The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [5]
For years, early morning was a time I dreaded. In the process of waking up, my mind would run with panic. All the worries of the previous day would still be with me, spinning around with old regrets as well as fears for the future. I don’t know how or when the change came, but now when I emerge from night, it is with more hope than fear. I try to get outside as early as possible so that I can look for signs of first light, the faint, muddy red of dawn.
September 3
GREGORY THE GREAT
Every commandment is about love, and all of them add up to one
commandment.
—FROM A HOMILY OF GREGORY THE GREAT
It feels right to come back to the monastic liturgy on this day, to settle in with Gregory after the rush of moving to St. John’s, the jumble of unpacking, the jumble of Gregory’s life on my mind as I walk up the hill. Wealthy young Roman sells his estates, founds several monasteries, and gives to the poor. Dedicated monk turns reluctant diplomat and, in a time of plague, is elected bishop of Rome. Vigorously defends Jews’ right to their synagogues, writes all we know of the life of Benedict. Fire, famine, earthquake; Rome sacked four times in twenty years. In 593, Gregory negotiates a truce.
I recall that on this day two years ago, I was in a hermitage, my marriage strained nearly to the breaking point. I felt as hard and dry as the bristly grasses of early fall, as exhausted as the drought-stricken trees around me. Then Gregory reminded me of the greatness of souls, how their true strength can emerge in the worst of times, when the known world is collapsing. “My mind divided,” he said of himself, “torn to pieces by so many problems.”
At vespers that night we had heard from Jeremiah: “I have loved you with an age-old love . . . Again I will build you, and you shall be built,” words that renewed in me the stirrings of memory and desire. As I walked back to the hermitage in the dusk, I was suddenly glad, and not despairing, that in just a few days I’d be back with my husband, to take up life in the ruins.
I did not know that it would lead us here, to this crisp morning, my husband asleep in the apartment on the river, myself hurrying up the hill to morning prayer. That I would go to my study after prayers and begin to write poems again for the first time in three years.
ST. JOHN’S
ABBEY
LITURGY
SCHEDULE
7 A.M.—Morning Prayer
Noon—Noon Prayer
5 P.M.—Eucharist
7 P.M.—Vespers
11:30 A.M.—Saturday Eucharist
10:30 A.M.—Sunday Eucharist
THE RULE
AND ME
Few books have so strongly influenced Western history as The Rule of St. Benedict. Written in the sixth century, a time as violent and troubled as our own, by a man determined to find a life of peace and stability for himself and others, it is a brief (ninety-six pages in a recent English translation), practical, and thoughtful work on how human beings can best live in community. Its style is so succinct that it is sometimes taught in law schools as an example of how to legislate simply and well. But the true power of the book, as with the Gospel it is based on, lies in its power to change lives.
I met the Rule by happy accident, when I found myself staying in a small Benedictine convent during a North Dakota Council on the Arts residency at a Catholic school. The women were pleasant enough, and I soon learned that the convent was indeed a heavenly place to return to after a day with lively schoolchildren. I felt it necessary to tell the sisters, however, that I wasn’t much of a churchgoer, had a completely Protestant background, and knew next to nothing about them. I said they’d have to tell me if I did anything wrong. In many ways my response was typical of a modern person with little experience of church as an adult; I had the nagging fear that people as religious as these women would find me wanting, and be judgmental.
The sisters listened politely and then one of them said, with a wit I’m just learning to fathom, “Would you like to read our Rule? Then you’ll know