The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [149]
At the Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo one year I witnessed a remarkable exchange between scholars of the medieval era and contemporary Benedictines. I’ve always noticed, at Kalamazoo, a bit of tension between the scholars who study monasticism and the people who live it—I find it similar to the unease literary scholars sometimes feel with living poets; it’s so much easier to study dead ones. In this case, a medievalist, a Benedictine monk, presented a paper on aging and dying in medieval monasteries. His point was that much of what modern psychology tells us is vital for families in the grieving process—the need for forgiving, for touching, for listening to stories—was provided for, in the medieval monastery, by a series of rituals that moved from the infirmary to the church to the cemetery. Most important, he said, these rituals helped people comprehend death not as a sharp breaking off from life—which is how modern people tend to see it—but rather as a new stage in a process of dying that we’ve been undergoing for some time. In a recent best-seller, How We Die, a medical doctor makes the same point; the death of the body is something we live with all our lives.
At Kalamazoo, Benedictine men and women responded to this presentation on medieval funeral practices by commenting on the rituals surrounding deaths in their own communities, and it was fascinating to watch the response of scholars both shocked and intrigued to learn that so many medieval rituals were still alive and well. A monk commented on the medieval practice of not leaving a dying person alone, but staying with them, and reciting scripture in order to keep the devil at bay, by saying that while modern Benedictines didn’t talk a great deal about the devil, the medieval bedside vigil sounded much like the ones in his own community. A nun said that in her monastery, when a sister dies, it is the job of the prioress to wash and dress the body. As a former prioress herself, she said that having to do this had been a forceful reminder of how deeply she’d loved these older women, and also compelled her to confront her own fear of death. Another monk, a Cistercian, commented that while the habit was no longer used as a burial shroud, as in medieval times, in his monastery another ritual—the monk’s cowl being closed over his face—served much the same purpose.
In the Lives of the Desert Fathers, it is said of the monks of Abba Isidore’s monastery that they were so attentive to God’s will that “when the time came for each to depart, he announced it beforehand to all the others and then lay down and fell asleep.” The going of monks from this world is not usually accomplished with such tidiness. What one does often find is that a lifetime of listening to the Bible, of celebrating on a daily basis the rituals of the Christian church, leads monks to call on the Bible in their last moments, and to identify more completely with the Jesus Christ they’ve been seeking all their lives. A retired abbot told me of the last words of a dear friend, words that he said were spoken suddenly, and with clarity, by a man who’d been suffering for days, in and out of consciousness, apparently unable to speak. “I didn’t know,” the dying monk said, “that the agony in the garden of Gethsemane would last so long.”
“THE REST OF
THE COMMUNITY”
I first began to understand how different monasteries were from any places I’d known when the monk