The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [150]
Hospital chaplains in large cities have told me that the number of people who die without family or friends is increasing. Often, it’s the hospital staff who arranges for the disposal of the body, and the chaplain who conducts the funeral for a person he or she may never have met. Monasteries couldn’t be more different. The vow of stability, which places people in a particular community, in a particular place, means that Benedictines live their monastic lives knowing exactly where and how they will be buried. I once asked a young monk how this felt as we walked back to the monastery after a graveside committal service. He said that he seldom talked about it, because most people found it morbid. But to him, it was one of the strengths of monastic life. “My friends are there, my mentors and guides in the religious life,” he said, gesturing back at the cemetery, “and one day I’ll join them.”
The funeral we’d just attended had been for a monk I’d never met, but after the eulogies felt I knew, a man from a tiny Montana town who’d become a scholar of medieval literature and had been baptized at the age of thirty-six, entering the monastery six years later. After retiring from a career as an English professor at a Benedictine college, he’d founded an AIDS hospice. In preparing his eulogy, the abbot had raided the abbey archives, and in quoting from letters the monk had sent home he made his voice come alive for us. “Having lost all my family in the last few years,” the monk had written to his abbot, “I’ve had to sort a few things out, and it is comforting to know that I have another family which has been very good to me.” A self-assessment made at the time of his retirement from teaching brought many smiles around the choir: “I am a sixteen-stone monk-medievalist enthusiastically arrived at the mid of my seventh decade. I am tolerant, compassionate, and bossy—probably the result of having been lucky all my life. I have, since childhood, always felt the strong support of family and friends—so strong that it has prevented my dwelling on my numerous shortcomings because it’s shown me that my shortcomings are acceptable to those I care about.”
After one Holy Week, the monk had written to the abbot, “My sense of renewal this Easter was highly emotional. . . . As I prepare to enter my seventh decade I am unreasonably happy. . . . Please convey to Fathers Alexander and Hilary my experience of gloriously humiliating joy! They will both know I have done absolutely nothing to deserve it.” And of his AIDS hospice he’d said, “The first person who lived with me weighed seventy-five pounds. . . . But I was in awe of how he functioned, how he never lost his sense of humor, his capacity to enjoy things. I couldn’t imagine myself functioning that way with what he had to bear. You can’t pity someone you’re in awe of.”
Many people said that the monk, a humble man, would have been highly amused at the drama of his funeral. Right at the prayer of consecration, during Mass, an enormous thunderclap sounded—it had been a sunny day—and several monks saw lightning arc through the upper reaches of the church. A gentle rain came just as we began to sing the Agnus Dei, but it had stopped by the time we were following the casket through the church and out the back door of the monastery. The storm was marching away from us, through the eastern sky, which looked like a scroll from the Book