The Cloister Walk
by Kathleen Norris
Riverhead Books
Reviewed by Patrick Quinn
The Cloister Walk
by Kathleen Norris
Riverhead Books
Reviewed by Patrick Quinn
Benedictine oblate, Kathleen Norris tells us on the first page of The Cloister Walk, is someone who has undertaken "an abbreviated yet powerful profession of monastic vows ... in which you promise to follow the Rule of St. Benedict insofar as your situation in life will allow." Norris -- married, Protestant, literary and feminist -- has been just such an oblate for 10 years. This, her luminous second book and a marvel, is the story of her oblation.
The Cloister Walk is a deceptively easy book to read, a collection of meditations on subjects that range from the sublime --"The War on Metaphor"-- to the straightforward -- "Good Old Sin"-- the whole built on the framework of the Liturgy of the Hours and the hours of the day. Norris, a poet and writer whose Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, was a 1993 bestseller, spent two nine-month terms at Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research at St. John's Abbey and University in Collegeville, Minn., beginning her daily communal worship with Morning Prayer and ending it with Vespers, experiencing first-hand what her monastic associates call "the sanctification of time."
There is a serenity in her descriptions of the liturgy, a sense that if she still struggles in shadow, she does so knowing that it is shadow from the light of the divine: "On All Souls, the mood is somber. We say the Office for the Dead, we ask for mercy. We pray for 'the faithful departed,' but out of habit I add 'and the unfaithful,' or, as one of the eucharistic prayers puts it, 'those whose faith is known to you alone,' those whose stories are a messy, long departure. Louise Bogan, who said to a friend, 'The gift of faith has been denied me,' Anne Sexton, who told a priest, 'I love faith, but have none,' John Berryman, who wrote, 'I would like if possible to be buried in consecrated ground.' They told it well, but darkly. Now the feasts wheel round, in the dark of the year. All Saints, All Souls, all song and story."
But Norris is a poet and poets are always dangerous, particularly when they adhere to the kind of happily anarchic ecumenism that can lead a practicing Presbyterian to a 1,500 year-old Roman Catholic monastic rite. Just when we might begin to embrace too ardently a fuzzy picture of quiet contemplation, she draws us back to the world. "I once had the pleasure of hearing the poet Diane Glancy astound a group of clergy," she says matter-of-factly at the beginning of "The War on Metaphor." "Mostly Protestant, mostly mainstream Lutherans. She began her poetry reading by saying that she loved Christianity because it was a blood religion. People gasped in shock; I was overjoyed, thinking, "Hit 'em, Diane, hit 'em where they live."
There is nothing to be done with a writer who reminds us that the Book of Revelations is "a story with dragons" but to read her. The Cloister Walk is an invocation, a song, a dialogue with God, a wise meditation on the living-out of vows, a joyful inscription on the human heart. Amid all the noisy, vacuous amusement park rides being peddled by the enlightenment trade, Kathleen Norris has built for us a tower of calm intelligence, where we can contemplate her examined life, and perhaps our own.
© Copyright 1996 Urban Desires
