TheCloisterWalk

My monastic friends are often at pains to counteract the romantic image of the monk or nun, insisting, rightly, that they are ordinary people. Every once in a while, however, the difference asserts itself, a reminder of the fact that the monastic world is not like the world that most of us inhabit. To eat in a monastery refectory is an exercise in humility; daily, one is reminded to put communal necessity before individual preference. While consumer culture speaks only to preferences, treating even whims as needs to be granted (and the sooner the better), monastics sense that this pandering to delusions of self-importance weakens the true self, and diminishes our ability to distinguish desires from needs. It’s a price they’re not willing to pay.

But in a consumer culture, monastic people must be vigilant, remaining intentional about areas of life that most of us treat casually, with little awareness of what we’re doing. One year at the American Benedictine Academy convention, an abbot, speaking on the subject of “The Monastic Archetype,” suddenly dropped all pretense to objectivity and said he was troubled by the growing number of cereals made available for breakfast in his community. “How many kinds of cereals do we need,” he asked, “in order to meet genuine health needs without falling into thoughtless consumerism?” The audience of several hundred Benedictine men and women broke into applause, obviously grateful that he’d captured, in one seemingly trivial example, an unease that many of them share about the way they live in contemporary America. One monk, a former abbot, said that he wasn’t as concerned with the number of cereals available as he was with the cafeteria-style of eating adopted by his community. “When we serve ourselves,” he said, “we do not exemplify monastic values.” He wondered if eating family-style, sharing from a common bowl, waiting to be served and then to serve one’s neighbor, was a practice monastic people could afford to lose.

A friend who is a retired corporate executive, and a Benedictine oblate, has pointed out to me that monastic, family-style management differs greatly from management as practiced by a corporation. While this difference sometimes results in Benedictines raising inefficiency to an art form, I’ve come to value the monastic witness to a model of institutional behavior that is not “all business,” that does not bow down before the idols of efficiency and the profit motive. Now that corporations are constructing ready-made “communities,” in the form of gated and guarded suburban enclaves, the difference between monastic community and corporate culture has become all the more evident.

What The New York Times recently termed “the fastest growing residential communities in the nation” are private developments created out of fear of crime and urban chaos. Fear is not easily contained, and it is not surprising to find that these developments also manifest a fear of individual differences that might spring up within the enclave itself, requiring a draconian set of rules that attempt to provide for every eventuality. Outdoor clotheslines, satellite dishes, and streetside parking are often prohibited, and in some communities, a pet dog who strays from its own yard is zapped by an electronic monitor. While strict regulation of such things as the colors of house paint, the height of hedges, the type of gardens or flower beds, and the number and size of hanging planters for the front porch may give the severely anal-retentive a place to call home, I find it a sad commentary on our ability to accept the responsibility of freedom. I suspect that it is also an experiment doomed to failure, as people discover that it is not easy to live according to a corporate model, and that their private governments, schools, and police forces provide more tyranny than security. The question asked by Tacitus when the well-to-do citizens of ancient Rome began fleeing the troubles of the city by retreating behind the walls of their guarded villas—“Who will guard the guards?”—is still a good one.

The Romans lost everything to barbarian invaders. Ironically, it is another legacy of the fall of Rome, the Benedictine monastery, that is still going strong fifteen hundred years later. As a young man, Benedict had abandoned the decaying city. “[Putting] aside his father’s residence and fortune,” his biographer Gregory the Great tells us, “and desiring to please God alone,” Benedict adopted the life of a hermit in the countryside. But his renown as a spiritual man soon attracted others, and in accommodating them, establishing a monastery and writing a rule for their way of life, Benedict was able to serve the world in ways that a “private community” cannot. He took it for granted that the world would come to monks. “A monastery is never without guests,” he said, implying that a true monastery is never so shut off from the world as to stop attracting guests.

