Weaver’s ‘Cloister and Community’ examines sacred space in everyday life

By Marilyn Breiter

Editor’s note: For those wishing to read more about Weaver and her colleagues in the IU Bloomington Department of Religious Studies, go to the following Web site to read Lauren Bryant’s story, “Minding the Divine,” in Indiana Alumni magazine:
http://www.indiana.edu/~relstud/

The Carmelite monastery in Indianapolis maintains an unusual relationship to the world outside its walls. It is home to 11, most of whom are in their 60s and 70s.

They no longer dress in long black woolen habits, listen to Mass behind a screen, or cover their faces with a veil when someone comes to the door, as was once their custom. They live simply, their day alternating between work, meals, communal prayers and private meditation. But now work can encompass not only baking altar bread to sell to churches around the country but also writing material for their own Web site. (See end of story for link).

The day may include being interviewed by a CNN reporter or Today Show host, or arranging for lay women to attend retreats at the monastery in the hope that some will want to join them in their calling.

Once living separately from the world, these religious women now embrace it. How they have created a dynamic idea of the cloister, balancing their call to holiness with an opening to the world, is the subject of Mary Jo Weaver’s new book, Cloister and Community: Life within a Carmelite Monastery, to be published next week in a $29.95 hardback edition by IU Press.

Weaver, an IU professor of religious studies, is a leading historian of American Catholicism and also a friend of the Indianapolis Carmelites. She originally began the book as an architectural history that would be printed in the monastery and distributed for the edification of the sisters. Soon, however, the project expanded to include the story of the women who live there and the ideas behind the Carmelite philosophy.

“I am always touched by the power of novelists to portray the life of a religious community. Each writer stands outside community life, but has an insider’s sympathy,” said Weaver. “ I tried to find that balance as I wrote this history. Like an outsider, I know the myths of Carmelite life, and so sometimes dream of myself in the great mystical adventure buoyed up and hidden in solitude. Like an insider, I know some of the shadows as well, and see that overly busy schedules and the minor irritations of daily life are not absent from the cloister. Beneath all these perspectives is the challenge to find a community of intimacy that draws one deeper into self-knowledge and, one hopes, closer to a compassionate life.”

Her book is divided into six chapters, corresponding to the stages in which the monastery was constructed. To place the Indianapolis Carmelites into context, she begins with the story of Saint Teresa of Avila and her reform movement. Weaver explores the idea of a sacred space and how it is created; the meaning of poverty; enclosure and silence as the twin pillars of the monastic life; and the animating spiritual consciousness that is rooted in tradition but also takes to heart the challenge to be more present to the world.

“The community that began in 1932 as a group living in a sacred space apart from the world has changed over time into a community that sees the world itself as a sacred space,” said Weaver. “Those who enter the monastery still seek silence and cloister, but in a more dynamic form through which one turns toward the world to gather its pain and its joy, and then turns inward to explore the deep mystery embedded there. In the process of opening toward the world and withdrawing to their inner silence, the sisters explore the cosmic dimensions of contemplation.”
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