Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith

by Kathleen Norris

Overview

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR

From the New York Times-bestselling author of The Cloister Walk, a book about Christianity, spirituality, and rediscovered faith.

Struggling with her return to the Christian church after many years away, Kathleen Norris found it was the language of Christianity that most distanced her from faith. Words like "judgment," "faith," "dogma," "salvation," "sinner"—even "Christ"—formed what she called her "scary vocabulary," words that had become so codified or abstract that their meanings were all but impenetrable. She found she had to wrestle with them and make them her own before they could confer their blessings and their grace. Blending history, theology, storytelling, etymology, and memoir, Norris uses these words as a starting point for reflection, and offers a moving account of her own gradual conversion. She evokes a rich spirituality rooted firmly in the chaos of everyday life—and offers believers and doubters alike an illuminating perspective on how we can embrace ancient traditions and find faith in the contemporary world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781573227216
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/01/1999
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.52(w) x 8.23(h) x 1.16(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Kathleen Norris is the award-winning, bestselling author of The Cloister Walk and Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, among others. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, in various anthologies, and in her own three volumes of poetry. She divides her time between South Dakota and Hawaii.

Read an Excerpt

Preface

An alert human infant, at about one month of age, begins to build a vocabulary, making sense of the chaos of sound that bombards the senses. Addressed by another human being, the baby pays attention with its whole body, often waving arms and legs in response. One of the first signs that the child has begun to understand there to be a relation between the human face and the oddly pleasurable noises it makes, between the world of self and that of other people, is that it watches that face intently, especially the mouth. And it begins to move the tongue in and out of its mouth in imitation, trying on the sound of speech, which at one month is well beyond its capabilities. But it is worth the effort, and the child will continue to try. An essential connection has been made; there are noises we share with others, sounds that are deserving of response.

Eventually the rudiments of words come; often "Mama," "Dada," "Me," and the all-powerful "No!" An unqualified "Yes" is a harder sell, to both children and adults. To say "yes" is to make a leap of faith, to risk oneself in a new and often scary relationship. Not being quite sure of what we are doing, or where it will lead us, we try on assent, we commit ourselves to affirmation. With luck, we find that our efforts are rewarded. The vocabulary of faith begins.

The confidence that faith requires is notoriously easier for small children than for adults. No matter what the circumstances of our upbringing, our capacity for trust, allegiance, and confidence is badly battered in the everyday process of growing up. I hada radiant faith as a child, mostly related to song and story. Like many people of my "baby boomer" generation, I drifted away from religion when catechism came to the fore, and well-meaning adults who taught Sunday school and confirmation class seemed intent on putting the vastness of "God" into small boxes of their devising. Theirs was a scary vocabulary, not an inviting one. And religion came to seem just one more childhood folly that I had to set aside as an adult. In my mid-thirties, however, it became necessary to begin to reclaim my faith, scary vocabulary and all.

If it have had any guide in this endeavor, it is my maternal grandmother, Charlotte Totten. Hers was a grown-up faith that retained so much of its childhood certitude that people in my church still talk to me about the Bible studies she conducted, even though she died twenty-five years ago. She was a woman of faith who was, as the saying would have it, no fool. I was an unruly child, but one penetrating look from her, one sharp word, even an emphatic, exasperated "Well!" was enough to make me mind, to bring me back to myself and my right relation to others. I learned from her that this coming to my senses, this realigning of true relationship, might serve as a definition of a living faith. Not a list of "things I believe," but the continual process of learning (and relearning) what means to love God, my neighbor, and myself.

When I began attending church again after twenty-five years away, I felt bombarded by the vocabulary of the Christian church. Words such as "Christ," "heresy," "repentance," and "salvation" seemed dauntingly abstract to me, even vaguely threatening. They carried an enormous weight of emotional baggage from my childhood and also from family history. For reasons I did not comprehend, church seemed a place I needed to be. But in order to inhabit it, to claim it as mind, I had to rebuild my religious vocabulary. The words had to become real to me, in an existential sense.

This book is a report on the process by which they did so. And in writing it, I find that it has been important for me to discern which words still remain "scary" to me, and for what reason. I have also inquired of others-friends, as well as strangers encountered at my readings and lectures-as to their own "scariest" religious words. Words like "Antichrist," "blood," "dogma," "revelation." I have compiled this "lexicon" in the firm conviction that human beings are essentially storytelling bipeds, and that dictionary definitions of potent religious words, while useful in understanding one' religious heritage, are of far less importance that the lived experience of them within that tradition. It has certainly been the case for me.

In approaching these words I have employed both poetic license, and what I hope is a fair and honorable sense of play. I am well aware that I am at play in a minefield. My writing about matter of faith has sometimes elicited peevish response from both extremes of the Christian spectrum in America-fundamentalists and liberals alike-as well as from people who think that religion is bunk and that I am wasting my time. But I persist in my hope that I have something to say to people who cannot believe that I joined a church, as well as to those who wonder what took me to do so.

