The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [138]
MONASTIC
PARK
Monastic humor is an acquired taste, so much so that monastic people themselves often spend a lifetime acquiring it. When I spent a week in a monastery as a reward for surviving my first book tour, the first person I encountered when I arrived was a dear friend who asked me what a book tour was like. I told him it was exhausting, and hard work, but not nearly as bad as I expected. “Maybe you were just too dumb to notice what was really going on,” he said, poker-faced, and I hugged him and said, “I knew there was a reason I missed you guys.”
The jokes continued. At vespers that night I discovered that the monks were reading from a desert mother, Amma Syncletica: “Just as a treasure that is exposed loses its value,” we heard, “so a virtue which is known vanishes; just as wax melts when it is near a fire, so the soul is destroyed by praise.” After weeks of interviews, an alarming amount of attention and praise, I’d just been kicked in the shin by a fierce fifth-century nun, and could only laugh at the delicious synchronicity that had brought us together.
The juxtaposition of the ancient and the modern in monastic life often helps monks to laugh at themselves. Not long ago a story circulated about a bear who had broken into a contemplative monastery in a remote wilderness while the monks were in church. The bear ransacked the kitchen, and probably would have left the living quarters alone, except that one monk had squirreled away a piece of chocolate in his room. “Private property, the old bugaboo,” one monk said. “Maybe we need a new desert saying: ‘If you try to hide a piece of chocolate, God will send a bear to find it.’ ” Another monk told me that in a recent excavation of a fourth-century monastery in Egypt, a small pile of gold coins had been found under one monk’s bed. “There is no hiding anything in this life,” he said, shaking his head, “but monks will always try.”
Monks are quick to seize on the humor of their situation with regard to the rest of the world. Their habits, while they symbolize the serious matter of a religious vocation, do have a comical side. I once witnessed monks using their scapulars in an impromptu fly-swatting competition. And the long skirt can be quite a look on a man. Once, when I happened to compliment a monk on his choice of attire—he’d put a heavy sweater on over his habit—he struck a model’s pose, hand on hip, and said, “Yes . . . classic, yet casual.” I once witnessed several teenage girls staring moon-eyed at a handsome young monk they’d developed a crush on when they were counselors at a camp for the handicapped. The monk, being kind, had stopped by their table to visit during lunch on the last day of camp. As he walked away, one girl sighed and said, dreamily, “Oh—he looks so good in black.” The monk, overhearing her, said to me, “That’s fine, because I’m going to have to wear an awful lot of it.”
Popular culture sometimes interacts with monastic culture in comical ways. When my sister-in-law became an Episcopal priest, and I told a monk friend that her young daughters were playing “mommy priest” with their Barbie dolls, he offered to make them vestments from scraps in his abbey’s sewing room. It felt odd to deliver a Barbie doll to a monastery—he needed one for a model—but the results were spectacular: a linen alb (made of the same material that the monastery priests wear) and chasubles made from old chalice covers.
Not all monks are so willing to embrace the absurdities of American culture. When the abbot of one monastery was contacted by someone on David Letterman’s staff to see if he’d allow a monk to come on the show with an item from the abbey’s museum (an enormous hairball from the stomach of a pig, rumored to be the largest hairball ever retrieved from the stomach of a pig), the