The Cloister Walk (25 page)

As my eyes grow accustomed to the light in the church, I can see my husband hunched in the balcony. I had warned him not to come, because the Mass usually puts him in such a bad mood. We make a comic spectacle, at least when it comes to religion: what makes me giddy with joy annoys or angers him. He said he had to come if I was singing in the choir; go figure, I said, shrugging, and dropped the subject.

I had wondered if being so much a part of this service would distance me from it—the liturgy director once told me that distraction had been a problem for him when he first took the job. I'm glad that I had the sense to take off my watch. This liturgy will carry us along in its own sweet time. But the music is demanding, and I have to pay attention. I'm glad to find that this does not distract me but makes me more focused. The truth of the old saying “The one who sings prays twice” is evident tonight.

Nearly three hours after we've begun, the abbot announces, just before the final blessing, that coffee and orange juice and light refreshments will be served in the Great Hall. I wonder if Benedictines can do anything without feeding people, without making it a party. And it's quite a party, full of stone-sober people who are drunk on liturgy. I look for my husband. He's been outside smoking, and when he comes up to us he puts his arm around me and says to the monks, “The last time I went to the Vigil it was still in Latin, but you guys do it up right.” They laugh. “The choir sounded magnificent,” David says to me. “You liked it?” I reply, amazed. “It was beautiful,” he says, and he seems to mean it. “Abbot Timothy,” I say, “we have an emergency. This is not the man I married.” The abbot laughs, we all laugh, and visit until nearly 2 A.M.

 

 

Somehow, I'm back at morning prayer at 9:30. The great week of singing, the Octave of Easter with its incessant “Alleluias,” begins. Some of the women in the schola, myself included, have still not had enough singing, so we go to the grad school dorm and make coffee and hold a hymn-sing in the lounge. Someone finds an old Methodist hymnal, and I teach these Catholics “I Love to Tell the Story,” and “Softly and Tenderly, Jesus Is Calling.” We revel in the schmaltzy harmonies.

 

 

On Easter Monday, I learn a great secret about monasteries. It's not the strenuous liturgies of the Triduum, not even the complex turns of the Vigil, that monks have to worry about getting through, but Easter Monday. At morning prayer, a man who has been a monk for nearly sixty years has suddenly forgotten how to begin morning prayer. A jump-start is required; then we're off and rolling, into forty days of Easter.

In the spring of every year, a medieval congress is held in Kalamazoo, which attracts several thousand scholars from all over the world. Days are given over to presentations on every aspect of medieval culture—coins, games, weaponry, literature, theology, monasticism—and at night there are magnificent concerts of medieval music, and dances that provide a spectacle worthy of Chaucer—hundreds of tipsy medievalists, some of whom are evidently let out of the library once a year, abandoning themselves to a tape of “Born to Run.” The first year that I attended, I fell in with a bunch of Cistercians and Trappists celebrating the 900th year of Bernard of Clairvaux's presence on earth, and had the time of my life. When I began attending vespers and compline with them, in part so that I could listen to their singing, the choir director boomed in a friendly but commanding voice, “This is not a spectator sport!” I got a crash course in church Latin and the chant, a wild ride. I wondered if Cinderella's journey in her pumpkin-turned-coach could have felt less momentous or strange.

On Saturday night, after we'd sung the “Salve Regina” to an oceanic stillness, and been blessed with holy water, we retired to the basement of the chapel for champagne and conversation. I walked back to the dorm that night in such a joyful state I hardly noticed it was raining. My shoes became soggy—so, Hawaiian that I am, I took them off and walked barefoot up the hill to the dorm. Holy ground.

In the harsh fluorescence of the lobby I found a Trappist monk with a worried expression, pacing the floor. The other monks he'd expected to help him move a table into place to serve as an altar for morning Mass had not appeared, and it was getting late. I said I'd be glad to help him, and he looked me over, doubtfully. We got the job done—I swear this is true—as the clock was striking midnight.

I knew that in a few hours I'd be on a plane, damp shoes and all, flying back through two time zones, to the man I love, to a dusty old house in a dusty little town on the Plains. I laughed and cried myself to sleep.

For the birds there is not a time that they tell, but the
point
vierge
between darkness and light, between nonbeing and being.
You can tell yourself the time by their waking, if you are
experienced. But that is your folly, not theirs.

—Thomas Merton, CONJECTURES OF A GUILTY BYSTANDER

I first came to the virgin martyrs as an adult, and from a thoroughly Protestant background, which may explain why I have little trouble taking them seriously. I find them relevant, even important, but many Catholics I know so resent the way they were taught about these saints that they've shoved them to the back of the closet. “Why are you writing about the virgin martyrs?” one Benedictine sister asked me, incredulous and angry: “They set women back! As if in order to be holy, you had to be a virgin, preferably a martyr. And that's not where most women are.” The current edition of the Roman breviary gives credence to the sister's outburst, saying of St. Cecilia, Virgin and Martyr, that “she is praised as the most perfect model of the Christian woman because of her virginity and the martyrdom which she suffered for love of Christ.” Married Christian women, then, and those who do not suffer enough, would seem doomed to be imperfect models of Christian faith.

