Martin Buber was one of the most significant writers, philosophers and religious thinkers of the Twentieth Century. His book I and Thou represented a paradigm shift in how humans view the world of objects and subjects. Relationships depend on the address and response of I and Thou, a dialogue between two subjects. That had great significance for Buber's understanding of prayer, worship and the relationship God establishes with each human being, I and Thou.
The poet Kathleen Norris was a careful reader of Buber, her own spiritual search a commitment to establishing and growing a relationship of dialogue and openness to the mysterious presence of God, who is never object, always subject. In The Cloister Walk, her best known book of spiritual reflections, she quotes words of Buber that are deeply resonant in her own experience of God.
"All of us have access to God, but each has a different access. Our great chance lies precisely in our unlikeness. God's all-inclusiveness manifests itself in the infinite multiplicity of the ways that lead to him, each of which is open to one person."
This is the kind of nugget that frequently glints on Norris's pages, and especially in The Cloister Walk and a similar later volume Amazing Grace. A Vocabulary of Faith.
Norris is a lay oblate of the Benedictine Order, and her spirituality and Christian practice has been formed by the disciplines, liturgies and practices rooted in the Rule of St Benedict. When possible she participates in the rhythms of the liturgical day, but is also a preacher and active member within both Catholic and non Catholic churches. Much of her writing explores the tensions and structures of community, the inner conflicts of the individual, usually with reference to her own inner struggles with faith and doubt, and the challenge of sustaining relationships through the inevitable and at times disruptive changes in human lives.
What I found both unusual and welcome was her shrewd frankness about her own heart, and her sharp observation of others' behaviour and character as evidence of what was going on in their hearts. She tells of the daily rhythms of prayer, Psalm singing or reading, meeting in community and learning to live with others. Doing so, we learn to love and come to like people, and to live into the diversity and frustrations inherent in community building. Such disciplined care is the making of those who would follow the One who gave the New Commandment, "Love one another as I have loved you."
As an example of what it means to love someone through thick and thin, Norris writes with considerable frankness about her marriage, her husband, and the tensions and conflicts that building a sustainable shared future involve. In The Cloister Walk she reflects bravely on the triumphs and struggles of intimacy, commitment, and mutual accompaniment in many of life's most serious challenges to two people determined to be with and for each other
She is very good on depression. Her husband suffered great anguish and with great honesty she writes of how to build a marriage that can sustain the extremes of unbearable joy and unbearable pain. The answer is love, but that too is a great mystery, and lays on us burdens that are also all but unbearable. When she likens her husbands suffering to crucifixion, you know you are reading someone who gets it, and who understands something of the terror of an inner world shut down. In one line she pinpoints the pastoral challenge when helping people confront and live through their suffering: "There's a fine line between idealising or idolising pain, and confronting it with hope." Read that again, slowly.
The Cloister Walk isn't a narrative that reaches a conclusion. It is loosely based on the liturgical year but the cycle is interrupted by essays on saints, reflections on sin, sins and grace, memoirs of incidents, people and life turning points, and much more. There are chunks of lectio divina, prayerful rumination on Bible texts, and out of these come characteristic pointers to how life can be better, obedience more faithful, insight less obscured by our standing in our own light.
Her brief essay on Gregory of Nyssa ends with the poignant confession: "I frequently take consolation in Gregory's sense that with God there is always more unfolding, than what we can glimpse of the divine is always exactly enough, and never enough."
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