The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [152]
A city is a place where the worst and best about humanity come to the fore, where we’re forced to be realistic enough to lock our doors even as we rejoice in being able to celebrate the greatest achievements of our culture. The Christian vision of heaven is of a city, the New Jerusalem, and Christian theology suggests that the Godhead itself is a kind of city, a community of three persons, or in the Benedictine Aidan Kavanagh’s words, “a collective being, with unity.” Kavanagh laments that in contemporary society the city’s sacred potential as a symbol of community has been “invested in sovereign individualism,” which allows us to retreat into a myopic unworldliness. “[Our] icon is not a city,” he writes in On Liturgical Theology, “whether of man or God, but the lone jogger running through suburbia, in order, we are told, to feel good about himself.”
Cities remind us that the desire to escape from the problems of other people by fleeing to a suburb, small town, or a monastery, for that matter, is an unholy thing, and ultimately self-defeating. We can no more escape from other people than we can escape from ourselves. As Basil the Great wrote to a friend after leaving the city of Caesarea in the fourth century, “I have abandoned my life in the town as the occasion of endless troubles, but I have not managed to get rid of myself.” Images of the city are impossible to avoid in the monastic choir, as scripture is full of them. You’re reminded, over and over, that in fact you have come here to be a part of the city of the living God, and you’re challenged to make something of it. Do you reflect Benedict’s belief that “the divine presence is everywhere”? Do you work, as Jeremiah reminds us to do, for the welfare of the city to which God has sent you? Can you say, with Isaiah, “About Zion I will not be silent, about Jerusalem I will not rest, until her integrity shines out like the dawn, and her salvation flames like a torch”?
NIGHT
A Vastness, as a Neighbor came,
A Wisdom, without Face, or Name,
A Peace, as Hemispheres at Home
And so the Night became—Emily Dickinson
They said of Abba Pambo that in the very hour when he departed
this life he said to the holy men who stood by him: “From the time
I came to this place in the desert, and built me a cell, and dwelt
here, I do not remember eating bread that was not earned by the
work of my own hands, nor do I remember saying anything for
which I was sorry even until this hour. And thus I go to the Lord
as one who has not even made a beginning in the service of God.”
—Thomas Merton, THE WISDOM OF THE DESERT
Compline, which means “complete,” is the traditional name for the night office. The compline Psalms, 4 and 91, remind us that we all need protection from forces beyond our control, even as they reassure us that protection is ours. The night will come with its great equalizers, sleep and death. It will pass over us, and bring us forth again into light.
“Ponder on your bed and be still,” Psalm 4 reminds us, “make justice your sacrifice and trust in the Lord.” One night I sat with a friend who had just learned of her sister’s death in a suspicious accident. Beyond the grief over losing a sister much younger than herself, whom she had always looked out for, was an unbearable question: Had the husband, who had been abusive in the past, now committed murder? In the morning she’d be traveling to the city where her sister had lived, and would be interviewed by the detectives investigating the death. But for now, sleep was necessary and, of course, impossible.
I said, feeling helpless, that maybe I could read her the best bedtime story I knew.