Gossip for good?

Like the desert tales that monks have used for centuries as a basis for a theology and a way of life, the tales of small-town gossip are often morally instructive, illustrating the ways ordinary people survive the worst that happens to them; or, conversely, the ways in which self-pity, anger, and despair can overwhelm and destroy them.  Gossip is theology translated into experience.  In it we hear great stories of conversion, like the drunk who turns his or her life around, as well as stories of failure. We can see that pride really does go before a fall, and that hope is essential.  We watch closely those who retire, or who lose a spouse, lest they lose interest in living.  When we gossip we are also praying, not only for them, but for ourselves.

Kathleen Norris

“The Holy Use of Gossip” in Dakota

Some may take issue with Norris' use of the word 'gossip' here, when normally it has more negative connotations.

The world in the Psalms

The relentless realism of the psalms is not depressing in the way that television news can be, although many of the same events are reported: massacres, injustices to those who have no one to defend them, people tried in public by malicious tongues. As a book of praises, meant to be sung, the Psalter contains a hope that "human interest" stories tacked on to the end of a news broadcast cannot provide. The psalms mirror our world but do not allow us to become voyeurs. In a nation unwilling to look at is own violence, they force us to recognize our part in it. They make us reexamine our values.

Kathleen Norris
The Cloister Walk

Holy versus human

You do not have to be holy to love God. You have only to be human. Nor do you have to be holy to see God in all things. You have only to play as a child with an unselfish heart.

Matthew Kelty
qtd. in Dakota [by Kathleen Norris]

See also this blog post written on the occasion of Kelty's death at 95. It includes one of Kelty's homilies.

Incarnation

For me, the Incarnation is the place, if you will, where hope contends with fear. Not an antique doctrine at all, but reality - as ordinary as my everyday struggles with fears great and small, as exalted as the hope that allows me some measure of peace when I soldier on in the daily round.

Kathleen Norris
Amazing Grace

Keeping Jesus 'alive'

When emphasis is placed on the divine at the expense of the human (the conservative errror), Jesus becomes an ethereal authority figure who is remote from earthly life and experience. When he is thought of as merely human (the liberal error), he becomes nothing more than a superior social worker or a popular guru.

Gregory Wolfe, The New Religious Humanists, quoted in Kathleen Norris' Amazing Grace (pg 174).

Norris adds: The orthodox Christian seeks another way, that of living with paradox, of accepting the ways that seeming duatlities work together in Jesus Christ, and in our own lives.

And in the next paragraph: When I confessed this [her Christianity missing its centre] to a monk, he reassured me by saying, 'Oh, most of us feel that way at one time or another. Jesus is the hardest part of the religion to grasp, to keep alive.'

Doubt and Belief

While reading Kathleen Norris' Amazing Grace, particularly the chapter, Belief, Doubt and Sacred Ambiguity, it occurred to me that for both Christians and atheists it isn't the believing we have trouble with, but the doubts - or, you could say, it isn't the doubts we have trouble with, but the believing. And I'm not sure which is the truer.

Who is my neighbour?

It seems clear, from reading the daily news if nothing else, that there will always be some in this world who want their holy wars, who will discriminate, vilify, and even kill in the name of God. They have narrowed down the concept of neighbor to include only those like themselves, in terms of creed, caste, race, sex, or sexual orientation. But there is also much evidence that there are many who know that a neighbor might be anyone at all, and are willing to act on that assumption.

Kathleen Norris
Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith

Kathleen Norris

In a religion centered on what is in Christian convention termed a "living Word," even our ridiculously fallible language becomes a lesson in how God's grace works despite and even through our human frailty. We will never get the words exactly right. There will always be room for imperfection, for struggle, growth, and change. And this is as it should be.

Kathleen Norris
Amazing Grace

See a review of Norris' more recent book, Acedia and Me, here.