The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [137]
I know that there are stories behind everything in the museum: the seeds kept in tiny vials labeled in faded ink; the animals stuffed by a local taxidermist; the ballpoint pen collection that a monk is still adding to (all the pens have business logos, most of them from area businesses that have long since closed their doors); the wooden device that makes a hideous clacking noise, which was used in the abbey years ago as a crude alarm clock; the mannequin of a boy in slacks and a school jacket from the school the abbey closed in the 1970s; the mannequin of a girl in a tropical print blouse and a hula skirt. She may simply be one of the mysteries of the universe, but chances are, someone in the monastery knows the story behind her.
Sometimes being a guest in a monastery feels to me like falling, comfortably, into a den of playful storytellers. Monastic living gives the raconteur plenty of opportunity to refine the art. “The last time someone shot at me,” Fr. Francis says slowly, in his customary growl, “was in Iowa.” He has our attention, of course, a group of monks and guests who had been discussing the hazards of walking outdoors during hunting season. Francis puffs contentedly on a cigar. “A cornfield,” he says, finally. “I was behind a little rise. I stood up and said to him, ‘I wish you wouldn’t do that.’ ” And once, during my year at St. John’s, I found myself in the waiting room of the doctor’s office, a young woman doctor who serves the community of over two hundred monks, and whose medical specialty, naturally, is fertility in women. I was nervous because I was to find out if a knee injury I’d sustained in a fall had resulted in cartilage damage, but my fear was dissipated by the monks in the waiting room, two men in their eighties. The sight of a younger woman with a cane, and the story of my accident, triggered all sorts of stories in them, about falls they’d had, the falls that monks of community legend had sustained. It was an impressive collection: falls off roofs and falls from trees, falls over tree roots in the woods, falls into quicksand, or the lake. The two were wily, cagey, telling stories about each other that had obviously been well-polished over the years. “He fell down once on the ice,” one said, pointing to the other, “and he lay on the frozen lake for over an hour before anyone found him, and in all that time he never had one pious thought!” “No, no,” the other one said, “you’ve got the story all wrong . . .” A younger monk who was leaving the clinic stopped to ask me how I was, and if there was anything he could do for me. Gesturing to the two older monks, who were still arguing amicably between themselves, I said, “Look at the company I’m in. I’m not only fine; I’m in heaven!”
Heaven, of course, is the point of monastic life, and sometimes the stories Benedictines tell reflect the tragicomic ways in which we set rigid boundaries in our lives, only to have the prospect of eternity open them wide. Some Benedictine women I know relish the story of a monk, now deceased, who had spent considerable energy in the pursuit of misogyny, making life miserable for the sisters who taught with him at their small college. Much to everyone’s surprise, however, in his old age he turned out to have a well-developed shadow side. One day the abbot received a call from the abbey nursing home; the monk was weeping inconsolably, and although he was in failing health, there didn’t seem to be anything drastically wrong. The abbot had some difficulty ascertaining what the problem was and was startled when the older monk, still weeping copiously, blurted out, “My wife died.” The monk had been celibate all of his life, but the abbot was able to assure him that he would meet his wife one day in heaven, and the man calmed down. A story Jung would have loved, one that the sisters tell me confirms their belief in God’s sense of humor, and a story that has now passed into the living memory of two monastic communities.
In any traditional society, stories are where the life is, where those in the present maintain