The Cloister Walk (36 page)

In the first years I was in the house, I felt that I should care for the flowers but didn't know how. Advice from neighbors helped, but not enough. Advice from books was sometimes of use, but often it only reinforced my sense of myself as a hopeless gardener. I'd weed around the flowers and usually pull some flowers by mistake. Often, in the spring, I was working away from home, and the weeds got away from me. I was mightily impressed that the columbines and painted daisies never failed to come back up, no matter how I neglected them. They came to seem like unlosable friends.

My grandmother had a small stand of mint that she used for making her own mint jelly. I recall that she used to call mint “near a weed,” and she was careful to keep it within bounds. In my twenty-one years of struggling with the garden, I've let the mint take over. It keeps the real weeds down. I use it in sun tea all summer and often send it, fresh or dried, to my urban friends, for whom it is a luxury. I do try to keep it from overrunning the columbines, my grandmother's favorite flower, and mine, a flower that can withstand both bitter cold winters and the wild storms of summer. The delicate whimsy of the columbine is deceiving. After violent hail and wind, I've seen the flowers, long spikes intact, blooming in the mud, the long stems bowed down but not broken.

In the half of the garden where my grandmother grew her vegetables, I've given up on tomatoes—end rot, no matter what I tried—and in some years have simply let the weeds take over. When I manage to be at home in the early spring, I have a friend till the ground and plant basil, lettuce, and snow peas. In a recent fit of optimism, I've tried to establish parsley (having killed off my grandmother's patch years ago), chives, sorrel, rosemary, and thyme. The thyme died before the summer was out, as did much of the tarragon patch a friend helped me establish years ago. Some of it seemed to have survived, and I hope it will be up next spring, along with the rosemary, parsley, sorrel, and chives. I wouldn't put money on any of it.

My parents were never much for gardening, and oddly enough, it was when I lived in New York City as a young adult that I first felt compelled to work with the earth. I had friends with a country place in Rhode Island, and I looked forward each spring to getting my hands into the warm soil and doing whatever job they had for me to do. I'd visit several times a summer and on into fall, shoveling manure and compost, gathering seaweed at a nearby beach for the compost pile, hoeing, weeding, picking potato bugs and releasing lady bugs, picking the ripened corn and tomatoes and eggplant just before we were to cook them.

In the medieval era gardens were designed to suffice for the loss of Eden. The garden I've grown into, in my middle age, seems more a kind of Purgatory, but I love it. It's a ratty little garden, not much at all. But I can call it mine.

Sometimes I feel that the small, isolated town I live in is as much a mystery to the outside world as any monastery. Here, churches help to define the community in ways that urban people might find incomprehensible. They are the only local institutions, for instance, that could have generated enough local support to establish and maintain a domestic violence hot line (and now a safe house), a community food pantry, and services to destitute transients. My husband, who grew up in New York, said that it was-n't until he moved here that he realized how much ministers do.

The Sunday morning service is a social highlight of the week for many people. Especially for the elderly, it's one of the few times all week that they get out. But for them, and for many younger people, church is much more than visiting with friends over coffee before the service; worship has been important to them all their lives, so they go. If a guy skips church now and then, it has much more to do with his love of fishing, or the need to get a hay crop in, than with existential angst. For many families here, church is both a serious commitment and a joy.

When I'm asked to preach I try to take advantage of my role as both an insider—the granddaughter of a woman who was a member of the church for most of its existence, over sixty years—and an outsider, someone who did not grow up in the town and has lived for much of her life in cities. Sometimes, especially when I've preached just before a new pastor is due to arrive, I've said things about us as a congregation, and our history as a church, that no salaried clergyperson could say; whatever I think might help us drop some of the old baggage that accumulates in any institution so that we might better welcome the new person with our hands free.

I've also taken great pleasure in the times I've been able to yoke my disparate worlds together in such a way that the congregation can benefit. I've found that the practical wisdom of the desert fathers and mothers, for example, is something that people here can appreciate. It's biblically based enough for any Protestant, and it's also great storytelling, which keeps people awake in the pews. People enjoyed the story about the monk who decided that he was making no spiritual progress in the monastery. He told the other monks that they were holding him back, constantly doing things that made him angry, which of course interfered with his prayer. But when the monk had left and was settling in a cave of his own, looking forward to perfect peace, he became frustrated over some trifle and threw a water jug against a wall, breaking it in pieces. Realizing that his anger was within him, and that it would be with him wherever he went, he returned to the monastery, apologized, and was taken back.

Dorotheus of Gaza has been a big hit; in fact it was people's responses to quotes from him in my sermons that first led me to suspect that there might be a good many connections between monasteries and small towns. Anyone who has endured the pain of gossip at close quarters, the petty squabbles that erupt in church congregations, can appreciate the honesty of Dorotheus: “We remain all the time against one another,” he says, “grinding one another down . . . Each considers himself right and excuses himself . . . all the while keeping none of the Commandments, yet expecting his neighbor to keep the lot!” When I read this at Hope, the country church, people nodded; they saw themselves in it, even though Dorotheus had said it about monks living in sixth-century Egypt.

