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of all that monasteries have survived in the 1500-plus years of their existence—pirate raids, bandits, wars and revolutions, political and social upheavals of all kinds, dictators, tyrants, confiscation, foreclosure, martyrdom at the hands of kings, as well as co-opting by the wealthy and powerful—I find it amazing that they’re still here. “We’re as persistent as weeds,” one Benedictine friend says. “We just keep springing up.” I suspect that it is the difference, the adherence to monastic bedrock, what one sister calls the “non-negotiables” in the face of changing circumstances, that makes monasticism so indestructible. Monastic communities traffic in intangibles—worship, solitude, humility, peace—that are not easily manipulated by corporate concerns, not easily identified, packaged, and sold. It will be interesting to see how monastic communities fare in a world which gives more and more power to large, multinational corporations.
    I expect they’ll survive, with their difference, the absurdity of faith that attracts people to a communal way of life and gives them the strength to persevere in it. “The basis of community is not that we have all our personal needs met here, or that we find all our best friends in the monastery,” I once heard a monk say. In fact, he added, his pastoral experience with married couples had taught him that such unreasonably high expectations of any institution, be it a marriage or a monastery, was often what led to disillusionment, and dissolution of the bond. “What we have to struggle for, and to preserve, is a shared vision of the why,” he said, “why we live together. It’s a common meaning, reinforced in the scriptures, a shared vision of the coming reign of God.”

September 30
JEROME
    We hear from Jerome today, at morning prayer, a section of the Prologue to his commentary on Isaiah. He was a contentious man: “Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ,” he booms, and his words shatter our sleepy silence. Jerome was the hard-edged, brilliant fellow who first translated the Hebrew scriptures into Latin. And, judging from his letters and his life, he may have been one of the most irascible people who ever lived.
    Jerome is a saint feminists love to hate, and to quote: “Now that a virgin has conceived in the womb and borne to us a child . . . now the chain of the curse is broken. Death came through Eve, but life has come through Mary. And thus the gift of virginity has been bestowed most richly upon women, seeing that it has had its beginning from a woman.”
    This is typical of the way in which the Christian biblical interpreters of the late fourth century—Jerome and then Augustine, not long after—made a connection between Eve and Mary. We’ve lost the wonder that these words must have had for those who first heard them; now we sigh, discouraged, hearing only the seeds of our well-worn, ludicrous sexual double standard which dictates that women must be either virgins or whores, either blessed or cursed, while men are simply sexual athletes, slaves of lust. (And, don’t forget, Christian boys and girls, everyone is a temple of the Holy Spirit.)
    As with most of these writings from a time so distant from our own, it is difficult to read without reading into it our modern frustrations, difficult to discern the complexities that resist our simplistic interpretations. To me, this passage reflects a fear of women that is thoroughly comprehensible: if Eve is the mother of the living, she is also mother of the dead. One of the most astonishing and precious things about motherhood is the brave way in which women consent to give birth to creatures who will one day die. That they do this is an awesome thing, as is their virginity, their existence in and of themselves, apart from that potential for bearing life and death. That we all begin inside a woman and must emerge