The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [66]
To abolish the metaphor of the treachery of darkness is to attempt to live in our heads, and not in the natural world. Darkness is a pain; it causes us to trip and stumble over objects that would be visible to us in the light. It is nature itself that these scholars would deny, and the metaphors that human beings, over thousands of years, have pulled out of the natural world in order to describe their religious experience. To a poet, such an “inclusive” translation feels very much like exclusion.
A friend who is a Cistercian monk once said in a letter that he had taken a book of contemporary poems with him on a hermitage retreat because of “poetry’s ability to draw together sacred and secular, back to the oneness of it all that we Westerners split. This touches me where I live. Monks should not see divisions.” This monk does value abstract reasoning when it’s appropriate and recognizes the human need to make distinctions. But when seeking to be at home in himself and with God in solitude and silence, he knows that metaphors, which insist on connecting disparate elements in ways that the reasoning mind resists, will be of more use than any treatise. His remarks encouraged me but also reinforced my sense of both poetry and monasticism as marginal enterprises, existing on the fringes of the mainstream culture, which educates us to think of metaphor as a lie. I sometimes get in trouble when I refer to the Incarnation as the ultimate metaphor, daring to yoke the human and the divine. To a literalist, I have just said that the Incarnation isn’t “real.” As a poet, I think I’ve said that it is reality at its most alive; it is the new creation.
March 18
MECHTILD OF MAGDEBURG
In a way, I imagined Mechtild before I learned of her existence. As I began reading feminist theology in the 1980s, I was haunted by the idea that women in the church’s past might have been as critical and outspoken as those in the present, and conjured up a fierce medieval nun who had walked a fine line between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. When I began to read Mechtild, with her vision of bishops in the lowest circles of hell, her description of the corrupt clergy of her day as “goats [reeking] of impurity regarding Eternal Truth,” I knew I had found the woman of my dreams.
It was a Benedictine sister who first turned me loose with Mechtild, and I’ll always be grateful to her for introducing me to a lively, observant, and witty poet whose work I might never have encountered. Mechtild’s praise of a soul “[that] has cast from her the apes of wordliness” is typical. My husband was a bartender for years, and I can assure you, the “apes of worldliness” is right on. I found Mechtild’s imagery to be extraordinarily sensuous and evocative, as when she describes herself as “a dusty acre” in need of “the fruitful rain of [Christ’s] humanity, and the gentle dew of the Holy Spirit.” Another passage that endeared Mechtild to me is her description of herself as a mystic: “Of the heavenly things God has shown me, I can speak but a little word, no more than a honeybee can carry away on its foot from an overflowing jar.”
But Mechtild, like many poets, both resists and transcends categories. More orthodox than not, she nevertheless was frequently put on the defensive by church officials, no doubt unamused by Mechtild’s criticism of the deadwood clergy of her day: “Stupidity is sufficient unto itself,” she wrote. “Wisdom