The Cloister Walk (47 page)

The stereotypical monk has a faith that is serene and certain. The reality is otherwise, especially for younger monastics, who often struggle mightily with issues of faith and belief. Near the end of a recent Monastic Institute, a week full of illuminating talks by a contemplative French Benedictine, Ghislain Lafont, an anguished young Trappist spoke up: “We've spoken of the loss of faith in American society. But what of loss of faith within the monastery itself?” He indicated that he was living, as a monk, with profound doubts, and that while the monastery was where he felt he belonged, at times his life there was nearly unbearable. Fr. Lafont nodded; none of this, evidently, was a surprise to him. What he said in response struck me as both practical and thoroughly monastic: “Of course we are weak, unable to cope. But if we can maintain faith, hope, and charity, it will radiate somehow. And people who come to us may find in us what we can no longer see in ourselves.”

If Benedictine life is about loving others, about seeking God within the human community, then the means of salvation is at hand, right there in the other monks. Both those who offer love and support, and those who are incompatible or unsympathetic, can teach the young monastic what it means to incarnate Christ, to become the sort of person who radiates love. In this context, friendships within the monastery can become an inspiration to all. Over lunch one day with several Benedictine sisters, I was treated to stories of two nuns, long-deceased, who had become inseparable as they aged. One of the women had lost most of her hair and had taken to wearing a bright red wig. One morning the wig was even more askew than usual, but as the two walked arm in arm into chapel for lauds, her friend was overhead to say to her, “My, you look lovely this morning.” When one of the women had to enter the convent nursing home and leave her friend behind, she said to her, “Don't forget about me.” And her friend replied, “How could I forget you? You're my better self.”

Younger monastic people revel in such stories, such lives. They may never have known their own grandparents well, but they come to feel, in the monastery, that they've found many grandparents, guides to life within community, exemplars for the arduous journey. The living-out of vows is not respected in America. Our commitments are disposable, and if a marriage, or life in a monastic community, isn't working out, we tend to move on. And young monks and nuns can't help but suffer from the tension; committed as they are, they retain an edge, a tension that only time in the monastery can wear away. But when younger monastics, still attuned to the competitive values of the world, are delegated to care for older ones, the dimensions of commitment become clearer. As they steer a recalcitrant older sister toward the bathroom, or the chapel, an inner voice reminds them.
This is what you can hope to become.

It's a message that can transform them. Young monks pray with sick old men whose piety seems terribly out-of-date, only to discover that as monks they have more in common than not. Listening well, they can hear the things that will help to make them monks. “On Candlemas one year,” a young monk told me, “I was overwhelmed to hear a brother say that as he grew older, he'd become more content to be like Simeon, an old man who spends his time sitting in the temple and waiting for the promised savior.”

I once said to a good friend, a monk in his thirties, that while I loved him very much, it was the guys who'd been in the monastery for fifty years or more who really appealed to me. He sighed, and said, “This life is like being in a rock tumbler, which is really great, if you want to come out good and polished.” It's not a bad comparison. Older monks and nuns often do attain an enduring and radical beauty, the many years of discipline having uncovered a freedom that others find inviting. While they usually have no certification as “spiritual directors,” something of a craze these days among younger monastics, these elderly are often the ones people turn to. Although they are genuinely humble and would refuse the designation, they have a wisdom and holiness that others recognize and draw from. Encountering them can be a dazzlement, a revelation of holy simplicity.

At the end of the Monastic Institute one year I paid a visit to one of my favorite people in the world, an elderly monk who is going blind. He is going blind as he has lived, with feistiness and grace, and without losing gratitude for the many blessings of a long life. As always, he apologized for his messy room, and then he proudly showed off his latest accoutrement: a tape recorder on which he listens to the current issue of
America,
and also the latest books on the liturgical theology that has been his life's work.

He asked if I would come with him to call on another monk who had taken a bad fall the day before. This was a monk I'd not met, a priest who had only recently retired, in his mid-eighties, from many years of serving as a chaplain in a prison not far from the monastery. Other monks had spoken of this man with admiration, as someone who was humbly realistic about his ministry. “He knew that a lot of the prisoners came to Mass for something to do, just to get out of their cell,” one young monk had told me, adding, “and that was enough for him. He just kept at it, hoping to do some good.”

The nurse was leaving his room. She told us he'd been napping off and on all morning, awaiting transport to a nearby hospital for a CAT scan. He'd hit his head in the fall and the doctors needed to know the extent of his injuries. I was nervous about disturbing a man who might be sleeping or in great pain, not wanting company. Nothing could have prepared me for what happened. Another nurse entered the room and called out, “You have a visitor. Two visitors.” We heard a weak voice respond, “Ah . . . it's a sweet life.” As we entered the room, and he got a look at us, he said again, “It's a sweet life.”

Gregory the Great tells a story in his
Dialogues
about a man who visited St. Benedict in his hermitage, explaining that as it is Easter, he has brought a gift of food. Benedict says to him, “I know that it is Easter, for I have been granted the blessing of seeing you.” Standing in that monastery nursing home, I felt that I'd just been blessed in the same earth-shaking way. The monk's greeting was the epitome of Benedictine hospitality—in his Rule Benedict says simply, “All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ”—and it also brought home to me the incarnational nature of monasticism. It is not a theory or even a theology, but a way of life.

All week at the Institute we had pondered and discussed the fundamentals of “the monastic way,” such essentials as sacred reading, liturgy, work, silence, vigilance, and stability. Now, in the presence of two elderly monks with well over a century of lived monastic experience between them, the point of all this was made clear: to so form people in community, stability, and hospitality that they can welcome each other, and life itself, as sweet, despite the savage ups and downs, despite the indignities of old age and physical infirmity.

