The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [33]
I knew that the people most likely to be singing the antiphons would be Roman Catholic or Episcopalian religious communities that pray vespers every night. Through a friend I obtained the name of a professor of nursing at a Catholic college in Los Angeles, who said that she could take me to such a community.
When I checked into the hotel, the clerk told me, as if it were significant, that my room had a view of the Hollywood Hills. I had no idea what this entailed, but it sounded good and I was glad to see the sinuous horizon, the graceful folds of land. The hills became my companion, especially at twilight, and in the blue light before dawn, when their human habitations seemed far less significant than the subleties of changing light. I sang the O Antiphons, all seven of them, to the Hollywood Hills.
The woman hired by my publisher to escort me to my interviews picked me up in an old Buick convertible. I couldn’t imagine a better vehicle in which to see the city. The woman explained that her public relations work was part-time, that she was a writer, too. “What do you write?” I asked. “Television game shows,” she replied. She was trying to sell her latest to one of the big networks. Her roommate, she told me, wrote unauthorized celebrity biographies. Bristling with gossip about the recent arrest of Heidi Fleiss for running a prostitution ring, she said she’d heard that Fleiss had paid several million in cash for a mansion. I said, “I didn’t know there were that many fucks in the world worth paying for.” This seemed to shock the woman; apparently she’d been told I was a religious writer.
But I didn’t much care. The sun, the ride in the open air, the California breeze after a cloistered Minnesota fall had put me in a reckless mood for my live interview on Pacifica radio. “Do you consider yourself a Christian?” my host asked. I sighed and said, “My problem with that is that so many people who publicly identify themselves as Christians are such jerks about it.” The woman laughed, as did the people in the sound booth behind her. “Especially now,” I continued, “when all that Christmas cheer is being rammed down our throats. It’s enough to make a saint scream.” I said I often wondered if being a Christian was something we could, or should, claim for ourselves; that if being a Christian meant incarnating the love of Christ in my own life, then maybe it would be best to let others tell me how well, or how badly, I’m doing. I spoke briefly about what Advent meant to me, and then confessed that I had schemed for months to find the O Antiphons in the city. I doubt that it was the looniest interview the woman had all day, but it had its moments.
My guide and I left the radio station and went in search of Mt. St. Mary, the college where I was to meet my professor. I’d been given explicit directions, but as we climbed high above Brent-wood, the woman kept asking, “Are you sure we keep going? I don’t think there’s anything more up here.” Finally, as promised, we saw the nuns’ retirement center ahead, and kept climbing until we had come to a tiny jewel of a campus. The L.A. woman was stunned; “Why, it’s a whole little world up here,” she exclaimed, “I had no idea.” “Catholics are good at this,” I said, and we parted company.
The view was stunning—the entire L.A. basin, the channel islands and Catalina. I found the nursing school and not one but two friendly women who were planning to take me to the O Antiphons. Vespers was at 5 P.M., and it was not quite 4, so one of the women asked if I’d like to first take a brief hike further up the mountain, past the convent and onto the fire road. It seemed a fine idea to me, and we took off.
Soon we could see, far below us, a small section of what she told me was the Santa Monica freeway. Then we left the traces of civilization behind. The air was lively with the lingering scent of juniper mixed with that of other vegetation I did not recognize. We never