Kathleen Norris and Mother Teresa

I had not heard of Kathleen Norris. She seems very interesting in making the leap from New York to Lemmon, South Dakota, and then writing about the experience. Her writing seems a little similar to Anne Lammot's where we get to see her emotions and feelings front and center. I think this kind of writing is important for women to reclaim their space.

Mother Teresa's life was also experiential, she saw extreme poverty in Calcutta and that motivated her to see grace by serving, helping the dying and creating the Missionaries of Charity.

I liked this analysis by Kathleen Norris.

We would do well to recall Graham Greene's insight that people can pray most anywhere--a concentration camp, a prison, the smoldering ruins of a bombed-out building. It's only the comfortable middle class, he said, that demands to pray in suitable surroundings. More important, we could take to heart the admonition of Jesus that it's not technique that heals us, but faith. He calls us not to be proficient, but to be faithful. And faith does not traffic with success, or failure. It does know comedy, however. My most "spiritual" activity, over the past year, was cleaning commodes and urinals for my husband; giving him baths and helping him change his clothes. I may not have been good at praying my beloved psalms, but the prayer of the commode--that, I could handle.

And this anecdote by Mother Teresa on sharing. It's easy to share when you have a lot, but to share when you have nothing that is true grace. My grandfather taught my mother that you give with one hand and you will receive a lot more with the other hand. As a child I always had this image of giving with my right and receiving something really nice with my left.

I had the most extraordinary experience of love of neighbor with a Hindu family. A gentleman came to our house and said: "Mother Teresa, there is a family who have not eaten for so long. Do something." So I took some rice and went there immediately. And I saw the children - their eyes shining with hunger. I don't know if you have ever seen hunger. But I have seen it very often. And the mother of the family took the rice I gave her and went out. When she came back, I asked her: "Where did you go? What did you do?" And she gave me a very simple answer: "They are hungry also." What struck me was that she knew - and who are they? A Muslim family - and she knew. I didn't bring any more rice that evening because I wanted them, Hindus and Muslims, to enjoy the joy of sharing.
I do think people's position in a particular time period of history influences them. For instance I don't think a Kathleen Norris or Anne Lammot would be understood in 15th century India, as Mirabai's devotion to her Lord Krishna was.

Mother Theresa Confronts America
A Short Excerpt of Mother Theresa's address at
the United Nations' "International Conference on Population and Development," held in Cairo, September 5 -13, 1994
Those who are materially poor can be very wonderful people. One evening we went out and we picked up four people from the street. And one of them was in a most terrible condition. I told the Sisters: "You take care of the other three; I will take care of the one who looks worse." So I did for her all that my love can do. I put her in bed, and there was such a beautiful smile on her face. She took hold of my hand, as she said one word only: "thank you" - and she died.

I could not help but examine my conscience before her. And I asked: "What would I say if I were in her place?" And my answer was very simple. I would have tried to draw a little attention to myself. I would have said: "I am hungry, I am dying, I am cold, I am in pain," or something. But she gave me much more - she gave me her grateful love. And she died with a smile on her face. Then there was the man we picked up from the drain, half eaten by worms and, after we had brought him to the home, he only said, "I have lived like an animal in the street, but I am going to die as an angel, loved and cared for." Then, after we had removed all the worms from his body, all he said, with a big smile, was: "Sister, I am going home to God" - and he died. It was so wonderful to see the greatness of that man who could speak like that without blaming anybody, without comparing anything. Like an angel - this is the greatness of people who are spiritually rich even when they are materially poor.

We are not social workers. We may be doing social work in the eyes of some people, but we must be contemplatives in the heart of the world. For we must bring that presence of God into your family, for the family that prays together, stays together. There is so much hatred, so much misery, and we with our prayer, with our sacrifice, are beginning at home. Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do, but how much love we put into what we do.

