The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [135]
The building itself, with towers and turrets rising dramatically out of the Plains, has always reminded me of Oz. And the monks in their robes do have the air of the wizard about them; they remind me to “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” but to focus on what lies beyond. The monastery has been a haven where I could come and stay awhile, and work things out; the monks will not surrender Dorothy.
It was here that I first learned of the baptism of desire, and the gift of tears, the purifying tears that the ancient monks said could lead us to the love of God. Once, when a little girl in a small town nearby, staring at the bright red boots I often wore to work with children in schools, asked me, “Do you live in a country?” I told her we lived in the same country. She looked dubious. But as I thought about it, the real answer came—it’s our secret country, where evil spells are broken by a promise of love, and little girls can melt away the wickedness that’s in them.
GENERATIONS
Once, when I spent Holy Week in a community of Benedictine women, I ended up working in the bakery with an older sister. It proved to be a happy arrangement for both of us. I’d been writing at home, so reclusive that my life there had been much like a silent retreat, and I found that the strenuous work of baking for more than two hundred women, and the sister’s good company, were exactly what I needed. I had first visited the monastery bakery out of curiosity and was offered chicory coffee and a sweet roll. But it seemed that with all of the extra baking the sister had lined up for Holy Week, she needed help far more than tourists. I volunteered, and soon was working with her from 5:30 in the morning until noon or so, with time out for morning prayer at 6:30 or 7.
I was slow to learn the sister’s method of forming cinnamon rolls, but I tried hard and she let me try. I soon learned that there was a right way to do everything, even flattening and storing twist ties. Had I been a much younger woman, a monastic novice only recently separated from parental authority or graduate school, this might have been hard to take. But I know so many women who have “sacred ways” around the house—I think of how I am about laundry and my own baking—that I surrendered. I felt a bit like an explorer, though, never quite knowing what wonder would next be revealed. How to pinch dough. How to fold plastic bags. Strong as she was, the sister’s not a young woman, and she was happy to let me wash the heavy mixing bowl with a minimum of instruction. I learned a bit about her; a Louisiana native, she seemed shocked to find herself in Kansas—“Why, the ground here,” she scoffed, “it’s nothing but clay. And they don’t know how to till it,” she added. “They just scratch at it like chickens.” Her mother died when she was small, and she was raised by a grandmother. She still misses the cat she left behind in Louisiana; her monastery there had closed, and this is where she had chosen to come.
We worked well together, although she found me a bit clumsy in removing bread from the hot loaf pans. Still, we were mostly in tune: “Kathleen, come in here and help me think!” she called once from the oven room, and I was quick to obey. On Holy Saturday, we baked forty-five pans of cinnamon rolls. The caramel sauce burned our fingers as we struggled to place the hot rolls on waxed paper. “It’s enough to make you lose your religion!” the sister exclaimed, and I replied, laughing, “Oh, anything but that! Not today.”
I was well aware that even though I was working, I was still a guest in the monastery, which meant that I was being treated with deference. Still, I wondered if I weren’t experiencing, in a limited sense, a kind of monastic formation. The newest members of a community are usually made to work with older ones, to subject themselves to the authority of a monk or nun of an earlier generation who may or may not be sympathetic to them, who may