The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [24]
At dinner, discussion turns toward something I’ve noticed that Benedictines seldom talk about, that is, the angelic nature of their calling. Their Liturgy of the Hours is, at root, a symbolic act, an emulation of and a joining with the choirs in heaven who sing the praise of God unceasingly. To most people even to think of such things seems foolish, and Benedictines are well aware that their motives are easily misinterpreted, labeled as romanticist or escapist. “Anyone who knows us knows we’re down to earth,” one sister says. “We have to be, to live in community as we do.”
But one of the Australian sisters insists that Benedictines “be willing to admit to the angelic charism. The best thing we can do,” she says, “is to praise.” I tell the story of a monk I know who dreamed one night that armed men in uniform had entered the abbey church, and when he tried to stop them from approaching the altar, they shot him. As he lay by the altar, he saw Christ standing before him. “Am I dead?” the monk asked, and Christ nodded and answered, gravely, “Yes.” “Well, what do I do now?” the monk inquired, and Christ shrugged and said, “I guess you should go back to choir.”
The laughter comes as blessing; women, youthful and aged, with nubile limbs and thick, unsteady ankles, graceful, busy hands and gnarled fingers slowed by arthritis, making a joyful noise. Our talk is light-hearted, easy as we clear the table.
So that we might sing vespers together, one sister has brought booklets that her home community devised for “Evening Praise, Common of Monastic Women.” Its cover is filled with their names: Scholastica, Walburga, Hildegard, Mechtild, Gertrude, Lioba, Julian, Hilda. The antiphon is from the Song of Songs: “Set me as a seal on your heart, for love is stronger than death.”
Our reading is from Gertrude, a recasting of the ceremony of monastic profession: “I profess, and to my last breath I shall profess it, that both in body and soul, in everything, whether in prosperity or adversity, you provide for me in the way that is most suitable . . . with the one and uncreated wisdom, my sweetest God, reaching from end to end mightily and ordering all things sweetly.”
I am pleasantly distracted by the echo from “O Wisdom,” one of the antiphons I am just learning to sing, that we will be singing in choir a month from now. All things, sweetly. I find my place in the booklet as our leader intones, “Jesus called them away to be alone with him.” To be alone with Jesus is something I can hardly fathom, but the words we sing in response are words that have in some sense been realized in these holy women, past and present. I am aware of a difference between us, although we share in some sense a monastic call; maybe it is our very differences that have drawn us together to celebrate Gertrude tonight. “They arose and went to the mountain,” we sing, identifying ourselves with the disciples at the Transfiguration: “They went to be alone with him, and when they raised their eyes, they saw no one but Jesus.”
EXILE,
HOMELAND,
AND
NEGATIVE
CAPABILITY
Exile, like memory, may be a place of hope and delusion. But
there are rules of light there and principles of darkness. . . . The
expatriate is in search of a country, the exile in search of a self.
—Eavan Boland, OBJECT LESSONS
Negative capability . . . [is being] capable of being in
uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching
after fact and reason.
—John Keats