If we are contemplatives in the heart of the world with all its problems, these problems can never discourage us. We must always remember what God tells us in Scripture: "Even if a mother could forget the child in her womb" - something impossible, but even if she could forget - "I will never forget you."

And so here I am talking with you. I want you to find the poor here, right in your own home first. And begin love there. Be that good news to your own people first. And find out about your next-door neighbors. Do you know who they are?

I had the most extraordinary experience of love of neighbor with a Hindu family. A gentleman came to our house and said: "Mother Teresa, there is a family who have not eaten for so long. Do something." So I took some rice and went there immediately. And I saw the children - their eyes shining with hunger. I don't know if you have ever seen hunger. But I have seen it very often. And the mother of the family took the rice I gave her and went out. When she came back, I asked her: "Where did you go? What did you do?" And she gave me a very simple answer: "They are hungry also." What struck me was that she knew - and who are they? A Muslim family - and she knew. I didn't bring any more rice that evening because I wanted them, Hindus and Muslims, to enjoy the joy of sharing.

But there were those children, radiating joy, sharing the joy and peace with their mother because she had the love to give until it hurts. And you see this is where love begins - at home in the family.

So, as the example of this family shows, God will never forget us and there is something you and I can always do. We can keep the joy of loving Jesus in our hearts, and share that joy with all we come in contact with. Let us make that one point - that no child will be unwanted, unloved, uncared for, or killed and thrown away. And give until it hurts - with a smile.

Because I talk so much of giving with a smile, once a professor from the United States asked me: "Are you married?" And I said: "Yes, and I find it sometimes very difficult to smile at my spouse, Jesus, because He can be very demanding - sometimes." This is really something true. And this is where love comes in - when it is demanding, and yet we can give it with joy.

One of the most demanding things for me is traveling everywhere - and with publicity. I have said to Jesus that if I don't go to heaven for anything else, I will be going to heaven for all the traveling with all the publicity, because it has purified me and sacrificed me and made me really ready to go to heaven.

If we remember that God loves us, and that we can love others as He loves us, then America can become a sign of peace for the world. >From here, a sign of care for the weakest of the weak - the unborn child - must go out to the world. If you become a burning light of justice and peace in the world, then really you will be true to what the founders of this country stood for. God bless you!

And here is an interview with K. Norris.

Kathleen Norris was first introduced to a wide audience with Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. Published in 1993, the book is a mosaic of essays about Norris's move from New York City to her grandparents' homestead in Lemmon, South Dakota, population 1,614. It captures the blows that the farm crisis of the 1980s dealt to Dakota communities, and the life she found there nonetheless--in small Protestant churches and Benedictine monasteries.

Norris has since published four prose works, including The Cloister Walk and Amazing Grace, both New York Times notable books. Her most recent book is The Virgin of Bennington, a memoir of her apprenticeship and formation as a young poet in New York City in the early seventies.

Though most of her readers know her as a prose writer, Norris thinks of herself most abidingly as a poet. (In fact, her poetry first appeared in The Other Side in the mid-1980s, long before her prose made her well known.) Her most recent poetry collection is the 2001-released Journey: New and Selected Poems, 1969-1999. Kathleen Norris spoke with me after a poetry reading at Calvin College's Festival of Faith and Writing.

--Gayle Boss



You say that Scripture and poetry touch the same place in us. Why is poetry necessary to you, and how is it necessary in the life of the world?

Sometimes I read a poem in the course of doing a sermon, and all of a sudden the people who've been sort of slumping and listening to prose and being sleepy sit up and pay attention as if I were reading Scripture again. There's something about a good poem that commands a deep attention.

In my adolescence, my poetry was self-protection, a me-against-the-world refuge, something I could do in secret. But it became my way of getting out into the world, of growing up and becoming a religious adult. Poetry really was the means of that conversion. It gradually led me out, and it led me back to church and Scripture.

