The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [4]
The Cloister Walk is a result of my immersion into a liturgical world, and in it I have tried to replicate for the reader the rhythm of saints’ days, solemnities, and feasts that I experienced when I first came to St. John’s in the fall of 1991. The book leaves the monastery, as I did, for family reunions, for work, for life at home in a small town in western South Dakota, and for worship at two Presbyterian churches there, Hope and Spencer Memorial. It also returns to the monastery, where for me, everything comes together. One pleasant surprise for me in writing this book is the way that my marriage came to weave in and out of it. It seems appropriate, as my life vows are not to a monastery but to matrimony, and marriage has for me been a primary instrument of conversion, “a school for love,” to employ Benedict’s metaphor for the monastery.
I’ve been a devoted reader since childhood and have been surprised to discover that what Benedict termed lectio divina, and many contemporary Benedictines call “spiritual reading,” has given me a new appreciation for the contemplative potential of the reading process. Lectio is an attempt to read more with the heart than with the head. One does not try to “cover” a certain amount of material so much as surrender to whatever word or phrase catches the attention. A slow, meditative reading, primarily of the scriptures, lectio respects the power of words to resonate with the full range of human experience. As a monastery is a place in which the scriptures come to permeate all aspects of one’s life, I have included in this book many quotations from the Bible. I feel this requires an explanatory note for the reader who, like the person I was for many years, may not have kept up an acquaintance with the Bible, and possibly thinks of it only as a weapon that Christians use against anyone who disagrees with them. Media sound bites can give the impression that this is the purpose of the Bible. But in the world the Benedictines have introduced me to, the scriptures constitute, as Paul Philibert, O.P., has described it in Seeing and Believing, “a demanding ecology of thought, imagination, decision, and action,” words that are “awake during our rest and our silences, active in our reflection . . . effective in our actions in cooperation with others, [and that] cut through all our excuses.”
Christianity, like Judaism and Islam, is a religion of the book, and for some seventeen hundred years the daily Christian liturgy has woven the Bible into the lives of monks and nuns. Monastic worship is essentially Hebraic; every day you recite the psalms, and you listen, as powerful biblical images, stories, and poems are allowed to flow freely, to wash over you. Doctrine and dogma are effectively submerged; present, but not the point. When I quote from scripture in this book, I am not trying to convince the reader that I have some hold on the truth. I am telling the story of the Liturgy of the Hours as I have experienced it, as “an open door, which no one is able to shut” (Rev. 3:8). I quote the Bible in the spirit of the great poet and theologian of the early church, Ephrem the Syrian, who said: “Scripture brought me to the gate of paradise, and the mind stood in wonder as it entered.”
DAWN
Somehow myself survived the night/And entered with
the Day . . .
—Emily Dickinson
Abba Poeman said concerning Abba Prior that every day he
made a new beginning.—THE SAYINGS OF THE
DESERT FATHERS
In the Orthodox tradition, the icon of Wisdom depicts a woman seated on a throne. Her skin and her clothing are red,