Biography
Kathleen Norris is one of America's preeminent literary voices. In 1993, Kathleen's first book, Dakota: A Spiritual Journey, received wide critical acclaim and was on the New York Times bestseller list for seventeen weeks. She followed that success with The Cloister Walk in 1996 and Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith in 1999, both of which appeared on bestseller lists and to rave reviews. A Chicago Tribune critic said that Kathleen Norris "writes about religion with the imagination of a poet." Her work has also been compared to that of Thomas Merton and she's been described as a "Midwestern, late-20th century mystic." Kathleen is married to poet David Dwyer and they live in Lemmon, South Dakota. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]  

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          and 30 Good Minutes.

"In the Midst of a Busy Life"
A brief passage in the letter of James strikes me every time I encounter it: "Let the believer who is lowly boast in being raised up, and the rich in being brought low, because the rich will disappear like a flower in the field...in the midst of a busy life, they will wither away."

In the midst of my own busy life, I often feel as if I am withering away, especially during this last year, when I've been stretched to the breaking point by my husband's ill health. It is nothing out of the ordinary--in fact, it's very ordinary--we are one of many thousands of families forced to deal with the contemporary plague of cancer.

My husband and I have been married for twenty-three years, and at times over these past months I have felt that the cancer was withering both of us. When I indulged in self-pity--and sometimes that felt good--I would tell myself that I was being worn down, made old before my time.

But that silly bit of self-drama also made me laugh at myself. For, despite it all, I had to acknowledge that I was rich. Incredibly rich, because despite my husband's illness, we did have each other to lean on, and we also had the support and prayers of family and friends. Thus I was, as James would put it, a "lowly believer who could boast of being raised up."

But we human beings don't need the wake-up call of serious illness to know what James means by fading away "in the midst of a busy life." In recent years, Americans have enjoyed one of the wealthiest societies that the world has ever known. For the first time in our history, nearly half of us have invested in the stock market. Both the American standard of living and our life expectancy keep rising, so that even the poor among us are rich by the standards of third-world nations.

Magazines report that with their new-found wealth, many Americans are building larger homes than ever before, with huge walk-in closets, luxurious baths, professionally equipped kitchens, four and five car garages with roofs high enough for the camper and SUV.

Even those of us with more modest means find that our riches sneak up on us, so that things we not long ago considered luxuries--microwaves, cell phones, e-mail--now seem like necessities. But as we scramble to pay for and maintain all the new "necessities" in our busy, busy lives, we would do well to recall the words of the monk Thomas Morton, a prophet for our time, who commented way back in 1968, that rather than be dazzled by the new gadgets offered in each year's automobile models, we might do better to ask how we had come to build a society in which we are so dependent on cars in the first place. And imagine a world, a life, in which we would not need them every day.

Our riches come at a price. After spending billions on shiny new things to make our lives easier and more fulfilled, Americans find that they must spend billions more on drugs to counter depression, unhealthy obesity, and sleep disorders. As James would put it, in the midst of our busy lives, we ourselves are withering away. We have bought fool's gold, and now we have to live with it.

This is one reason why we need to allow religious voices to be heard, because they can help us find where our true treasure lies. Turning to Psalm 62, 1 am told, "Do not set your heart on riches, even when they increase." Psalm 49 reminds us that no amount of money will prevent our death, and states that "in their riches, people lack wisdom: they are like the beasts that go astray." I found absolute proof of this recently, in a fancy catalog, which offered me, for just $89.95, a "remote-controlled triple-turbo indoor flying saucer." Along with a helium tank--that's fifty dollars more--I have a toy that I can fly around the living room.

In our riches, we lack wisdom. And we often seem to need hardship to bring us to our senses. I live in a rural area, in which many family farmers and ranchers are struggling to stay in business, to stay on the land. This year, after a bad harvest and disastrously low prices for what they did raise, a farm woman in my church commented, "This is a year when you have to look at what you have, not at what you don't have."

