Augustine and the Rockettes

“The Cloister Walk”

By Kathleen Norris

Riverhead Books

384 pp.; $23.95

Three years ago, Kathleen Norris was surprised by the success of “Dakota: A Spiritual Geography,” her meditative appraisal of how living on the sparsely populated, meagerly vegetated upper Great Plains affects one’s soul. This time she is prepared for the acclaim that her new book, “The Cloister Walk,” will surely receive. Her two nine-month residencies as a Benedictine oblate at Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, where days are ordered by the Liturgy of the Hours, both helped her absorb her new fame and provided material for the current book.

The liturgical year encircles “The Cloister Walk’s” 75 chapters, holding within its sphere what might at first appear disparate elements–everything from memories of family Christmases in Honolulu to interesting tidbits about the fourth-century hymnist and theologian Ephrem of Syria. Without this encompassing structure, the book could seem little more than a collection of occasional pieces. Saints’ feast days at the monastery alternate with book-tour cocktail parties. Commentary on the Psalms is interspersed with homage to Emily Dickinson. Some chapters are personal, revealing details of Norris’s childhood and her marriage to poet David Dwyer; others are scholarly accounts of the Desert Fathers. Even the pieces’ length varies greatly, some taking no more than a page and a half, while others are ten-page essays.

But one should read this book neither for confessional titillation nor for esoteric information about early Christianity–though a useful reading list could be combed from these pages. The value of “The Cloister Walk” lies in the way it maps a modern consciousness confronting almost 1,500 years of religious tradition. Saint Benedict, in the sixth century, drew up a monastic Rule for his monks, most of them laymen, at Monte Cassino. The main purpose of the community remains corporate prayer, called the Liturgy of the Hours, for which the members gather a minimum of four times a day. Benedict’s Rule–which, Norris observes, was developed in times “as violent and troubled as our own”–provides both stability and flexibility, a combination that she, as a modern, vocationally motivated woman, found just as beneficial as did those men and women uprooted by the collapse of the Roman Empire.

In Norris’s first book, a vast geographical and psychological distance separated New York, where she had gone as an aspiring young poet, from the ancestral home she returned to in Lemmon, South Dakota. In “The Cloister Walk,” an even greater distance separates the worlds of Saint Augustine and the Radio City Rockettes. Yet the light Norris manages to shine on each world reflects in an illuminating way on the other. She compares, for example, the sexual exploitation of Marilyn Monroe to that of the Virgin Martyrs. By paralleling scenes from her marriage with stories from the monastery, she shows how both institutions need Benedict’s virtue of hospitality. Aware that her secular audience is well trained in suspicion, Norris is careful to acclimate Christianity’s cultured–or simply ignorant–despisers to the rarefied air of monastic practice. In an entry for September 30, the feast of Saint Jerome, she mitigates Jerome’s reputation for misogyny by pointing out that the great translator was “an equal-opportunity curmudgeon. He despised both men and women, but women fascinated him more.”

As Norris gains the reader’s confidence, she offers increasingly pointed critiques of the world we inhabit today. If you believe “in the power of words to change things,” she says, “you’re better off with poets these days than with Christians.” Fundamentalists flagrantly enlist metaphor (“the blood of the Lamb,” “the throne of grace”) to encapsulate truth while insisting on literalism as a tenet of faith, and liberal theologians and denominational hirelings, fearing metaphor’s power, degrade religious language with vague abstractions. She calls our culture’s “idol of the autonomous individual” a fraud; “the truth is we expect everyone to be the same, and dismiss as elitist those who are working through a call to any genuine vocation.”

Norris’s most powerful cultural critique, however, comes in several chapters that probe the wounds of contemporary sexuality. Rape as martyrdom, both of third-century virgins in Rome and of an 11-year-old girl in twentieth-century El Salvador, prompts a reconsideration of why virginity has value–not a topic often covered today. And her study of celibacy and its meaning comes like news from another planet to a culture drugged by eroticism.

The spirit of such criticism remains, in the Benedictine style, “hospitable.” The flavor of the book is neither sour nor bland but, like the loaf on a refectory table, substantial and satisfying. Norris does not spend much time rhapsodizing about “community,” a word much in fashion of late, yet a cumulative sense of its meaning grows as we follow her days spent chanting psalms in choir, baking with an aged and exacting nun, telling jokes with monks in the monastery cemetery. Closing the pages on “The Cloister Walk,” one looks back wistfully, longing for the comfort and wisdom found in such a “school of love.”

July/August 1996, Vol. 2, No. 4, Page 21

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