The Cloister Walk

“I have found my calling: my call is love,” and writes: “In the heart of the Church, my mother, I will be love, and thus I will be all things . . .”

The human experience is of violence, and the psalms reflect our experience of the world.”

when you go to church several times a day, every day, there is no way you can “do it right.”

I should try telling my friends who have a hard time comprehending why I like to spend so much time going to church with Benedictines that I do so for the same reasons that I write: to let words work the earth of my heart. To sing, to read poetry aloud, and to have the poetry and the wild stories of scripture read to me. To respond with others, in

Walter Brueggeman, in a book on the prophets entitled Hopeful Imagination, suggests that “a sense of call in our time is profoundly countercultural,” and notes that “the ideology of our time is that we can live ‘an uncalled life,’ one not referred to any purpose beyond one’s self.”

These days, when someone commits an atrocity, we tend to sigh and say, “That’s human nature.” But our attitude would seem wrong-headed to the desert monks, who understood human beings to be part of the creation that God called good, special in that they are made in the image of God. Sin, then, is an aberration, not natural to us at all.

temptations are, as well as our gifts—not that we might better “know ourselves,” or in modern parlance, “feel good about ourselves,” but in order that we might become instruments of divine grace for other people, and eventually return to God.

as if the purpose of poetry is to provide boring exercises for English class. The metaphorical intelligence that has pulled disparate elements together to make the poem is of no consequence.

It counters our tendency to see individual experience as sufficient for formulating a vision of the world.