She's a woman of faith, and her remark is steeped in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the religion of my ancients, my grandmothers and grandfathers. And I still need to listen to their voices, including the voices I find in the Bible, which is full of wisdom on the subject of wealth and poverty. The theme appears very early in the Hebrew Scriptures and surfaces again in the prophets, and threads its way through the Christian gospels, and into Paul's letters to the fledgling congregations of the early church, all the way to the Bible's conclusion with the Revelation to John. It's a theme that is reflected in the world's other great religious traditions as well. And it is simply this: God upsets our applecarts, the precious idols of the status quo. That which we see as rich and powerful and wise God exposes as foolish and weak; that which we despise as poor and unworthy is treasured by God as a pearl beyond price.

For God knows, even if we resist knowing, that when we think of ourselves as self-sufficient in our riches, we are truly poor. Our lives wither away, and in our desperation for control, we stunt the lives of others, even those closest to us--our parents, mates, and children. But when we come to know ourselves as we really are: weak and unfortunate creatures who need the love of God and other people, it is then that we are rich. It is then that we begin to reach out to others, not only to serve them, but to be served (which for control freaks like myself, is always a much more difficult proposition). And when we come to understand that even our most ordinary human relationships are holy, given to us by God, we grow eager to encourage others, even as we are encouraged and enriched by them. We can come to know what St. Paul described, in his letter to the church at Galatia, as the fruits of the spirit: "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control."

In this divine scheme of things, joy follows closely on the heels of love. But how much joy do our riches give us? On any day, on any airplane in America, you might find a young businessman or woman who is trying to balance a family life with working up to 90 hours a week. And for what? Not love, or joy, or peace, but for survival in a brutal business climate. A climate in which, ironically, concepts such as "patience" and "gentleness" have become fighting words, despised as weakness.

Who dares to speak of love, joy, or peace in this broken world? Who does this crazy woman on TV think she is, daring to use lofty words that have nothing to do with real life? Does she know what goes on out there? Peace? Joy? Give me a break!

The words of religion can be downright annoying, if they remain abstractions, or seem to be nothing but pie-in-the-sky. I can only say that I am just another person who is trying to make sense of it all. The writer Kate Daniels, in a recent essay entitled "Poetry and Presence," sums up the dilemma of faith in describing a typical evening at her house. She and her husband have come home from their jobs, the kids are trying to do their schoolwork, but are mostly squabbling while she prepares a meal, and the dog overturns the kitchen garbage can and then runs away, leaving garbagy paw prints all over the house.

Kate Daniels recognizes that at the end of the day each family member is both "tired" and "overstimulated," a perfect description of the American condition at present. And she knows in her heart that each person is seeking love in the family, and healing, and nourishment--of both the spiritual and physical kind. But all too often weariness, frustration, and irritation boil to the surface, and family conversation is bitter and sharp rather than gentle and kind.

"Try as I may," Daniels writes, "and I do try--I have a hard time browning the ground turkey I'm planning to mix with canned spaghetti sauce for the glory of God." But--she adds--"I try to find the poetry that exists, even here " And that, it seems to me, is half the battle, a spiritual desire that makes Kate Daniels very rich indeed. It can make any of us rich, because it acknowledges that we are here for each other, and that even the thankless toil we commit ourselves to can lead us closer to God and to those we love.

In her essay Kate Daniels recalls a sermon at her Catholic church, in which a visiting priest asked the parishioners to imagine Jesus coming to them, not in the church, but in their place of drudgery. He asked: What would you ask of Jesus, there? What do you really need?

When I consider that question, I realize that my answer has a lot more to do with people than with things. It's so often things that keep me busy, sometimes to the point of exhaustion. But even in tense and difficult times, just talking to or being with those I love, can bring me back to life.

