The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [67]
When a theologian criticized one of Mechtild’s early images of the Trinity (“I must to God—my Father through nature, my Brother through humanity, my Bridegroom through love”) by protesting that all God does in us is through grace and not nature, she responded boldly, appropriating language that Jesus himself used when preaching to his disciples. “Thou art right and I, too, am right,” she wrote. “Listen to a parable. However good a man’s eyes may be, he cannot see over a mile away; however sharp his senses, he cannot grasp supernatural things, except through faith.” She continues with a Pauline image of the Godhead “[pouring] His own Divine nature into [the soul],” and concludes humbly: “What we know is as nothing, if we do not love God properly in all things.”
Mechtild had left the comforts of an upper-class home when she was in her twenties, joining a movement of women nicknamed Beguines who desired a religious life, but not in cloistered, contemplative communities. Living and praying in common, they worked among the poor and the sick in the burgeoning medieval cities. This was a dangerous life at a time when the church was becoming increasingly clerical, and the women were frequently attacked as heretics.
But Mechtild held on for nearly fifty years, sometimes protected by the Dominican friars who had become her confessors and friends. The story of the Benedictine women of Helfta, taking the aged, half-blind, and embattled Mechtild into their monastery, surely is one of the great stories of hospitality in monastic history. And when I began to study Mechtild’s central eucharistic vision, “Of a poor maid and the Mass of John the Baptist,” I began to see hospitality as its theme. The “poor maid” is Mechtild, and the image is not simply a literary device. In the vision, as often happened in her life, she has been denied communion by church authorities, and asks God, “Must I be without Mass this day?” Because of her desire, God “[brings] her wondrously into a great church” in which she sees several saints, among them John the Baptist, who is about to sing the Mass. Mechtild is dressed in rags and does not think she should remain. But the Blessed Virgin herself invites her into the choir, “to stand in front of St. Catherine,” and Mechtild receives communion after all.
As church officials were becoming increasingly sensitive to any suggestion of anti-clericalism, Mechtild was attacked by a literal-minded churchman for suggesting that a “layman” such as John the Baptist could say Mass. Mechtild responded, typically, by referring to her critic as “My Pharisee” and raging: “No Pope or Bishop could speak the Word of God as John the Baptist spoke it, save in our supernatural Christian faith which cannot be grasped by the senses. Was he then a layman? Instruct me, ye blind!”
I first read Mechtild’s vision on a Palm Sunday, at the abbey where I’m an oblate. By the world’s standards, this was a most inappropriate place for me to be: as a woman, married, a Protestant, a doubter. It was my first experience of Palm Sunday in a monastery, and despite the hospitality of the monks, I was acutely aware of my otherness. Then the abbey’s liturgy director asked me to participate in their reading of the gospel for that day, a group reading, in which the abbot took the part of Christ, another monk was the narrator, and so on. I had the part of the young servant woman who questions Peter following Jesus’ arrest. By identifying him as a follower of Jesus, she precipitates Peter’s denial of Christ.
The monks included me and a handful of other guests in the community’s procession into church. In choir I sat in front of the abbey’s farm manager, not St. Catherine, but small matter. Divine hospitality was at work, and it has the power to change everything. After that Mass, I found that my soul, to quote Mechtild, was “startled, but inwardly rejoicing.” Later that day, when I got around to reading some articles about Mechtild, one scholar charitably pointed out that “theology was not her strong point.” Thank God for small