The Cloister Walk (28 page)

“Some declared that the girl's strange power proved that God existed,” Danner writes. “And that brought them back to the killing of the children. There were a lot of differences among the soldiers about whether this had been a good thing or whether they shouldn't have done it.” Sometimes it takes a death to make us see the obvious. Sometimes it is a fierce little girl who is hard to kill, who gives witness to a mystery beyond our understanding and control. And in the wild center of that young girl's heart, we glimpse love stronger than death, a love that shames us all.

I have never met Simon Tugwell; I'm merely a fan. He's on my short list of contemporary theologians with a lively prose style—never a whiff of jargon or academic aridity. As a poet, I appreciate his compression of profound ideas into plain English. And I owe to him my first taste of laughter in a monastery choir. At noon prayer one day, the community was listening soberly, with grumbling stomachs, to Tugwell's
Ways of Imperfection,
a book about saints. Hearing that St. Thérèse of Lisieux “detested the pious trivialities which find their way into religious life” seemed to cheer people, and Thérèse's own description of her convent sisters as “a fine bunch of old maids” broke everyone up.

I appreciated, too, being led to the discovery that it is through our failings and weaknesses, our “ways of imperfection,” that we find God, and God finds us, the God who can turn any mess we've made to the good. I hadn't thought much about the saints; they seemed a Catholic thing, impossibly holy people. But I was learning to see them as witnesses to our limitations and God's vast possibilities (as well as sense of humor), as Christian theology torn from the page and brought to life.

Years after I first encountered him, Simon Tugwell was a godsend in another way, late one April evening in Minneapolis. I'd had dinner with faculty of the Luther Northwestern Seminary in St. Paul, and then gave a reading in the imposing seminary chapel. Over four hundred people, mostly Lutherans, many with roots in the Dakotas, were in attendance, and we ended the reading with a lively discussion. Lutherans are great discussers. When it came time for me to sign books, I sat down at a tiny table at exactly 9 P.M. and didn't stand up again until over an hour later. I don't know how many people I spoke with during that time, but it must have been over a hundred. When I got back to the hotel at 10:45, I felt as if I'd been hit by a truck.

My husband was sound asleep; we'd planned to have a night-cap together, and I was disappointed, too wound up to sleep. After engaging as best I could with all those people, my throat was dry, my limbs ached, my brain was numb. I felt the need for
something—
a long walk, a swim, chocolates, champagne, strawberries, or even chicken soup—and I wasn't going to get it. Room service had shut down for the night; the pool was closed.

I'd noticed on my return that the hotel bar was still open, a respectable-looking place, and almost empty, which told me that I probably wouldn't have unwelcome attention from drunks. Earlier that day, I had bought a book edited by Simon Tugwell, entitled
Early Dominicans: Selected Writings.
There was no jacket photo, which I felt was a shame; another of Tugwell's books has an engaging photograph of him looking both angelic and impish in his Dominican habit.

Even without the impish countenance, I felt that Simon Tugwell would be a suitable companion for a drink or two, and I carried the book with me to a booth in the bar, where, fortunately, there was just enough light to read by. Gin gimlet in hand, I soon found myself immersed in the world of thirteenth-century Dominicans, an era and an order I know very little about. To my surprise, I discovered that it was exactly where I wanted to be.

“The Dominican Order exists in order to be useful to other people,” Tugwell said, which I found refreshing. It's always good to meet people who understand that religion is about saving lives. None of us can understand what possible use we are in this world; it's one of the deeper mysteries. Rarely, grace comes to us in the form of another person who tells us we have been of help. But usefulness is not something we can know, or claim, for ourselves; I suspect that to have it as a goal of one's religious life would engage a person with mystery in tantalizing ways. Simon Tugwell seems to agree.

The gentle wit and formidable erudition of Tugwell's introduction to a group of people who had found a way, in difficult times, to go where they were needed made a peculiar bedtime story, but adequate. It nudged me back into myself. It was Tuesday of the fourth week of Easter, and for a month my head had been filled with stories from the Book of Acts, tales of the fervent camaraderie of the apostles. Lately, they'd scattered after the martyrdom of Stephen. Barnabas went to Antioch, and then up to Tarsus in search of Paul. Together, they founded a church at Antioch, and it was there that the disciples were for the first time called Christians. I had marveled at the fragile human agency of it all.

Tugwell's quotation from Humbert of Romans' “On the Formation of Preachers” was the last passage I read before I went back upstairs and hit the pillow. It seemed a good thing to sleep on. Glossing both Ezekiel 1 and Philippians 3, Humbert describes the contemplative preacher as one who has “eyes to the rear, to see whether they are being enticed back to the things they have abandoned, and eyes in front, to see if they are, like the apostle, surpassing themselves in what lies ahead of them, namely spiritual things, and eyes to the left, to see that they do not lose heart when things are difficult, and eyes to the right, to see that they do not become proud when things are going well.” Angelic contemplation—the seraphim are all eyes—but also the kind of attentiveness that anyone might pursue who seeks to work in this world in a wholly human way.

