The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [75]
I had wondered if being so much a part of this service would distance me from it—the liturgy director once told me that distraction had been a problem for him when he first took the job. I’m glad that I had the sense to take off my watch. This liturgy will carry us along in its own sweet time. But the music is demanding, and I have to pay attention. I’m glad to find that this does not distract me but makes me more focused. The truth of the old saying “The one who sings prays twice” is evident tonight.
Nearly three hours after we’ve begun, the abbot announces, just before the final blessing, that coffee and orange juice and light refreshments will be served in the Great Hall. I wonder if Benedictines can do anything without feeding people, without making it a party. And it’s quite a party, full of stone-sober people who are drunk on liturgy. I look for my husband. He’s been outside smoking, and when he comes up to us he puts his arm around me and says to the monks, “The last time I went to the Vigil it was still in Latin, but you guys do it up right.” They laugh. “The choir sounded magnificent,” David says to me. “You liked it?” I reply, amazed. “It was beautiful,” he says, and he seems to mean it. “Abbot Timothy,” I say, “we have an emergency. This is not the man I married.” The abbot laughs, we all laugh, and visit until nearly 2 A.M.
SUNDAY MORNING
Somehow, I’m back at morning prayer at 9:30. The great week of singing, the Octave of Easter with its incessant “Alleluias,” begins. Some of the women in the schola, myself included, have still not had enough singing, so we go to the grad school dorm and make coffee and hold a hymn-sing in the lounge. Someone finds an old Methodist hymnal, and I teach these Catholics “I Love to Tell the Story,” and “Softly and Tenderly, Jesus Is Calling.” We revel in the schmaltzy harmonies.
EASTER MONDAY
On Easter Monday, I learn a great secret about monasteries. It’s not the strenuous liturgies of the Triduum, not even the complex turns of the Vigil, that monks have to worry about getting through, but Easter Monday. At morning prayer, a man who has been a monk for nearly sixty years has suddenly forgotten how to begin morning prayer. A jump-start is required; then we’re off and rolling, into forty days of Easter.
CINDERELLA
IN KALAMAZOO
In the spring of every year, a medieval congress is held in Kalamazoo, which attracts several thousand scholars from all over the world. Days are given over to presentations on every aspect of medieval culture—coins, games, weaponry, literature, theology, monasticism—and at night there are magnificent concerts of medieval music, and dances that provide a spectacle worthy of Chaucer—hundreds of tipsy medievalists, some of whom are evidently let out of the library once a year, abandoning themselves to a tape of “Born to Run.” The first year that I attended, I fell in with a bunch of Cistercians and Trappists celebrating the 900th year of Bernard of Clairvaux’s presence on earth, and had the time of my life. When I began attending vespers and compline with them, in part so that I could listen to their singing, the choir director boomed in a friendly but commanding voice, “This is not a spectator sport!” I got a crash course in church Latin and the chant, a wild ride. I wondered if Cinderella’s journey in her pumpkin-turned-coach could have felt less momentous or strange.
On Saturday night, after we’d sung the “Salve Regina” to an oceanic stillness, and been blessed with holy water, we retired to the basement of the chapel for champagne and conversation. I walked back to the dorm that night in such a joyful state I hardly noticed it was raining. My shoes became soggy—so, Hawaiian that I am, I took them off and walked barefoot up the hill to the dorm. Holy ground.
In the harsh fluorescence of the lobby I found a Trappist monk with a worried expression, pacing the floor. The other monks he’d expected to help him move a table into place to serve as an altar for morning Mass had not appeared, and it was getting