Eruptions of Grace

The Cloiser Walk by Kathleen Norris
Riverhead Books, New York, 1996.

This was a selection (my genre of choice: memoirs) for our CPC reading group for February discussion. It was recommended in Gladys Hunt's Honey for a Woman's Heart and by Dr. Calhoun, in my Ancient and Medieval Church History class at Covenant Seminary. I've owned the book for over a year, but hadn't gotten to read it yet. It is Presbyterian Mrs. Norris' memoir of her two nine-month stays at a Benedictine monastery. I love memoirs more than any other genre. Maybe it's because they are easier to understand - no figuring out symbolism or meaning...just reading someone else's story. I always benefit from hearing from others. I know I have a ways to grow in my fiction reading, and I want to, but I always look forward to reading these real life stories.

I have lots of notes for this book. I will have to lead our discussion in a few weeks, so hopefully this will help me organize my thoughts. I asked the book club to jot down things that resonated with them, but also things that caused them to raise an eyebrow.

Here are some of mine:

(nod) The monastic perspective welcomes time as a gift from God, and seeks to put it to good use rather than allowing us to be used up by it. (xix)

(eyebrow) Doctrine and dogma are effectively submerged; present, but not the point. When I quote from scripture in this book, I am not trying to convince the reader that I have some hold on the truth. I am telling the story of the Liturgy of the Hours as I have experienced it, as "an open door, which no one is able to shut" (Rev 3:8). (xxi)
Her purpose - fair enough.

In just a few days I'd be back with my husband, to take up life in the ruins. (p. 3)

(nod) And when the "thorns of contention" arise in daily life, daily forgive, and be willing to accept forgiveness. Remember that you are not the center of the universe but, to use Benedict's words, "keep death daily before your eyes." (p. 8)

Can I say this? Regarding St. Therese: She herself had become impoverished by the loss of a sense of God's presence that had been with her all her life. She saw this as grace, that God should permit her to be overwhelmed by impenetrable darkness. Again, she adresses God: "Lord, your child has understood your divine light: she asks pardon for her brothers, and consents to eat for a long as you wish it the bread of sorrow, and she will not rise from this table, which is filled with bitterness, where poor sinners eat, until the day you have appointed"....Therese concludes boldly, "I told [the Lord] that I am happy not to enjoy heaven here on earth in order that he may open heaven for ever to poor unbelievers." (p. 28)

(vigorous nod/some eyebrow too) I began to despise mathematics when I sensed that I was getting only part of the story, a dull, literal-minded version of what in fact was a great mystery, and I wonder if children don't begin to reject both poetry and religion for similar reasons, because the way both are taught takes the life out of them. If we teach children when they're young to reject their epiphanies, then it's no wonder that we end up with so many adults who are mathematically, poetically, and theologically illiterate. (p. 60)

(nod) If faith, like poetry, is a process, not a product, then this class will be messier than we imagine. (p. 62)

(eyebrow?) "When it comes to faith, while there are guidelines...there is no one right way to do it...." She quotes Martin Buber: "All of us have access to God, but each has a different access" Does this mean different gods, or simply different stories? I think it's the latter....we each have a different, but significant story. We don't need someone else's story.

(eyebrow) Quoting Bishop John V. Taylor: "Imagination and faith are the same thing, giving substance to our hopes and reality to the unseen.

(nod) The Psalms defeat our tendency to try to be holy without being human first. ( p. 96) (Allender/Longman's The Cry of the Soul)

worship in community: One soon finds that a strength of the monastic choir is that it always contains someone ready to lament over a lifetime of days of "emptiness and pain" or to shout with a joy loud enough to make "the rivers clap their hands" (p. 101)

I frequently take consolation in Gregory's sense that with God there is always more unfolding, that what we can glimpse of the divine is always exactly enough, and never enough. (p. 113)

"Listen" is the first word of St. Benedict's Rule for monasteries, and listening for the eruptions of grace into one's life - often from unlikely sources - is a "quality of attention" that both monastic living and the practice of writing tend to cultivate. (p. 143)