The Cloister Walk

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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. 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.

This is only, of course, a brief (ok, not so brief) look at some of the content Norris covers, at least the focuses that were most powerful to me. Gradually she learns much about simplicity, patience, forgiveness, the value of community, and the responsibility of freedom. She suggests that faith is more process than product, more, perhaps, like the act of writing than like the final draft of a document. By the time I finished the book I realized I was reading while listening to the CD of chants prepared at the monastery I most often visit.I think I’ve maybe got some of it in the end though- she talks about how life without metaphor is unbearable to her. Muchelney Abbey was thought to have been first established under a foundation charter from King Cynewulf in 762. There’s an absolutely fascinating chapter on the self-serving, propaganda-filled canonization of St.

The most obvious comparison for this book is Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time to Keep Silence, which I read last year. The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation. This is the question that poet Kathleen Norris asks us as, somewhat to her own surprise, she found herself on two extended residencies at St. Even in the earthly sphere, truth is complex and untidy, impossible to express succinctly, sometimes even self-contradicting. They gossip, crack jokes, fall asleep in church, suffer through depression and doubt like the rest of us….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. It was refounded in the late 10th century by King Athelstan as a Benedictine house dedicated to St Peter and St Paul. Add in the extra elements – the forced chastity, the segregation of community that follows, and the austere garb that denies the human shape, and you have an institution that reeks of the Dark Ages and distances those of us who consider ourselves modern and reasonably woke.