The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [50]
sword, I must bend my knee before you, saying, I must alter my life.
I have still to become a Christian.
—Karl Rahner, PRAYERS FOR MEDITATION
Today, the monks are doing something that seems futile, and a bit foolish. They are blessing candles, all the candles they’ll use during worship for the coming year. It’s good to think of the light hidden inside those new candles; walking to prayer each morning in the bitter cold, I know that the light comes earlier now. I can feel the change, the hours of daylight increasing. The ground has been covered by snow since Thanksgiving; in this climate, I’ll seize hold of any bit of hope, even if it’s monks saying prayers over candles.
The reading from Karl Rahner, at morning prayer, came as a shock. To hear so esteemed a theologian cry out, “I have still to become a Christian” was humbling. The words have stayed with me all day. I wonder if one of the reasons I love the Benedictines so much is that they seldom make big noises about being Christians. Though they live with the Bible more intimately than most people, they don’t thump on it, or with it, the way gorrillas thump on their chests to remind anyone within earshot of who they are. Benedictines remind me more of the disciples of Jesus, who are revealed in the gospel accounts as people who were not afraid to admit their doubts, their needs, their lack of faith. “Lord, increase our faith,” they say, “Teach us to pray.” They kept getting the theology wrong, and Jesus, more or less patiently, kept trying to set them straight. Except for Peter, the disciples were not even certain who Jesus was: “Have I been with you all this time, and still you do not know me?” Jesus asks in the Gospel of John, not long before he’s arrested and sentenced to death.
Maybe because it’s the heart of winter, and the air is so cold that it hurts to breathe, the image of the sword from Luke’s gospel comes to mind as I walk back home after vespers. We’ve heard it twice today, at morning prayer and at Mass. I wonder if Mary is the mother of lectio, because as she pondered her life and the life of her son, she kept Simeon’s hard prophecy in her heart. So much that came easily in the fall has become a struggle this winter. I still walk to morning prayer—it seems necessary to do—but it requires more effort now. Still I know that it is nothing that I do that matters, but what I am, what I will become. Maybe Mary’s story, and this feast, tell us that if the scriptures don’t sometimes pierce us like a sword, we’re not paying close enough attention.
CELIBATE
PASSION
The Cherub was stationed at the gate of the earthly paradise with
his flaming sword to teach us that no one will enter the heavenly
paradise who is not pierced with the sword of love.
—St. Francis de Sales, TREATISE ON THE LOVEOF GOD
Celibacy is a field day for ideologues. Conservative Catholics, particularly those who were raised in the pre-Vatican II church, tend to speak of celibacy as if it were an idealized, angelic state, while feminist theologians such as Uta Ranke-Heinemann say, angrily, that “celibate hatred of sex is hatred of women.” That celibacy constitutes the hatred of sex seems to be a given in the popular mythology of contemporary America, and we need only look at newspaper accounts of sex abuse by priests to see evidence of celibacy that isn’t working. One could well assume that this is celibacy, impure and simple. And this is unfortunate, because celibacy practiced rightly is not at all a hatred of sex; in fact it has the potential to address the sexual idolatry of our culture in a most helpful way.
One benefit of the nearly ten years that I’ve been a Benedictine oblate has been the development of deep friendships with celibate men and women. This has led me to ponder celibacy that works, practiced by people who are fully aware of themselves as sexual beings but who express their sexuality in a celibate way. That is, they manage to sublimate their sexual energies toward another purpose than sexual intercourse and procreation. Are they perverse, their lives