The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [74]
FRIDAY
At morning prayer on Good Friday a monk sings one of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, and it hurts; it feels like a blow to the solar plexus. Jeremiah’s images are strikingly contemporary: infants dying of thirst, children on the streets with no one to care for them, the wealthy facing sudden ruin, young women being raped in a city gone mad: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, return to the Lord your God,” the young monk sings, and then a terrible silence in the church. And in my heart.
I have finally come to Good Friday on its own terms. It is the morning after, the coming-to. Last night we feasted with our dearest friends, and now we wake to find that for the dearest of them, Jesus himself, death is imminent. We gather in the harsh light of morning, the harsh light of grief.
At lunch, in the guest dining room, leftovers from last night’s feast. The world has changed sinced then. The church bells have been silenced, and I notice more than ever how disorienting this is. I’ve been here since early September, and the bells had come to make sense of the time for me, every quarter hour. Now time itself is absorbed in the flow of the Triduum liturgies.
Of all days for there to be a power outage! Foolish non-virgin that I am, I have left something I need in my study in the sub-basement of the library. I borrow a janitor’s flashlight and descend. My familiar work space has become close, dark as a tomb, and as I climb the three flights back into sunlight I am as dazed as Lazarus.
On the afternoon of Good Friday, we wait in the cloister walk again; one woman carries on about the car trouble that has plagued her all semester. It is not an easy thing, silence. Not the silence of death. I wonder if the others are as tired as I am; I really will need a nap today, if I am to stay awake for vespers. I haven’t been up past 10 P.M. in months. I’d better take a nap—but when?
The familiar gospel is hard to take—“Woman, there is your son,” Jesus says from the cross, “and there, your mother.” A friend buried his mother on Wednesday, and I don’t know how he can bear this. I return to the apartment to find my husband sitting on the cold patio, reading the Gospel of Mark to a squirrel.
SATURDAY
On Holy Saturday, I walk up the hill to the cemetery and I meet old Fr. Gall walking stiffly toward me, dressed in a black suit, a narrow, European cut decades out of fashion. He twirls his walking stick and says, brightly, “Ah, you have come to visit those who are in heaven? You have come to seek the living among the dead!”
The air is full of the anticipation of snow, a howling wind. Words will not let me be: in cold and silence you are born, from the womb of earth, the cloud of snow yet to fall. And from somewhere in the liturgy: What has been prepared for me? Tonight I have a big responsibility; after the Service of Light, after the long story of the Exultet is sung—“This is the night, this is the night”—I will speak the first words of the Liturgy of the Word, the opening lines of Genesis: “In the beginning, God . . .”
My friend Columba and I share this first reading—here, they divide it between God and a narrator. Rehearsing in the abbey’s chapter house, we had flipped a coin, and Columba won the part of God, which I didn’t mind in the least. The narrator has better lines. Now, standing in the church full of people I can barely see, I say them slowly, as if I had all the time in the world. It is the creation of the world we are saying, and I’m surprised to find surprise in the lines: let there be . . . and there was, God waiting to see, and to call it good.
As my eyes grow accustomed to the light in the church, I can see my husband hunched in the balcony. I had warned him not to come, because the Mass usually puts him in such a bad mood. We make a comic spectacle, at least when it comes to religion: what makes me giddy with joy annoys or angers him. He said he had to come if I was singing in the choir; go figure, I said, shrugging,