Despite the worry and drudgery of this past year, when I have had to care for my husband as he struggled through his cancer treatments, I can honestly say that I have also encountered peace, and goodness, and even joy. The peace that settled on us in the evenings, during his weeks of radiation treatment, when we would nestle in front of the TV and laugh ourselves silly watching reruns of Bugs Bunny cartoons. The goodness I found in so many of the people--doctors, nurses, aides--who were caring for my husband, and found many small ways to offer us kindness. The joy that came when I remembered to be grateful for the sheer wonder of life itself: the beauty of creation, the miracle of my marriage, the love of my family and friends.

Religion--my Christian religion, at least--is not about sweetness and light and unattainable holiness. It gets down to the nitty gritty. The Jesus I encounter in the scriptures is the same one I find in the daily newspaper or on the street, in my home, in my low and high moments, and even in my place of drudgery. And when I recognize who it is that is with me in all the busy-ness of life, I do feel myself--my weak, weary, and withered seft--to be every bit as rich as a queen.

Interview with Kathleen Norris
Interviewed by Lydia Talbot

Lydia Talbot: Kathleen, you are a New York Times best-selling author and poet. You were also a fallen-away Protestant. You journeyed back to reclaim the religious faith of your youth. You are a Presbyterian and a Benedictine Oblate. How has that faith that you met again helped sustain you as you struggle, as you are stretched to the breaking point as you put it, by your husband's cancer?

Kathleen Norris: Well, I think just rediscovering the Bible has been one of the main things. It's a great support by returning to the Psalms on a daily basis. The Psalms really contain all of human experience, every human emotion from despair to joy, to bitterness, to rage. Everything is there, so I find now that I can just look up a Psalm and know that maybe three thousand years ago somebody was feeling this and praying it, someone in the Jewish tradition or in the Christian tradition. It's like all my ancestors are there with me, praying this with me. It's a great strength.

Talbot: The poetry of the Psalms.

Norris: They're beautiful poems, but there is also this very emotional uplift. You're very vulnerable. The emotions are really quite raw in the Psalms, and I really find them to be, I think, the mainstay of my faith now. It took me a long time to reach this point, to really think that God suffers along with us, that we're not really alone even when we feel the most alone.

Talbot: God weeps, too.

Norris: God weeps.

Talbot: In your latest book, Amazing Grace, A Vocabulary of Faith, it was a faith whose language was once dead to you. What do you think the connection is between your religious sensibility and understanding poetic imagery?

Norris: Well, I think words have always been so important to me and really Christian tradition is very full of poetry and the Protestant tradition has tended to sort of shove that aside a little bit. It was sort of rediscovering the meaning of the words, a history of a lot of these words, that allowed me entry into my faith. Really, it was through words that I began. I struggled. You know, I would go to church services and say, "What are they talking about?" and that is really why I wrote the book, because it was my journey back through all these words, to find out what they could possibly mean for me now.

Talbot: One of the words that your favorite poet and soul-mate, Emily Dickinson, uses frequently is circumference. You know that rapturous state that she felt every time she completed a poem--the achievement of a whole. Do you feel that as you journey?

Norris: I can feel that even in an ordinary Christian worship service when all of these people who really aren't very good singers somehow make a noise that is greater than the sum of their feeble voices. Even in an ordinary worship service I can feel that sort of wonderful release. Where else are we allowed to gather and sing even though we can't?

Talbot: Despite the abysses, as Emily Dickinson would say, the loneliness, the moments of isolation and despair?

Norris: Well, this is why an ordinary church congregation is so wonderful. You know the people. You know that the person sitting behind you has just lost their brother in a tragic accident and that the older couple there just had their first grandchild. You know everybody is mourning and celebrating all at once. It becomes this great human community and I think that's what people are seeking so much now, some sense of community. Churches really can provide it if we can just get past all the obstacles and mental blocks. I had a lot of blocks myself.

Talbot: And you have now gone through that semantically bumpy road to conversion and we are so grateful you have been with us today, Kathleen Norris.

Norris: Thank you.