The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [129]
Such ceremonies mark all stages of entry into a Benedictine community, and on each occasion, a sign of the monastic vocation is received. A copy of the Rule of Benedict might be presented by the formation director as a woman enters the novitiate, keeping with Benedict’s suggestion that people who ask to join a monastery have the Rule read to them so they’ll know what they’re getting themselves into. At first vows, the prioress might present a sister with a Benedictine medal, and at final vows the ring and/or pendant that will identify the woman as a member of a particular monastery. One striking thing about this process in most Benedictine women’s communities these days is that the new member will receive no specifically monastic clothing. While most men’s communities kept the Benedictine habit after the reforms of Vatican II, the women were quick to give it up.
The reasons for this reflect the complex history of Benedictine women in America, and their status (or lack of it) within the Roman Catholic church. Before Vatican II, while men received the habit and other signs of monastic profession from their religious superior (an abbot or a prior), women received theirs not from their prioress but from the local bishop. Often these ceremonies literalized “bride of Christ” imagery in ways that women found overbearing. “To join my religious community,” one sister said to me, “I had to borrow my sister’s wedding gown. This was a common practice. But it made me feel as if I were marrying the bishop!” Women also resented the fact that before Vatican II, men were able to use the habit primarily as a church garment, as many Benedictine men do today, but they wore street clothes underneath, and could take the habit off for travel, visits to the dentist, or farm work. The women did not have that luxury. “We were expected to do everything in our habits,” one sister said, “from cleaning the kitchens and bathrooms to ice skating, teaching, cooking, milking cows, and driving a tractor. The situation lacked all sense,” she said, adding, “It was both dangerous and unsanitary.”
The men’s Benedictine habit had the virtue of simplicity, consisting of a long-sleeved cassock-like garment, belt, scapular, and cowl, but the women’s clothing was complicated, difficult to wear and to maintain. A slip made of cheap material with a wide black band at the hem. A sleevelet whose sole purpose was to avoid exposing the bare flesh of the arms, with elastic at the top and a cuff at the wrist that snapped onto the inner sleeve of the habit. The habit itself, long-sleeved and floor-length, usually made of black serge and later of dacron, and over it the wide belt of the cincture, and a floor-length scapular. For the head, a cotton cap that didn’t show, upon which was attached a stiff linen coif which covered the ears and came under the chin, emerging as a kind of bib with 144 tiny pleats. (Sisters more or less affectionately refer to it as “the duck bill.”) Pinned to the coif was a boxy headpiece made of linen, and later of plastic (which, one sister has told me, served very well as a dam for perspiration), to hold a half-veil that covered the back of the neck and a longer, full veil that came halfway down the back. I’m told that the one advantage women had with all of this garb was that they could get by with undershirts instead of brassieres.
The elaborate headgear of the old habit is especially resented by many contemporary sisters because to them it symbolizes a subjection to the authority of the church that monastic men were never asked to make. “The veil, in many traditional societies, and in some cultures today,” one sister said, “is a sign that you’re the property of your husband and no one else is to see you.” Another said, “In the Roman Catholic tradition, the veil