Presbyterian Literary Lights, Part II

In the cold of an Atlanta winter—if that can be even called cold—I got a call from someplace really cold: Lemmon, South Dakota. It was from the Pastor Nominating Committee at Spencer Memorial Presbyterian Church, a congregation of about 160 members at the time, and it was one of those gang-calls that folks who’ve served on a PNC know so well . . . the members gather around a speaker phone of dubious quality and call the candidate at a pre-arranged time and they all strain to hear one another, a lot of “this is Bill Evans, the chair of worship” heard indistinctly in the background. And because this was a pre-arranged call, we’d already done some homework and found that Lemmon makes Tuscaloosa look like a metropolis, that it’s a long way from anywhere else, and that it’s really, really cold, and the thing is, the committee knew this. They knew how hard it was to get folks to come to the extreme North of South Dakota, and they were so desperate that they invited all of us—Pam and me and the kids—up there after only one conversation. And they did one other thing: they slyly saved their trump card for last “Uh, just one other thing,” I heard the chair-person say “This is Kathleen Norris’ church . . .”

And immediately I was transported by flights of ego (I know that’s hard for y’all to believe). Think of it—me, Kathleen Norris’ pastor! I envisioned a blossoming writing career, an inside track on acquiring an agent, hob-nobbing with the literati of Lemmon, South Dakota . . . but Pam didn’t. She said something along the lines of “We’re not moving to someplace where it’s a hundred below zero, our only neighbors are cattle, and the highest relief is the Stuckey’s sign.” So much for my dreams of fame and fortune . . . but that PNC knew whereof they spoke. Kathleen Norris had not so long before published her second best-selling book of essays, Amazing Grace, and was (and still is) a popular speaker and workshop leader. Unlike Frederick Buechner, whom we profiled last week, she was raised up in the church, but left it for a 20-year-or-so stretch in the 60s and 70s. Born in Washington DC in 1947, she published the first of seven volumes of poetry twenty four years later. After spending a decade in New York working for the American Academy of Poetry, she moved to her grandparents home in Lemmon.

Although a poet at heart, Norris is best known for her four volumes of non-fiction prose. The first one, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was selected as one of the best books of the year by Library Journal. Cloister Walk detailed her sojourn at Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, where she later became a Benedictine oblate. Her third book, Amazing Grace, continued her spiritual journey and the fourth, The Virgin of Bennington, is a memoir of her life before she moved to Lemmon.

Kathleen Norris’s poetry is rich and earthy and reverent and spiritual, and she brings the same qualities to her prose. Indeed, if anybody could be said to write “poetic prose,” Norris would be the one. She marries this skill with a unique ability to relate complex theological issues in plain English to our everyday lives. If you haven’t discovered her yet, I encourage you to check her out. You’ll be glad you did.