The Cloister Walk (24 page)

 

I am working for the South Dakota Arts Council in a junior high school. An irrepressible seventh-grade boy who has for days been writing passionate poems about motorcycles and TransAms says to me during last period on Friday afternoon: “This is the best week we ever had in school. You're here. At noon on Tuesday in the gym we had a guy from the L.A. Lakers. And on Thursday some convicts from the State Pen came to talk to us. And next week we're off, for Easter.”

 

One bright Sunday morning, my husband and I are awakened by a knock on our bedroom door. It's a small town, and sometimes we wake to find a friend sound asleep on the living room sofa, having wandered in after the bars closed. But it's unusual for anyone to be knocking on our bedroom door. “Dave? Kathleen?” We recognize the voice, a cowboy friend, and we reply, sleepily, “Just a minute,” as we untangle bedsheets and pull on bathrobes.

He's standing in our kitchen, a half-empty bottle of Canadian whiskey in one hand, a plastic bucket in the other. He says, “We had some yearling bulls that we had to cut to go to grass, and I thought, I sure would hate to see these big nuts go to waste. I cleaned 'em up; they're ready to cook.” Our friends love my husband's cooking, but this is the first time he's been asked to prepare rocky mountain oysters for breakfast.

David decides to stir-fry them in the wok. I pour whiskey into three glasses and toast some of my home-made bread. There's buffalo berry jam that my grandmother made, the last jar we have. “Hey, it's Easter,” I say, “let's celebrate,” and we have ourselves a feast.

 

It's Palm Sunday at the abbey. The monks have invited their guests to join them in the procession into church. Four girls, their catechism teachers, and myself. It's a rag-tag procession, and the children wave their palms self-consciously. No matter. It will have to do. The hour is on us.

At Mass I stand alongside the youngest girl. She stares at the celebrant as if at a flame, her eyes wander around the great candy box of a church, its pretty angels and painted vines, lilies spinning around the Christ Child. She seems to be too young for first communion, but she's careful to do what everyone else does, which is mostly standing still.

Yet we move, and change. Her life crosses mine, and there is no name for it. The quantum effect. Communion. At about her age I refused to believe that Jesus dies; I wonder if I believe it yet. I wonder what she knows of death, if she, too, will run from pain, to a dark beyond telling, if she will find God there, for the touching and tasting.

The girl stares at her hands where bread has fallen as if from heaven, and looks around wildly, face aflame. “Do I eat this?” she wonders, half-aloud. “Yes,” I whisper. “Yes.”

 

It's been a rough winter. Medical, financial, emotional disaster that somehow we've come through. After weeks on the road as an artist-in-schools, I feel ready for a Holy Week, my first experience of the Roman Catholic Easter liturgy. My husband is at home, writing; he'll be better off, he says, knowing that I'm here. My “I-survived-Catholic-school-and-won't-go-near-a-Mass-ever-again” husband thinks I'm where I belong. He may be right.

Good Friday is stark, solemn, final. But on Holy Saturday the world seems expectant again. I'm delighted to find that the long story-telling session of the Vigil contains some of my favorite images from childhood—the parting of the Red Sea, and passage through the desert, following a fire by night and a pillar of cloud by day.

The Vigil moves us through the night. I try to keep in mind what one monk has said to me, about not letting the self-voice take all the room inside me. Somewhere, Thomas Merton says that “simplicity is completely absorbed in listening to what it hears,” and for much of the night, I am a simple-minded listener.

Another monk, a liturgist, has suggested that I sit in the choir loft so that I have a good view of everything. Two monks join me there, and as there are three bells, they say, and only two of them, would I take one bell at the Gloria? In the chilly tower, they give me the rope for the smallest bell, which is probably the only one I can handle. “Be careful not to tip it,” one monk says, demonstrating. It is hard to see; his black habit merges with the shadows. There is no electricity in the bell tower, only the light of the full moon.

We return at the close of the Vigil, near midnight, and ring the bells for a long time. Through the frosty glass I can make out the lights of cars on the Interstate in the distance; I wonder if they can hear the racket we're making, if someone is wondering what the bells are for.

Afterwards, the abbot invites me to the Easter party—beer, popcorn, candy, and good conversation until one in the morning. True celebration; maybe these people can enjoy Easter because they also observe Lent well enough to be happy to see it go. I have such a good time that I spend the rest of the night dreaming it all over again. This time there's a monk at the party I've never seen before, and when I introduce myself, I'm surprised to see that he's wearing gold vestments. He seems amused to meet me, amused also at my confusion. “Oh, I'm here all the time,” he says, waving his right hand as if this is of no consequence. “You just don't see me.”

I wake refreshed, truly glad for the first time in months. At a late breakfast, the monks grumble over a full-page spread on the monastery in the local paper. “They make it look like we're spiritual all the time,” one says. “Next time they come, we should make them take a picture of our pool table.” “I could always have them help me check the pregnant cows,” says the farm manager.

There is much teasing of one monk who's been misquoted, so that he seems to be denying the Resurrection; the theologians of the monastery busy themselves with determining exactly which heresy is implicit in his remark. The reporter has also garbled the monastery schedule, so that it sounds as if the monks sleep all day and go to church all night. “Whatever,” says the liturgy director, glancing at his watch.

In a monastery, the Easter Triduum—which literally means “the three days,” Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday—is a total surrender to worship. Time feels suspended, allowing for focus on the events commemorated: Jesus gathering with friends the night before his death, to share a last meal; Jesus' arrest and execution; and his resurrection. If you've become acclimated to the normal rhythms of the monastery, the daily round of prayer, meals, and work, the liturgies of the Triduum are guaranteed to throw you off.

