Quotes from Kathleen Norris

Just the knowledge that a good book is waiting for one at the end of a long day makes the day happier.

Our idol of the autonomous individual is a sham; the truth is we expect everyone to be the same, and dismiss as elitist those who are working through a call to any genuine vocation. It may be that our culture so fears the necessary other that it has grown unable to identify and name real differences without becoming defensive about them.

I began to appreciate religious belief as a relationship, like a deep friendship, or a marriage, something that I could plunge into, not knowing exactly what I was doing or what would be demanded of me in the long run.

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

At an interreligious conference of Buddhist and Christian monastics held not long ago at a Trappist monastery, a reporter asked the Dalai Lama what he would say to Americans who want to become Buddhists. "Don't bother," he said. "Learn from Buddhism, if that is good for you. But do it as a Christian, a Jew, or whatever you are. And be a good friend to us.

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.

When I would begin to apologize for my spotty education, stating that I often felt that my passionate, haphazard reading has given me some of the faults of the autodidact, he would speak up and praise my "native intelligence." Those were healing words for me to hear...

It seems that many men, and some women, cannot give up the illusion of possessing another person. The idea of that person—and "idea" is related etymologically to the word "idol"—becomes more important, more potent than the actual living creature. It is much safer to love an idol than a real person who is capable of surprising you, loving you and demanding love in return, and maybe one day leaving you.

The Bible—and human life itself—is full of evidence that religion itself can become an idol: what the sentimental call the love of God is nothing if it is short-circuited into private piety or religious self-righteousness and doesn't translate into compassion for others.

get a life,' current slang suggesting that life itself is a commodity [ Out of the Garden ].

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.

With remarkable consistency the prophets, who depict God's anger in painfully vivid ways, allow us to see anger as a proper response to human injustice, the terrible wrongs we inflict on others, especially on those least able to defend themselves.

I wonder if holiness is not the ability to apply one's anger in quietly working against systemic evil, taking care not to draw undue attention to oneself. But human anger can never be as simply and essentially righteous as God's anger; in us, even well-placed anger all too easily becomes mean and self-serving. It can cause us to lose both our focus and our balance.

In our culture, time can seem like an enemy....But the monastic perspective welcomes time as a gift from God and seeks to put it to good use rather than allowing us to be used up by it.....Liturgical time is essentially poetic time, oriented toward process rather than productivity, willing to wait attentively in stillness, rather than always pushing to get the job done

I believe that where local congregational life is concerned, it is best to give the Holy Spirit all the room we can, because the Spirit has a way of reminding us that what we think is right—even what we think the Bible spells out as right—is not necessarily letter-perfect in the sight of God. If God did not choose to work in ways that confound us, grace would not be amazing. It would not be grace.

An old farmer once asked my husband and me how long we'd been in the country. "Five years," we answered. "Well, then," he said, "you've seen rain.

For some reason we human beings seem to learn best how to love when we're a bit broken, when our plans fall apart, when our myths of our self-sufficiency and goodness and safety are shattered.

By the time a town is 75 or 100 years old, it may be filled with those who have come to idealize their isolation. Often these are people who never left at all, or fled back to the safety of the town after a try at college a few hundred miles from home, or returned after college regarding the values of the broader, more pluralistic world they had encountered as something to protect themselves and their families from...

The polarization that characterizes so much of American life is risky business in a church congregation, but especially so in a monastic community. The person you're quick to label and dismiss as a racist, a homophobe, a queer, an anti-Semite, a misogynist, a bigoted conservative or bleeding-heart liberal is also a person you're committed to live, work, pray, and dine with for the rest of your life.

More than ever, I've come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those who have lost their natural curiosity to cope with change.

For me, preaching is not teaching. It is not about something I know well enough to pass on, but a means of suggesting and pointing to possibilities I have discovered in a text as it interacts with life itself.

Others find it easy to dismiss the Bible out of hand, as negative, vengeful, violent. I can only hope that they are rejecting the violence-as-entertainment of movies and television on the same grounds, and that they say a prayer every time they pick up a daily newspaper or turn on CNN. In the context of real life, the Bible seems refreshingly whole, an honest reflection on humanity in relation to the sacred and the profane.

Allein schon das Wissen, dass einen am Ende eines langen Tages ein gutes Buch erwartet, macht diesen Tag zu einem glücklicheren.«

One so often hears people say, "I just can't handle it," when they reject a biblical image of God as Father, as Mother, as Lord or Judge; God as lover, as angry or jealous, God on a cross. I find this choice of words revealing, however real the pain they reflect: if we seek a God we can "handle," that will be exactly what we get. A God we can manipulate, suspiciously like ourselves, the wideness of whose mercy we've cut down to size.