The Cloister Walk

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In 1974, her grandmother died leaving Norris the family farm in South Dakota, and she and her future husband, the poet David Dwyer, decided to temporarily relocate there until arrangements to rent or sell the property could be made. and yokes them to psychological and spiritual realities in such a way that we’re often left gasping. The readings appropriately follow the wheel of the year, and the saint’s days and feast days that mark its change. The author, raised Protestant, has been a Benedictine oblate, or lay associate, for 10 years, and has lived at a Benedictine monastery in Minnesota for two. Collected from a diverse range of sources, including Parabola and The New Yorker, these essays offer some insight and grace, but the organizing principle of community is a bit diffuse.

We hope it will prove to be a valuable accompaniment to Kathleen Norris’s unique work — “a gift of insight… one of those rare books too rich to race through” ( The Kansas City Star). will work to the good of all people despite all our groaning, quibbling, and squabbling over terminology. I started this book at the same time I started to read a psalm every day and the accompanying commentary on the Enduring Word commentary site. She found herself deeply moved and spiritually enriched by the daily Liturgy of the Hours, the oral recitation of Scripture, and the spiritual practice of hospitality within this community. Norris shares her life with us in glancing ways***, but never makes herself the point the way that Fermor does.Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages. Norris comes from a protestant background, and yet finds herself compelled by this life of chastity and worship, cloisters and habits, and its quiet gentleness and yet worldly acceptance of things as they are. How would you answer the author’s question: “ Are monks wasting their time in seeking to convert themselves, and the world, from evil? Norris employs the phrase “negative capability” to describe the mindset that allows for writing poetry. She bequeathed a group of paintings to the Victoria Art Gallery because she loved Bath – not just for the city’s beauty, but also because she gained relief from arthritis through thermal treatment there.

If you like poetic imagery written in prose and are interested in this theme, you will like this book.Reason for finally picking up: New Year’s book resolution to recommit myself to challenges, and to ignore the voice that says that my mind isn’t good enough to read certain books right now. An award-winning poet, Kathleen Norris brings her appreciation for language and metaphor to the reading of Bible, especially the psalms, and shares the way she slowly, sometimes painfully, “let words work the earth of her heart.

The quality of negative capability, Norris says, well-honed by her work as a poet, has also proved invaluable for her growth in religious faith. Each chapter is structured around a reading, a line, or a life of a saint she encounters while attending worship with the monks.Add in the extra elements – the forced chastity, the segregation of community that follows, and the austere garb that denies the human shape, and you have an institution that reeks of the Dark Ages and distances those of us who consider ourselves modern and reasonably woke. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, in various anthologies, and in her own three volumes of poetry. And it is our sense of negative capability, Norris might add, that allows us to sit with these difficult human truths—that each person is both kind and cruel, both beautiful and ugly, that the created world is a place both extraordinarily precious and ferociously brutal—without insisting that we choose a side.