The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [151]
The psalm we sang as we walked—“I rejoiced when I heard them say, let us go to God’s house, and now my feet are standing within your gates, O Jerusalem”—gained new resonance, as did the other psalms we’d sung all day, doing the Office for the Dead instead of our regular prayer services. I realized that the familiar words—“My soul takes refuge in the shadow of your wings, I take refuge until the storms of destruction pass by,” or, “Awake my soul, awake lyre and harp; I shall awake the dawn”—carried a new poignancy in the presence of death. And I suspected that the next time I encountered them in the ordinary, four-week cycle of psalms, I’d find them to be more deeply textured, changed by this day of mourning, which opened onto eternity.
One never has so strong a sense of what monastic community means as at a funeral; it is the apotheosis of monastic storytelling. And it also reminds us that monks seek to live this life with hearts focused on eternity. As my friend Patrick Henry, director of the Ecumenical Institute at St. John’s, once said to me, “Monastic funerals always blur the line between this world and the next; one feels that the present is just a moment in the continuum, between this community, and the community of the saints.” The “rest of the community” turns out to be very large indeed, and in the funeral liturgies, it makes itself known. Monks do not flinch from the reality of death—during the night-long vigil and Office for the Dead, the coffin lies open near the altar—but there is also a powerful sense of Benedict’s vision of monks here and now being brought by Christ “together into everlasting life.”
Anyone with a sacramental understanding of the world knows that it’s the small things that count. And in a monastery, the gestures, songs, antiphons, prayers, and scripture readings that unify a monastic profession service, the Holy Week and Easter liturgies, and the funeral become small things writ large. In one community I know, the lines from Psalm 119—“If you uphold me by your promise, I shall live; do not disappoint me in my hope”—that a sister repeats three times when she makes her profession of monastic vows, are also sung three times by the community at her death: at the reception of her body, at the beginning of the funeral service, and at the grave. In another community, the hymn called the “Ultima” that is sung at the end of all feast-day meals is also sung at the end of a monk’s funeral. The goal of a monastic life is to let oneself be changed by community ritual, ceremony, and the repetition of the psalms, until, in the words of one hymn, our lives become a psalm in praise of the glory of God’s name. The connections that Benedictines painstakingly thread through their everyday lives reinforce my sense of monastic life itself as a great poem, one that honors and celebrates Jesus Christ, who, Oscar Wilde tells us in De Profundis, “is the poem God made.”
“THE ONLY
CITY IN
AMERICA”
You have come to Mt. Zion and the city of the living God . . .
—Hebrews 12:22
When Thomas Merton first encountered the Abbey of Gethsemani, where he was later to live as a monk, he wrote: “I had wondered what was holding the country together, what has been keeping the universe from cracking in pieces and falling apart. . . . This is the only city in America—and it is by itself, in the wilderness . . .” A monastery is a city in the ancient meaning of the word, as “civitas,” a place which stands for human culture in the largest sense, and exists to serve the common good.
I have often had the odd feeling that the monastery is the real world, while the dog-eat-dog world that most people call “real” is in fact an artifice, an illusion that we cling to because it seems to be in our best interest to do so. The true city, the holy one, allows us, in the words of Paul Philibert, an alternative “vision of human relationships where beauty is more desirable than financial profit, friendship more precious than advantage, and solidarity in a common