March 9: Mr. Antolini, Kathleen Norris, "The Cloister Walk," New Cartoon

"Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.”

Mr. Antolini says this to Holden.  Holden has gone to Antolini's apartment, having no place else to go.  He doesn't want to stay at home, because his parents still don't know he's been kicked out of school again.  He doesn't have the money to stay another night at a hotel.  So he calls his former English teacher, and Mr. Antolini invites Holden to spend the night.

While the situation eventually turns sour, Mr. Antolini says some pretty wise things to Holden.  He talks to Holden about history and poetry and school and life.  He knows Holden's family, has lunch sometimes with Holden's father.  I think Antolini really cares about Holden's future.  Perhaps a little too much, as it turns out.  However, what he says about history and poetry is true and contains a lot of beauty.

Last night, I posted a poem by Kathleen Norris.  Norris knows a lot about history and poetry.  An essayist and poet, she wrote one of my favorite books of all time--The Cloister Walk.  It's a collection of essays about Norris' tenure as a Benedictine oblate at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota.  An oblation, Norris explains, "is an abbreviated yet powerful profession of monastic vows; you attach yourself to a particular monastery by signing a document on the altar during Mass, in which you promise to follow the Rule of St. Benedict insofar as your situation in life will allow."  She immerses herself, a lifelong Protestant, in the rhythms and patterns of monastic life.  In doing so, she examines the modern world with the eyes of a feminist, poet, and mystic.

The subjects Kathleen Norris writes about are diverse.  She writes about saints and virgin martyrs, mental illness and music.  Her prose isn't antiseptic, devoid of the soil and toil of life.  If anything, she plants herself in that very dirt and allows her writing to germinate.  In her preface, she tells the monk who is her oblate director, "I can't imagine why God would want me, of all people, as an offering.  But if God is foolish enough to take me as I am, I guess I'd better do it."  Her journey lasts many months, and she leaves the monastery at times for family and professional obligations.  However, she learns to revel in the liturgical hours of the Benedictines.  She writes, "Liturgical time is essentially poetic time, oriented toward process rather than productivity, willing to wait attentively in stillness rather than always pushing to 'get the job done.'"

Norris struggles spiritually in The Cloister Walk.  She writes, with great sensitivity, about the role of women in the evolution of the Christian faith.  Her insights are tempered with feminist ideology, especially when she discusses subjects like the murder and canonization of Maria Goretti and the use of the traditional habit for Benedictine nuns.  Her struggles are never angry.  She never allows herself to slip into modern indignation over these controversial subjects.  Rather, she is more of a pilgrim, trying to understand at face value the way of life she has adopted.

In The Cloister Walk, Kathleen Norris records her troubles, as Mr. Antolini tells Holden in the passage I opened with.  In recording her troubles, she reflects on history and poetry.  In the last essay of the book, Norris is trying to comfort a friend whose sister has been killed, possibly by an abusive husband.  Saint Marty can think of no better way to end this post than with Norris' final paragraph:

The great desert monk Anthony once said that "the prayer of the monk is not perfect until he no longer realizes himself or the fact that he is praying."  Frank O'Hara speaks in a poem, "In Favor of One's Time," of an angel engaged in an immortal contest, "which is love assuming the consciousness of itself . . ."  Between these two poles, it seems to me, we seek to become complete:  between shedding our self-consciousness and taking on a new awareness, between the awesome fears that shrink us and the capacity for love that enlarges us beyond measure, between the need for vigilance in the face of danger and the trust that allows us to sleep.  Night comes, or as Miss Dickinson put it, it becomes, and we turn our lives over to God.  We are able to rest, in the words of an old hymn, "on the promises," we are willing to lean "on the everlasting arms."

 Confessions of Saint Marty