The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [6]
What happened to me then has no doubt happened to many unsuspecting souls in the fifteen-hundred-plus years that Benedictines have existed. Quite simply, the Rule spoke to me. Like so many, I am put off by religious language as it’s manipulated by television evangelists, used to preach to the converted, the “saved.” Benedict’s language and imagery come from the Bible, but he was someone who read the psalms every day—as Benedictines still do—and something of the psalms’ emotional honesty, their grounding in the physical, rubbed off on him. Even when the psalms are at their most ecstatic, they convey holiness not with abstraction but with images from the world we know: rivers clap their hands, hills dance like yearling sheep. The Bible, in Benedict’s hands, had a concreteness and vigor that I hadn’t experienced since hearing Bible stories read to me as a child.
Benedict’s Prologue has an appealing, familial tone, and indeed Benedictine communities function as families. Contrary to what one might expect, he writes: “We hope to set down nothing harsh, nothing burdensome.” (This, I later learned, is a far cry from earlier monastic rules, some of which are harshly, even paranoiacally, punitive.) Benedict is refreshingly realistic in his understanding and acceptance of people as they are. “The souls of all concerned,” he reminds us, “may prompt us to a little strictness in order to amend faults and safeguard love.”
The Rule surprises people who expect the ether that often wafts through books on spiritual themes, the kind of holy talk that can make me feel like a lower life form. Benedict knows that practicalities—the order and times for psalms to be read, care of tools, the amount and type of food and drink and clothing—are also spiritual concerns. Many communal ventures begun with high hopes have foundered over the question of who takes out the garbage. Over and over, the Rule calls us to be more mindful of the little things, even as it reminds us of the big picture, allowing us a glimpse of who we can be when we remember to love. Benedict insists that this remembering is hard work needing daily attention and care. He writes for grown-ups, not people with their heads in the clouds. “No one shall be excused from kitchen duty,” Benedict says, making exceptions only for the sick or those people engaged in the urgent business of the monastery. Today, that means that the Benedictine scholar with the Ph.D. scrubs pots and pans alongside a confrere who has an eighth-grade education, the dignified abbot or prioress dishes out food and wipes refectory tables after the meal.
I first encountered the Rule in the mid-1980s, when my husband and I were barely hanging on as freelance writers in an isolated, rural area. We were not alone in our economic uncertainty; everyone in the region was severely affected by what was termed “the farm crisis.” The distress was not merely economic, but social and emotional as well, and the church I had recently, and reluctantly, joined was, like other local institutions, in considerable turmoil. Among its members were bankers as well as farmers going through bankruptcy, and tensions ran high. It surprised me to find that a sixth-century document spoke so clearly to our situation, offering a realistic look at human weakness, as well as sensible and humane advice for us, if we truly wished to live in peace with one another.
I was also surprised, as I hadn’t read the Bible in years, at how much of Benedict’s advice came straight from scripture. In his prologue, he takes that enticing question of Psalm 34, “Which of you desires life, and covets many days to enjoy good?” and states that God has already given us the answer in the very next verses of the