The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [31]
St. John’s has a custom that I believe to be rare among monasteries; they always invite a person from outside the monastic community to do the first reading at their Sunday Mass. This person also carries the great book of scriptures into the sanctuary, and leads the liturgical procession. At St. John’s, this includes all the monks who are in residence, well over a hundred, who walk in, two by two. The liturgy director had tapped me for the first reading that Sunday, and warned that the procession would be even longer than usual, as the abbots of over twenty European monasteries were visiting and would follow the St. John’s community down the aisle.
I succumbed to the temptations of a minor demon, who suggested that with all of the basic black in evidence, a touch of color would be appropriate. I wore a scarlet dress. And just before the service began, as I walked with the liturgy director from the sacristy to the head of the long line of monks, one of them, a good friend, winked at me and whispered, “A scarlet woman—we’ll give those abbots something to talk about when they get home.”
Walking at the slow pace set by the liturgy director, I soon felt the astonishment that often comes to me during worship, whether I’m with the congregation of a little country church, or Benedictines in a magnificent monastery chapel. It is the wonder that I should be there at all. My faith was non-existent, or at least deeply submerged, for so long a time, but liturgy pulled me back. As so often happens, on this day worship reinforced my conviction that only Christ could have brought all of us together, in this place, doing such absurd but necessary things.
My text that morning was from Isaiah and, as always, when I am granted the great privilege of reading him aloud in worship, I am grateful. Grateful that such poetry exists, that it tastes so good in the mouth, grateful that my messy, stormy life has led to this calm sea. Being a lector is a unique experience; it feels nothing like reading poems, my own or anyone else’s, to an audience. And it’s certainly not a performance; no emoting, or the monks would have my hide. The Liturgy of the Word is prayer. You pray the scriptures with, and for, the people assembled, and the words go out to them, touching them in ways only God can imagine. The words are all that matter, and you send them out as prayer, hoping to become invisible behind them.
The words on that first Sunday of Advent were from Isaiah 63: “Why do you let us wander, O God, from your ways, and harden our hearts so that we fear you not?” The passage is an honest rendering of the human condition, a desperate prayer for God’s presence, a recognition that we fall apart, and our world falls apart, when God is absent from our hearts. Why are our hearts so hard? Can God rend them, like the heavens, and change us for the good?
The next day, when I had to fly to New York City, Isaiah proved a good traveling companion. He permeates the readings of early Advent, and as I walked in Manhattan, those words seemed to come to life before me: “The lofty city God . . . casts to the dust. The foot tramples it, the feet of the poor, the steps of the needy.” From a bus I glimpsed an old woman seated on layers of clothing on a patch of damp ground in front of the Plaza Hotel, an incarnation of Isaiah’s judgment against another city: “Instead of perfume there shall be a stench . . . instead of beauty, shame. Your young men shall fall by the sword and your warriors in battle. And her gates shall lament and mourn; ravaged, she shall sit upon the ground.” Being in the city is good for my monastic soul. If anything, the desert monks’ command to “pray without ceasing” seems easier there;