The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [139]
For younger monastics, especially, the popular culture provides ample opportunity for play. Skits and satires have a long history in monasteries; the sister I know who wrote several parodies of pop songs to celebrate her first vows—she sang them at the community party after the church ceremony—was, in a sense, being a traditional Benedictine. To the delight of her sisters, she sang, “Don’t know much monastic history/Don’t know much theology/But I do know all my vows by heart/Especially that celibate part/What a wonderful world it will be.” Her version of “Pistol-Packin’ Mama” (“I was drinkin’ beer in a cabaret/havin’ lots of fun/and then one night He got to me,/and now I am a nun”) brought the house down. Benedictines in Alabama recently welcomed monastics from the rest of the country to a conference by singing “Dixie” as a Gregorian chant. They also had what I’m told was a hilarious collection of redneck jokes—“You know you’re a redneck liturgist, monk, nun . . . when . . .” Unfortunately, no one I spoke with could recall a single one of the punch lines. Monastic humor tends to be of the moment, and in-house, which seems appropriate for people who build communities set apart from the world.
I once heard young Benedictine sisters threatening to put their monk friends into a “Hunk Monk” calendar. And several monks and I once made up an elaborate series of names for Punk Monk bands. Some were of the “you-had-to-be-there” variety—“Theodore and the Studites and their Monster Hit, ‘Circumscribed’ ”—was funny only if you’d sat through the reading at morning prayer during which Theodore used the words “Circumscribed,” “Uncircumscribed,” and “Circumscribability” for what seemed like a hundred times. It would have made even Emily Dickinson’s head spin. “Abbot Pons and the Gyrovagues” was another we liked, gyrovagues being a restless kind of monk of whom Benedict did not approve; of Abbot Pons, the less said, the better. “Monks with Attitude” was our favorite, because we all know some. When the movie Jurassic Park came out, I happily participated in the invention, during lunch in a monastic refectory, of “Monastic Park,” a fantasy monastery in which the fourth-century desert abbas and ammas had been brought back to life. (Some monks said it gave them a whole new outlook on the monastic life to think of their abbey as a kind of theme park. Others said they felt that they were already living in “Monastic Park,” dinosaurs and all.) Sometimes monks speak of casting their own monasteries, trying to figure out who would play them. The choices range from Clint Eastwood to E.T. One middle-aged monk insists that he would best be portrayed by Angela Lansbury, and he may be right.
What I treasure most about monastic humor, however, is not the elaborate constructions that monks frequently engage in, but the little remarks, the simple pleasures that add spice to the day. When, after I’d had a bad fall and was limping along with a cane, feeling a bit sorry for myself, I was cheered up by a monk who greeted me with an enormous grin, and asked, “Did God finally strike you down?” When, after the first time I’d been asked to participate in a liturgical procession and reading at St. John’s, I told the abbot after Mass, “You guys sure know how to show a woman a good time,” he shrugged and said, “Practice, years of practice.” What he meant, of course, is centuries. He was also making a play on the Greek word “praktike,” long significant in monastic history as a term for asceticism.
But I believe that my favorite instance of monastic humor came as I arrived for a schola practice during Holy Week at St. John’s. As I took my seat among the other women, I noticed that the monk behind me, a friend, was gazing at the ceiling. I said, “Ooooh,