As we had read Jeremiah at St. John's during the fall, we read straight through the Book of Revelation at morning prayer during Easter, and oddly enough it came as a relief. We had been reading through the Book of Hebrews, and I'd had trouble staying awake. My good friend Susan, a systematic theologian, had the opposite reaction. She felt swamped by the incessant imagery of Revelation and missed the ideas that thread their way, laboriously, through Hebrews. I was happy not to be asked to think so hard at seven in the morning.

The Apocalypse, or Revelation, of John begins sweetly, blessing both “the one who reads aloud” and “those who listen to this prophetic message and heed what is written in it” (1:3). This presumes a communal context, in which a reader reads and others listen and respond, a context similar to the one in which I found myself in the monastery choir. Benedictines practice
lectio
both privately and in common. Benedict considered private reading so important that he allowed several hours a day for it in a monastery's daily routine. As
lectio
is not a matter of literacy so much as a disposition of the heart toward prayer, however, Benedict expected illiterate monks to participate by contemplating the words of psalms and the gospels they had memorized.

In communal
lectio,
I found that it helped to listen to the Book of Revelation
as
an illiterate; to keep in mind that its primary impact is visual. The Cherokee writer Diane Glancy once told me that she liked Revelation because there was so much to look at, so much that resonated with Indian culture. The colors, the horses, the eagles. The four directions, the four winds. The Book of Revelation does not make for easy listening, but Diane's comments reminded me that I could simply shut my eyes and let the pictures unfold. To my surprise, I found it a relief to listen to John's baffling, wild, beautiful, and often frightening images without resisting, without always seeking to make sense of them. Slowly, I began to grasp the consoling and even healing power of apocalypse. Most important of all, I saw the need to reclaim it as poetic turf.

The word “apocalypse” comes from the Greek for “uncovering” or “revealing,” which makes it a word about possibilities. And possibilities are poetic territory. Both poetry and apocalyptic writing explore the limits of speech and thus must rely on intensely metaphoric language, as well as visual imagery. Revelation was Emily Dickinson's favorite book of the Bible for a good reason. “Uncovering” and “revealing” appeals to poets; it's the reason we write.

I'll stake a claim to Revelation simply by saying that I like any story with dragons in it. But this is a somewhat guilty pleasure; in some circles you can be labeled a fundamentalist just by admitting that you like the Book of Revelation. I suspect that this attitude is evidence of the extreme literalism, the fear of metaphor that in some ways defines American culture. But it also reflects a curious symbiosis of fundamentalists and liberals within American Christianity, in which the liberals have tended to cede to fundamentalists the literature of apocalyptic vision.

The Book of Revelation confronts our literalism by assaulting our fear of metaphor head-on, defying our denial of whatever is unpleasant or uncontrollable. As a writer, I know how unpleasant, even scary, metaphor can be. It doesn't surprise me that people try to control it in whatever way they can, the fundamentalists with literal interpretations of prophetic and apocalyptic texts that deny the import of its metaphorical language, the liberals by attempting to eliminate metaphoric images of plague, punishment, the heavenly courts, martyrdom, and even the cross—that might be deemed offensive, depressing, or judgmental.

Ironically, it was hearing Revelation read aloud that allowed me to re-examine the way I'd always stereotyped the book as “hell-fire and damnation.” Engaging the book as a listener forced me to consider the awesome power of metaphor, and how thoroughly it defeats our attempts to contain it. We do not value it for what it is, a unique form of truth-telling, and that is precisely what John's Apocalypse seemed to be: uniquely true, true in its own terms, and indefinable—or just plain weird—outside them. Its images radically subvert our desire to literalize them, and also expose the flimsiness of our attempts to do so. Mainstream and liberal Christians may denounce apocalyptic imagery as negative thinking, and fundamentalists may try to defuse them by interpreting them as simple prediction. But the Book of Revelation comes with a built-in irony. Whether one believes that John wrote the book, or regards God as the true author of all scripture, to interpret its images so literally is to show a strange disregard for the method its author employs.

There is no denying that metaphoric language, the language of revelation, can be dangerous, especially when one attempts to force it back into the literal. Literal interpretations of apocalyptic metaphors have often led Christians to construct a boogey-man God who acts suspiciously like an idol, confirming our own prejudices. All too often, it has tempted Christians to pass judgment on other people. But hearing John's Apocalypse read aloud, I was astonished to find how little support there is for such a position. Judgment comes, and it's a terrifying spectacle. Judgment is up to God, and that's the good news. All evil is vanquished, and justice is done. The story reflects what we know from experience: that the point of our crises and calamities is not to frighten us or beat us into submission but to encourage us to change, to allow us to heal and grow.

We often use the word “apocalypse” to mean catastrophic destruction, and cosmic upheaval is evoked in Daniel, in the Book of Revelation, and several gospel passages, in images of earthquake, fire, and plague, of the sun and moon darkening, the sea turning to blood, and stars falling from the sky. But destruction is not what the word “apocalypse” means, and it is certainly not the heart of its message, which is hope for persecuted or oppressed communities in crisis, hope for those on the losing end. As I listened to the Book of Revelation over several weeks I found in it a healing vision, a journey through the heart of pain and despair, and into hope. And I was consistently reminded of how subtly this vision works on us. It asserts that the evils of this world are not incurable, that injustice does not have the last word. And that can be terrifying or consoling, depending on your point of view, your place within the world.