In 1971 I would never have imagined that I would be going back to church. But poetry was sort of there all along, pushing me, nudging me, guiding me. A Benedictine sister whom I was asking to be my spiritual director commented, "You've always had direction." And this is true: God was present for me there in New York, even though I ignored that fact.

My freshman college teacher, Ben Belitt, said, "You always have to remember that your words and your poems are wiser than you are." At eighteen, I didn't understand what he meant, but I do now. Somehow there's this process of writing that goes deep into the unconscious and the subconscious, and that's where the guidance comes in.

I remember the poet Jean Valentine, who is a Christian, once said, "All poetry is prayer. What else could it be?" There is some truth to that. So many of the poets I know are deeply spiritual people. Often they are fleeing from the religion they were raised in, or they're uncomfortable with a lot of churchy stuff, but you certainly wouldn't say that they're spiritually dead, or trivial people.

They take things in; they meditate on little things that happen in life--like changing a baby's diaper--and suddenly they're comparing it to the third day of creation when God created the earth and the swamps and the fleshy stuff. (That's in a Kate Daniels poem.) Poets make a big deal out of these little things, these ordinary things. And that is a spiritual process that makes us look deeper at the meaning of things we do every day.

It's like Jesus saying, "Wake up!" He's saying: Pay attention, don't fall asleep. Poets demand that we pay more attention to all sorts of events in our lives--birth and death and love and just the ordinary things that people do. If you do that, you're going to be led to something greater than yourself--and maybe other than yourself.

How do you respond to the argument that poetry is useless and, given the suffering of the world, we really ought to be out there alleviating some of the world's pain directly? It takes time to write and read poetry, and that's time away from the works of compassion.

Poetry is as old as agriculture. This is because it really is something that is indispensable, something we need. You're essentially talking about the classic tension between action and contemplation. One thing that I hope we've learned as a culture and as a people--certainly as religious people--is that we need both, and we need them in balance.

When you're all action, prayer starts to seem unnecessary. I've seen this happen to pastors, where action, action, action, on behalf of poor people and victims of domestic violence and hungry people--all necessary and important--takes over until prayer itself seems unnecessary and unimportant. Then the all-action people actually begin to lose their faith.

If you're always active, you're never going to really see what's there. But on the other hand, contemplatives tend to end up very satisfied--it's a very insular mindset. Balancing the two is essential.

When I sit alone at home and write, or I despair because my brain isn't working and I can't write, that's the contemplative. When I go out and do an event--a reading or a workshop or a talk about writing--that's the communal aspect, the action part.

I once gave a reading at a bull sale in South Dakota. I had a friend, a well-known cattleman in the area, who had a bull sale, and his wife was kind of a flake like me. We got together and said, "Wouldn't it be fun to do a poetry reading before the bull sale?" There was me and the microphone in this little round arena and an auctioneer waiting in the wings, and I said, "Look Bob, I'm going to do this for about eight minutes." I said, "I've timed it, I'm a professional, you can trust me, I'm not going to send the bull buyers running out screaming. I know what I'm doing."

Then I read a couple of poems, like my poem called "Cows" about my Grandfather Totten--a lot of people at that sale knew my grandfather--and I found a poem by Gary Snyder about putting up hay. You could tell that he really had put up hay. He knew exactly what it felt like and how much it itched and all these things--it's there in the experience of the poem. People who never knew you could write a poem about putting up hay--because it's just ordinary work that everybody does on the farm--you find these people saying, "Wow! This guy made something out of hay!" You give people their own experience back. Afterward a man told me, "Boy, ma'am, that was nothing like the poems I learned in school."

So I have found a way to evangelize for poetry in very strange locations. Probably the hardest audience I ever had was a whole bunch of North Dakota state legislators at the end of a long day, all stuck in a hotel ballroom in Bismarck. I thought, Oh, this is so much fun--all these guys who don't want to be here, with their wives. I said, "Well, I bet you think this is going to be really boring, but we're going to have some fun." I think it's important to try to reach people that way: to give them a reading of poetry that's a pleasure and fun and surprises them because they don't think they're going to like it, and then they do. I really like creating these unexpected venues.

