The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [147]
He asked if I would come with him to call on another monk who had taken a bad fall the day before. This was a monk I’d not met, a priest who had only recently retired, in his mid-eighties, from many years of serving as a chaplain in a prison not far from the monastery. Other monks had spoken of this man with admiration, as someone who was humbly realistic about his ministry. “He knew that a lot of the prisoners came to Mass for something to do, just to get out of their cell,” one young monk had told me, adding, “and that was enough for him. He just kept at it, hoping to do some good.”
The nurse was leaving his room. She told us he’d been napping off and on all morning, awaiting transport to a nearby hospital for a CAT scan. He’d hit his head in the fall and the doctors needed to know the extent of his injuries. I was nervous about disturbing a man who might be sleeping or in great pain, not wanting company. Nothing could have prepared me for what happened. Another nurse entered the room and called out, “You have a visitor. Two visitors.” We heard a weak voice respond, “Ah . . . it’s a sweet life.” As we entered the room, and he got a look at us, he said again, “It’s a sweet life.”
Gregory the Great tells a story in his Dialogues about a man who visited St. Benedict in his hermitage, explaining that as it is Easter, he has brought a gift of food. Benedict says to him, “I know that it is Easter, for I have been granted the blessing of seeing you.” Standing in that monastery nursing home, I felt that I’d just been blessed in the same earth-shaking way. The monk’s greeting was the epitome of Benedictine hospitality—in his Rule Benedict says simply, “All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ”—and it also brought home to me the incarnational nature of monasticism. It is not a theory or even a theology, but a way of life.
All week at the Institute we had pondered and discussed the fundamentals of “the monastic way,” such essentials as sacred reading, liturgy, work, silence, vigilance, and stability. Now, in the presence of two elderly monks with well over a century of lived monastic experience between them, the point of all this was made clear: to so form people in community, stability, and hospitality that they can welcome each other, and life itself, as sweet, despite the savage ups and downs, despite the indignities of old age and physical infirmity.
The elderly monk in that hospital bed would probably be startled to hear how beautiful he was to me as he lay there with a hideously bruised face; how he radiated the love of Christ; how I felt as if a desert abba had given me words I didn’t even know I needed—“It’s a sweet life.” I don’t know what he was like as a young man, but I’m sure he struggled, like every other Benedictine I’ve known, to become a monastic person. He’d probably hasten to assure me that he struggles still, that he is still in need of spiritual guidance and correction in pursuing “conversion of heart,” a vow unique to the Benedictines. Yet with one simple gesture, he had powerfully demonstrated to me the incarnational nature of Christian faith, how, to paraphrase Teresa of Avila, we are the only eyes, mouth, hands, feet, and heart that Christ has on earth.
He was an ill, old man, and not one but two people had come to see him. What could it be but sweetness, and God’s blessing? His welcome refreshed me and made me see something that’s easy to lose sight of in our infernally busy lives. That we exist for each other, and when we’re at a low ebb, sometimes just to see the goodness radiating from another can be all we need in order to rediscover it in ourselves.
COMING AND
GOING:
MONASTIC