The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [17]
One day, not long after we’d begun to read Jeremiah, and it was dawning on us that we had a long, rough road ahead, a monk said to me: “We haven’t read a prophet for a while, and we need to hear it. It’s good for us.” Another said he was glad to be reading Jeremiah in the morning, and not at evening prayer, when there are more likely to be guests. “The monks can take it,” he said, “but most people have no idea what’s in the Bible, and they come unglued.”
Coming unglued came to seem the point of listening to Jeremiah. The prophet, after all, is witness to a time in which his world, the society surrounding the temple in Jerusalem, meets a violent end, and Israel is taken captive to Babylon. Hearing Jeremiah’s words every morning, I soon felt challenged to reflect on the upheavals in our own society, and in my life. A prophet’s task is to reveal the fault lines hidden beneath the comfortable surface of the worlds we invent for ourselves, the national myths as well as the little lies and delusions of control and security that get us through the day. And Jeremiah does this better than anyone.
The voice of Jeremiah is compelling, often on an overwhelmingly personal level. One morning, I was so worn out by the emotional roller coaster of chapter 20 that after prayers I walked to my apartment and went back to bed. This passionate soliloquy, which begins with a bitter outburst on the nature of the prophet’s calling (“You enticed me, O Lord, and I was enticed”), moves quickly into denial (“I say to myself, I will not mention him, I will speak in his name no more. But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones”). Jeremiah’s anger at the way his enemies deride him rears up, and also fear and sorrow (“All my close friends are watching for me to stumble”). His statement of confidence in God (“The Lord is with me like a dread warrior”) seems forced under the circumstances, and a brief doxology (“Sing to the Lord, praise the Lord, for he has delivered the life of the needy from the hands of evildoers”) feels more ironic than not, being followed by a bitter cry: “Cursed be the day that I was born.” The chapter concludes with an anguished question: “Why did I come forth from the womb, to see sorrow and pain, to end my days in shame?”
Listening to that dazzling convergence of the prophet’s call with his pain and his hope, I realized suddenly that the prophet Jeremiah had become part of a remarkable convergence in my own life, a synchronicity of blessings and curses that had shattered certain boundaries that had long held me secure. For much of that fall, I experienced the most intense and prolonged writing period of my life. Poems were coming almost every morning and, unlike my earlier work, they came out whole, and nearly finished. As I hadn’t written any poetry for several years, I was extremely grateful.
But at the same time that I was experiencing this rush of poetic energy, I was also experiencing bitter failure in my attempts to fit in with the rest of the “resident scholars” at the Institute. That was our official title, although I’m not a scholar in the conventional sense, and often find myself ill at ease in the academic environment. Denise Levertov once said that “the substance, the means of art, is incarnation, not reference but phenomena,” and like many poets, I’d much rather read a poem out loud than discuss it. Having to talk about what I do, what poets do, tends to make me stupid.
Two years before at the Institute, my attempts to explain myself and what I was doing there had been received by the group with a bemused toleration. One exchange I will never forget took place at a seminar that I’d been dreading because