Read Online The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris - Free Book Online

Ecumenical Institute, I began to suspect that just as monastic discipline looks to many people like restriction but ends in freedom, so what looks like the untrammeled freedom of the artist is, in fact, an exacting form of discipline. To employ yet another analogy, I’ll use Robert Frost’s famous comment that writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net. What he meant by that is that it’s damned difficult. Imagine playing tennis well without a net. And doing it not only with your writing, but your very life.
    The danger of going out of bounds is real. Poetry is a vocation without many guidelines for formation, and poets are often people who lack the religious underpinnings that might help them to take in stride both the intense seclusion of the writing process and the safe return to “the world.” Without such underpinnings, they’ve often turned to drugs or alcohol to help them manage the highs and lows; many poets’ lives, since the late nineteenth century, have been demonstrations of William Blake’s axiom: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” aptly titled one of the Proverbs of Hell.
    When I was beginning to write poetry in college, in the 1960s, it seemed as if, for contemporary poets, madness and suicide were the primary occupational hazards. Religion itself was dangerous for some, a goad to the manic-depressive roller coaster. (John Berryman and Anne Sexton are tragic examples.) It seemed that the best one could do was to take what one of my teachers called “the artist’s road to redemption,” and find salvation through writing. This worked for me for years.
    That it worked so well for so long is a credit to the nature of the poetic call. Art is a lonely calling, and yet paradoxically communal. If artists invent themselves, it is in the service of others. The work of my life is given to others; in fact, the reader completes it. I say the words I need to say, knowing that most people will ignore me, some will say, “You have no right,” and a few will tell me that I’ve expressed the things they’ve long desired to articulate but lacked the words to do so.
    By what authority does the poet, or prophet, speak? How dare the poet say “I” and not mean the self? How dare the prophet say “Thus says the Lord”? It is the authority of experience, but by this I do not mean experience used as an idol, as if an individual’s experience of the world were its true measure. I mean experience tested in isolation, as by the desert fathers and mothers, and also tried in the crucible of community. I mean a “call” taken to heart, and over years of apprenticeship to an artistic discipline, developed into something that speaks to others.
    The Oxford Companion to the Bible suggests that the emotional power of Jeremiah 20, and several other chapters in the book that evoke the tensions of a prophet’s calling, comes from the fact that “behind the apparently untroubled certainty of ‘Thus says the Lord,’ there may lie a host of unresolved questions and deep inner turmoil.” It’s no wonder. Jeremiah grieves—“Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored? O that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep day and night for the slain of my poor people!” (8:22; 9:1)—but if he grieves, he must also speak words of unspeakable violence—“[your friends] shall fall to the sword of their enemies while you look on” (20:4)—to the very people he loves; he must plead to God on their behalf: “We look for peace, but find no good; for a time of healing, but there is terror instead” (14:19).
    In our own time we look for peace and healing, but our newspapers are filled with tales of violence and rage. And Jeremiah holds this world up to us, as a