During my read everything about Benedictine spirituality phase, I came across the poet and spiritual writer Kathleen Norris. Strangely I have never got round to looking for and reading all that much of her poetry, though some of her prose writing tips over into the use of poetic language if not structure. But what intrigued and held my interest was her honesty and curiosity about what it is like to pray, to live life in a Godward direction, to seek with the hope of finding and to knock with 'I'm not going away' persistence.
The first non fiction book she wrote was Dakota. It was reviewed in Commonweal with enthusiasm, “a poet’s book; a work of beauty; a testament to the work of the Spirit.” The original printing of 8,000 proved to be an underestimate - it sold over 100,000 in hardback, and since has gone on selling. The sub title A Spiritual Geography, opens up a book about open spaces and extended silences, a lovingly critical mapping of landscape that sees beneath the visible and senses the depths of life around her. But please note; Norris not only sees beneath the visible, she also sees, pays attention to, and contemplates the meaning of what is visible, tangible and thus made sacramental by the invisible currents of grace.
She had moved from the cornucopia of New York, to the isolated prairie town of Lemmon, population around 1700. She writes about the desert and the flash floods, the semi-permanent blue blue sky, the foibles and habits of the people, their courage and indomitable rootedness in where they were, and the weather - cyclones and drought, baking temperatures and desert frost, rocks and withered plains, vast cloud formations before rain and hot breezes that dehydrate in minutes.
And in all of this the contemplative voice of poet observing the given external landscape, and the given inner landscape of her mind and heart, he thoughts and feelings, her spiritual responsiveness to what is, and what might be. Think of this book as a travel book; except there are two journeys. The one takes you over the topography and demography of Dakota, its land and people; the other takes you on a journey inwards, reflective, alert and an education of the spirit.
Thinking about the grasslands and the long formation of compost, she considers what's happening to her inner landscape, climate and growth:
"It astonishes me as much as it delights me that moving to the Dakota grasslands led me to a religious frontier where the new growth where the new growth is fed by something old, the 1,500 year tradition of Benedictine monasticism. It grounds me; I use it as compost to 'work the earth of my heart'...I can long for change for a 'new earth...a good heart, a heart like the earth, which drinks up the rain that falls on it and yields a rich harvest.'"
My first reading of this book was 25 years ago. Slipped inside the back cover is the sheet of paper on which I wrote a subject index of pages where Norris hit nails on the head and drove important insights into my head. The list now reads as intriguing clues to what interested me then. Such notes as, tensions in life inevitable but good; dryness and impoverished spirit; the sacrament of work; laughter as benediction; poetry and faith; not blaming yourself is pride.
Now that last one; that not blaming ourselves is a form of pride, our loud disclaimer as if we never would or could have done whatever. The old Scottish cry of the self-exculpating child, "It wisnae me!" Norris is on to something here. Honest admission of responsibility, or at least refusing the instinct to self-excuse takes the kind of humility that only comes with maturity, and a growing self-awareness, and acceptance of our own fallibility. Such open acknowledgement of fault runs counter to so much self justifying and self-excusing that has become part of political, social and cultural life. To that extent it is a regression to childish evasion of the reality of who we really are.
In a sermon, one Sunday, Norris quoted the wonderfully named Dorotheus of Gaza, "The root of all disturbance, if one will go to its source, is that no one will blame himself." Norris goes on, "When I read those words at Hope Church, one old farmer forgot himself; he nodded and shouted out, 'That's right.'
Dakota is an unusual book, and unusually rich in sharp and humane observation, leaving the impression of a writer who has patience with human behaviour and oddities, such that her willingness to take time to understand rather than criticise, easily tumbles over into compassion for people, all people.
That is the essence of hospitality. Here's how she puts it:
"The classic sign of our acceptance of God's mystery is welcoming and making room for the stranger, the other, the surprising, the unlooked for and unwanted. It means learning to read the world better, that we may better know our place in it."
Who wouldn't want to pin that one down, and come back to it 25 years later, and find it truer than ever?
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