The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [34]
I was overcome with the wonder of having come all the way from western South Dakota, via Minnesota, only to find myself alone with coyotes in Los Angeles. Breathing in the delicious air, taking in the snow-capped peaks of mountains to the east and the breadth of the Pacific to the west, I understood for the first time the beauty of the place; why it was people had thought it was a paradise.
In the chapel, an elderly sister, who brought us booklets so we could follow the vespers service, whispered, loudly, “Who are you?” But when we began to answer, she waved our words away, “Don’t bother, I’m hard of hearing,” she said, adding as she shuffled down the aisle, “It doesn’t matter, we’re all God’s children.” The antiphon that night, December 21, was “O Oriens”: “O Radiant Dawn, brightness of light eternal, and sun of all justice; O come and illumine those who live in deep darkness, in the shadow of death.” It passed too quickly.
After the service, several sisters gathered around us and would not hear of our leaving until they’d fed us. I’d hoped to find a dazzling ethnic restaurant in Los Angeles, but the meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and steamed zucchini we were served went down just fine. The hospitality of the nuns was dazzlement enough. Younger sisters briefed us on the community’s history; they have the top of the mountain because in the mid-1920s a nun had been determined to buy it. People thought she was crazy to buy a lot of scrub brush on top of an isolated mountain way out in ranch country. The elderly of the community, dignified women in wheelchairs, the former president of the college among them, were introduced to us as other sisters, and several students assisted them with their meals, and with mobility.
The western wall of the dining room was mostly glass, to take advantage of the view. As the darkness intensified, I sensed that we were floating between the stars above and the lights below. One of the sisters, an octogenarian with an impossibly youthful demeanor, leaned on her cane and said to me, “Imagine our being here, with all this, just like the rich people.”
“Sister, I said, “you are the rich people.”
BORDERLINE
“Dear Kathy,
I feel hurt because you wrote a book and I didn’t. Happy for you and I try read your book and I was bored with it. Mom and dad and everybody talking about it. I feel left out but it will pass. Hope you understand how I feel about your book. I telling you how I feel and I starting to cry while I write this letter.”
This comment on my book Dakota, which became a surprise best-seller in 1993, is by far the best response I received. It bored my sister Becky. Not for the first time in our relationship, she became a kind of amma for me, a desert mother challenging my complacency, allowing me to see the world (and myself) in a new light. By calling me back to the important things in life, my sister seemed as wise and stern as Amma Syncletica, a desert monastic of fourth-century Egypt, who said that “it is impossible for us to be surrounded by worldly honor and at the same time to bear heavenly fruit.” Syncletica sums up, I believe, the difficulty writers have in America in surviving success: to keep bearing fruit one must keep returning, humbly, to the blank page, to the uncertainty of the writing process, and not pay much heed to the “noted author” the world wants you to be. Becky’s letter was a godsend—reading it over, I found myself released from much of the tension induced by sudden notoriety, the rigors of a book tour stretched out over nearly two years; too much travel, too much literary hoohah.
Becky’s life has been a kind of desert. When she was born, the doctors at Bethesda Naval Hospital gave my mother too strong a dose of anesthesia. Having already given birth to two children, she knew something was wrong when she couldn’t push enough