The Cloister Walk (33 page)

I won a first-book competition during those years; a book full of strange music and promise as well as some dreadful, sophomoric verse. I was sophisticated in the shallow way that only a person in her twenties can be, and both I and my poetry suffered for it. It wasn't until I had moved to the place of my childhood summers, my grandparents' house, where my mother grew up, that my voice as a writer emerged. A friend, reading the new poems I began writing there, commented, “When you moved to South Dakota, it's like you discovered gravity.”

This is a journey many writers have made. Feeling a call to go back to the matrix of the family stories, we place ourselves in their landscape. For me that is the western Dakotas, which has shaped my work for over twenty years. I am placed here, maybe not the way my friend Tom Lyman is, who in his late seventies still lives on the ranch he was born on, but deep enough. Yet, even though I have not followed the college teaching route of many writers—I live one hundred miles from the nearest small college, over four hundred from a university of any size—I am also a person of the literary culture, and it places me here in a distinct way. If you will, it displaces me.

The fact that so much of my work is directed outward, to publications, colleges, and organizations in the urban areas of the nation, can't help but set me apart from the people I live with in an agriculturally based society. And my perceptions of them, and the place in which we live, can't help but be altered by links with the world outside that are a necessary part of surviving as a writer in isolated circumstances—modem, fax, FedEx, and my preferred “snail mail.” Often I am a stunned observer of the ways in which my worlds collide. The first time I had a poem printed in the
New Yorker,
I was startled to hear the pastor at Spencer Presbyterian announce it in church on Sunday, as one of the “joys of the congregation.” His gesture made me more a part of the Lemmon community, even as it separated me from it.

Having to frequently come and go from Lemmon, as most of my paying work is elsewhere, has reinforced my sense both of rootedness and displacement. It's because I'm acclimated to the relative calm of my small town that I usually enjoy (at least for a few days) the sound of traffic in the charged-up, urban intensity of mid-town Minneapolis or Manhattan. I enjoy the feel of being an anonymous one among many on a crowded sidewalk or subway platform. And sometimes I am enlarged by unexpected connections that surface between my rural place and the city. During the Gulf War in 1991, I happened to be in New York City, and my conversations with cab drivers centered on the young people we knew who'd been sent to fight. Urban poor, rural poor, for whom the military represents opportunity. One cab driver, a pleasant Jamaican immigrant, had picked me up at a ritzy address and had a hard time believing that I knew people who were in the war. He told me he had a nephew and several cousins in the Gulf.

One summer day, not long after I'd returned from St. John's, I took part in a conference call among writers scattered across America. To begin, our chair had asked us to “go around the room,” a cyberspace room, stretching from California and Oregon all the way to Connecticut and upstate New York. I stretched out in a favorite rocker to take the call. Just a few days before, near the crest of a butte some forty miles from Lemmon, a place with a view of nearly sixty miles to the south and west, my body had been totally absorbed in giving a rattlesnake enough room. I'd scared him up at dusk, after a spectacular sunset, and while I couldn't see the snake at all, instinct told me where his rattling had come from and I quickly backed off.

It was a good night, all in all, and even the rattlesnake's presence felt like a blessing, a West River welcome after I'd spent nearly a year in Minnesota, writing up a storm and consorting with trees and lakes, blue herons and loons.
All is forgiven,
the rattlesnake said;
watch your step.
I received another kind of welcome at a social and hymn-sing held at Hope Church, a country church I love. It sits in the middle of a pasture, and as the pickup trucks were arriving I was hugging everyone in sight—people I hadn't seen for many months, ranch men and women in their best jeans and snakeskin cowboy boots, some moving stiffly, seemingly suddenly older, little kids who seemed to have grown about a mile, new babies. We were also keeping an eye on the sky. It was overcast, and it didn't seem as if the sunset would amount to much. Wait a few minutes, one of the old-timers said. Soon the eastern sky turned pink, bathing our faces in rosy light. I had my back to the west when I
felt
the light change, as if I'd been nudged on the shoulder by an unseen hand. It was as if the light had spoken. I turned to a horizon ablaze with deep scarlet; the upper sky had turned to fine-spun gold. When the night settled in and mosquitoes came out, we went inside the church and sang with gusto the hymns of our childhoods: “Amazing Grace,” “I Would Be True,” “I Love to Tell the Story.” Welcome home.

During each of the four semesters that I was at St. John's, I took brief retreats at St. Benedict's, a neighboring community of Benedictine women. It was my first experience of “directed” retreats, which entailed meeting with a sister once or twice a day. As we were planning one such retreat, I said I'd like to focus on my marriage, and asked if I might prepare a brief paper for her to read in advance. She agreed, and when we met our discussions soon became very frank.

The sister began to speak of her own life as a celibate woman. She had entered the convent in her late teens and a few years later, when she was still in formation—that is, she had not yet made lifelong vows as a Benedictine—she'd become infatuated with a priest. “I quickly learned,” she said, “the truth of Psalm 32; I was miserable as long as I tried to keep it hidden. But as soon as I admitted to myself, and then to my novice mistress, what was going on, I felt an enormous release from guilt.” She'd been corresponding with the priest, “an innocent correspondence on his part, I think,” she told me, “but I was truly infatuated, for the first time in my life.” The advice she got from the novice mistress was “to just put it away, break off all contact, and let it work its way out.” While she found this painfully difficult at the time, she obeyed, sneaking off just a few cards to the man during the course of a year. Not long after she'd finally thrown out the last of his letters that she'd kept hidden, she attended a workshop where she ran into him by accident. “I realized then,” she said, “that my obedience had dispelled the mental image that I'd built up of him. My infatuation hadn't taken the real person into account. I found that love starts,” she added, “when you see the real person, not the one you've invented.” She and the priest have now been friends for many years.

