The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [72]
He’s standing in our kitchen, a half-empty bottle of Canadian whiskey in one hand, a plastic bucket in the other. He says, “We had some yearling bulls that we had to cut to go to grass, and I thought, I sure would hate to see these big nuts go to waste. I cleaned ’em up; they’re ready to cook.” Our friends love my husband’s cooking, but this is the first time he’s been asked to prepare rocky mountain oysters for breakfast.
David decides to stir-fry them in the wok. I pour whiskey into three glasses and toast some of my home-made bread. There’s buffalo berry jam that my grandmother made, the last jar we have. “Hey, it’s Easter,” I say, “let’s celebrate,” and we have ourselves a feast.
It’s Palm Sunday at the abbey. The monks have invited their guests to join them in the procession into church. Four girls, their catechism teachers, and myself. It’s a rag-tag procession, and the children wave their palms self-consciously. No matter. It will have to do. The hour is on us.
At Mass I stand alongside the youngest girl. She stares at the celebrant as if at a flame, her eyes wander around the great candy box of a church, its pretty angels and painted vines, lilies spinning around the Christ Child. She seems to be too young for first communion, but she’s careful to do what everyone else does, which is mostly standing still.
Yet we move, and change. Her life crosses mine, and there is no name for it. The quantum effect. Communion. At about her age I refused to believe that Jesus dies; I wonder if I believe it yet. I wonder what she knows of death, if she, too, will run from pain, to a dark beyond telling, if she will find God there, for the touching and tasting.
The girl stares at her hands where bread has fallen as if from heaven, and looks around wildly, face aflame. “Do I eat this?” she wonders, half-aloud. “Yes,” I whisper. “Yes.”
It’s been a rough winter. Medical, financial, emotional disaster that somehow we’ve come through. After weeks on the road as an artist-in-schools, I feel ready for a Holy Week, my first experience of the Roman Catholic Easter liturgy. My husband is at home, writing; he’ll be better off, he says, knowing that I’m here. My “I-survived-Catholic-school-and-won’t-go-near-a-Mass-ever-again” husband thinks I’m where I belong. He may be right.
Good Friday is stark, solemn, final. But on Holy Saturday the world seems expectant again. I’m delighted to find that the long story-telling session of the Vigil contains some of my favorite images from childhood—the parting of the Red Sea, and passage through the desert, following a fire by night and a pillar of cloud by day.
The Vigil moves us through the night. I try to keep in mind what one monk has said to me, about not letting the self-voice take all the room inside me. Somewhere, Thomas Merton says that “simplicity is completely absorbed in listening to what it hears,” and for much of the night, I am a simple-minded listener.
Another monk, a liturgist, has suggested that I sit in the choir loft so that I have a good view of everything. Two monks join me there, and as there are three bells, they say, and only two of them, would I take one bell at the Gloria? In the chilly tower, they give me the rope for the smallest bell, which is probably the only one I can handle. “Be careful not to tip it,” one monk says, demonstrating. It is hard to see; his black habit merges with the shadows. There is no electricity in the bell tower, only the light of the full moon.
We return at the close of the Vigil, near midnight, and ring the bells for a long time. Through the frosty glass I can make out the lights of cars on the Interstate in the distance; I wonder if they can hear the racket we’re making, if someone is wondering what the bells are for.
Afterwards, the abbot invites me to the Easter party—beer, popcorn, candy, and good conversation until one in the morning. True celebration;