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Pain--is missed--in Praise.

-Emily Dickinson

In her 1993 book, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, poet Kathleen Norris documented how the Plains shaped and challenged her soul. She told how a frenzied New York life gave way to an austere North Dakota sojourn, how her agnostic mind gave way to a rekindling of the faith of her grandmothers. This led her in surprising directions. She became a lay preacher in her Presbyterian church and began hanging out at the local Benedictine monastery.

Now, in her follow-up book, The Cloister Walk (Riverhead Books), from which this article comes, Norris explores more deeply her rediscovery of the Christian faith. During two nine-month visits to a Benedictine community in Minnesota, she enters into the premodern monastic world with its ancient rituals, rhythms, and ways of seeing. Her role becomes that of a translator, interpreting what she discovers for modern sensibilities. In this chapter, she focuses on the seemingly familiar psalms, finding them transformed when experienced in the context they were created for: public worship.

Church meant two things to me when I was little: dressing up and singing. I sang in choirs from the time I was four years old and for a long time believed that singing was the purpose of religion, an illusion that was rudely swept away by the rigors of catechesis. Church was also a formal affair, a matter of wearing "Sunday best" and sitting up straight. Like the girl in Anne Sexton's "Protestant Easter, 8 years old" I knew that "when he was a little boy / Jesus was good all the time," and I made a confused attempt to connect his story with what I saw around me on Sunday morning: "They pounded nails into his hands. / After that, well, after that / everyone wore hats . . . / The important thing for me / is that I'm wearing white gloves."

I have lately realized that what went wrong for me in my Christian upbringing is centered in the belief that one had to be dressed up, both outwardly and inwardly, to meet God, the insidious notion that I need be a firm and even cheerful believer before I dare show my face in "his" church. Such a God was of little use to me in adolescence, and like many women of my generation, I simply stopped going to church when I could no longer be "good," which for girls especially meant not breaking rules, not giving voice to anger or resentment, and not complaining.

Not surprisingly, given their disruptive tone, their bold and incessant questioning of God ("How long, O Lord, will you hide yourself forever?" [Ps. 89:46]), the psalms were largely excluded from Sunday worship when I was a girl, except for a handful of the more joyful ones selected as suitable for responsorial reading. The wild and often contradictory poetry of the psalms is still mostly censored out of Christian worship in America, though Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and other mainstream Protestants hear snippets every Sunday. In worship services that lack a liturgical structure one hears less of the exacting music of poetry than lax, discursive prose that provides the illusion of control over what happens in church, and in the human heart. And the Pentecostal churches that allow for more emotional response in their worship try to exercise control by sentimentalizing emotions. Their "psalms" are likely to be pop tunes about Jesus.

Not having been to church for some 20 years following high school, I rediscovered the psalms by accident, through my unexpected attraction to Benedictine liturgy, of which the psalms are the mainstay. A Benedictine community recites or sings psalms at morning, noon, and evening prayer, going through the entire Psalter every three or four weeks. As I began to immerse myself in monastic liturgy, I found that I was also immersed in poetry and was grateful to find that the poetic nature of the psalms, their constant movement between the mundane and the exalted, means, as British Benedictine Sebastian Moore has said, that "God behaves in the psalms in ways he is not allowed to behave in systematic theology," and also that the images of the psalms, "rough-hewn from earthy experience, [are] absolutely different from formal prayer."

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July 15 1996, Vol. 40, No. 8