The Cloister Walk (4 page)

Before my husband embarked on his South Seas journey, he installed a large National Geographic map of the region on the stark white wall by the kitchen table. When he called last night, he'd just arrived in Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands. I found the words on the map, and fingered them as we spoke. I finger them again, at breakfast, to keep him in my presence. It's our fifteenth anniversary. He's staying at the Paradise Inn.

We didn't pick our wedding day for any particular reason. We eloped, continuing what has become a family tradition, on my mother's side; both my grandmother Totten and my mother eloped when young—probably too young—and then built of this folly marriages that endured for close to sixty years. We've had just one church wedding within the last seventy years, and it resulted in our one divorce.

One day, in a library reference room, I became curious to know if the date of our wedding had any significance in the Christian tradition. When I discovered that it was the feast of Archangels, I got the giggles and left before the librarian would have to throw me out.

I have saved up things to tell David: a monk who'd complained to me about the resistance to change he'd encountered at work, who said, “It's the well-worn idol named, ‘But we've never done it that way before!' ” Exasperated, he'd said, “And people wonder how dogmas get started!” David laughs; he knows this is the feast of archangels, and tells me that he's discovered that in the native religion of Tonga, whales are the messengers of the Gods, performing a function much like the eagle in Lakota religion, or angels in Christianity. In Nuku'alofa, which means, “The City Where Love Lives,” he purchased an amulet of a whale's fluke, representing the divine messenger who moves between our world and that of the Creator, who lives at the bottom of the sea. The woman who sold it to him said it had been blessed by a Methodist bishop, but he could also take it to a priest of the old religion. “I did,” he said. “It cost me a six-pack of beer and a carton of cigarettes,” he says, happily. I am happy to think of him walking around paradise wrapped in blessings.

At morning prayer, the psalms seem suited to the archangels. Psalm 29, for Michael, the power of God: “The Lord's voice resounding on the waters, the God of Glory thunders; the Lord on the immensity of waters . . .” And for Gabriel, Psalm 25, a quiet prayer of hope and trust. For Raphael, a psalm that I love, 147: “The Lord builds up Jerusalem, and brings back Israel's exiles. And heals the broken-hearted; and binds up all their wounds.”

Michael—who is as God; Gabriel—God's messenger; Raphael—God's healing. They say what angels always say, “Do not fear.”

Once, as I was preparing an omelet, I turned to the friend standing in the kitchen of my apartment at the Ecumenical Institute and asked him, “How do you like your eggs?” I glanced up from chopping green onions to find him looking dazed but pleased, as if I had just suggested that we run off to Paris for the weekend. “You know,” I said, puzzled by his silence, “runny or well-done?” And then it hit me: he's a monk, which means that no one ever asks him how he likes his eggs. For most of his adult life he has dined communally, eating whatever is put before him.

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.)