A pause for reflection

THE CLOISTER WALK by Kathleen Norris

Lion Publishing, 16.99, pp. 400

A refreshingly new look at contemporary monastic life is given us by Kathleen Norris in The Cloister Walk; Norris, a married American woman poet and a Protestant, became a Benedictine oblate and spent long periods of time in St John's Abbey in Minnesota, leading the life set out in the Rule of St Benedict. Part of the Rule of St Benedict, one of the seminal books in Western history and one which she learnt to value greatly, is its insistence that in each day there should be time for prayer, work, study and play, a direction that many of us could probably well benefit from in the rather circumscribed lives we tend to lead today.

Norris was told by a monk that while Benedict respected the individual he recognised that the purpose of individual growth is to share with others.

Living communally means that on a daily basis communal necessity has to be put before individual preference, a marked difference from life in our consumer culture, which grants our every selfish whim instantly and in which autonomy and abundance of choice are taken for granted. One of the major attractions of Benedictine life is the hospitality which underlies the whole way of being: Benedictines `receive all as Christ' and she found that being their guest gave her a remarkable freedom to be herself. The importance of the ritual of monastic life is twofold, both a powerful way of building a community together and a way of binding an individual to the community.

Norris's own life commitment was to marriage and her marriage weaves in and out of The Cloister Walk, a book written from the loose diary that she kept during her stays in the monastery. She starts with the dawn and works her way through the monastic day and the liturgical year, with meditations on monastic life, saints and the seasons. These chapters, some very short, pinpoint the precise difficulties encountered in daily life, and life in a monastery does have many of the same problems as a secular life. The monastic value of not judging others can be extremely painful when you are living hugger-mugger in the community with someone you don't like; everyone is part of the same family and somehow you have to learn to live with them. Norris encountered some of these problems herself with her fellow inmates, mostly scholars, during one of her residences, as she felt they disliked her for what they considered to be her slow thinking. She sensed this was a fundamental difference between scholars, who speak with authority in order to convince, and poets, who speak with no authority but suggest, evoke and explore. She felt saved by the liturgy, which inspired her not only to write many poems but also pulled her back to her faith.

There is an excellent and instructive chapter on celibacy and relationship in which she goes against current thinking by saying that she believes celibate men and women often make remarkably good counsellors in both sexual matters and affairs of the heart. She states that celibacy is not an excuse for unhappiness and not a vow to repress feelings, but rather a way of bringing everything into consciousness through prayer; the constraints of celibacy have somehow been transformed into an openness that attracts people of all ages and all social classes, and celibates put an extremely high value on friendship.

Norris's personal search for her path through life challenges any preconception that there is an easy way; she takes us through her dark moments in which she was helped by the liturgy and she comes to an understanding of Christ's message, which is not that `Suffering will make you strong' but that `This will cost you'. She also discovers from Psalm 32 that there is more misery in keeping something hidden: `When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long.'

For many years she had thought that she had to choose between literature and religion, but after staying with the Benedictines she experienced a healing and a joining together of the threads of her life. Her writing gives us a chance to reflect on the way we should be living life and on its purpose.

Copyright Spectator May 8, 1999
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