Free The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris

speaks to them, I suppose it is now, but this is beyond my grasp. I miss my husband—his voice, his face—though it’s been two months since I have seen him, and his face has grown indistinct in my mind. Nevertheless, I hold him there, for a moment, and the distance between us is as nothing.
    My afternoon is full of errands, annoying but necessary. It ends more pleasantly, at a lecture in which a monk, a historian, remarks that “church history for a long time was largely a cosmetic process, which,” he says, slowly, savoring the words, “if you were remarkably stupid, could be edifying.” In describing the environment surrounding the creation of the magnificently illuminated Lindisfarne Gospel in the seventh century, he says, “Everyone lived in the sticks, nothing was going on. They had enormous amounts of time and could enjoy figuring things out.” It sounds good.
    I hurry home and change into a simple dress of bright green flannel. I add a scarlet and gold scarf made of sari cloth. God, the laughter. I hear it as soon as I enter the dorm. Women are cooking, chopping vegetables, washing paring knives and serving spoons, transforming the homely little communal kitchen into a place of feast. My offerings, homemade bread and a magnum of champagne, are accepted with joyful exclamation. One of the grad students pokes his head in the door and says, “My, Sister Julie, you’re looking sultry tonight.” Julie, a highly spirited and pretty young woman, replies with mock confusion: “Sultry? Why? Is my face broken out?” as she good-naturedly shoos the young man out.
    At dinner, discussion turns toward something I’ve noticed that Benedictines seldom talk about, that is, the angelic nature of their calling. Their Liturgy of the Hours is, at root, a symbolic act, an emulation of and a joining with the choirs in heaven who sing the praise of God unceasingly. To most people even to think of such things seems foolish, and Benedictines are well aware that their motives are easily misinterpreted, labeled as romanticist or escapist. “Anyone who knows us knows we’re down to earth,” one sister says. “We have to be, to live in community as we do.”
    But one of the Australian sisters insists that Benedictines “be willing to admit to the angelic charism. The best thing we can do,” she says, “is to praise.” I tell the story of a monk I know who dreamed one night that armed men in uniform had entered the abbey church, and when he tried to stop them from approaching the altar, they shot him. As he lay by the altar, he saw Christ standing before him. “Am I dead?” the monk asked, and Christ nodded and answered, gravely, “Yes.” “Well, what do I do now?” the monk inquired, and Christ shrugged and said, “I guess you should go back to choir.”
    The laughter comes as blessing; women, youthful and aged, with nubile limbs and thick, unsteady ankles, graceful, busy hands and gnarled fingers slowed by arthritis, making a joyful noise. Our talk is light-hearted, easy as we clear the table.
    So that we might sing vespers together, one sister has brought booklets that her home community devised for “Evening Praise, Common of Monastic Women.” Its cover is filled with their names: Scholastica, Walburga, Hildegard, Mechtild, Gertrude, Lioba, Julian, Hilda. The antiphon is from the Song of Songs: “Set me as a seal on your heart, for love is stronger than death.”
    Our reading is from Gertrude, a recasting of the ceremony of monastic profession: “I profess, and to my last breath I shall profess it, that both in body and soul, in everything, whether in prosperity or adversity, you provide for me in the way that is most suitable . . . with the one and uncreated wisdom, my sweetest God, reaching from end to end mightily and ordering all things sweetly.”
    I am pleasantly distracted by the echo from