Religious orders, she soon experienced in full panoply the ''solemnities and feasts,'' the celebrations of the various saints that took place in a monastery that became, for her, a spiritual home, even though she Raised a ''thorough Protestant,'' and not especially knowledgeable about Roman Catholic Had professed monastic vows modified in accordance with her secular life as a married woman, a writer, a sometime lecturer. John's Benedictine monastery in Minnesota - though five years earlier she had already become a Benedictine oblate that is, she

In ''The Cloister Walk,'' persisting in her wonderfully idiosyncratic ways, she gives us the result of an ''immersion into a liturgical world'' started five yearsĪgo, when she began the first of two nine-month terms in a religious and cultural institute at St. a tradition of watchfulness and evocation that in form defies literary genres and in content mixes concrete description with spells of soulful inwardness suggestively put into words. To it, often against great odds and rendered what she had witnessed with a meditative intensity and originality worthy of James Agee's response over a half-century ago to Hale County, Ala., or William Carlos Williams's extendedĮxamination in verse of Paterson, N.J. She paid attention with knowing devotion to a social and moral landscape gave grateful respect to the individuals who have clung

Voices of people at a substantial distance from our big cities, confident centers of money and learning. In the prairie land of the late 20th-century upper Midwest an observant writer found a stoic, introspective dignity, an abundant moral energy. God as present in the world, in the daily rhythms of our particular lives. She began to do so in ''Dakota'' (1993), which she called a ''spiritual geography.'' It was a lyrical, documentary homage to a place, but also a modest, telling insistence on immanence: ''Grace is everywhere,'' the French novelist Georges Bernanos has his dying cure exclaim in ''The Diary of a Country Priest,'' and in recent years the American poet Kathleen Norris has been developing a similar

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The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris