The Cloister Walk

The Cloister Walk, Kathleen Norris

The Cloister Walk takes us through a liturgical year in a Benedictine monastery. Benedictine monasteries exist in a way that is both timeless and intimately bound up in time. The Rule of St. Benedict was first written in 516 and has continued to guide the order for the last 1500 years. While a monastery will have internet and cars, in many ways the existence has been the same for over a millennia. And yet they are also proscribed by time. Prayers happen at specific moments throughout the day. Being an order that requires Work, manual labor, they often have farms, gardens, or otherwise manage their land and are therefore tied up in the seasons. And the Church itself has strict ways to measure time, with the liturgical year divided up with Ordinary Time, Holy Days, Advent, Lent, and Pentecost.

All of this provides a well measured life, that nonetheless passes in a way that is distant from the outside world. Kathleen Norris, a married woman, raised as a Protestant, has found a comfort in this way of life. She writes insightfully of her year dividing her life between home and residing in the monastery (it is little known outside of the very Catholic world that many orders have a ‘third order’ of lay members, or that they will often welcome long-term residents or retreat goers.) There is a deep spirituality that comes from living in time measured by the seasons and by the daylight, rather than our work days and our clocks. And there is something that pulls at people in the Benedictine law of prayer and humble work, and a day where there hours are counted by prayers, something that has allowed this way of life to exist for 1500 years. It may be far smaller than previously, but it still exists throughout the world, and in many variations of the Benedictine order.

It is difficult to impart to others how something can be so affecting, but Norris tries mightily to explain her pull towards the Benedictines, in large part as she tries to identify for herself how she ended up in this surprising circumstance. Through it she follows the liturgical year, and her own experience of each piece of it. This is a book imbued with the peace and calm often found at a monastery or convent, and seems to flow gently but deeply as she shares her experience and her feelings. There is a deep well of feeling at the bottom, and a pull within the book itself for such calm and identity as well—for there is no doubt that a deep part of the connection with such an order is the fact that it does have a connection with others around the world and going back in time. Norris’s book pulls this out and communicates what makes such a thing special to so many people. Reading it was a retreat in and of itself.