The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [60]
welcome it all.
DEGENERATES
Not long ago I accompanied a Trappist abbot as he unlocked a door to the cloister and led me down a long corridor into a stone-walled room, the chapter house of the monastery, where some twenty monks were waiting for me to give a reading. Poetry does lead a person into some strange places. This wonderfully silent, hidden-away place was not as alien to me as it might have been, however, as I’d been living on the grounds of a Benedictine monastery for most of the last three years. Trappists are more silent than the Benedictines, far less likely to have work that draws them into the world outside the monastery. But the cumulative effect of the Liturgy of the Hours—at a bare minimum, morning, noon, and evening prayer, as well as the Eucharist—on one’s psyche, the sense it gives a person of being immersed in the language of scripture, is much the same in any monastery. What has surprised me, in my time among monastic people, is how much their liturgy feeds my poetry; and also how much correspondence I’ve found between monastic practice and the discipline of writing.
Before I read a few poems of mine that had been inspired by the psalms (the mainstay of all monastic liturgy,) I discussed some of those connections. I told the monks that I had come to see both writing and monasticism as vocations that require periods of apprenticeship and formation. Prodigies are common in mathematics, but extremely rare in literature, and, I added, “As far as I know, there are no prodigies in monastic life.” The monks nodded, obviously amused. (The formal process of entering a monastery takes at least five years, and usually longer, and even after monks have made final vows, they often defer to the older members of the community as more “fully formed” in monastic life.)
Related to this, I said, was recognizing the dynamic nature of both disciplines; they are not so much subjects to be mastered as ways of life that require continual conversion. For example, no matter how much I’ve written or published, I always return to the blank page; and even more important, from a monastic point of view, I return to the blankness within, the fears, laziness and cowardice that, without fail, will mess up whatever I’m currently writing and, in turn, require me to revise it. The spiritual dimension of this process is humility, not a quality often associated with writers, but lurking there, in our nagging sense of the need to revise, to weed out the lies you’ve told yourself and get real. As I put it to the monks, when you realize that anything good you write comes despite your weaknesses, writing becomes a profoundly humbling activity. At this point, one of the monks spoke up. “I find that there’s a redemptive quality,” he said, “just in sitting in front of that blank piece of paper.”
This comment reflects an important aspect of monastic life, which has been described as “attentive waiting.” I think it’s also a fair description of the writing process. Once, when I was asked, “What is the main thing a poet does?” I was inspired to answer, “We wait.” A spark is struck; an event inscribed with a message—this is important, pay attention—and a poet scatters a few words like seeds in a notebook. Months or even years later, those words bear fruit. The process requires both discipline and commitment, and its gifts come from both preparedness and grace, or what writers have traditionally called inspiration. As William Stafford wrote, with his usual simplicity, in a poem entitled “For People with Problems About How to Believe”: “a quality of attention has been given to you: / when you turn your head the whole world / leans forward. It waits there thirsting / after its names, and you speak it all out / as it comes to you . . .”
Anyone who listens to the world, anyone who seeks the sacred in the ordinary events of life, has “problems about how to believe.” Paradoxically, it helps that both prayer and poetry begin deep within a person, beyond the reach of language. The fourth-century