The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [16]
On other days, I became angry, or was reduced to tears, perhaps a promising sign that something of Jeremiah’s grief had broken through my defenses. The command in chapter 4:3, “Break up your fallow ground,” stayed with me long enough to elicit a response in my journal. The ancient monastics recognized that a life of prayer must “work the earth of the heart,” and with their acceptance of the painful, and even violent nature of this process in mind, I wrote, “And as I take my spade in hand, as far as I can see, great clods of earth are waiting, heavy and dark, a hopeless task. First weeds will come, then whatever it is I’ve planted. I feel the struggle in my knees and back.”
One beneficial effect of lectio continua is that it enables a person to hear the human voices of biblical authors. It becomes obvious, for instance, that Paul’s letters are actual letters, meant to be read aloud, and in their entirety, to church congregations. The monks, in keeping that tradition alive, are also helping Paul’s words to live in the present. Paul’s theological wheel-turning can lose me—Oscar Wilde once described Paul’s prose style as one of the principal arguments against Christianity—but hearing Paul read aloud in the monk’s choir allowed me to take an unaccustomed pleasure in the complex play Paul makes of even his deepest theology. To hear the joke working its way through 1 Corinthians 1:21 is to get the point: “For since in the wisdom of God the world did not come to know God through wisdom, it was the will of God through the foolishness of the proclamation to save those who have faith.” Hearing the passage read slowly one night at vespers, I suddenly grasped the exasperation there, and God’s good humor, and it made me laugh.
Listening to the Bible read aloud is not only an invaluable immersion in religion as an oral tradition, it allows even the scripture scholars of a monastic community to hear with fresh ears. A human voice is speaking, that of an apostle, or a prophet, and the concerns critical to biblical interpretation—authorship of texts, interpolation of material, redaction of manuscript sources—recede into the background. One doesn’t forget what one knows, and the process of listening may well inform one’s scholarship. But in communal lectio, the fact that the Book of Jeremiah has several authors matters far less than that a human voice is speaking, and speaking to you. Even whether or not you believe that this voice speaks the word of God is less important than the sense of being sought out, personally engaged, making it possible, even necessary, to respond personally, to take the scriptures to heart.
Taking Jeremiah to heart, day in day out, I got much more than I bargained for. I found it brave of these Benedictines, in late-twentieth-century America, in a culture of denial, to try to listen to a prophet at all. The response of the monks was illuminating, and sometimes comical. “Know what you have done,” Jeremiah shouted at us one morning (2:23), but before we could get over the ferocity of that command—it’s so much easier to live not knowing what we’ve done—the prophet had gone on to a vivid depiction of Israel as a frenzied camel in heat, loudly sniffing the wind, making directionless tracks in the sand. This was imagery we could smell; the poetry of scripture at its earthy best.
Monks are not used to being compared to camels in heat, but they took it pretty well. I noticed eyebrows going up around the choir, and then a kind of quiet assent: well, there are days. Monks know very well how easy it is to lose track of one’s purpose in life, how hard to maintain the discipline that keeps (in St. Benedict’s words) “our minds in harmony with our voices” in prayer, the ease with which aimless desire can disturb our hearts. “Stop wearing out your shoes” (2:25), Jeremiah said, and we sat up straight. This was something a crusty desert father might have said to a recalcitrant