Preface
Dawn
September 3: Gregory the Great
St. John's Abbey Liturgy Schedule
The Rule and Me
September 17: Hildegard of Bingen
September 29: Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Archangels
The Difference
September 30: Jerome
October 1: Thérèse of the Child Jesus
October 2: Guardian Angels
Jeremiah as Writer: The Necessary Other
November 1 and 2: All Saints, All Souls
November 16: Gertrude the Great
Exile, Homeland, and Negative Capability
New York City: The Trappist Connection
Los Angeles: The O Antiphons
Borderline
The Christmas Music
January 2: Basil the Great and Gregory of Nazianzus
Passage
The Paradox of the Psalms
Baptism of the Lord: A Tale of Intimacy
January 10: Gregory of Nyssa
February 2: Candlemas/Presentation of the Lord
Celibate Passion
February 10: Scholastica
Good Old Sin
Acedia
Pride
Anger
Noon
Degenerates
New Melleray Abbey Liturgy Schedule
Chicago: Religion in America
The War on Metaphor
March 18: Mechtild of Magdeburg
April 2: Mary of Egypt
Saved by a Rockette: Easters I Have Known
Triduum: The Three Days
Triduum Notes
Cinderella in Kalamazoo
The Virgin Martyrs: Between "Point Vierge" and the "Usual Spring"
Minneapolis: Cocktails with Simon Tugwell
May 15: Emily Dickinson
Maria Goretti: Cipher or Saint?
Evening
Genesis
Road Trip
Places and Displacement: Rattlesnakes in Cyberspace
Learning to Love: Benedictine Women on Celibacy and Relationship
The Cloister Walk
The Garden
The Church and the Sermon
June 9: Ephrem the Syrian
Small Town Sunday Morning
At Last, Her Laundry's Done
Dreaming of Trees
Monks and Women
July 11: Benedict's Cave
A Glorious Robe
Women and the Habit: A Not-so-glorious Dilemma
The Gregorian Brain
Oz
Generations
Monastic Park
August 28: Augustine
The Lands of Sunrise and Sunset
The Nursing Home on Sunday Afternoon
One Man's Life
"It's a Sweet Life"
Coming and Going: Monastic Rituals
"The Rest of the Community"
"The Only City in America"
Night
Acknowledgments
Kathleen Norris is the award-winning, bestselling author of Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith; The Cloister Walk; and Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, in various anthologies, and in her own three volumes of poetry. She divides her time between South Dakota and Hawaii.
"In The Cloister Walk, persisting in [Norris's] wonderfully
idiosyncratic ways, she gives us the result of an 'immersion into a
liturgical world'... She is one of hisotyr's writing pilgrims but
also a contemporary American one, boldly willing to forsake any
number of cultural fads, trends, and preoccupations in favor of
this 'walk,' this searching expedition within herself." --The New
York Times Book Review
"Norris continues to write plainspoken meditations that expand the
purview of non-fiction... She writes about religion with the
imagination of a poet... In reading Norris, one comse to feel like
a spiritual collaborate and, when one's spirit fails, like a
spiritual rebel." --Chicago Tribune
"With her lucid, luminous prose, hardheaded logic, and far-reaching
metaphors, Norris has brought us the cloister at its most alive."
--San Francisco Chronicle
"The Cloister Walk is a new opportunity to discover a remarkable
writer with a huge, wise heart... you want to share this great
discovery, giving her work as a gift-- or you simply shove a copy
in the face of a friend, saying, 'Read this.'" --Minneapolis
Star-Tribune
"Norris presents ample proof that holy people don't have to be
starchy... If you learn anything from The Cloister Walk, it's that
monks are people too. They gossip, crack jokes, fall asleep in
church, suffer through depression and doubt like the rest of us....
Perhaps there's hope for spiritual life outside the cloister after
all." --Newsday
The allure of the monastic life baffles most lay people, but in her second book Norris (Dakota) goes far in explaining it. 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. Here, she compresses these years of experience into the diary of one liturgical year, offering observations on subjects ranging from celibacy to dealing with emotions to Christmas music. Like the liturgy she loves, this meandering, often repetitive book is perhaps best approached through the lectio divina practiced by the Benedictines, in which one tries to "surrender to whatever word or phrase captures the attention." There is a certain nervous facility to some of Norris's jabs at academics, and she is sometimes sanctimonious. But there is no doubting her conviction, exemplified in her defense of the much-maligned Catholic "virgin martyrs," whose relevance and heroism she wants to redeem for feminists. What emerges, finally, is an affecting portrait‘one of the most vibrant since Merton's‘of the misunderstood, often invisible world of monastics, as seen by a restless, generous intelligence. (Apr.)
"In The Cloister Walk, persisting in [Norris's] wonderfully
idiosyncratic ways, she gives us the result of an 'immersion into a
liturgical world'... She is one of hisotyr's writing pilgrims but
also a contemporary American one, boldly willing to forsake any
number of cultural fads, trends, and preoccupations in favor of
this 'walk,' this searching expedition within herself." --The
New York Times Book Review
"Norris continues to write plainspoken meditations that expand the
purview of non-fiction... She writes about religion with the
imagination of a poet... In reading Norris, one comse to feel like
a spiritual collaborate and, when one's spirit fails, like a
spiritual rebel." --Chicago Tribune
"With her lucid, luminous prose, hardheaded logic, and far-reaching
metaphors, Norris has brought us the cloister at its most alive."
--San Francisco Chronicle
"The Cloister Walk is a new opportunity to discover a
remarkable writer with a huge, wise heart... you want to share this
great discovery, giving her work as a gift-- or you simply shove a
copy in the face of a friend, saying, 'Read this.'"
--Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"Norris presents ample proof that holy people don't have to be
starchy... If you learn anything from The Cloister Walk, it's that
monks are people too. They gossip, crack jokes, fall asleep in
church, suffer through depression and doubt like the rest of us....
Perhaps there's hope for spiritual life outside the cloister after
all." --Newsday
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