One year at St. John's, I was invited to join a group of women who would be singing at all the Triduum liturgies as part of the monastery schola (or choir). When a friend wrote to me to ask what Easter in a monastery had been like, this is what I sent her:

 

7 A.M.—Morning Prayer

10:30 A.M.—Schola rehearsal

Noon—Midday Prayer

NAP!!!

5:45 P.M.—Reception & Festal meal, Monastic refectory

7:30 P.M.—Schola rehearsal

8-9:30 P.M.—Mass of the Lord's Supper

9:30-11:45 P.M.—Vigil of Adoration (Silent meditation in the church)

11:45-Midnight—Prayer of Closing Adoration (Sacrament is removed from church)

 

7 A.M.—Morning Prayer

Noon—Midday Prayer

2 P.M.—Schola rehearsal

3-4:30 P.M.—Liturgy of the Lord's Passion

NAP!!!—Also, baking bread for Sunday's Potluck

9:30 P.M.—Compline

 

7 A.M.—Morning Prayer

10 A.M.—Rehearse for reading at Vigil

10:45 A.M.—Schola rehearsal

Noon—Midday Prayer

NAP!!!

5:30 P.M.—Vespers

9:45 P.M.—Schola rehearsal

10:45 P.M.-1:45 A.M.—Easter Vigil

1:45-2:15 A.M.—Reception, Great Hall

 

9:30 A.M.—Morning Prayer

Coffee & informal hymn sing with theology students in graduate dorm

Noon—Midday Prayer

12:30-2:30 P.M.—Potluck at Ecumenical Institute

NAP!!!

5:30 P.M.—Vespers

 

Back to normal monastery schedule

 

The Triduum begins with the singing of the “Ubi Caritas” in the monastic refectory; the words of the great medieval poem—“Where charity and love are found, there is God”—set the tone for our meal and the liturgy that follows. I know Benedictines who could transform a meal at McDonald's into a love feast, but this is ridiculous. “Love one another,” the abbot reads from the Gospel of John. At this moment, at this table, it seems possible.

After the feast, I stand with the rest of the schola in the chilly cloister walk. As we'll lead the procession into church, we wait there for the community to line up behind us. This is the night Jesus spends in the garden of Gethsemane, praying by the vigil light of the stars. Near midnight, the abbot will wrap up the Eucharist in the cloth of the humeral veil and carry it out of the church.

 

 

At morning prayer on Good Friday a monk sings one of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, and it hurts; it feels like a blow to the solar plexus. Jeremiah's images are strikingly contemporary: infants dying of thirst, children on the streets with no one to care for them, the wealthy facing sudden ruin, young women being raped in a city gone mad: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, return to the Lord your God,” the young monk sings, and then a terrible silence in the church. And in my heart.

I have finally come to Good Friday on its own terms. It is the morning after, the coming-to. Last night we feasted with our dearest friends, and now we wake to find that for the dearest of them, Jesus himself, death is imminent. We gather in the harsh light of morning, the harsh light of grief.

At lunch, in the guest dining room, leftovers from last night's feast. The world has changed sinced then. The church bells have been silenced, and I notice more than ever how disorienting this is. I've been here since early September, and the bells had come to make sense of the time for me, every quarter hour. Now time itself is absorbed in the flow of the Triduum liturgies.

Of all days for there to be a power outage! Foolish non-virgin that I am, I have left something I need in my study in the sub-basement of the library. I borrow a janitor's flashlight and descend. My familiar work space has become close, dark as a tomb, and as I climb the three flights back into sunlight I am as dazed as Lazarus.

On the afternoon of Good Friday, we wait in the cloister walk again; one woman carries on about the car trouble that has plagued her all semester. It is not an easy thing, silence. Not the silence of death. I wonder if the others are as tired as I am; I really will need a nap today, if I am to stay awake for vespers. I haven't been up past 10 P.M. in months. I'd better take a nap—but when?

The familiar gospel is hard to take—“Woman, there is your son,” Jesus says from the cross, “and there, your mother.” A friend buried his mother on Wednesday, and I don't know how he can bear this. I return to the apartment to find my husband sitting on the cold patio, reading the Gospel of Mark to a squirrel.

 

 

On Holy Saturday, I walk up the hill to the cemetery and I meet old Fr. Gall walking stiffly toward me, dressed in a black suit, a narrow, European cut decades out of fashion. He twirls his walking stick and says, brightly, “Ah, you have come to visit those who are in heaven? You have come to seek the living among the dead!”

The air is full of the anticipation of snow, a howling wind. Words will not let me be:
in cold and silence you are born, from the womb of earth, the cloud of snow yet to fall.
And from somewhere in the liturgy:
What has been prepared for me?
Tonight I have a big responsibility; after the Service of Light, after the long story of the Exultet is sung—“This is the night, this is the night”—I will speak the first words of the Liturgy of the Word, the opening lines of Genesis: “In the beginning, God . . .”

My friend Columba and I share this first reading—here, they divide it between God and a narrator. Rehearsing in the abbey's chapter house, we had flipped a coin, and Columba won the part of God, which I didn't mind in the least. The narrator has better lines. Now, standing in the church full of people I can barely see, I say them slowly, as if I had all the time in the world. It is the creation of the world we are saying, and I'm surprised to find surprise in the lines: let there be . . .
and there was,
God waiting to see, and to call it good.