The modern guest who partakes of Benedictine hospitality soon discovers that it entails a remarkable freedom to be oneself. If you start to sing Ramones songs in a loud voice at three in the morning, chances are someone will ask you to quiet down. But then, again, maybe not. The responsibility is yours; rules and regulations are kept to a minimum. In fact, the “customary” of a monastery—a book that contains, in written form, the everyday customs and traditions of the place—reveals that Benedictines themselves live free from much written legislation. The customary of one of the largest monasteries in the world is little more than a sketchy outline. One monk told me, “This is because the minute you write something down, you set it in stone. And that’s dangerous, because then someone will want to enforce it.” Because they operate as families, Benedictines can claim a culture that is primarily oral rather than written, more dependent on lived experience than explicit codes of conduct.

I once heard a monk who has doctorates in both canon and civil law explain that Benedict had taken one of the strengths of Roman society, a passion for civil order, and had converted it into legislation for a way of life that integrates prayer, work, and communality so flexibly that it is still relevant to twentieth-century needs. It may be more relevant now than ever. “While Benedict respected the individual,” he said, “he recognized that the purpose of individual growth is to share with others.” It was refreshing to hear a good legal mind with soul, another reminder of the monastic difference: “We live in vigil,” the monk said, “working at love in common living. Monastic life is meant to be lived in vigil, in koinonia, or, a community of love. And it looks toward eternal life, where love will be completed.” I don’t know many tough-minded lawyers who talk like this.

Benedictines often remind me of poets, who while they sometimes speak of the art of poetry in exalted terms also know that little things count, that in fact there are no things so “little” as to be without significance in the making of a poem. Monastic life also requires paying attention to the nitty-gritty. “We know that details matter,” another monk once told me, “and we’ll tinker with our liturgy of the hours, trying a minute of silence after each psalm, after discovering that ninety seconds is too long. But we are still an experiment, after all these years, and we resist codifying.” The great experiment of Christian monasticism has taken so many forms that it is hard to characterize: now, as in the fourth century, monastic people live as hermits, in loosely organized clusters of hermits, as members of cloistered communities, and in communities in constant contact with the world. They are urban, rural, and they live in wilderness; they work as pastors (and as counselors, teachers, nurses, doctors, and massage therapists) and they pray as contemplatives. At times in the Middle Ages, “monastic cities” existed, inhabited by monks and their students, soldiers, and families of merchants, servants, farmers, and artisans, a situation that several modern monasteries have emulated loosely, taking in artists who practice their craft in exchange for room and board, or allowing widows, married couples, and families to participate more fully in monastic life without making lifelong vows. Time will tell what works, and what doesn’t; after a millennium and a half, Benedictines can afford to take the long view.

I was intrigued to discover that there are fussy monastic rules that predate that of Benedict, notably The Rule of the Master, in which fear and suspicion predominate, revealing an overwhelmingly negative view of both the world outside the monastery, and the motives of individuals within it. Predictably, the author of this rule attempts, in the words of one commentary, “to regulate everything in advance, to foresee every possible case.” Benedict appears relaxed and humane by comparison, more laissez-faire, much more trusting of individual discretion: “Whoever needs less should thank God and not be distressed,” he writes in the section about distribution of goods in the monastery, but he adds that “whoever needs more should feel humble because of his weakness, not self-important because of the kindness shown him. In this way, all the members will be at peace.” From the earliest days in the Egyptian desert, monastic life has attracted all classes of people. And this means, as Benedict was quick to realize, that equal treatment does not translate into equality; what is an unpleasantly hard bed to someone raised in wealth might be a luxury to a shepherd used to sleeping on the ground. As recently as the 1930s, monastic novices raised on American farms, who had slept all their lives on straw-filled ticking, got their first experience of mattresses and sheets in the monastery. (This cultural phenomenon, by which monastic deprivation becomes a form of luxury, is much in evidence today in the thriving Benedictine monastaries of the Third World, making Benedict’s wisdom on the subject of need more relevant than ever.)

The ongoing Benedictine experiment demonstrates a remarkable ability to take individual differences into account while establishing the primacy of communal life. I find this most evident when a Benedictine community is deciding whether or not to accept a candidate. Questions that would be primary in the business world—what are this person’s credentials and skills, what will they add to the organization’s efficiency and productivity?—are secondary, if they’re raised at all. Even the question of “acceptability,” which is so often a mask for prejudice, is muted. People are simply asked to consider whether or not this person has a monastic vocation for that particular community. The fact that you might not like the person, certainly not enough to want to live with them for the rest of your life, is not supposed to be a factor. The monastic value of not judging others, of giving them the benefit of the doubt, can become extremely painful at a time like this, because once a person becomes a part of the community, they are family.

