The Cloister Walk

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Chicago Tribune "With her lucid, luminous prose, hardheaded logic, and far-reaching metaphors, Norris has brought us the cloister at its most alive. In The Cloister Walk, persisting in [Norris's] wonderfully idiosyncratic ways, she gives us the result of an 'immersion into a liturgical world'. Kathleen Norris well understands our temptation to smooth over the thornier elements of Christian faith, to frame them in terms we can easily affirm, terms that play nicely with our post-Enlightenment understanding of reality. Kathleen Norris is the award-winning, bestselling author of Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith; The Cloister Walk; and Dakota: A Spiritual Geography.

Monastic “church” reflects a whole-body religion, still in touch with its orality, its music… I find it a blessing that monks still respect the slow way that words work on the human psyche. Beyond moral precepts and Bible stories, The Cloister Walk is a very personal account of religion lived fully. It made me yearn to be able to do as she does and spend long periods of time within the monastery, sharing in the daily round of work and prayer. Part record of her time among the Benedictines, part meditation on various aspects of monastic life, The Cloister Walk demonstrates, from the rare perspective of someone who is both an insider and outsider, how immersion in the cloistered world– its liturgy, its ritual, its sense of community– can impart meaning to everyday events and deepen our secular lives. The path to faith she points us toward is neither straight nor narrow—rather, it wends through the wilderness of metaphoric imagination.

Part record of her time among the Benedictines, part meditation on various aspects of monastic life, The Cloister Walk demonstrates, from the rare persp It’s just a poet’s way of saying what most of us feel the need to say: that there’s more than this, that there must be more than this.

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. John’s in Collegeville, Minnesota, her general spiritual journey from apathy to restrained devotion, and the impacts this journey has on her perception of the world and the church, including its stranger saints.Even in the earthly sphere, truth is complex and untidy, impossible to express succinctly, sometimes even self-contradicting. From letters signed by Disney himself to classic children’s books or ephemera, be sure to check out some of the collectible Walt Disney books on Biblio! These cloistered people are still just that: very real and very human people who approach life and all its complexities and needs with a startling honesty. Not that metaphor isn’t there, just that often times people like to say the entire thing is some sort of allegory, or at least the bits they don’t want to personally do are a metaphor for some soft-soap like adage of “ah, just love your fellow man. I now know far too much about her father's jazz band, the death of her childhood dog, her difficulties with her sister, her bad mescalin trip, her meeting with a 'rockette' (whatever that is) and above all, her poetry writing.

A New York Times bestseller for 23 weeksA New York Times Notable Book of the Year"A strange and beautiful book. On the other hand, poets speak with no authority but that which the reader is willing to grant them. The most obvious comparison for this book is Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time to Keep Silence, which I read last year. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, in various anthologies, and in her own three volumes of poetry.There’s a reason Margaret Atwood is popular again, and nobody’s brushing what she has to say under the rug anymore. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Poetry lovers, English-literature students, marriage counsellors, monks, hairstylists, unemployed people, teachers, Catholics, Protestants, agnostics, Buddhists. She suggests that faith is more process than product, more, perhaps, like the act of writing than like the final draft of a document.