In Amazing Grace you say that you want to take the patina off religious words, that you just want to tell stories about them. Did you feel driven to do that primarily for yourself or for other people scarred by these words?

Both. I started out writing that book primarily for myself, because I had struggled with those words. But it occurred to me as I was working on the book that I wanted to share my journey: Here's what I learned about these words and their history and the effect of that on me. For example, the word perfect really means, be who God intended you to be; be fully mature and ripe. That's a much more inviting concept than our usual idea of perfect, which is rooted in perfectionism. We can't be perfect as God is perfect. But we can try to be mature, and we can try to be the people God made us to be. In that case, I was very conscious of sharing a little bit of something I had learned. But a lot of the words were terms I was personally struggling with, and it seemed important to reflect that journey.

Readers of that book have been Christian, anti-Christian, or fairly indifferent to religion, as well as Jewish and Hindu. I had a Hindu man approach me in Boston who said that he had thought Christianity was a weird religion, but that I'd opened it up for him; he thought he understood a little bit more about it now. That's the kind of thing I live for!

In your more recent poems, like "Body and Blood," you're using more of the traditional language of Christian faith than you've used before.

Certainly I use traditional language at times, when I feel like I can use it appropriately and well and maybe in a fresh way. That poem has the body and blood, but it also has a bumblebee. That's the thing--you have to have the bee. When you have something for people to look at, you can use a phrase like the body and the blood because you've earned the right to do it.

Once I wrote the phrase "the living Christ," slipping into Christian jargon. My Jewish editor wouldn't let me get away with it: "What do you mean by that?"

That's the challenge for people who are Christians and who are writing: You need to avoid jargon at all costs, but that doesn't mean you can't use the traditional language of the faith at all. You have to always make the language fresh and make it reach people. People don't really hear jargon. It just slides in one ear and out the other. You really want to avoid that.

There's been an explosion of the spirituality movement as baby boomers have aged. Your work, beginning with Dakota and continuing with The Cloister Walk and Amazing Grace, caught that generation. Were you conscious of touching a nerve there?

Oh no! In fact, my publisher wasn't either. They only published eight thousand copies of Dakota in the first printing. And I thought, I hope I sell them. We were taken completely by surprise when it did so well. I was conscious of trying to tell a story about the Dakotas, about the farm crisis, about the grace of finding church communities out there and these communities of Benedictines. I knew I was telling a story; I thought it was kind of a neat story, but I really hadn't figured out who my readers were, or if I would even have any.

Writing about what I witnessed in the farm crisis was actually the genesis of the book. I was experiencing the turmoil in churches and schools. It was a very chaotic, bad time. I thought, I have to write about what's happening out here. It wasn't a story reflected on television or any of the media. The surprising thing was that so many people wanted to pay attention.

I was also conscious that my poetry could not handle this story. I write short lyrical poems. This was bigger. It wasn't just my town; I was hearing from ministers and teachers in all sorts of towns. I knew farmers who were going bankrupt and people struggling hard not to go bankrupt. Then I realized that there really weren't very many books about this region written by people who actually lived there, so I said, "Maybe I should do a portrait of this time and place." My new book, The Virgin of Bennington, is also a portrait: New York in the late sixties and seventies, a certain time and place. I was very conscious of what I was doing in both books.

The Virgin of Bennington strikes me as quite different from your other books.

It is. I've always known that it was an exciting time to be in New York, a very special time and place. I was meeting people like W.H. Auden and Galway Kinnell and Adrienne Rich--these marvelous poets--and here I was, a young poet in formation. I've always had the sense that there were stories I wanted to tell from that period. After I wrote Dakota and The Cloister Walk and Amazing Grace, I thought I really had to go back to that time, when I wasn't going to church, when I was not aware that I was on any road to conversion of any kind, and tell the story about my apprenticeship as a young poet.