Most monasteries now employ psychological screening methods for candidates, and the discipline of the novitiate tends to weed out the severely maladjusted. But I’ve often been touched by the way in which monastic communities, like strong families, can accommodate their more troubled members. Every monastery I know contains at least one borderline person, who may be socially retarded (or just extremely repressed), who has minimal brain damage, who suffers from a mental illness such as manic-depression, or who is ravaged by Alzheimer’s, or even, in the words of one monastic friend, who may simply be “surpassingly strange.” And it is good to see the many ways that communities find to make room. While monastic people are not conventionally nice to each other—as family, they can be brutally honest, taking liberties that outsiders find shocking—I’ve often witnessed support for their more disturbed members in the form of prayers, and daily acts of patient, loving-kindness that would put many families to shame. Benedictines do make use of psychiatrists and drugs such as Prozac, but I sometimes wonder if the sustained love of a community doesn’t help just as much.

Contemporary American Benedictines, like the culture they live in tension with, are struggling with questions of diversity. Communities founded by Swiss or German monastics a century or more ago are contending with the loss of old customs, as their newest members—of Mexican, Laotian, Vietnamese ethnicity—bring new customs with them. Several Benedictines who teach novitiate classes in both men’s and women’s communities, have said to me that one of the biggest problems monasteries currently face is people who come to them having no sense of what it means to live communally. Schooled in individualism, often having families so disjointed that even meals in common were a rarity, they find it extremely difficult to adjust to monastic life. “They want to be alone all the time,” one formation director said to me of his current novices. “I have to force them to do things as a group.”

Monasticism is a way of life, and monasteries are full of real people. In considering the great tensions that have always existed in the monastic imperative—between structure and freedom, diversity and unity, openness to the world and retreat from it—monks are better off when they retain the ability to laugh at themselves. One monk, when asked about diversity in his small community, said that there were people who can meditate all day and others who can’t sit still for five minutes; monks who are scholars and those who are semiliterate; chatterboxes and those who emulate Calvin Coolidge with regard to speech. “But,” he said, “our biggest problem is that each man here had a mother who fried potatoes in a different way.” Differences between individuals will either be absorbed when the community gathers to act as one, or these communal activities become battlegrounds. As one monk, a liturgist, once said to me, “Go to the dining room and to prayers, and you’ll find out how a monastery is doing.”

When I think of all that monasteries have survived in the 1500-plus years of their existence—pirate raids, bandits, wars and revolutions, political and social upheavals of all kinds, dictators, tyrants, confiscation, foreclosure, martyrdom at the hands of kings, as well as co-opting by the wealthy and powerful—I find it amazing that they’re still here. “We’re as persistent as weeds,” one Benedictine friend says. “We just keep springing up.” I suspect that it is the difference, the adherence to monastic bedrock, what one sister calls the “non-negotiables” in the face of changing circumstances, that makes monasticism so indestructible. Monastic communities traffic in intangibles—worship, solitude, humility, peace—that are not easily manipulated by corporate concerns, not easily identified, packaged, and sold. It will be interesting to see how monastic communities fare in a world which gives more and more power to large, multinational corporations.

I expect they’ll survive, with their difference, the absurdity of faith that attracts people to a communal way of life and gives them the strength to persevere in it. “The basis of community is not that we have all our personal needs met here, or that we find all our best friends in the monastery,” I once heard a monk say. In fact, he added, his pastoral experience with married couples had taught him that such unreasonably high expectations of any institution, be it a marriage or a monastery, was often what led to disillusionment, and dissolution of the bond. “What we have to struggle for, and to preserve, is a shared vision of the why,” he said, “why we live together. It’s a common meaning, reinforced in the scriptures, a shared vision of the coming reign of God.”

Jerome is a saint feminists love to hate, and to quote: “Now that a virgin has conceived in the womb and borne to us a child . . . now the chain of the curse is broken. Death came through Eve, but life has come through Mary. And thus the gift of virginity has been bestowed most richly upon women, seeing that it has had its beginning from a woman.”

