The Cloister Walk (37 page)

That utter transparency was evident to Ephrem's contemporaries; they found in him a sage who had sensed the interconnectedness of all things and was gifted with the language to articulate it. I'm grateful to Brock for making available another ancient story about Ephrem. A venerable monk had a vision in which angels sent by God with a scroll full of writing were discussing who on earth to give it to. They finally said, “No one can be entrusted with it except Ephrem.” The tale concludes: “It is said of Ephrem that when he was a boy he saw a dream, or a vision, in which a vine shoot sprang up from his tongue; it grew, and everywhere under the heaven was filled by it. It bore bunches of grapes in proliferation, and all the birds of the sky came and ate of its fruits; the more they ate, the more the bunches multiplied and grew.”

Ephrem died at nearly seventy years of age in the city of Edessa, while caring for people during a plague.

At the worship services of Hope and Spencer there's a time after the sermon, and before the Lord's Prayer, in which people are asked to speak of any particular joys they wish to share with the congregation, or concerns they want us to address in our communal prayer on that Sunday, and also to pray over during the coming week. It's an invaluable part of our worship, a chance to discover things you didn't know: that the young woman sitting in the pew in front of you is desperately worried about her gravely ill brother in Oregon, that the widower in his eighties sitting across the aisle is overjoyed at the birth of his first great-grandchild.

All of this pleases the gossips; I've been told that on Sunday afternoons the phone lines in town are hot with news that's been picked up in church. For the most part, it's a good kind of gossip, its main effect being to widen the prayer circle. It's useful news as well; I'm one of many who make notes on my church bulletin; so-and-so's in the hospital; send a card, plan a visit. Our worship sometimes goes into a kind of suspended animation, as people speak in great detail about the medical condition of their friends or relatives. We wince; we squirm; we sigh; and it's good for us. Moments like this are when the congregation is reminded of something that all pastors know; that listening is often the major part of ministry, that people in a crisis need to tell their story, from beginning to end, and the best thing—often the only thing—that you can do is to sit there and take it in.

And we do that pretty well. I sometimes feel that these moments are the heart of our worship. What I think of as the vertical dimension of Presbyterian worship—the hymns in exalted language that bolster our faith, the Bible readings, the sermon that may help us through the coming week—finds a strong (and necessary) complement in the localized, horizontal dimension of these simple statements of “joys and concerns.”

For many years this aspect of our worship has also been strongly ecumenical. If your neighbor who's a Catholic, or a member of the Church of God, had a heart attack the day before and was flown to Bismarck in the air ambulance, you ask for people's prayers for him and his family. Our prayers also extend to those who seldom darken a church door. Not long ago, the congregation learned from one of his longtime friends that Bill O'Rourke had died. (Wild Bill to his friends, way back in his drinking days.) Most of us knew that he'd been failing in the Veterans Hospital in Sturgis for some time. I knew him casually, but missed him. An old-time cowboy—he broke horses for the U.S. Cavalry between the world wars—he was permanently bow-legged. In retirement he'd become a fixture at the cafe on Main Street; you could nearly always find him there, holding court. More rarely, I'd run into him outside. Bill would wait for someone to come by who would stop and admire one of the Ford pickup trucks from the early 1950s that he kept polished and in running condition. When his death was announced, a sigh ran through the congregation. All but the youngest members, and our pastor, had known him for years, and had their own Bill stories.

It was an odd moment. Bill's death felt like a loss, to me, to many people, but we also knew that our young minister would know nothing of him. The pastor was about to begin the intercessory prayer that follows this part of worship, when one of Bill's oldest friends couldn't resist saying, “You know, Bill paid me the first fifty cents I ever made, back in 1930.” The minister smiled, but looked a bit nonplussed. He took a breath, as if to start the prayer. From a pew in the back of the church came a voice, “And I'll bet you still have it.”

Of course we laughed for a good long time, before continuing with our worship; it was the kind of story Bill would have enjoyed. He didn't care much for church decorum, but he took some aspects of religion seriously enough. The last time I saw him was at the Lutheran church, where he'd come for the funeral of an old friend. Bill sat alone at the back of the church. “I wanted to make sure they gave him a good sendoff,” is all he said to me, after the service. He was apparently satisfied.

When the minister finally got to say his “Let us pray,” we were ready. We had been praying, all along. We had been being ourselves before God.

