The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [85]
“Some declared that the girl’s strange power proved that God existed,” Danner writes. “And that brought them back to the killing of the children. There were a lot of differences among the soldiers about whether this had been a good thing or whether they shouldn’t have done it.” Sometimes it takes a death to make us see the obvious. Sometimes it is a fierce little girl who is hard to kill, who gives witness to a mystery beyond our understanding and control. And in the wild center of that young girl’s heart, we glimpse love stronger than death, a love that shames us all.
MINNEAPOLIS:
COCKTAILS WITH
SIMON TUGWELL
I have never met Simon Tugwell; I’m merely a fan. He’s on my short list of contemporary theologians with a lively prose style—never a whiff of jargon or academic aridity. As a poet, I appreciate his compression of profound ideas into plain English. And I owe to him my first taste of laughter in a monastery choir. At noon prayer one day, the community was listening soberly, with grumbling stomachs, to Tugwell’s Ways of Imperfection, a book about saints. Hearing that St. Thérèse of Lisieux “detested the pious trivialities which find their way into religious life” seemed to cheer people, and Thérèse’s own description of her convent sisters as “a fine bunch of old maids” broke everyone up.
I appreciated, too, being led to the discovery that it is through our failings and weaknesses, our “ways of imperfection,” that we find God, and God finds us, the God who can turn any mess we’ve made to the good. I hadn’t thought much about the saints; they seemed a Catholic thing, impossibly holy people. But I was learning to see them as witnesses to our limitations and God’s vast possibilities (as well as sense of humor), as Christian theology torn from the page and brought to life.
Years after I first encountered him, Simon Tugwell was a godsend in another way, late one April evening in Minneapolis. I’d had dinner with faculty of the Luther Northwestern Seminary in St. Paul, and then gave a reading in the imposing seminary chapel. Over four hundred people, mostly Lutherans, many with roots in the Dakotas, were in attendance, and we ended the reading with a lively discussion. Lutherans are great discussers. When it came time for me to sign books, I sat down at a tiny table at exactly 9 P.M. and didn’t stand up again until over an hour later. I don’t know how many people I spoke with during that time, but it must have been over a hundred. When I got back to the hotel at 10:45, I felt as if I’d been hit by a truck.
My husband was sound asleep; we’d planned to have a night-cap together, and I was disappointed, too wound up to sleep. After engaging as best I could with all those people, my throat was dry, my limbs ached, my brain was numb. I felt the need for something— a long walk, a swim, chocolates, champagne, strawberries, or even chicken soup—and I wasn’t going to get it. Room service had shut down for the night; the pool was closed.
I’d noticed on my return that the hotel bar was still open, a respectable-looking place, and almost empty, which told me that I probably wouldn’t have unwelcome attention from drunks. Earlier that day, I had bought a book edited by Simon Tugwell, entitled Early Dominicans: Selected Writings. There was no jacket photo, which I felt was a shame; another of Tugwell’s books has an engaging photograph of him looking both angelic and impish in his Dominican habit.
Even without the impish countenance, I felt that Simon Tugwell would be a suitable companion for a drink or two, and I carried the book with me to a booth in the bar, where, fortunately, there was just enough light to read by. Gin gimlet in hand, I soon found myself immersed in the world of thirteenth-century Dominicans, an era and an order I know very little about.