The Cloister Walk Read Online Free

from scripture. In his prologue, he takes that enticing question of Psalm 34, “Which of you desires life, and covets many days to enjoy good?” and states that God has already given us the answer in the very next verses of the psalm: “Keep your tongue from evil, your lips from speaking deceit. Depart from evil, and do good; seek peace, and pursue it” (Ps 34:12-14). It was good to be reminded, as I thought of the conflicts in my town and church and family, that peace is not an easy thing, but something that must be struggled for.
    In a marriage, in a small town, in a monastery, it is all too easy to let things slide, to allow tensions to build until the only way they can be relieved is in an explosion that does more harm than good. Benedict’s voice remains calm—persevere, bear one another’s burdens, be patient with one another’s infirmities of body or behavior. And when the “thorns of contention” arise in daily life, daily forgive, and be willing to accept forgiveness. Remember that you are not the center of the universe but, to use Benedict’s words, “keep death daily before your eyes.”

September 17
HILDEGARD OF BINGEN
    â€œWhat I do not see I do not know,” Hildegard wrote to a monk late in her life. “I see, hear, and know simultaneously, and learn what I know as if in a moment. But what I do not see I do not know, for I am not learned.” At our first seminar I tell my colleagues at the Ecumenical Institute, mostly college professors on sabbatical, that this seems to me a poetic way of knowing, that poets are indeed at the mercy of what they see.
    In a way, I tell them, it might also describe me, a poet who is “not learned.” I have no advanced degrees and have never worked in academia. When my first book was published in 1971, I turned down a job in a college English department, because I couldn’t see myself as a teacher. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was a vocational decision; I became a freelance writer instead. Some eyebrows go up. I explain that my “research” at the Institute will be primarily experiential, and will be centered on attending the daily Liturgy of the Hours at the monastery. The eyebrows stay up.
    I talk about the way Hildegard captures in this letter the path of knowledge that I’m most familiar with, in which thoughts and images constellate, converging, sometimes violently, in the subconscious. The sounds of words and the silence of images are more important at this stage than sense or “meaning.” In composing a poem, one often seems to move directly from ignorance to revelation, instantly from a muddled sense of things to a clear picture, with only the vaguest sense of how it happened. Experience is the ground of this way of knowing. But if visionaries and poets are at the mercy of what they see, they are also called to articulate it. And this requires them to employ another form of knowledge, the linear thought that enables them to communicate their experience to others. As with most human endeavors, the key to employing these complementary elements of human intelligence is balance.
    Cardinal Newman, in referring to the Benedictines as the most poetic of religious orders, has helped me to understand one aspect of their attraction for me. I’ve often sensed that the rhythms of monastic life, which now, as in Hildegard’s time, are set to a liturgical pace, foster a way of knowing that values image over idea, the synthetic over the analytical, the instantaneous over the sequential, the intuitive and associative over the formal and prescribed. If, as Jean Leclercq has put it, monastic culture is “more literary than speculative,” it also reflects what I mean by a poetic way of knowing.
    A line from Hildegard’s sequence for the virgin martyr Ursula: “The girl has no idea what she means,” has great resonance for me. Although it is the crowd that