The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [23]
At morning prayer, in the Book of Revelation, a new song is spoken of. St. Bernard laments, “The saints want us to be with them, and we are indifferent. . . . Let us long for those who are longing for us,” he pleads, and I think of human weakness turned into strength, human folly become the wisdom of God.
On All Souls, the mood is somber. We say the Office for the Dead, we ask for mercy. We pray for “the faithful departed,” but out of habit I add “and the unfaithful,” or, as one of the eucharistic prayers puts it, “those whose faith is known to you alone,” those whose stories are a messy, long departure. Louise Bogan, who said to a friend, “The gift of faith has been denied me,” Anne Sexton, who told a priest, “I love faith, but have none,” John Berryman, who wrote, “I would like if possible to be buried in consecrated ground.”
They told it well, but darkly. Now the feasts wheel round, in the dark of the year. All Saints, All Souls, all song and story.
November 16
GERTRUDE THE GREAT
It is good to be asked to dine with other people; I’ve had too little of that lately. But the Benedictine women at St. John’s, who have come from monasteries as far away as Australia and South Africa to work or to study, have decided to celebrate the Feast of St. Gertrude in a big way, and I’m one of several Benedictine oblates whom they’ve invited for a festal meal followed by vespers in the grad school dorm. I’ve been looking forward to it for days.
At morning prayer we hear from Gertrude’s Fourth Spiritual Exercise, a prayer I find as touching as it is various: “Deliver me from timidity of spirit and from storminess. . . . From all heedlessness in my behavior, deliver me O Lord.” I do not know Gertrude’s writing well, but I know the story. In the year 1260, at the age of four, she entered the great monastery of Helfta in Saxony, and received an education there—she wrote in both Latin and her native German. But she was for years, as she later put it, a nun in name only: frivolous, vain, inattentive to the Divine Office.
When she was twenty-six, she endured a month of restlessness, with a deeply troubled mind. Then one night, as she was walking in the monastery at dusk, in the deep silence after compline, an older nun approached. Gertrude bowed to her, as prescribed in the Rule of Benedict: “Whenever sisters meet, the junior asks her senior for a blessing.” But when Gertrude looked up, she saw the face of the youthful Christ, a boy of about sixteen. “Courteously and in a gentle voice,” she later wrote, “he said to me: ‘Soon will come your salvation; why are you so sad?’ ”
The older nun passed by, and Gertrude was changed forever. I have a busy morning, and race to noon prayer. On such a day, the brief reading and silent response is welcome, a door that opens onto the still point, where my heart is. Today we hear from the Song of Songs: “Arise, my love . . . let me see your face and hear your voice . . . For your voice is sweet, and your face is lovely.”
The word “lovely” resonates through the choir, poignant among the celibates. If Christ speaks to them, I suppose it is now, but this is beyond my grasp. I miss my husband—his voice, his face—though it’s been two months since I have seen him, and his face has grown indistinct in my mind. Nevertheless, I hold him there, for a moment, and the distance between us is as nothing.
My afternoon is full of errands, annoying but necessary. It ends more pleasantly, at a lecture in which a monk, a historian, remarks that “church history for a long time was largely a cosmetic process, which,” he says, slowly, savoring the words, “if you were remarkably stupid, could be edifying.” In describing the environment surrounding the creation of the magnificently illuminated Lindisfarne Gospel in the seventh century, he says, “Everyone lived in the sticks, nothing was going on. They had enormous amounts of time and could enjoy figuring things out.” It sounds good.
I hurry home and change into a simple dress of bright green flannel. I add a scarlet and gold scarf