This is typical of the way in which the Christian biblical interpreters of the late fourth century—Jerome and then Augustine, not long after—made a connection between Eve and Mary. We’ve lost the wonder that these words must have had for those who first heard them; now we sigh, discouraged, hearing only the seeds of our well-worn, ludicrous sexual double standard which dictates that women must be either virgins or whores, either blessed or cursed, while men are simply sexual athletes, slaves of lust. (And, don’t forget, Christian boys and girls, everyone is a temple of the Holy Spirit.)

As with most of these writings from a time so distant from our own, it is difficult to read without reading into it our modern frustrations, difficult to discern the complexities that resist our simplistic interpretations. To me, this passage reflects a fear of women that is thoroughly comprehensible: if Eve is the mother of the living, she is also mother of the dead. One of the most astonishing and precious things about motherhood is the brave way in which women consent to give birth to creatures who will one day die. That they do this is an awesome thing, as is their virginity, their existence in and of themselves, apart from that potential for bearing life and death. That we all begin inside a woman and must emerge from her body is something that the male theologians of the world’s religions have yet to forgive us for.

The truth about Jerome is that he was an equal-opportunity curmudgeon. He despised both men and women, but women fascinated him more. Maybe because he genuinely believed that in them, as in Mary, lay the beginnings of salvation. Jerome’s friendships with women—Paula, her daughter Eustochium, Marcella—certainly saved him from much hardship. These learned, powerful women had taken their considerable wealth out of the Roman Empire’s reach in order to found monasteries and scholarly enterprises such as Jerome’s. Without their friendship and financial support, his translation of the Bible would not have been possible.

It is clear from Jerome’s correspondence that his friendships with these women were abiding and deep. I like to think that they inspired him to give the women of the New Testament a theological import that is radical, even now. Whenever I hear of conservative seminarians (Roman Catholic or Protestant) who bristle at the mention of Mary Magdalene as a model for the apostles, I think of Jerome’s typically tart comment on the subject: “The unbelieving reader may perhaps laugh at me for dwelling so long on the praises of mere women; yet if he will but remember how holy women followed our Lord and Saviour and ministered to Him out of their substance, and how the three Marys stood before the cross and especially how Mary Magdalene—called the tower from the earnestness and glow of her faith—was privileged to see the rising Christ first of all before the very apostles, he will convict himself of pride sooner than me of folly. For we judge people’s virtue not by their sex but by their character . . .”

Jerome’s own character was notoriously difficult. As Peter Brown has dryly noted, he was a man “of pronounced ascetical views,” not at all shy about advising his lady friends on the virtues of going without baths, of aspiring to “holy knees hardened like a camel’s from the frequency of prayers,” and of sleeping on cold floors, full of groans and tears. Who wouldn’t cry?

The hymn we sing in Jerome’s honor is a pleasant, generic hymn in praise of the saints, entitled “Who Are These Like Stars Appearing,” and it amuses me greatly to envision Jerome, of all people, shining like a star, and hating every minute of it. As we’re leaving the church, I mention this to one of the monks. “Ah, poor Jerome,” he said, “forced to smile and sing for all of eternity. Maybe that’s his punishment.” One of the theology students has overheard us. “The feast of St. Jerome,” he says, “Wickedness is in the air.”

As Emily Dickinson was known to be attracted to the company of children—they were the eager recipients of cookies and gingerbread that she baked and lowered in baskets from the window of her room—I love to think that she might have enjoyed a conversation with the four-year-old Thérèse, whose response to being offered a handful of ribbons from which to choose was to say, simply, “I choose all.”

Both Thérèse and Emily Dickinson did choose all, I think, and in doing so gave up almost everything. First Corinthians attracted them both; I suspect it is where each woman found her calling. Emily Dickinson, attracted to Paul’s confession of “weakness and much fear and trembling,” his knowing “nothing but Christ crucified,” speaks in her poems of daily crucifixion, of “newer—nearer Crucifixion.” Near the end of her life, she wrote in a letter: “When Jesus tells us about his Father, we distrust him. When he shows us his Home, we turn away, but when he confides to us that he is ‘acquainted with Grief,’ we listen, for that also is an Acquaintance of our own.”