The elderly monk in that hospital bed would probably be startled to hear how beautiful he was to me as he lay there with a hideously bruised face; how he radiated the love of Christ; how I felt as if a desert
abba
had given me words I didn't even know I needed
—“It's a sweet life.”
I don't know what he was like as a young man, but I'm sure he struggled, like every other Benedictine I've known, to become a monastic person. He'd probably hasten to assure me that he struggles still, that he is still in need of spiritual guidance and correction in pursuing “conversion of heart,” a vow unique to the Benedictines. Yet with one simple gesture, he had powerfully demonstrated to me the incarnational nature of Christian faith, how, to paraphrase Teresa of Avila, we are the only eyes, mouth, hands, feet, and heart that Christ has on earth.

He was an ill, old man, and not one but two people had come to see him. What could it be but sweetness, and God's blessing? His welcome refreshed me and made me see something that's easy to lose sight of in our infernally busy lives. That we exist for each other, and when we're at a low ebb, sometimes just to see the goodness radiating from another can be all we need in order to rediscover it in ourselves.

—Psalm 121

Any small town has rituals that mark the season: in Lemmon, South Dakota, they include the Christmas Fair and Snow Queen Contest, the Boss Cowman Rodeo in July, the Junior Livestock Show in the fall. A monastery follows the liturgical year, the great cycles of Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter, as well as the calm flow of Ordinary Time. From the repetition of saints' days, feasts, and solemnities over the course of a lifetime, a Christian monastic seeks to experience what Paul Philibert has described in
Seeing and Believing
as “the mystery of our living between two worlds, one of space and time, the other of promise and expectation.”

The daily round of a monastic life—coming to the day, to church, to meals, to evening, to sleep—is marked by the Liturgy of the Hours. But other momentous comings and goings—to the novitiate, to first vows and then life vows, to a new job in a dependent monastery halfway round the world, to a silver or golden jubilee, to a deathwatch, to a funeral—are marked by rituals of great solemnity and beauty. Even what would be mundane events in the world are often sanctified in a monastic setting. I once attended the installation of a new president of the American Benedictine Academy. The ceremony was incorporated into a worship service and involved a laying on of hands, as over three hundred people stood in a monastery choir, hands upraised, and a blessing was said over the new president. After our final hymn, I happened to be with a friend, a retired business executive. “Is this how they did it at Honeywell?” I asked. She rolled her eyes and said, “Not quite.”

Rituals bind a community together, and also bind individuals to a community, and while this is something that monastic people have long been aware of, I find that these days they're talking about it more, and setting about to reclaim some of the ritual aspects of their life that were cast aside in what I've heard more than one Benedictine call the “mindless modernizing” after Vatican II.
The American Monastic Newsletter
recently established an open forum on rituals, inviting Benedictine men and women to describe the rituals that their communities have found most valuable. People have sent in reports on everything from a “commissioning ceremony” held in August, when jobs are assigned for the year, and a prioress presents each sister “with a symbol of her Benedictine life and a paper with her ministry written on it,” to a ritual held in a monastery cemetery on All Souls' Day, in which a vigil light is placed on each tombstone, and the abbot blesses each grave with holy water. A monk describes a communal anointing of the sick held quarterly in his monastery, in which those confined to infirmary rooms are assigned to pray for specific purposes. “This gives them,” the monk says, “a greater sense of participation in the monastery's life and work.”

I have witnessed monastic communities bestowing a ritual blessing at vespers the night before an abbot or prioress departs for a lengthy trip, or when a monk or sister is about to embark for a sabbatical or a new job in Jerusalem, Ireland, or Brazil. At one monastery I know, the community recently devised a new ritual for monks who decide to leave before making final vows. At vespers one night, shortly before the man would have made his lifelong commitment, the monks had a brief ceremony to bless him as he went on his way. It was clear to me that the ceremony was also intended to leave the door open, in case the man ever decided that he wanted to return.

The great return in a monastic life, of course, is the return to God. While I have not participated in any of the informal deathbed rituals that often mark a death in a monastery—these tend to be in-house affairs, for family and members of the community—when I've heard of them, I've been struck by how loving they seem, and also how of a piece they are with the rest of monastic life. In some communities, each member comes individually to be with the dying person for a while, to talk over old times, to pray, to read the scriptures out loud. Sometimes groups of monks or sisters will gather, to sing a confrere's favorite hymns or psalms. Often, people hold a deathbed vigil, taking turns reciting psalms out loud for someone they may have been reciting the psalms with for fifty years or more. A sister who participated in such a vigil for a dying monk, a mutual friend, told me that his death lasted a long time. He was struggling, resisting, but while he seemed unconscious, he did respond to some of the psalms. In fact, she said, they were the only thing that seemed to calm him as he finally slipped away.

At the Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo one year I witnessed a remarkable exchange between scholars of the medieval era and contemporary Benedictines. I've always noticed, at Kalamazoo, a bit of tension between the scholars who study monasticism and the people who live it—I find it similar to the unease literary scholars sometimes feel with living poets; it's so much easier to study dead ones. In this case, a medievalist, a Benedictine monk, presented a paper on aging and dying in medieval monasteries. His point was that much of what modern psychology tells us is vital for families in the grieving process—the need for forgiving, for touching, for listening to stories—was provided for, in the medieval monastery, by a series of rituals that moved from the infirmary to the church to the cemetery. Most important, he said, these rituals helped people comprehend death not as a sharp breaking off from life—which is how modern people tend to see it—but rather as a new stage in a process of dying that we've been undergoing for some time. In a recent best-seller,
How We Die,
a medical doctor makes the same point; the death of the body is something we live with all our lives.