wfn.org | Poetic Pilgrim: The Spiritual Journey of Kathleen Norris

[PCUSA.NEWS@pcusa.org]

9-April-1998 
98130 
 
    Poetic Pilgrim: The Spiritual Journey of Kathleen Norris 
 
    by Steve Rabey 
    Religion News Service 
 
WASHINGTON-Since the 1960s, pilgrims seeking an authentic spiritual path 
have often looked beyond the Christian faith of their parents to the 
esoterica of the New Age, the mysticism of Eastern religions or the allure 
of newfangled cults. 
 
    Kathleen Norris abandoned the Protestant pieties of her childhood for 
the life of a poet in New York City, a substitution she says "actually 
worked pretty well." 
 
    But in the early 1980s, a surprising thing began happening to her. A 
hunger she describes as "a vague desire for more spiritual depth in my 
life" led her to reexamine Christian traditions, and in the process she 
found them "much more various, rich, and nourishing than I had ever 
imagined." 
 
    In "The Cloister Walk," her 1996 best-selling follow-up to her 
critically acclaimed "Dakota," Norris introduced readers to the rhythms and 
mysteries of monasticism, which she had experienced firsthand during nine 
months as an oblate (or lay associate) at a Benedictine monastery. 
    Her recently released "Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith" 
(Riverhead) offers lively, literary interpretations of concepts like 
"salvation," "incarnation," "repentance" and "orthodoxy," as well as dozens 
of other perplexing Protestant terms she encountered at Spencer Memorial 
Presbyterian Church in Lemmon, S.D. 
 
    "When I first ventured back to Sunday worship in my small town, the 
services felt like a word bombardment, an hourlong barrage of heavyweight 
theological terminology," she writes. "Often I was so exhausted afterwards 
that I would need a three-hour nap." 
 
    After periods of resting and wrestling, Norris wrote "Amazing Grace," a 
book that's neither preachy nor pedantic, but applies a poet's ear - she is 
the author of three collections of poetry -- and a prodigal's heart to the 
tricky task of shedding warm light on musty and often misunderstood words. 
 
    "I'm not a representative of any one faction of the Christian church," 
said the 50-year-old Norris in Denver, the first stop in a 20-city 
publicity tour.  "I'm simply a seeker saying I'm grounded here in the 
Presbyterian tradition, and here's how things look from here. I'm too much 
of a poet to have an agenda." 
 
    Over the course of 384 pages, Norris explores more than 50 complex 
concepts like asceticism and apocalypse.  A lyrical, literary writer, 
Norris also cares about accuracy, and she had both a Protestant and a 
Catholic theologian critique "Amazing Grace." 
 
    Early drafts were also read by her agnostic husband, her Jewish editor, 
and a writer friend whose first reaction to Norris' conversion was to ask, 
"What in the world happened to you? Did you have a lobotomy?" 
 
    Her ability to communicate to such a broad spectrum of readers is just 
one of Norris' gifts, but one allowing her to ride the crest of the current 
wave of interest in spirituality. 
 
    "The Cloister Walk," for example, was on the "New York Times" hardback 
best-seller list for more than four months, was excerpted in both "New Age 
Journal" and the evangelical "Christianity Today" (which also named it one 
of the year's best books) and was the subject of a story on Jesuit-run 
Vatican radio. 
 
    At the same time, Norris is anything but "anything goes," and there are 
aspects of the contemporary spirituality boom that concern her. 
 
    "I think we're seeing the fruit of a lot of well-meaning people in the 
'60s who said we're going to raise the kids with no religion.  As a result, 
people are frantically searching for some religious meaning in their lives. 
And they're sort of taking whatever shows up, which is a really unwise 
thing.  If you raise people with no religion, they will wind up with some 
really warped religions." 
 
    She writes about religion's "shadow side" in "Amazing Grace": "I might 
hire someone to channel my personal angels, or purchase an Indian name from 
a company in California. I might look into my `past lives' and discover 
that I was, as some now claim to be, an Indian in a former life.  The 
religious marketplace is full of spiritualities that can costume us in 
fancy dress."  In contrast to such shenanigans, Christianity seems "not so 
crazy, after all, but an ancient thing, and wise." 
 
    Wrestling with one's religious inheritance is never easy, a truth 
Norris illustrates by discussing the lives of poet Emily Dickinson and 
Chicago Bulls coach Phil Jackson, neither of whom fit comfortably into the 
faith of their parents. 
 
    But, she writes, the answer isn't found in "a perpetual seeking for 
something, anything, that doesn't lead us back to where we came from." 
That only results in something she calls "a perpetual adolescence." 
 
    After looking elsewhere, Norris found what she was looking for closer 
to home.  Some were shocked she returned to the church. Others wondered why 
it took so long.  Meanwhile, she is watching, listening, taking notes and 
writing about her pilgrimage. 
 
    "It's been a lively journey," she writes. "And I am the same person who 
departed, so long ago, and not the same at all." 

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