The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [148]
RITUALS
The Lord will guard your coming and going, both now
and forever
—Psalm 121
Any small town has rituals that mark the season: in Lemmon, South Dakota, they include the Christmas Fair and Snow Queen Contest, the Boss Cowman Rodeo in July, the Junior Livestock Show in the fall. A monastery follows the liturgical year, the great cycles of Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter, as well as the calm flow of Ordinary Time. From the repetition of saints’ days, feasts, and solemnities over the course of a lifetime, a Christian monastic seeks to experience what Paul Philibert has described in Seeing and Believing as “the mystery of our living between two worlds, one of space and time, the other of promise and expectation.”
The daily round of a monastic life—coming to the day, to church, to meals, to evening, to sleep—is marked by the Liturgy of the Hours. But other momentous comings and goings—to the novitiate, to first vows and then life vows, to a new job in a dependent monastery halfway round the world, to a silver or golden jubilee, to a deathwatch, to a funeral—are marked by rituals of great solemnity and beauty. Even what would be mundane events in the world are often sanctified in a monastic setting. I once attended the installation of a new president of the American Benedictine Academy. The ceremony was incorporated into a worship service and involved a laying on of hands, as over three hundred people stood in a monastery choir, hands upraised, and a blessing was said over the new president. After our final hymn, I happened to be with a friend, a retired business executive. “Is this how they did it at Honeywell?” I asked. She rolled her eyes and said, “Not quite.”
Rituals bind a community together, and also bind individuals to a community, and while this is something that monastic people have long been aware of, I find that these days they’re talking about it more, and setting about to reclaim some of the ritual aspects of their life that were cast aside in what I’ve heard more than one Benedictine call the “mindless modernizing” after Vatican II. The American Monastic Newsletter recently established an open forum on rituals, inviting Benedictine men and women to describe the rituals that their communities have found most valuable. People have sent in reports on everything from a “commissioning ceremony” held in August, when jobs are assigned for the year, and a prioress presents each sister “with a symbol of her Benedictine life and a paper with her ministry written on it,” to a ritual held in a monastery cemetery on All Souls’ Day, in which a vigil light is placed on each tombstone, and the abbot blesses each grave with holy water. A monk describes a communal anointing of the sick held quarterly in his monastery, in which those confined to infirmary rooms are assigned to pray for specific purposes. “This gives them,” the monk says, “a greater sense of participation in the monastery’s life and work.”
I have witnessed monastic communities bestowing a ritual blessing at vespers the night before an abbot or prioress departs for a lengthy trip, or when a monk or sister is about to embark for a sabbatical or a new job in Jerusalem, Ireland, or Brazil. At one monastery I know, the community recently devised a new ritual for monks who decide to leave before making final vows. At vespers one night, shortly before the man would have made his lifelong commitment, the monks had a brief ceremony to bless him as he went on his way. It was clear to me that the ceremony was also intended to leave the door open, in case the man ever decided that he wanted to return.
The great return in a monastic life, of course, is the return to God. While I have not participated in any of the informal deathbed rituals that often mark a death in a monastery—these tend to be in-house affairs, for family and members of the community—when I’ve heard of them, I’ve been struck by how loving they seem, and also how of a piece they are with the rest of monastic life. In some communities, each member comes individually to be with the dying