABIT:
A NOT-SO-GLORIOUS
DILEMMA
Early in the Gospel of John, Jesus turns to two men who are following him, and asks, “What is it that you seek?” The answer he receives is ambiguous: “Where is it you are staying?” Jesus replies, “Come and see,” and the men go with him and become his disciples. The question, “What do you seek?” is one that is asked