March 2, 1998
When poet Norris (The Cloister Walk) found her way back into church in the early 1980s, she was unsettled by what she calls the "vaguely threatening and dauntingly abstract" vocabulary of the church. Many of the words, like "Christ," seemed to her code words churchgoers used out of convenience when they could not find other words to use. Other words--like "salvation," "conversion," and "dogma"--seemed to Norris to be too abstract to reflect meaningfully her own experience. In this "vocabulary of faith," Norris draws upon her considerable poetic skills to refashion the vocabulary of the church into her own religious vocabulary. In each of these meditations, Norris uses anecdotes and humor to invest these words with fresh meanings. On "Salvation," for instance, she tells the story of an acquaintance who had become relatively successful in a new venture with his business partner. But, when Norris's friend realizes that his partner will go as far as committing murder to succeed, he leaves the partnership and returns home. Norris describes this victory as the beginning of salvation, "to make sufficient," because her friend "realized the road he was on was not sufficient; it could lead nowhere but death." In "Conversion: The Scary Stuff," Norris retells the story of Jacob's wrestling with the angel to demonstrate the struggle we all undergo in seeking the face of God. Norris's lyrical prose rings with clarity and grace as she brings life to her experience of the church's vocabulary.
February 1, 1998
Norris has tapped into a widespread and deeply rooted concern with matters of faith. Her highly original and extremely moving books chronicling her return to the church after a 20-year absence, "Dakota: A Spiritual Geography" (1992) and "The Cloister Walk" (1996), have become best-sellers, a remarkable feat given their often radical and always poetic approach to Christianity. Here, in her third volume of spiritual musings, Norris once again offers a unique and provocative blend of the personal and the theological, the historical and the contemporary, showing by the very nature of her free-flowing and keenly observant narrative how faith can, and must, permeate every aspect of life. A poet, she is exquisitely attuned to the power of language; a writer of great candor, she admits that Christianity's vocabulary of "scary" words was a major factor in her leaving the church, a barrier, she realized, she had to dismantle. She accomplishes that feat by working her way through an entire lexicon of significant and mysterious terms, using each as the focus of a spiritual meditation. Following her own private line of inquiry, she begins with eschatology, the Antichrist, and silence, then moves on to inheritance, exorcism, and perfection ("one of the scariest words I know"), displaying, in each instance, unfailing lyricism, sharp wit, and splendidly intuitive interpretational skills. Belief is a process, she writes, "a relationship like a deep friendship, or a marriage," its size, contours, and demands unknown and unending, and absolutely essential to a compassionate life. ((Reviewed February 1, 1998))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1998, American Library Association.)
November 15, 1997
Best-selling spiritual author Norris (a former LJ reviewer) uses her poet's natural grasp of language to clarify terms like faith, grace, and judgment.