The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [32]
I had a number of obligations in the city, several of them public, and the next morning, when I realized that my last haircut, a freebie from one of the graduate students at St. John’s, was growing out badly, I decided to go in search of an inexpensive beauty salon. I left my friends’ apartment on West Eighty-first Street, and walking south, passed several places strong on elegant, spare decor, the false simplicity that merely means “expensive.” Finally, I found a place that was busy—moms with kids coming and going, along with elderly women who looked as if they’d lived in the neighborhood for many years. This was promising, as was the sign in the window, “Haircuts, $8.00 and up.”
Within minutes, the receptionist had handed me over to a middle-aged man—hyper, gay, extremely extroverted—who lost no time in sweeping me into a chair and fluffing my hair with his fingers. Immediately he scowled and grumbled, “Whoever did your last haircut?” I shrugged and said, “Ah, the price was right. It was given to me for nothing by a delightful young nun. I suspect she’s a much better nun than she is a hair stylist.”
“A nun?” he said, and paused. Then he smiled, as if he suddenly thought much better of me and my unkempt hair. “Some of my best customers are nuns, and former nuns. I just love them. They’re good people.” Then he asked, “Do you know the Trappists?” Bemused, I said, cautiously, “Yes, I know some Trappists.” “Well, have you ever been to Spencer, Mass? The monastery there?” “No,” I said. “I’ve heard of the place, but I’ve never been there.”
The man then began to praise the monks of Spencer, his tongue seeming to move as fast as his scissors. He’d been isolated, ostracized in his small hometown in the South, and made to feel unwelcome in the church he was raised in. So, years ago, he’d come to New York City. He’d written off religion, he told me. Then he met a Catholic priest who’d engaged him in a small group studying the Bible, and one year they went to Spencer for Holy Week. “Boy, did I love that,” he said, “just sitting in that church, the way they let you come to church with them. They don’t preach at you, they let you experience it for yourself.” He stilled the scissors for a moment and said, “You know, I’ve never felt so close to God before or since. It blew me the fuck away.”
I caught his eye in the mirror and nodded, “Yes,” I said, “I know what you mean.”
LOS ANGELES:
THE O
ANTIPHONS
The O Antiphons are verses that are sung or chanted preceding the Magnificat (“My soul magnifies the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior . . .”) at vespers during the last week of Advent, from December 17 through 23. Each one addresses Christ by a different title: “O Wisdom,” “O Adonai,” “O Root of Jesse,” “O Key of David,” “O Radiant Dawn,” “O King of Nations,” “O Emmanuel.” The chant tones are uncommonly beautiful, and combine with an uncommon wealth of imagery to fulfill one role of chant, that is, to engage us more fully, more bodily, with our faith each time we hear or sing them.
I seldom get to sing the O antiphons with a monastic community, but during one residency at St. John’s, it looked as if I might make it nearly through all seven before I left for the family Christmas in Honolulu. I grew up only dimly aware of the Advent season. We usually had an Advent calendar, but even in the 1950s, before Christmas had become the consumer feeding frenzy that it is now, the push to celebrate Christmas overshadowed the subtleties of Advent. It is through my affiliation with the Benedictines that I’ve learned how much the Advent season holds, how it breaks into our lives with images of light and dark, first and last things, watchfulness and longing, origin and destiny.
It was my destiny, that Advent, to submit to my publisher’s request that I stop in Los Angeles for a few days before going on to Hawaii. I set about looking for a place in Los Angeles where I could hear the O Antiphons. The publicist couldn’t help me; his job was arranging interviews and putting me in a tony hotel in