The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [68]
Mechtild of Hackeborn, one of Mechtild of Magdeburg’s sisters in the monastery at Helfta, once described the Order of St. Benedict as “standing in the middle of the church, holding it up like a column on which the whole house rests.” While the sense of monasticism as the center of the church may be lost on many people today, I think it still holds true, and hospitality is at the center of it all. In a world in which we are so easily labeled and polarized by our differences: man/woman, Protestant/Catholic, gay/straight, feminist/chauvinist, monastic hospitality is a model of the kind of openness that we need if we are going to see and hear each other at all.
The radical, incarnational nature of that hospitality hasn’t diminished at all since Mechtild’s time, or St. Benedict’s. It still has the power to effect conversion and to work miracles. In the nearly ten years that I have been a Benedictine oblate, I have become convinced that hospitality is at the center of the Christian faith—the bread of the Eucharist is called the “host,” after all, and for good reason. But church hierarchies, in Mechtild’s time as in our own, become inhospitable whenever they forget that they are not the center.
Mechtild’s images of hospitality became more intimate as she aged. It does not surprise me that she grew impatient with the infirmities of old age, finding them “cold and without grace.” But God comforts her with words both homey and profound: “Your childhood was a companion of the Holy Spirit; your youth was a bride of humanity; in your old age you are a humble housewife of the Godhead.” In her last writings Mechtild reveals that the hospitality of the nuns of Helfta had helped her to transform what could be regret into thankfulness: “Lord!” she writes, “I thank Thee that since Thou hast taken from me the power of my hands . . . and the power of my heart, Thou now servest me with the hands and hearts of others.” Mechtild entitled this section “How God Serves Humankind,” and there is no better definition of hospitality than that.
April 2
MARY OF EGYPT
I once gave an icon of Mary of Egypt to a woman who counsels teenaged prostitutes. They range in age from ten—a girl who’d developed early, and whose stepfather and brothers had put her on the streets—to a world-weary eighteen. Many are runaways, most often from abusive homes, most have grown accustomed to being treated like trash. My friend’s job is to convince them that they aren’t trash. She works hard—sometimes enduring threats from pimps—to help these girls see that they are good for something besides being bought and sold.
Mary of Egypt lived in the fifth century, but her story is all too familiar in the twentieth. Running away from home at the age of twelve, she became a prostitute in Alexandria. At the age of twenty-nine, she grew curious about Jerusalem and joined a boatload of pilgrims by offering the crew her sexual services for the duration of the journey. She continued to work as a prostitute in Jerusalem. On hearing that a relic of the true cross was to be displayed at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, her curiosity was aroused again, and she joined the feast-day crowds. But at the threshold of the church some invisible force held her back. Suddenly ashamed of the life she’d led, she began to weep. Kneeling before an icon of the Virgin Mary, she begged forgiveness and asked for help. A voice said to her, “If you cross over the Jordan, you will find rest.” Mary spent the rest of her life, forty-seven years, as a hermit in the desert.
Late in her life, Mary encounters a monk who had come to the desert for a period of fasting, and she tells him her story. Touchingly, she relates that she had missed the fish she used to eat in Egypt, and the wine—“I had enjoyed wine very much,” she says. The monk is amazed to discover that Mary knows many Bible verses by heart, for in the desert she has had no one but God to teach her. She asks him to bring communion to her, when next he comes to the desert, and this he does. On his third visit, however, he finds