The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [69]
Monks have always told the story of Mary of Egypt to remind themselves not to grow complacent in their monastic observances, mistaking them for the salvation that comes from God alone. And in the Eastern Orthodox churches, Mary’s life is read on the Fifth Sunday of Lent, presented, as the scholar Benedicta Ward tells us, “as an icon in words of the theological truths about repentance.” Mary’s story is an important one, but not because she seems particularly relevant to teenaged prostitutes, or because the world would be a better place if prostitutes thought better of things and headed for the nearest desert to live in caves. Repentance is not a popular word these days, but I believe that any of us recognize it when it strikes us in the gut. Repentance is coming to our senses, seeing, suddenly, what we’ve done that we might not have done, or recognizing, as Oscar Wilde says in his great religious meditation De Profundis, that the problem is not in what we do but in what we become.
Repentance is valuable because it opens in us the idea of change. I’ve known several young women who’ve worked in the sex trade, and one of the worst problems they encounter is the sense that change isn’t possible. They’re in a business that will discard them as useless once they’re past thirty, but they come to feel that this work is all they can do. Many, in fact, do not like what they become. The facile thinking of middle-class America—I’m OK, you’re OK, your pimp is OK—isn’t of much use to these women once they recognize that they need a change.
The story of Mary of Egypt opens the floodgates of change. It comes from a tradition of desert stories suggesting that if monks and whores can’t talk to each other, who can? The monk who encounters Mary still has a lot to learn; his understanding of the spiritual life is facile in comparison to hers, and he knows it. Mary, for all her trials, is like one of those fortunate souls in the gospels to whom Jesus says, “Your faith has made you whole.” Benedicta Ward has said that these stories are about deliverance from “despair of the soul, from the risk of the tragedy of refusing life, of calling death life,” which may be one function of the slang term for prostitution: it is called “the life.” But the story of Mary of Egypt is one any of us might turn to when we’re frozen up inside, when we’re in need of remorse, in need of the tears that will melt what Ward terms “the ultimate block within [us]; that deep and cold conviction that [we] cannot love or be loved.” In this tradition, Ward says, virginity, defined as being whole, at one in oneself, and with God, can be restored by tears.
SAVED BY
A ROCKETTE:
EASTERS
I HAVE KNOWN
Let us sing now, not in order to enjoy a life of leisure, but in
order to lighten your labors. You should sing as wayfarers do—
sing, but continue your journey. Do not be lazy, but sing to make
your journey more enjoyable. Sing, but keep going.
—St. Augustine
A dark plaid, deep reds and browns. My favorite dress. Soft cotton, no scratchy lace. Buster Brown shoes. An occasion; my mother has set my hair in rags overnight and in the morning she lets me brush out the curls. Then we go to a department store in downtown Washington, D.C., where along with other children, I have tea and cookies with the Easter Bunny. I have the photograph to prove it.
I love singing in the cherub choir at the First Methodist Church in Arlington, Virginia. In the picture I pose before the altar, hands pressed together, eyes closed tight as if I am praying hard. But I am thinking about the way I look, in the starched white collar and big black bow tie, my arms like angel wings in voluminous pale blue sleeves.
Much is made of new things. The electric stove, on which I promptly burned the palm of my right hand. The television. There’s a story on television that I like very much, because it is the same story I hear at Sunday school.