The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris Our regular booknotes writer, Lawrence S Cunningham, writes, "Our hoary reactions to virgin saints, celibacy, the misogynist streak in our ascetical tradition are 'deconstructed' by the author's angle of vision, which looks with new but hardly naive eyes"
Cunningham, Lawrence S
MONASTICISM, NEWLY SEEN The Cloister Walk Kathleen Norris Riverhead Books (Putnam), $23.35,384 pp. Lawrence S. Cunningham Kathleen Norris's Dakota (1993) was to become an unlikely word-of-mouth...
...Her reading of Scripture serves her well when called upon to preach at her own church in South Dakota...
...Our hoary reactions to virgin saints, celibacy, the misogynist streak in our as-cetical tradition are "deconstructed" by the author's angle of vision, which looks with new but hardly naive eyes...
...Among that number one must include, conspicuously, Kathleen Norris who can bring alive the old desert fathers and mothers, the saints of the calendar, the idiosyncrasies of community life, the travails of smalltown living, the joys and pains of marriage and old age...
...More than anything else, Norris is a contemplative reader of Scripture who follows the liturgy and reads in a manner known in the monastic tradition as lectio divina...
...I say "unlikely" because the work was difficult to classify beyond the author's own subtitle: a "spiritual geography," In meditative prose, Norris reflected lovingly on her life in Lemmon, South Dakota, through the lens of her long connection with Benedictine monasticism...
...This book, in fact, reflects her participation in the liturgical life at Saint John's, her visits to other monastic houses, and her inevitable return to small-town life in South Dakota...
...Saint Thomas More once said that the world needed more monks and more housing for the poor...
...The psalms live as poetry and the acid voice of Jeremiah (she has a splendid chapter on the latter) is heard afresh...
...The revelatory character of Norris's prose is best found in the fresh eye she brings to elements of the Catholic tradition which may be overly familiar to those who were born into the tradition...
...To which I would add: more poets who appreciate both those needs...
...We have thus been blessed by the writings of, among others, Nancy Mairs, Patricia Hampl, Annie Dillard, and De-nise Levertov...
...Gifted with the power of language and disinclined to get mired down in petty ecclesiastical squabbles or sidetracked by the banality that often passes for spirituality, they, like the householder of the gospel, bring forth "old things and new...
...Lawrence S. Cunningham Kathleen Norris's Dakota (1993) was to become an unlikely word-of-mouth best seller...
...It is one of the graces of our time that the best of our contemporary spiritual writers are women who are also poets...
...Her more recent work reflects her still intense connections to monasticism...
...It is a pastiche (some of the chapters have been previously published) of scriptural meditation and reflections on her monastic experience, along with sharply edged reflections on her own life and closely observed vignettes of the several communities within which she has found herself...
...Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame and writes the "Religion Booknotes" for Commonweal...
...Despite the fact that she is a Presbyterian lay preacher and a well-regarded poet, she saw nothing curious about such an oddly ecumenical approach to life...
...She spent the better part of a year at the Ecumenical Institute at Saint John's Abbey in Minnesota and her deep love for monasticism has also been acknowledged by the many invitations she receives to read to monastic communities...
...Poets like Kathleen Norris who understand, as she says of Gregory of Nyssa, that "with God there is always more unfolding...
...Monks, after all, have a nearly two-millennium history of living in sparsely populated places, and the Dakotas are, in Norris's words, the "Cappadocia of America...
Vol. 123 • May 1996 • No. 10