Commenting on First Corinthians in her autobiography, Thérèse laments that for a long time she could not find herself in any of the members which Paul describes in the epistle—not a martyr (that’s a matter of opinion), not an apostle, but an insignificant young nun who was known in her convent mainly for her tendency to fall asleep during the Liturgy of the Hours. Remembering, suddenly, to be the bold child who chooses all, she states, “I have found my calling: my call is love,” and writes: “In the heart of the Church, my mother, I will be love, and thus I will be all things . . .”

This is the reading in the breviary for this day, and the text I had expected to hear at morning prayer. Instead, I am startled awake by Thérèse in another mode: “For a long time,” she says, “I have wondered why the good Lord has preferences . . . I was surprised to see the Lord give extraordinary favors to saints who had offended him.” (She may be referring here to St. Jerome.) Why these saints, she wonders, blessed all their lives by God’s interfering presence, when there are so many people Thérèse considers to be unimaginably poor, “dying without even hearing the name of God . . .”

She finds her answer in the “book of nature” that Jesus has given her. Contemplating the diversity of flowers, she writes, “I have come to realize, that the radiance of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not take away the fragrance of the little violet or the delightful simplicity of the daisy.” She decides that “perfection consists in being what God wants us to be.”

It was a decision that was to cost her dearly. Emerging out of the narrow confines of nineteenth-century Jansenism, a thickly pious little girl, adored and spoiled by her parents and older sisters, she rushed headlong into the wide spaces of sanctity, only to be confined again by tuberculosis, a disease in which the lungs become brittle over time, and are finally coughed out. With a temerity equal to that of Paul (and Emily Dickinson), she addressed Jesus frequently towards the end of her life, saying “My little story, which was like a fairy tale, has turned into prayer.”

Thérèse was then twenty-four, and close to death. At Easter of 1896, the year before she died, she herself had become impoverished by the loss of a sense of God’s presence that had been with her all her life. She saw this as grace, that God should permit her to be overwhelmed by impenetrable darkness. Again, she addresses God: “Lord, your child has understood your divine light: she asks pardon for her brothers, and consents to eat for as long as you wish it the bread of sorrow, and she will not rise from this table, which is filled with bitterness, where poor sinners eat, until the day you have appointed. Further, can she not say in their name . . . ‘Have pity on us, Lord, for we are poor sinners.’ ” Thérèse concludes, boldly, “I told [the Lord] that I am happy not to enjoy heaven here on earth in order that he may open heaven for ever to poor unbelievers.”

Here a saint emerges, an astonishing brat who dares to speak thus to God, in a voice that Emily Dickinson might well recognize as kindred to her own. (I can hear them talking, perhaps in the Elysian Fields: “My business is to love . . . My business is to sing,” Emily says, and Thérèse replies, “My call is love . . . love embraces every time and every place.” From the confines of a room in Amherst, a drafty cell at the Carmel in Lisieux, each woman might be said to have traveled extensively.) I believe that Thérèse became a uniquely valuable twentieth-century saint, a woman who can accept even the torment of doubt, as she lay dying, as a precious gift, who turns despair into a fervent prayer for others. I think of her as a saint for unbelievers in an age of unbelief, a voice of compassion in an age of beliefs turned rigid, defensive, violent.

Late in the morning, I emerge from my study in the basement of the library to find buses of the Guardian School Bus company disgorging flocks of brightly dressed children, who with their wary-looking teachers and weary parents, are waiting—jumping, dancing, screaming, running, slapping hands and knees—on the steps of the abbey church. Soon they’ll take a tour of the woods and no doubt collect some red and golden leaves. I notice in the courtyard by the guest wing of the monastery that tough little roses are still in bloom, despite the hard frost.

Two crows interpose themselves between me and the golden trees—ash, oak—between the blood-red maple and a full moon grown pale in a cloudless blue. Their cries, on the chill wind, come as mystery, much like the question Bernard tosses up to God: “What are we, that you make yourselves known to us?”

September 30

JEROME

October 1

THÉRÈSE OF THE CHILD JESUS

October 2

GUARDIAN ANGELS