Quotes from Kathleen Norris

Living with people at close range over many years, as both monastics and small-town people do, is much more difficult than wearing a hair shirt. More difficult, too, I would add, than holding to the pleasant but unrealistic ideal of human perfectibility that seems to permeate much New Age thinking.

Nowadays many in America seem to regard "Christian" as synonymous with "fundamentalist," an error the media seems bent on perpetuating. The fact that Islam is generally treated with the same ignorance offers me no comfort.

Well, they tell us meat isn't good for us anyway!

When people speak in the same tone of voice about a "personal deodorant," a "personal trainer," and a "personal Savior," I suspect that what they really mean is "private." I've got mine; too bad about you. But Christianity, like its ancestor Judaism, is inescapably communal.

Tobacco, banjo playing, and dominoes do not figure in the Decalogue as recorded in the Book of Exodus. But particularly in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, Christians have been adept, and remarkably inventive, at interpreting God's commandments to cover just about anything they don't approve of. The effect, of course, is to make the surpassingly large God of the scriptures into a petty Cosmic Patrolman.

One of the advantages of laws is that you can follow them blind, when you have lost all your moorings. You can't follow your instincts, but you can remember your rule.

Heaven is light to me, light-hearted, and full of holy laughter.

Faith simply is, and what the religious traditions of the world do is to give us guidance as to how to interpret our own experience in the light of what our ancestors have made of it over the centuries.

A prophet's task is to reveal the fault lines hidden beneath the comfortable surface of the worlds we invent for ourselves, the national myths as well as the little lies and delusions of control and security that get us through the day. And Jeremiah does this better than anyone.

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.

Any life lived attentively is disillusioning as it forces us to know us as we are.

Here we discover the paradox of the contemplative life, that the desert of solitude can be the school where we learn to love others.