The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [86]
“The Dominican Order exists in order to be useful to other people,” Tugwell said, which I found refreshing. It’s always good to meet people who understand that religion is about saving lives. None of us can understand what possible use we are in this world; it’s one of the deeper mysteries. Rarely, grace comes to us in the form of another person who tells us we have been of help. But usefulness is not something we can know, or claim, for ourselves; I suspect that to have it as a goal of one’s religious life would engage a person with mystery in tantalizing ways. Simon Tugwell seems to agree.
The gentle wit and formidable erudition of Tugwell’s introduction to a group of people who had found a way, in difficult times, to go where they were needed made a peculiar bedtime story, but adequate. It nudged me back into myself. It was Tuesday of the fourth week of Easter, and for a month my head had been filled with stories from the Book of Acts, tales of the fervent camaraderie of the apostles. Lately, they’d scattered after the martyrdom of Stephen. Barnabas went to Antioch, and then up to Tarsus in search of Paul. Together, they founded a church at Antioch, and it was there that the disciples were for the first time called Christians. I had marveled at the fragile human agency of it all.
Tugwell’s quotation from Humbert of Romans’ “On the Formation of Preachers” was the last passage I read before I went back upstairs and hit the pillow. It seemed a good thing to sleep on. Glossing both Ezekiel 1 and Philippians 3, Humbert describes the contemplative preacher as one who has “eyes to the rear, to see whether they are being enticed back to the things they have abandoned, and eyes in front, to see if they are, like the apostle, surpassing themselves in what lies ahead of them, namely spiritual things, and eyes to the left, to see that they do not lose heart when things are difficult, and eyes to the right, to see that they do not become proud when things are going well.” Angelic contemplation—the seraphim are all eyes—but also the kind of attentiveness that anyone might pursue who seeks to work in this world in a wholly human way.
A STORY
WITH DRAGONS:
THE BOOK OF
REVELATION
As we had read Jeremiah at St. John’s during the fall, we read straight through the Book of Revelation at morning prayer during Easter, and oddly enough it came as a relief. We had been reading through the Book of Hebrews, and I’d had trouble staying awake. My good friend Susan, a systematic theologian, had the opposite reaction. She felt swamped by the incessant imagery of Revelation and missed the ideas that thread their way, laboriously, through Hebrews. I was happy not to be asked to think so hard at seven in the morning.
The Apocalypse, or Revelation, of John begins sweetly, blessing both “the one who reads aloud” and “those who listen to this prophetic message and heed what is written in it” (1:3). This presumes a communal context, in which a reader reads and others listen and respond, a context similar to the one in which I found myself in the monastery choir. Benedictines practice lectio both privately and in common. Benedict considered private reading so important that he allowed several hours a day for it in a monastery’s daily routine. As lectio is not a matter of literacy so much as a disposition of the heart toward prayer, however, Benedict expected illiterate monks to participate by contemplating the words of psalms and the gospels they had memorized.
In communal lectio, I found that it helped to listen to the Book of Revelation as an illiterate; to keep in mind that its primary impact is visual. The Cherokee writer Diane Glancy once told me that she liked Revelation because there was so much to look at, so much that resonated with Indian culture. The colors, the horses, the eagles. The four directions, the four winds. The Book of Revelation does not make for easy listening, but Diane’s comments reminded me that I could simply shut my eyes and let the pictures