The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [29]
We will need a powerful catalyst. In any institution, while there’s always the sacred “way we’ve always done it,” and certainly a place for the traditions that such an attitude reflects, there is also a spirit at work that has more to do with being than with doing.
Poets are immersed in process, and I mean process not as an amorphous blur but as a discipline. The hard work of writing has taught me that in matters of the heart, such as writing, or faith, there is no right or wrong way to do it, but only the way of your life. Just paying attention will teach you what bears fruit and what doesn’t. But it will be necessary to revise—to doodle, scratch out, erase, even make a mess of things—in order to make it come out right.
When it comes to faith, while there are guidelines—for Christians, the Bible and the scaffolding of the church’s theology and tradition—there is no one right way to do it. Flannery O’Connor once wisely remarked that “most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow,” and Martin Buber implies that discovering that means might constitute our life’s work. He states that: “All [of us] have access to God, but each has a different access. [Our] great chance lies precisely in [our] unlikeness. God’s all-inclusiveness manifests itself in the infinite multiplicity of the ways that lead to him, each of which is open to one [person].” He illustrates this with a story about Rabbi Zusya, who said, a short while before his death, “In the world to come I shall not be asked: ‘Why were you not Moses?’ I shall be asked: ‘Why were you not Zusya?” The rabbi is not speaking of a vague “personal spirituality” that allows him to be Zusya alone; he knows himself to be a part of the people of Israel.
For myself, I have found that being a member of a church congregation, and also following, as I am able, the discipline of Benedict’s Rule, has helped me to take my path toward God without falling into the trap of thinking of myself as “a church of one.” I have also found that the Benedictines are a good illustration of Buber’s point. Although their members follow a common way of life, monasteries do not produce cookie-cutter monks and nuns. Just the opposite. Monasteries have a unity that is remarkably unrestrained by uniformity; they are comprised of distinct individuals, often memorable characters, whose eccentricities live for generations in the community’s oral history.
The first time I went to a monastery, I dreamed about the place for a week, and the most vivid dream was of the place as a chemistry lab. Might religion be seen as an experiment in human chemistry? And the breath of the divine as the catalyst that sparks reactions and makes our humble institutions work as well as they do, often despite ourselves? Imagination and reason, those vital elements of human intelligence, are adept at dismantling our delusions. Both bring us up against our true abilities and our limitations. But we’ve gotten ourselves into a curious mess in the modern world. We’ve grown afraid of the imagination (except as a misguided notion of a “creativity” granted to a few) and yet are less and less capable of valuing rationality as another resource of our humanity, of our religious humanity. We end up with a curious spectrum of popular religions, a rigid fundamentalism