The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [98]
I am haunted also by the countless women whose names we’ll never know, who have faced their rapists with a holy resistance, and possibly even forgiveness, known only to themselves and God. Rapes reported and unreported in so many societies such as our own, which paint themselves as respectable and deny the commonplace, daily reality of rape. It is always something that happens to “someone else.” It is always something she did, or didn’t do: she wore blue jeans, or a skirt, she took a walk through the woods behind her house, she walked down a city sidewalk, she had the wrong uncle, or boyfriend, clergyman, or neighbor. Maria Goretti as cipher allows us to cling to our lies, our illusion of goodness. But Maria Goretti as saint can free us, a symbol of resistance to evil temin her life, “is the only commandment I ever obeyed.”
EVENING
Fairer through Fading—as the Day
Into the Darkness dips away
—Emily Dickinson
Abba Poemen was asked for whom this saying is suitable, “Do not
be anxious about tomorrow” (Matt. 6:34). The old man said, “It
is for the man who is tempted and has not much strength, so that
he should not be worried, saying to himself, ‘How long must I suffer
this temptation?’ He should rather say every day to himself, ‘Today.’”
—THE SAYINGS OF THE DESERT FATHERS
At St. John’s I discovered the true purpose of vespers, which is to let my body tell me, at the end of a workday, just how tired I am. Often I’d come to vespers after dinner, and in the middle of a psalm, or in the silence between psalms, I’d find that my great plans for the evening—to attend a concert, lecture, or a film—were falling by the way. I’d sometimes notice monks who seemed as tired as I, and recall the maternal mercy of Abba Poemen, who when he was asked about the problem of monks falling asleep during communal prayers, had said, “For my part, when I see a brother who is dozing, I put his head on my knees and let him rest.”
Sitting in the choir, in the wooden seats that hadn’t seemed so hard at morning prayer, or at noon or at Mass, I would realize that I’d been running for hours on nervous energy. Grateful for the quiet flow of vespers that had nudged me into acknowledging my weary state, I’d become more willing to do what my body asked of me: let the day suffice, with all its joys and failings, its little triumphs and defeats. I’d happily, if sleepily, welcome evening pered by forgiveness, a symbol of the grace of healing that we long for, for those wounded by rape and sexual abuse, both rapist and victim.
But convenient untruths die hard. In a world in which some cultures still believe that a woman is better off dead than raped, we are wary of accepting the resistance of a Maria Goretti, a Kirsten French. As we read of them, sitting in our comfortable chairs, we think, surely, they had another way. Maybe not. It is not a cipher, but a real girl who says the “no,” who becomes a warrior in the face of death, insisting, “Some things are worth dying for.” Maybe only those who have faced that moment of terrible freedom have the right to agree. Maybe only a saint’s example can bring us to forgive.
GENESIS
I have been too depressed to go to the Liturgy of the Hours, and I could kick myself. I only have a few weeks left at St. John’s; why, when the liturgy has meant so much to me over the last nine months, am I shutting down inside, unable to embrace it in my last days here?
I force myself to go to vespers but feel so dead inside that not even the poetry of the psalms can penetrate my despair. A few words seem to spark—“You are close to all who call you, who call on you from their hearts”—but the flame I know is in them soon dies down. Still, I’m glad to be here, where I belong. Then the reading comes; the first words of Genesis, words I read aloud in this church over a month ago, at the Easter Vigil: “In the beginning, God.” I am shocked to recall