Amazing Grace
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REVIEW BY DONNA SCHAPER
If you liked Kathleen Norris's previous books, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography and The Cloister Walk, you'll love this one. Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, an old-fashioned miscellany with dozens of entries, offers honest, personal reflections on matters that are not exactly carpool conversation-God, the Bible, idolatry, and eschatology to name a few. Peppered with hundreds of biblical and literary allusions, Amazing Grace is a long conversation with thinkers and writers, like Emily Dickinson, who influenced the author's spiritual evolution. Norris, who for years distanced herself from organized religion and defined her religious affiliation as "nothing," now describes herself as a cross between a Roman Catholic and two types of Protestant. One grandmother was Methodist, the other Presbyterian; both, and more, are incorporated in Norris's mature faith. Though she is now more secure in her own faith, Norris does not try to convert the reader. She knows the difference between belief and doubt and sacred ambiguity. Her base may be Christian, but her range is global. Norris draws upon the wisdom of the Dalai Lama, which helps people recognize the value of where they have come from and tells them to become what they were meant to become. Readers will find themselves subtly, not powerfully, transformed. Norris wrote this "vocabulary of faith" because she needed to explain, to redefine, church words. As a lover of words, she found those used by the ecclesiastical establishment to be foreign, and often intimidating. In writing this book, she befriended the church's vocabulary -- her way. Whether it is humor or wide-ranging, well-lived experience, this writer lives up to her title. She amazes with grace.
The Reverend Donna Schaper lives and writes in Amherst, Massachusetts. |
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