It's a coming-of-age story, as well as a portrait of a time and a place. It tells my religious journey, but not in an overtly religious way. I couldn't drag it into the book in retrospect, because religion just was not on my mind at that time. I had to let the reader watch me, going, "Oh boy, what's she doing hanging out in that bar with those Andy Warhol degenerates?" I kind of tell you why, and I tell you what happened--why I decided not to do that anymore and ended up moving to South Dakota. The best review I received was in the Jesuit magazine America, entitled "How We Get There."

In The Cloister Walk, in a section on Jeremiah, you name yourself "a necessary other" and talk about the church as home for all "others." It's a powerful meditation on exclusion and community.

That chapter on Jeremiah was very difficult to write. But as so often happens with those stories that we think we can't tell--because they're too personal or embarrassing, or (in that case) because somebody's going to think I'm comparing myself to Jeremiah the prophet--that chapter became the one people responded to most. They'd share what happened to them in a situation where they felt very excluded and lonely, or say things like "That chapter meant so much to me. You told my story."

I was in a setting surrounded by people who were sort of insular academics, and I was a thorn in their side. They didn't know what to make of me. I wasn't a scholar. I wasn't an academic. I was just a poet, and what good was that? They weren't very pleasant to me. And that's ok, that happens. But in addition my husband was thousands of miles away, I fell down and hurt my knee pretty badly, and I was going to morning prayer every day and getting socked by Jeremiah! It was like, "Oh yeah, hit me again!" It was a painful time in many ways.

But then, of course, Jeremiah gets to the good stuff. And one day, on the feast day of Saint John Lateran, things just sort of came together with a reading from Ephesians: "Once you were strangers, but no longerÉ" And I thought, "Ah ha!"

It was an ordinary story of many things coming together and connecting. It was important for me to work though that feeling I'd had since childhood and was now growing up out of, that feeling of being sort of "off," the wallflower, the "other."

I remember telling one of the monks, "You know, I was happy to think of these people as my enemies, but I can't anymore, because they gave me this chapter, they gave me stories to tell, and something very good came out of it." He laughed. "Yeah, it's like that in the monastery too."

What are you working on now, both in terms of your writing and your spiritual journey?

It's been a difficult year. After The Virgin of Bennington, I wanted to take a little break from writing, and I needed to. But then the break became more like: I can't write; I can't concentrate. Part of the problem is that the next book project that I've taken on is to write about the "sin of sloth"--its spiritual side. It's not just laziness. There really is a very deep spiritual component that's actually closer to despair and loneliness.

In order to even start working on that, I've had to combat my own sloth and slump periods, times when I can't do anything, and I think I'm emerging. I've tried to keep notebook writing at least alive, a little, and I think I've actually begun a few poems. But I haven't been able to finish much. It's been frustrating. A lot of people would simply call this depression, but in it lies a spiritual component that has a long history in the monastic literature and in Dante (where those who are slothful are in one section of the Inferno and one section of the Purgatorio.) I want to talk about this, sharing some context from my own experiences as well.

Everybody has prolific years, when the poems are coming and they're producing like crazy. I could really use a year like that now, but it's not happening. There are times when I say, "Oh I used to be a writer," and laugh at myself. But there are times when it really does seem pretty bleak.

It's a question of being patient and having faith that the writing process isn't dead, but rather just going through some kind of transformation. I like the image of the prairie grass, the native grass in the Dakotas. If there's a drought, it begins dying down. It will seem to die all the way to the roots, but it takes a lot to really kill it. The minute there's moisture, it just springs green. Overnight this stuff that was brown yesterday becomes a brilliant, spring-like green, because it knows how to use the moisture that comes.

For me, that's a perfect metaphor for the creative process--to remain at least alert enough to receive what the world is trying to give you.