The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [136]
Monastic storytelling is a form of gossip, and like the best gossip, it often serves a moral purpose. The stories that circulate often reveal the dangers inherent in the monastic way of life. Monks and nuns are not all sweetness and light—they’re ordinary human beings—and I’ve been told by Benedictines that one of the greatest dangers in monastic life is to succumb to pettiness. Often it is the old in whom the fault lines are revealed, and others tell their stories wonderingly, both as cautionary tales and as humbling reflections on human frailty. There was the monk who became obsessed with how much toilet paper others were using; there was the sister who insisted on seeing her prioress, who had just returned from a grueling trip overseas, only to complain that some people were taking two hot dishes at dinner, both the meat dish and the vegetarian.
When younger monks and nuns tell stories about older ones, it is often with great pride and affection. I’m always finding out things I didn’t know about the ministries that the “retired” members of a community have quietly practiced for years: that this sister spends some time every day recording books for the blind; that this brother makes frequent visits to the nursing home down the street. But sometimes the young take pride in the eccentricities of their elderly confreres, and the stories they relate are just plain funny. A young sister tells of being sent, with other novices, to search on foot for a car that another sister had lost. “She knew she couldn’t drive any more,” the sister explained. “But sometimes she’d forget, and she’d take a car and drive it out in the middle of the prairie and then walk home, forgetting where she’d left it.” The sister is not making fun of the older woman, and this is understood by her audience, other Benedictines and oblates. She’s making fun of herself; a former bank officer, she never imagined that a call to the religious life would lead her to wander over a prairie in search of a lost car, but why not, if this is what it takes?
A prioress tells of visiting a sister who was thought to have Alzheimer’s. “We’d put her name in big letters on the door of her room, hoping that she’d remember it was her room. Sometimes she’d get stubborn, and wouldn’t want to go in. The doctor had told us to ask her questions frequently, and once, when I was visiting, I asked, ‘Sister, do you know who I am?’ She became indignant,” the sister tells us, “and shouted at me: ‘Well! You look old enough to me! If you don’t know who you are by now, I certainly can’t help you!’ ”
I toss my own story into the conversation, about knitting a shawl for an elderly sister. When I presented it to her she held it close, happily exclaiming. “Oh, it’s blue and green! I do love green!” She sighed and confided, “I get so tired of black.” Others in our group had stories of this sister, who was known for wonderful remarks. A monk from a neighboring monastery told us that when she was well into her nineties and in declining health, she once asked him if he thought that God had simply forgotten about her.
Stories from a monastery’s more remote past are less a historical record than a repository of habits, hobbies, and trivia—like the attic of an eccentric aunt or uncle who never threw anything away. Over the years I’d heard stories of the two sharpshooters at one abbey who kept up an informal competition—one would shoot from an upper floor window, putting holes in a bucket of milk that the other was carrying up the hill—but I never believed them until I saw the impressive case of shooting medals in the dusty little abbey museum. I want to believe the story about the grave-side service that one of them once provided in a parish. When a rat was spotted at the bottom of the grave, the monk reached under his vestments for a pistol, shot the rat, and completed