The Cloister Walk

One difficulty that people seeking to modernize hymnals and the language of worship inevitably run into is that contemporaries are never the best judges of what works and what doesn’t.

for all of the military metaphors employed in the Old Testament, the command that Israel receives most often is to sing. I

The young monk read from the Bible: “The Lord God called to the man, and said to him, ‘Where are you?’ He said, ‘I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.’ ” I have always found that to be a poignant summary of the human response to evil: I was afraid, I tried to hide.

I should try telling my friends who have a hard time comprehending why I like to spend so much time going to church with Benedictines that I do so for the same reasons that I write: to let words work the earth of my heart. To sing, to read poetry aloud, and to have the poetry and the wild stories of scripture read to me. To respond with others, in

While the sense of monasticism as the center of the church may be lost on many people today, I think it still holds true, and hospitality is at the center of it all. In a world in which we are so easily labeled and polarized by our differences: man/woman, Protestant/Catholic, gay/straight, feminist/chauvinist, monastic hospitality is a model of the

He speaks of the depressing thought that suddenly “depicts life stretching out for a long period of time, and brings before the mind’s eye the toil of the ascetic struggle, and . . . leaves no leaf unturned to induce the monk to forsake his cell and drop out of the fight.”

John Cobb, in commenting on the history of art from the Byzantine age to the present, says that “the power that can transform, redeem, unify and order has moved in a continuous process from a transcendent world into the inner being of artists themselves.”

when you go to church several times a day, every day, there is no way you can “do it right.”

But to the modern reader the psalms can seem impenetrable: how in the world can we read, let alone pray, these angry and often violent poems from an ancient warrior culture? At a glance they seem overwhelmingly patriarchal, ill-tempered, moralistic, vengeful, and often seem to reflect precisely what is wrong with our world. And that’s the point, or