The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [61]
“Listen” is the first word of St. Benedict’s Rule for monasteries, and listening for the eruptions of grace into one’s life—often from unlikely sources—is a “quality of attention” that both monastic living and the practice of writing tend to cultivate. I’m trained to listen when words and images begin to converge. When I wake up at 3 A.M., suddenly convinced that I had better look into an old notebook, or get to work on a poem I’d abandoned years before, I do not turn over and go back to sleep. I obey, which is an active form of listening (the two words are etymologically related).
In fact, I tell the monks, when I first encountered the ancient desert story about obedience—a monastic disciple is ordered by his abba to water a dead stick—I laughed out loud. I know that abba’s voice from those three A.M. encounters; I know the sinking, hopeless feeling that nothing could possibly come out of this writing I feel compelled to do. I also know that good things often come when I persevere. But it took me a long time to recognize that my discipline as a writer, some of it at least, could translate into the monastic realm.
The monastic practice of lectio divina—which literally means holy reading—seemed hopelessly esoteric to me for a long time. When I’d read descriptions of it, I’d figure that my mind was too restless, too impatient, too flighty to do it well. But then the monk who was my oblate director said, “What do you mean? You’re doing it!” He explained that the poems I was writing in response to the scripture I’d encounter at the Divine Office with the monks, or in my private reading, were a form of lectio. He termed this writing active lectio, at least more active than the usual form of meditating on scripture. I had thought that because I was writing, because I was doing something, it couldn’t be lectio. But writing was not what I’d set out to do; words came as if organically, often simply from hearing scripture read aloud. I was learning the truth of what the Orthodox monk Kallistos Ware has said about the monastic environment; that in itself it can be a guide, offering a kind of spiritual formation. Not all my poems are lectio—to believe that would be too easy, a form of self-indulgence—but the practice of lectio does strike me as similar to the practice of writing poetry, in that it is not an intellectual procedure so much as an existential one. Grounded in a meditative reading of scriptures, it soon becomes much more; a way of reading the world and one’s place in it. To quote a fourth-century monk, it is a way of reading that “works the earth of the heart.”
I should try telling my friends who have a hard time comprehending why I like to spend so much time going to church with Benedictines that I do so for the same reasons that I write: to let words work the earth of my heart. To sing, to read poetry aloud, and to have the poetry and the wild stories of scripture read to me. To respond with others, in blessed silence. That is a far more accurate description of morning or evening prayer in a monastery than what most people conjure up when they hear the word “church.” Monks have always recognized reading as a bodily experience, primarily oral. The ancients spoke of masticating the words of scripture in order to fully digest them. Monastic “church” reflects a whole-body religion, still in touch with its orality, its music. In the midst of today’s revolution in “instant communication,” I find it a blessing that monks still respect the slow way that words work on the human psyche. They take the time to sing, chant, and read the psalms aloud, leaving plenty of room for silence, showing a respect for words that is remarkable in this culture, which goes for the fast talk of the hard sell, the deceptive masks of