I recently finished reading Kathleen Norris’s The Cloister Walk. It is half memoir and half meditative account of what it’s like to be a Benedictine oblate, in the monastary from time to time, but not of it. Much of the theology is alien to me as I am not a Christian, but Benedict’s Rule has existed for centuries as a guide for monastics, and today many folks other than Catholics are finding inspiration within it. Among other things, it is a helpful and compassionate guide to living as a true community rather than merely a collection of individuals. And I find that admirable.
Norris’s book is difficult to get through at times since although it’s loosely structured in a Book of Hours-like format, in chronological time it jumps around quite a bit. And since it is part memoir, a good deal of the content has little or nothing to do with monasticism (the author is a poet by profession and tends to wander all over the mental map, as most poets do). But Norris’s friendships with various monks and nuns and her own reflective, thoughful nature have given her a unique perspective on modern monastic life. Take, for example:
Monastic men and women tell me that one question that bites pretty hard in their early years in the monastary is why anone would choose to live this way, deprived of the autonomy and abundance of choice that middle-class Americans take for granted. We’re taught all our lives to “keep our options open,” but a commitment to monastic life puts an end to that. It is not a choice but a call, and often the people who last in a monastary are those who struggle through their early years reminding themselves of that fact.
I found this incredibly heartening, having recently grappled (yet again) with the question of “why am I doing this?” I often have a hard time remembering that for me, too, it was not a choice but a calling. And by “calling” I don’t just meant that my gods told me this is what They wanted. It was also a deep, inexorable soul-pull towards the culmination of action that in my own religious tradition is called wyrd, a recognition that for me, this is the way things ought to be or rather, become.
Elsewhere she writes:
If scarcity makes things more precious, what does it mean to choose the spare world over one in which we are sated with abundance? [...] What would I find in my own heart if the noise of the world were silenced? Who would I be? Who will I be, when loss or crisis or the depredations of time take away the trappings of success, of self-importance, even personality itself?
Reading these bits was electrifying for me. It came along precisely at a moment when I, in the grip of acedia, was desperately and uselessly searching for some kind of banal distraction with which to avoid silencing the noise of my world. I was not born knowing I’d become Loki’s priestess-wife, never felt that one day I would willingly choose this weirdly cloistered existence over the things my parents, my peers and everyone else told me I ought to pursue to supposedly fulfill my life. When the call did arrive, I answered it gladly enough, but that hasn’t made it any easier to lose the things that obstruct my view of where I’m going and want to be eventually.
I realized that I can make vows and take on the veil (symbolically speaking) and commit myself to a more rigorous daily life, but only the silencing of the voices that take my attention from my Beloved can really help me understand who I am and what shape my devotion will take. And I can’t do that if I’m constantly getting involved in useless hobbies that don’t serve any practical purpose, or getting caught up in issues that have nothing to do with my religious commitment. Just because I haven’t got a cloister to retire into, and just because my god is one who requires neither chastity nor self-restraint nor fierce asceticism from His followers doesn’t mean I’m exempt from the need to improve my life’s signal to noise ratio.
So reading this book, while sometimes boring or annoying, provided me with some things to chew on as regards my own life and novice state. I’d owned my copy for some months but never gotten around to reading it until a month or so ago, and when I did I found that, as so often happens, it was exactly what I needed to hear.
The “autonomy and abundance of choice that middle-class Americans take for granted” can bind us with chains stronger than we know. I have known people to get upset because the grocery store was out of their favourite brand of cereal. People sometimes get out of sorts if their favourite TV program is pre-empted.
On the other hand, obedience to vocation frees one from such bondage to one’s own preferences. A monk, for example, eats whatever God and the abbot provide and is grateful. Over time, one realizes how truly liberating this is.
I would also say that being able to understand the difference between wants and needs can both free a person from “affluenza,” greed and envy of others’ material possessions, and allow one to appreciate the physical, material world even more.
That last bit is very important to me, since as a Pagan I believe that holiness is immanent in, not transcendent of, the material world (I was going to say “natural” but things of artificial human make can be sacred and “alive”, too.) It is sometimes a struggle for me to regard certain aspects of embodied existence as sacred, and my hope is that living a comparatively simple life will allow me to appreciate all of it more.