We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.Įveryone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia).

A down-to-earth and accessible introduction to a powerful tradition. Norris is also aware of the tensions in American Benedictine life, e.g., she powerfully presents the cases for and against wearing the traditional habit and outlines some of the impact of feminist thought. We hear how celibacy is about a primary relationship with God and demands a self-awareness and emotional wholeness that often makes monastics invaluable counselors to laypeople. She reports conversations with the monks and visiting sisters on the pressures of community life and the struggle to remain faithful to the prayer in a culture that values independence and putting self first.

She speaks of the monastic lectio divina as a mode of reading that involves the heart and aims at a surrender to whatever word or phrase catches the attention. Norris is struck by the way communal recitation of the Psalms, with their paradoxical, violent emotions, breaks through the conventions of church language and American optimism. We hear how the Benedictines find a meaning in the passing of time through their daily rhythm of prayer and work.

She sets out her experiences in the form of 75 short reflections, which cover the course of the monks' liturgical year and touch on many aspects of their life and her reactions to it. Since then she has spent two nine-month periods studying and teaching at one of the abbey's many academic institutes.

Ten years ago Norris, a Protestant who had not been to church for 20 years, became an oblate, or lay associate, of the large Benedictine community of St. Ruminations on the perennial relevance of Benedictine monastic life from Norris (Dakota: A Spiritual Biography, 1993), who acts as a sympathetic and perceptive outsider.

The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris