September 19, Young and Old

Angela writes:

A wooden box with rows of bolts on the one side, neatly cut hollow circles on the other. I was to unscrew the bolts out of their nut and screw them again on the opposite side. This, with my left, weaker hand. A deck of cards that I was to shuffle with my left hand again. Pens ordered in a row, which I had to pick one by one with two fingers and replace at the end of the row, in a repetitive semicircular motion. These simple frames have all the appearance of a dream made of disjointed scenes, yet they belong to the training towards recovery I undergo once a week. As you can tell, keyboard exercises are the least surrealist of the propositions offered to me.

For the last few evenings we have watched a couple of documentaries about the life of two silent monastic orders. The Ordre des Chartreux, in the French Alps, and the Discalced Order of Carmelites, in London. The monks in the first, the nuns in the second, dedicate their lives to prayer and contemplation. I had wanted for a long time to know something about life lived in silence, silence almost absolute, except for assigned times when the secluded are allowed to engage in conversation among themselves.

What I found most astonishing is the fact that the more difficult – physically difficult – tasks like gardening (in the Alps it begins with snow still high on the ground) and cooking, sewing clothes, shaving, laundry, all in the service of the community, are accomplished by the older of the brothers and sisters. And by “older” I mean quite old, considering that these groups, small in numbers already, have a precious few members under forty years of age.

It was the prioress of the Carmelites who helped me understand why. She tells the story of her own entering into faith, which took about eighteen years after her entering the order. She alluded to how, busy with work, with the daily chores, she had no time to face herself and therefore fell into deep spiritual drifting, doubt, maybe the despair of not being sure of anything any longer. Such a state, the melancholy or acedia of the cloistered, cannot be cured but by study, self-examination and prayer. In other words, the young – and again, by young we understand here the able bodied at the stronger pole of the spectrum – are supposed to work much more towards reaching that state of self-understanding, than to contribute, through the execution of tasks, to the well-being of the community. As time goes by, and one is better advanced into accepting one’s condition and place, one can begin to give more to those with whom she shares her life and beliefs.

The gardener and cook of the Chartreux was so old, his body so feeble, that he had to lean on the spade with which he was digging his garden in order to move from place to place. The tailor’s neck, so bent as to resemble a flamingo’s. His vertebrae a crown of knots under the hand of the brother patiently rubbing an ointment onto the old man’s shoulders and back.

Nevertheless, the old and very old have now reached a place where the work of the spirit is mostly done. The reading, the praying, the contemplation and learning, are more urgently a task for the young. And in a reversal of the order of things we are accustomed to, the more difficult, more exigent – including bodily – of tasks, are deemed not to be the physical ones. Not that there is not a part of physicality in prayer and learning, of course there is. But it remains that all of the able body’s energies are employed towards the sustenance of a yet doubtful soul. As soon as that part of learning is achieved, or achieved mostly, the body, now feeble and fatigued, is ready to put itself into the service of the necessities of life.

god's ribs

It is a marvelous use these orders make, of the old. So long as they can move. While we, seculars, wait for later to possibly address the needs of the soul, and put all our young energies into the service of the body, youthful appearance including. And keep postponing the day when we should look at the nakedness of our flamingo spine.

All the way hoping, that such a day should never come to us.