Poetic Pilgrim: Spiritual Journey of Kathleen Norris

Since the 1960s, pilgrims seeking an authentic spiritual path have often looked beyond the Christian faith of their fathers to the esoterica of the New Age, the mysticism of Eastern religions, or the allure of newfangled cults.

“I’m simply a seeker saying I’m grounded here in the Presbyterian tradition, and here’s how things look from here.”

—Kathleen Norris

Author Kathleen Norris recently completed Amazing Grace, the third in her series of spiritual writings which includes Dakota: A Spiritual Geography and The Cloister Walk, a New York Times best seller that recounts her experiences of monastic life in Minnesota, in St. John Abbey, Collegeville, and St. Benedict Monastery, St. Joseph. (CNS photo by D. Towalski, St. Cloud Visitor.)

Kathleen Norris abandoned the Protestant pieties of her childhood for the life of a poet in New York City, a substitution she says “actually worked pretty well.”

But in the early 1980s, a surprising thing began happening to her. A hunger she describes as “a vague desire for more spiritual depth in my life” led her to re-examine Christian traditions, and in the process, she found them “much more various, rich, and nourishing than I had ever imagined.”

In The Cloister Walk, her 1996 best-selling follow-up to her critically acclaimed Dakota, Norris introduced readers to the rhythms and mysteries of monasticism, which she had experienced firsthand during nine months as an oblate (or lay associate) at a Benedictine monastery.

Her recently released Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (Riverhead) offers lively, literary interpretations of concepts like “salvation,” “incarnation,” “repentance,” and “orthodoxy,” as well as dozens of other perplexing Protestant terms she encountered at Spencer Memorial Presbyterian Church in Lemmon, SD.

“When I first ventured back to Sunday worship in my small town, the services felt like a word bombardment, an hour-long barrage of heavy-weight theological terminology,” she writes. “Often, I was so exhausted afterwards that I would need a three-hour nap.”

After periods of resting and wrestling, Norris wrote Amazing Grace, a book that’s neither preachy nor pedantic, but applies a poet’s ear—she is the author of three collections of poetry—and a prodigal’s heart to the tricky task of shedding warm light on musty and often misunderstood words.

“I’m not a representative of any one faction of the Christian church,” said the 50-year-old Norris in Denver, the first stop in a 20-city publicity tour. “I’m simply a seeker saying I’m grounded here in the Presbyterian tradition, and here’s how things look from here. I’m too much of a poet to have an agenda.”

Over the course of 384 pages, Norris explores more than 50 complex concepts like asceticism and apocalypse. A lyrical, literary writer, Norris also cares about accuracy, and she had both a Protestant and a Catholic theologian critique Amazing Grace.

Early drafts were also read by her agnostic husband, her Jewish editor, and a writer-friend whose first reaction to Norris’ conversion was to ask, “What in the world happened to you? Did you have a lobotomy?”

Her ability to communicate to such a broad spectrum of readers is just one of Norris’ gifts, but one allowing her to ride the crest of the current wave of interest in spirituality.

The Cloister Walk, for example, was on The New York Times hardback best-seller list for more than four months, was excerpted in both New Age Journal and the evangelical Christianity Today (which also named it one of the year’s best books), and was the subject of a story on Jesuit-run Vatican radio.

At the same time, Norris is anything but anything-goes, and there are aspects of the contemporary spirituality boom that concern her.

“I think we’re seeing the fruit of a lot of well-meaning people in the ‘60s who said we’re going to raise the kids with no religion. As a result, people are frantically searching for some religious meaning in their lives. And they’re sort of taking whatever shows up, which is a really unwise thing. If you raise people with no religion, they will wind up with some really warped religions.”

She writes about religion’s “shadow side” in Amazing Grace “I might hire someone to channel my personal angels, or purchase an Indian name from a company in California. I might look into my ‘past lives’ and discover that I was, as some now claim to be, an Indian in a former life. The religious marketplace is full of spiritualities that can costume us in fancy dress.” In contrast to such shenanigans, Christianity was “not so crazy, after all, but an ancient thing, and wise.”

Wrestling with one’s religious inheritance is never easy, a truth Norris illustrates by discussing the lives of poet Emily Dickinson and Chicago Bulls coach Phil Jackson, neither of whom fit comfortably into the faith of their fathers.

But, she writes, the answer isn’t found in “a perpetual seeking for something, anything, that doesn’t lead us back to where we came from.” That only results in something she calls “a perpetual adolescence.”

After looking elsewhere, Norris found what she was looking for closer to home. Some were shocked she returned to the church. Others wondered why it took so long. Meanwhile, she is watching, listening, taking notes, and writing about her pilgrimage.

“It’s been a lively journey,” she writes. “And I am the same person who departed, so long ago, and not the same at all.”