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Why would a married woman with a thoroughly Protestant background and often more doubt than faith be drawn to the ancient practice of monasticism, to a community of celibate men whose days are centered around a rigid schedule of prayer, work, and scripture? This is the question that Kathleen Norris herself asks as, somewhat to her own surprise, she found herself on two extended residencies at a Benedictine monastery. Yet upon leaving the monastery, she began to feel herself transformed, and the daily events of her life on the Great Plains - from her morning walk to her going to sleep at night - gradually took on new meaning. She found that in the monastery, time slowed down, offering a new perspective on community, family, and even small-town life. By coming to understand the Benedictine practice of celibacy, she felt her own marriage enriched; through the communal reading aloud of the psalms every day, her notion of the ancient oral tradition of poetry came to life; and even the mundane task of laundry took on new meaning through the lens of Benedictine ritual. Kathleen Norris here takes us through a liturgical year, as she experienced it both within the monastery and outside it. She shows us, from the rare perspective of someone who is both insider and outsider, how immersion in the cloistered world -- its liturgy, its rituals, its sense of community -- can impart meaning to everyday events and deepen our secular lives, no matter what our faith may be.… (more)
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In this book she shares
The book is partly memoir, partly contemplation - a lot of small and larger essays and devotions put together. Some reflections on books in the Bible, about prayer, reading, listening to Bible readings, some about Catholic saints, a lot about daily life of monks and nuns - and collected what Benedictine spirituality can offer us modern people living in a stressful world. Here's one reflection on time:
In our culture, time can seem like an enemy: it chews us up and spits us out with appalling ease. But the monastic perspective welcomes time as a gift from God, and seeks to put it to good use rather than allowing us to be used up by it….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".
I'm not sure Norris ever really answers that question; indeed, I'm not sure she can. It's evident that she is drawn to ritual and structure, to
One is the concept of lectio continua, reading though whole books of the Bible at morning and evening prayer. She describes it thus: "The monastic discipline of listening aims to still body and soul so that the words of a reading may sink in. Such silence tends to open a person . . ."
The other is metaphor, although she says, "Poets believe in metaphor, and that alone sets them apart from many Christians . . ." The scriptures, she notes, are full of strange metaphors. Interestingly, she, a believer, and I, a non-believer, both feel quite strongly about the attempts to modernize and make "relevant" hymnals and the language of worship. I agree with her wholeheartedly when she says " . . . contemporaries are never the best judges of what works and what doesn't. This is something all poets know; that language is a living thing, beyond our control, and it simply takes time for the trendy to reveal itself, to become so obviously dated that it falls by the way, and for the truly innovative to take hold." This "metaphoric poverty" of the modern church causes her to seek to go back to an earlier time, when theology was written as poetry.
There is so much meat to this book! It begins as though it will be a straightforward account of her time at St. John's. But it becomes a series of meditations, some short, some long, on subjects as esoteric as Mechtild of Magdeburg, as current as the debate on celibacy, as mundane as laundry.
Norris has a way of drawing me to her for different reasons at different times of my life. The craziness of the
Norris speaks to me. I guess it isn't any more complicated than that.
If you're a fan of authors such as Thomas Merton I recommend giving this book a slow and thoughtful read.