The Cloister Walk is Kathleen Norris's account of two extended residencies at St. John's Abbey, a Benedictine community in Collegeville, Minnesota. Norris, a Protestant poet who had not attended church in twenty years before becoming a Benedictine oblate, structures the book as 75 short meditations following one liturgical year. She writes about the communal recitation of the Psalms, the practice of lectio divina, celibacy, the Daily Office, and conversations with monks on community, doubt, and faith. Throughout, she draws connections between the monastic rhythm of prayer and work and contemporary American life, arguing that liturgical time—oriented toward process rather than productivity—offers a different way of inhabiting the hours.
Norris writes neither as an apologist for Catholicism nor as a skeptic performing detachment. Her perspective is that of a convinced outsider: a Protestant who finds in the Benedictine tradition a seriousness about language, silence, and communal life that her own tradition had not provided. She is attentive to tensions within American Benedictine life—debates over the religious habit, the effect of feminist thought on monastic communities—and to the way the Psalms' violent and paradoxical emotions cut through the conventions of polite church language. The book is as much about poetry and language as it is about religion.
Liturgical time is essentially poetic time, oriented toward process rather than productivity, willing to wait attentively in stillness rather than always pushing to get the job done.
The Cloister Walk
Reception
The Cloister Walk became a New York Times bestseller for 23 weeks and was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. It received the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award and the Books for a Better Life Book Award. The New York Times Book Review called it "vivid, compelling... an embrace of moral and spiritual contemplation," and praised Norris as one of "history's writing pilgrims, boldly willing to forsake any number of cultural fads." The Chicago Tribune noted that "she writes about religion with the imagination of a poet." The San Francisco Chronicle praised her "lucid, luminous prose" and described the book as presenting "the cloister at its most alive." On Goodreads, the book holds a 4.05 rating from nearly 9,000 readers. Some reviewers with strong Roman Catholic identities noted that Norris's Protestant outsider position occasionally simplifies distinctions that practitioners inside the tradition would draw more carefully.
Frequently asked
What is The Cloister Walk about?
It is Kathleen Norris's account of two extended residencies at St. John's Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in Minnesota. The book follows one liturgical year through 75 short meditations on the Psalms, the Daily Office, celibacy, and monastic community. Norris writes as a Protestant oblate — a committed outsider — rather than as a Catholic convert.
Is Kathleen Norris Catholic?
No. Norris is a Protestant — a member of the Presbyterian tradition — who became a Benedictine oblate, a layperson formally affiliated with a monastic community. The Cloister Walk explores what the Catholic Benedictine tradition offered her that her own Protestant upbringing had not, while remaining clear about the distinctions.
How does The Cloister Walk relate to Dakota by Kathleen Norris?
Dakota (1993) was Norris's first memoir and dealt with her return to the South Dakota Great Plains; it introduced the themes of place, community, and vocation that The Cloister Walk develops. The Cloister Walk followed in 1996 and focuses more directly on her Benedictine oblate experience and the liturgical cycle. The two books are companion pieces in sensibility, though each stands alone.