Laundry seems to have an almost religious importance for many women. We groan about the drudgery but seldom talk about the secret pleasure we feel at being able to make dirty things clean, especially the clothes of our loved ones, which possess an intimacy all their own. Laundry is one of the very few tasks in life that offers instant results, and this is nothing to sneer at. It's also democratic; everyone has to do it, or figure out a way to get it done. When I picture Honolulu's Chinatown, circa 1960, which I passed through daily on a school bus, what I smell is the open-air fish market, but what I see are the signs, mysterious to me then, that read “Taxi Dance Hall: Girls Wanted,” and all the colorful laundry strung up between tenements. There was never a day without it. In any city slum, it's laundry—neat lines of babies' T-shirts, kids' underwear and jeans—that announces that families live here, and that someone cares. For some people, laundry seems to satisfy a need for ritual. A television commentator with a hectic schedule once told me that the best, most contemplative part of his day was early morning, a time he set aside for laundering and ironing his shirts.

My images of laundry abound. One that I've never seen but love to imagine is that of Benedictine nuns in the Dakotas, in the days before Vatican II, when many of them worked in elementary schools, beating their black serge habits on snow banks to get the dust out. They tell me that the snow was good for removing stains. I picture the small clothesline that a friend has put up in her penthouse garden in Manhattan. For her, laundry is a triumph of hope over experience. “I grew up in the suburbs,” she explains, “and my mother hung clothes on the line. This is not ideal,” she admits, “but on a nice windy day, the soot doesn't fall.”

Of course an attachment to laundry can be pathetic, even pathological, in a woman who feels that it's one of the few areas in her life over which she has control. More often, though, it's an affectionate throwback to the world of our mothers and grand-mothers. We may be businesswomen or professors, but it's hard to shake that urge to do laundry “the right way,” just like mama did. The sense that “laundry must not be done casually,” as an arts administrator once told me, is something that seems lost on most men. She and her husband had reached an armed truce: he could do his own laundry but was to leave hers alone. She had grown tired of picking lint from his red sweatpants off her good blouses.

Many women have a “system” that is not to be trifled with. “You're hanging the underwear wrong” I was solemnly informed by a woman minister one day as we rushed to get her laundry on the line so that we could get to a meeting. She had a Master of Divinity degree from Princeton Seminary, but that's not where she learned that only a slouch would dare to use a dryer on a fine, windy summer day such as this in Lemmon, South Dakota, or that the fact was so obvious it could remain unspoken between us. She relegated me to the simple stuff, pillowcases and towels, but she kept an eye on me.

At St. John's, we had been housed in a block of small, elegant, but very livable apartments designed by Marcel Breuer, and clotheslines were not permitted. The great architect found them “tacky,” we were told, and visually distracting. It is good to be home, where I can hang clothes and air bedding on the line, and be as tacky as I like. I come by my attachment to laundry honestly. One of my first visual memories is of my mother pulling clothes from the sky; she had a line on a pulley that ran from a window in our row house near the Naval gunnery in Washington, D.C. These days, my mother lives in a neighborhood in Honolulu where her backyard clothesline is something of a scandal. But she's a Plainswoman at heart, and a clothesline is simple necessity.

Living in the house where she grew up, I've become pleasantly haunted by laundry. I'm grateful that I no longer have to pull clothes through a wringer, as my grandmother did for years. Her bottles of blueing gather dust in the basement; I haven't used them, but can't throw them out. But, like her, I wouldn't dream of using the electric dryer unless I have to. In March or April I begin to long for the day when I can hang clothes on the line again. Our winters are so long and severe in western South Dakota that we bank on the slightest summer joys; the scent of clothes dried out of doors, the sweet smell of sun on them.

I must be vigilant; sudden thunderstorms march across the prairie in late afternoon, making a mockery of clothes hung out to dry. Our winds can be so strong that clothes go flying. And during times of drought, there is sometimes so much dust in the air that line drying is impractical. Old-timers who recall the “Dirty Thirties” speak of seeing grasshoppers eat clothes right off the line, a sight I never hope to see, although I've thought about it in the springs and summers when we've waited months for rain.

My youngest sister once had a dream about a tornado that seemed an astute portrait of our parents: as the storm approached, Dad wandered off to get a better look at the twister and Mom ran to get the clothes off the line. I recall running into my clergy friend one evening at a church supper. She'd been frantically busy with meetings all day and the next night would be conducting a wedding rehearsal. News of a death in the congregation meant that she now also had a funeral to prepare for, and this led us to talk of epitaphs. “I know what I want on my tombstone,” she said. “At last, her laundry's done.”

—Brave Buffalo,
Sioux, BY THE POWER OF THEIR DREAMS