The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [38]
I inherited my father’s promiscuous nature. He falls in love easily, he’s the sort of man who easily turns strangers into friends. And he doesn’t like to lose people. His fidelity to friendship is such that in his late seventies, he still corresponds with high school and college friends, including his first girlfriend. I also inherited my mother’s stability, her commitment to the sacred vows of matrimony. All of it has helped. That year, my sister-in-law said about of them, “They have large human hearts, getting larger. As they age, they’re becoming more intensely themselves, and it’s so good. Good for them, good for us, good for the children to see.”
January 2
BASIL THE GREAT AND GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS
Gregory and his friend Basil met as students in Athens in the mid-fourth century, and later lived together as monks in Cappadocia. Basil wrote a Rule for monasteries that is still followed in the Orthodox world today. Grounding monastics firmly in private and communal prayer, as well as manual work, he also gave a high priority to their care of the needy; he legislated flexibly enough to provide for a mix of contemplation and action in monastic life. Basil himself founded a number of hospitals, orphanages, and residences for the poor, and was termed “the Great” by the populace of Caesarea, when, shortly before becoming the bishop of the city, he gave away much of his inheritance in famine relief, and served food to the destitute.
In one of Gregory’s orations, “De pauperum amore” (On the love of the poor), he supports his friend Basil’s soup kitchens by asking the rich to express their gratitude to God in gracious giving, without prejudging the needy. It is not unlike some of the last sermons of the martyred archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar Romero. At any rate, Gregory’s view of the common good is still relevant, and increasingly endangered in a world that idolizes private wealth. “Let us put into practice,” Gregory says, “the supreme and primary law of God. He sends down rain on just and sinful alike and to earth’s creatures he has given the broad earth, the springs, the rivers, and the forests. . . . He has given abundantly to all the basic needs of life, not as a private possession, not restricted by law, not divided by boundaries, but as common to all, amply and in rich measure.”
PASSAGE
I spent some time, over Christmas, sorting through a box of mementoes, some of my own from college, and many more that my mother has saved for me since I was a child, among them several bills from Providence Hospital, in Washington, D.C., dating from the late 1940s. This is where, at the age of six months, I came close to dying. I had shrunk to twelve pounds.
I owe my life to the doctors and nurses there, and to Sir Alexander Fleming, the man who discovered penicillin. After using the drug successfully on soldiers during World War II, doctors thought it might work as well on infants. They felt that I would die without massive doses of it, and my grandfather Totten, who was a doctor, signed papers approving the experimental treatment that saved my life. Before we moved from Washington, when I was nearly seven years old, my mother took me to see the surgeon who had operated on me. Pulling a heavy book off a shelf, he showed me the pages where Baby X’s treatment was recorded. He told me that I’d become so accustomed to the shots that the nurses would come in, turn me over and give me the dose, and I wouldn’t even wake up.
He also said something I’d long heard from my parents and grandparents, that the reason I lived was because I had the will to live—“You were a fighter,” the doctor said. Not until I was in my thirties did I realize that this was not the whole truth. Babies are drawn to pretty things, and if dying is as full of light as those who’ve come closest to it say, I may have wanted to die, to follow the blue light, which