The sister said, “I learned from this experience that it isn't ‘how good you are' that matters—I was still full of a romantic desire to be a ‘good nun,' but my image for that didn't have much to do with reality. What matters,” she said, “is not that you're good but that you trust. I had trusted God, and I had trusted my novice mistress, to see me through this. It was the obedience that did it. However,” she added, “I also learned something about myself. Infatuation is a part of me; I like to fall in love, I like to be in love.” I teased her a bit; “Sister,” I said, “that sounds a lot like me. Maybe we're just a couple of floozies.” Her astonishment—never in her life had anyone come close to calling her a “floozie”—soon turned to laughter. “It was quite an experience,” she said, “to discover that I was a floozie at heart,
after
having entered the convent.

“I learned to accept my need for love,” she said, “and my ability to love, as great gifts from God. And I decided that, yes, I did want to remain in the monastery, to express my love within a celibate context. It was not difficult to see falling in love as a part of seeking God. But it was also good to realize that while infatuation might be an impetus to seek God, it puts you out of balance, and therefore is something to be treated with care.” Then she said something that has stayed with me for years, that seemed utterly mysterious, but that I knew I'd have to try to grasp if I were ever to understand my monastic friends. “I finally realized,” she explained, “that I had to keep in mind that my primary relationship is with God. My vows were made to another person, the person of Christ. And all of my decisions about love had to be made in the light of that person.”

I was stunned. I could not conceive of Christ being so alive for me, or myself that intimate with him, but couldn't deny what this sane, mature, and gracious woman was saying to me. It turned out that her expressing the unimaginable is what made the retreat for me; later that day I was thinking about my marriage—the sister's remarks, after all, had been made in a discussion of marriage, and the fidelity it requires—and wondered if I had been coming at things the wrong way round. The problem did not start with theology—with my inability to grasp Christ as a living person—but might have more to do with my resistance to accepting the full mystery of the Christ present in any person, but most particularly, for me, in my husband. The great commandment, to love God with all your heart and soul, and your neighbor as yourself, seemed more subtle than ever. I began to see the three elements as a kind of trinity, always in motion, and the three loves as interdependent. It would be impossible to love God without loving others; impossible to love others unless one were grounded in a healthy self-respect; and, maybe, impossible to truly love at all in a totally secular way, without participating in the holy.

When the sister said, “It takes time to love,” she was reflecting on her more than thirty years' experience in a Benedictine convent. And when I nodded my assent, I was responding in the light of nearly twenty years of marriage. I wonder if the lyrics by Dolores Dufner, quoted above, do in fact convey the great human task—to learn to live, and love, and die. Perhaps to take on one is to accept all three. These are, of course, the classic questions of human psychological development. And it may be that growing to mature adulthood requires us to reject much popular mythology: that life is simply handed to us, that love is easy, quick, fated, romantic, and death a subject to be avoided altogether. My conversation with the sister encouraged me to ask other Benedictine women what the task of learning to love has been like for them. It seemed to me that women who have committed themselves to celibacy might have a great deal to say about how the practice has formed them spiritually, and also helped them develop their capacity for love.

I soon discovered that the sister's experience of infatuation was not uncommon, and not surprising, given the sexual repression in convents during the 1950s. “We were taught to avoid the thought of anything remotely sexual,” one friend wrote me. “We certainly never used the word ‘sex.' Even deep friendships with other women in the community were discouraged. We sublimated all our energies into work. I think,” she added, “that's why we worked so hard!” In a scenario that seems typical for many religious, it wasn't until she was in her mid-thirties that a crisis developed, the first real test of her vow as a celibate. “I fell in love with a priest,” she says, “and that's when I realized what celibacy is all about.”

She, like many of my Benedictine friends, feels that falling in love is a normal, necessary but painful part of one's formation as a celibate. “It's a part of human development that can't be denied,” one sister wrote to me, “and if we deny or repress it in the name of holiness we end up with a false religion, we end up hurting ourselves and our communities.” Another sister said, “To fall in love is to experience ego collapse. The other person completes something in your own personality.” Citing the philosopher Ernest Becker, she said, “There are two basic ways to experience a radical change: to undergo a nervous breakdown, and to fall in love. And love is preferable. Love, if we can move beyond projecting onto another person and see them as they really are, also makes us more aware of who we are.”

It was clear to me that when the sisters spoke about “falling in love,” they did not mean engaging in sexual intimacy but rather coping with the emotional onslaught that infatuation brings. Several women spoke of the goal of celibacy in terms of “having an undivided heart” and said that they'd learned to be wary of any relationship that seemed out of balance with their goal of seeking God in a religious community. Sally Cline, in her book
Women, Passion and Celibacy,
relates a story about a nun who had once been romantically involved with another nun, who told Cline that the worst thing about the relationship “(though at the time it seemed the best) [was] the intense focus on each other.” I suspect that many monastics would agree with Cline's conclusion that “the difference between sexual intimacy and social celibacy is less a matter of genital contact than that matter of
focus.”
(Emphasis Cline's.)