The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [146]
If Benedictine life is about loving others, about seeking God within the human community, then the means of salvation is at hand, right there in the other monks. Both those who offer love and support, and those who are incompatible or unsympathetic, can teach the young monastic what it means to incarnate Christ, to become the sort of person who radiates love. In this context, friendships within the monastery can become an inspiration to all. Over lunch one day with several Benedictine sisters, I was treated to stories of two nuns, long-deceased, who had become inseparable as they aged. One of the women had lost most of her hair and had taken to wearing a bright red wig. One morning the wig was even more askew than usual, but as the two walked arm in arm into chapel for lauds, her friend was overhead to say to her, “My, you look lovely this morning.” When one of the women had to enter the convent nursing home and leave her friend behind, she said to her, “Don’t forget about me.” And her friend replied, “How could I forget you? You’re my better self.”
Younger monastic people revel in such stories, such lives. They may never have known their own grandparents well, but they come to feel, in the monastery, that they’ve found many grandparents, guides to life within community, exemplars for the arduous journey. The living-out of vows is not respected in America. Our commitments are disposable, and if a marriage, or life in a monastic community, isn’t working out, we tend to move on. And young monks and nuns can’t help but suffer from the tension; committed as they are, they retain an edge, a tension that only time in the monastery can wear away. But when younger monastics, still attuned to the competitive values of the world, are delegated to care for older ones, the dimensions of commitment become clearer. As they steer a recalcitrant older sister toward the bathroom, or the chapel, an inner voice reminds them. This is what you can hope to become.
It’s a message that can transform them. Young monks pray with sick old men whose piety seems terribly out-of-date, only to discover that as monks they have more in common than not. Listening well, they can hear the things that will help to make them monks. “On Candlemas one year,” a young monk told me, “I was overwhelmed to hear a brother say that as he grew older, he’d become more content to be like Simeon, an old man who spends his time sitting in the temple and waiting for the promised savior.”
I once said to a good friend, a monk in his thirties, that while I loved him very much, it was the guys who’d been in the monastery for fifty years or more who really appealed to me. He sighed, and said, “This life is like being in a rock tumbler, which is really great, if you want to come out good and polished.” It’s not a bad comparison. Older monks and nuns often do attain an enduring and radical beauty, the many years of discipline having uncovered a freedom that others find inviting. While they usually have no certification as “spiritual directors,” something of a craze these days among younger monastics, these elderly are often the ones people turn to. Although they are genuinely humble and would refuse the designation, they have a wisdom and holiness that others recognize and draw from. Encountering them can be a dazzlement, a revelation of holy simplicity.
At the end of the Monastic Institute one year I paid a visit to one of my favorite people in the world, an elderly monk who