Only those who know how long resentments can smolder in the living memory of a congregation can best savor Dorotheus's advice that prayer is the only remedy, particularly a difficult and humbling prayer such as, “O God, help my brother, and help me through his prayers.” In this prayer, Dorotheus says, we show sympathy and love for those with whom we're in conflict, and also acknowledge our need for compassion in return. “Where there is sympathy and love and humility,” Dorotheus asks, how can anger continue to develop? He compares the ability to pray for our enemies to learning a trade such as carpentry. “Always [we have to] start by doing,” he says, “and doing it wrong, making and unmaking, until, little by little, patiently and persevering, [we] learn the trade while God looks on at [our] labor and humility, and works with [us.]” These words might make no sense at all in the world as most of us know it, but people who are committed for the long haul to either a monastery or a small-town church know how true they are. The Hope and Spencer congregations have also appreciated the pithy definition of anger by another monk, Abba Isaiah, who summarized it as quarreling, lying, and ignorance. And also, John Climacus's evocative bodily image in his statement that “the man who claims to love the Lord but is angry with his neighbor is like a man who dreams he is running.”

I seldom quote from modern theologians in my sermons, although I'm often indebted to their scholarship, because I often find their language too theoretical to be of much use. The language of the theologians of the early church, however, is remarkably vivid, energized by metaphors so grounded in earthy reality as to still be effective after more than a thousand years. John Chrysostom, for example, one of the most learned men of the fourth century, often speaks in a way that is thoroughly accessible to country people today. “Pride is a rock,” he said, “where wild beasts lurk that would tear you to pieces every day.” In coyote country, that image has real meaning.

I have fun giving Chrysostom, old “Golden Mouth” himself, a good run in western South Dakota, but it's also serious business. After the accidental death of a young man that grieved the whole community, the kind of death that can test anyone's faith in God, I read in a sermon a portion of one of Chrysostom's sermons on Divine Providence. Imagine someone without the least notion of agriculture, he says, “observing a farmer collecting grain and shutting it in a barn to protect it from damp. Then he sees the same farmer take the same grain and cast it to the winds, spreading it on the ground, maybe even in the mud, without worrying any more about the dampness. Surely he will think that the farmer has ruined the grain, and reprove the farmer.” The reproof comes from ignorance and impatience, Chrysostom says; only waiting until the end of the summer, he would see the farmer harvest that grain, and be astonished at how it has multiplied. So much the more, he adds, ever the consummate theologian, should “we await the final outcome of events, remembering who it is who ploughs the earth of our souls.” I hoped it helped just a bit, to remind people that when the tragic, inexplicable events come, one of the hardest things to accept is that we don't have answers or explanations enough to cover the way they tear us up inside.

Chrysostom's metaphor of the soil of our souls made sense to the people in the congregations I was addressing, but to many in the world it might seem a contradiction. The popular mythology of our day, the one-sentence stereotype of Christians that you encounter everywhere, is that Christians are people who have always despised the earth. Most of us, Christians or not, were brought up to believe that “earth” and “soul” are distinct categories, thoroughly separate, and not to be mixed. All I can say is, many things were looser in the fourth century than they are in our uptight, narrow-minded age. And they're a lot looser now, out in western South Dakota, than in either the academy or the city.

The metaphoric poverty of the contemporary churches sends me back to an earlier time in Christian history, when Ephrem, the great theologian of the early Syrian church, wrote theology
as
poetry. The Incarnation was everything to him; frequently, Ephrem prays in a way made possible by the doctrine itself:

Ephrem's Christianity, as the contemporary scholar Sebastian Brock has remarked, is much more Semitic than Greek. A man after my own heart, Ephrem “avoids—indeed abhors—definitions, which he regards as boundaries that impose limit; his own method, by contrast,” Brock says, “is to proceed by way of paradox and symbol.”

Ephrem is a serious and orthodox Christian theologian—officially, a Doctor of the Church—but he does lead his readers into strange places. One of his hymns on faith includes a passage on God's efforts “to [clothe] Himself in our language, so that He might clothe us in His way of Life.” Ephrem compares this, memorably, with a person trying to teach a parrot to talk by the use of a mirror.

In his own time, Ephrem had such a reputation for holy tranquility that one story told about him in
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers
concerns a prostitute who solicited him, mostly to see if she could tempt him to anger, for, we are told, no one had ever seen him angry! He asks her to follow him and, when they reach a crowded place, tells her that she may now do what she desires with him. Ashamed, she departs. We hear nothing more of the woman, though in many monastic stories concerning prostitutes, the tremor of shame that the woman feels at the monk's gentle rebuke proves to be the means by which she is able to change her life. This story gives us a glimpse into the ancient monastic attitude toward sexual honesty; or, as a later monk, John Cassian, put it, the goal of having anger subdued by chastity so that a monk “is found the same, day and night, the same in bed as in prayer, quite the same alone as surrounded by men,” with absolutely nothing to hide.