For many Catholic women, the virgin martyrs are simply a mystery. A friend relates, “In parochial school, we were taught things like, ‘She sacrificed her life to preserve her virginity,' and we thought, well, why didn't she just give it to him—like a handbag? The nuns never explained to us what virginity
was.
They didn't want you to know exactly
what
you weren't supposed to give up, so you were regularly confused by these cryptic narratives.” In fact, the virgin martyrs make little sense unless you are willing to talk about what their virginity means, and are also willing to look at them in their historical context. The women who provoke such irritation and puzzlement, identified in the church's liturgical calendar as “virgin and martyr,” were among the first women revered by Christians as saints. Most come from a time when there was no powerful Christian church, as we understand it; many Christians came from the Roman nobility, but to declare yourself a Christian was to relinquish social standing, and be executed as a rebel, a traitor to the Empire. Most of the virgin martyrs date from the persecution of Christians under the Roman Emperors Decius and Diocletian in the third and fourth centuries, but they range from second-century Rome to sixth-century Persia, where Christians were persecuted by both Persian emperors and Jewish kings.

The virgin martyrs were a source of inspiration to Christians through the Middle Ages, but today are maddeningly elusive. There is no entry for “virgin martyr” in
The Catholic Encyclopedia,
and one can search entries there, and in
The Encyclopedia of Early Christianity,
on both “virginity” and “martyrdom” without getting a picture of these women or their importance in church history. A secular reference, the
Women's Studies Encyclopedia,
reveals that while the tales of early women saints and martyrs (some of them virgins, some married with children) have largely been dismissed as legendary, historical sources do exist, notably the
Ecclesiastical History
of Eusebius, written in the early fourth century, and the third-century
Passion of Perpetua and Felicity,
especially valuable because “it includes the prison diary of Perpetua herself, one of only a handful of works by women authors to survive from antiquity.”

Growing up as a Methodist, I envied Catholic girls their name days, holy cards, medals, and stories of women saints. I had few female images of holiness, except for the silent Mary of the crèche, and “girls of the Bible” stories sanitized for middle-class consumption. It was a far less textured and ambiguous world than that of a Benedictine sister I know who recalls two virgin martyrs among the many images of women in the windows of her childhood church. “There was Barbara, and Catherine, my namesake,” she says, “which made me enormously proud. I found it inspiring that women could be saints. I also remember that my mother used to pray to Saint Barbara ‘for a happy death,' which seemed a powerful thing.” Like many girls of the 1950s, she was also invigorated by Ingrid Bergman in the film
Joan of Arc.
“After I saw that movie,” she said, “I had my hair cut short, and walked around
being
Joan. I had no armor, of course. My uniform, all that summer, was a faded blue sweatshirt.”

But for all their power to inspire a young girl, the virgin martyrs convey an uneasy message of power and powerlessness. They die, horribly, at the hands of imperial authorities. They are sanctified by church authorities, who eventually betray them by turning their struggle and witness into pious cliché, fudging the causes of their martyrdom to such an extent that many contemporary Catholics, if they're aware of the virgin martyrs at all, consider them an embarrassment, a throwback to nineteenth-century piety; the less said, the better. It's enough to make one wonder if the virgin martyrs merely witness to a sad truth: that whatever they do, or don't do, girls can't win. A book published in the early 1960s,
My Nameday—Come for Dessert,
is a perfect expression of this heady ambiguity. Offering both recipes and religious folklore, the book defines virgin martyrs as young women “who battled to maintain their integrity and faith.” But the radical nature of this assertion—that girls could have such integrity as to suffer and be canonized for it—is lost in Betty Crocker land: “St. Dorothy was racked, scourged, and beheaded in Cappadocia. Her symbols are a basket of fruit and flowers, which may be incorporated in a copper mold for her nameday dessert.”

A girl named Dorothy, reading such prose, might conclude that the world (or a part of it called Cappadocia) is a very dangerous place. At least until dessert. Eventually she might discover that, more than most saints, the virgin martyrs expose a nerve, a central paradox of Christian history: that while the religion has often justified the restricting of women to subservient roles, it has also inspired women to break through such restrictions, often in astonishingly radical ways. And the church, typically, has emphasized the former at the expense of the latter.

Dorothy's story is that of a young Roman noblewoman who has refused a lawyer's proposal of marriage and is mocked by him as she is being led away to her execution. Her crime, as with most of the virgin martyrs, was being a committed Christian who refused to marry or to worship idols as required under Roman law. The young man calls out to Dorothy from a crowd of his friends and asks her to be sure to send him fruits from the garden of paradise. This she agrees to do. When, after her death, an angel delivers three apples and three roses, the young man converts to Christianity and is also martyred. Dorothy, then, is a dangerous young rebel, a holy woman with the power to change a man and to subvert the Roman state, in which, as Gilbert Marcus has noted in
The Radical Tradition,
“marriage and the family were the basis of
imperium
. . . the guarantee of the gods that Rome would continue.”