Not long ago, after I had presented a portion of this book at Catholic college, a woman in the audience asked a question. The discussion period was coming to an end I was getting ready to call it a night, but the faculty member who has introduced me spotted her hand in the air. I'll always be grateful to him for so carefully scanning the darkened auditorium, and to her for allowing curiosity and frustration to overcome discretion. "I don't mean to be offensive," she said, " but I just don't understand how you can get so much comfort from religion whose language does so much harm."

I had spent too many years outside the Christian religion to be offended by her comment. I know very well that faith can seem strange, and even impenetrable, to those who do not share it. I understood all too well where that question was coming from. But how to respond, there and then, to this woman's evident bafflement, and even anguish? I took a deep breath, and blessed clarity came. I realized that what troubled me most was her use of the word "comfort," so I addressed that first. I said that I did not think it was comfort I was seeking, or comfort that I'd found. Look, I said to her, as a rush of words came to me. As far as I am concerned, this religion had saved my life, my husband's life, and our marriage. So it's not comfort that I'm talking about but salvation.

The woman nodded her head vigorously, as if to ward off any more undeniable but incomprehensible things I might say. As for myself, I was startled by the words that had come flying out of my mouth; as so often happens when I put on the spot, I had said things I hadn't fully realized were true until I'd said them. All in all, it felt good to drop for a moment the polite fiction of religious tolerance and get down to the real questions people have about faith in the modern era: How can you believe this stuff? How can you find good where I see only prejudice, sexism, evil? I don' understand.

Table of Contents

Amazing GracePreface

Eschatology
Antichrist
Silence
Salvation
Inheritance: Blessing and Curse
Incarnation
Detachment
Conversion: The Family Story
Exorcism
Perfection
Prayer
Belief, Doubt, and Sacred Ambiguity
Repentance
Annunciation
Inheritance: What Religion Were You Raised in, and WhatAre You Now?
Commandments
Idolatry
Bible
Righteous
Conversion: The Stories
God
Blood
Virgin Mary, Mother of God
Anger
Conversion: The Feminist Impasse
Chosen
Fear
Conversion: One More Boom
Grace
Intolerance/Forbearance
Christ
Sinner, Wretch, and Reprobate
Faith
Good and Evil
Preaching
The Bible: Illiteracies and Ironies
Heresy/Apostasy
Creeds
Orthodoxy
God-Talk
Inquisition
Oppression
Herod
Conversion: The Wild West
Ecstasy
Medieval
Christian
The Bible Study
Worship
Conversion: My Ebenezer
The Bible: Give Me a Word
"Organized" Religion
Hospitality
Church
Lectio Divina
Mystic
Trinity
Seeking
Conversion: The Scary Stuff
Evangelism
Imagination (Or, How Many Christians Does It Take to Balance N. Scott Momaday?)
Unchurched
Hell
Judgment
Apocalypse
Prayer as Remembrance: The Expert Marksman's Medal
Dogma
Angels
Wickedness
Interpretation: "I Know Not"
Revelation
Pentecostal
Prayer as Mystery
Neighbor
Theology
Asceticism
Heaven
Infallibility
Truth
The New Jerusalem

Acknowledgments

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"An engaging meditation on the language of faith."—The New York Times Book Review

"A unique and glorious voice."—Boston Globe

"[Kathleen Norris] writes about religion with the imagination of a poet."—Chicago Tribune

"It's hard to imagine less off-putting or pious writing about religion than this sublimely commonsensical lexicon of words and concepts that, as Kathleen Norris explains them, have rarely sounded less frightening—or quite so simple to understand."—Elle

"One of the most eloquent yet earthbound spiritual writers of our time...frequently irreverent and funny...She makes us converts to her simple faith of warmth."—San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle

"Definitely worthwhile reading...She combines an impressive understanding of theology with personal experience, making her essays read like letters from a highly literate friend."—People

Editorial Reviews

"An engaging meditation on the language of faith."—The New York Times Book Review

"It's hard to imagine less off-putting or pious writing about religion than this sublimely commonsensical lexicon of words and concepts that, as Kathleen Norris explains them, have rarely sounded less frightening—or quite so simple to understand."—Elle

"Definitely worthwhile reading... She combines an impressive understanding of theology with personal experience, making her essays read like letters from a highly literate friend."—People

"A unique and glorious voice."—Boston Globe

"[Kathleen Norris] writes about religion with the imagination of a poet."—Chicago Tribune

"One of the most eloquent yet earthbound spiritual writers of our time...frequently irreverent and funny... She makes us converts to her simple faith of warmth." —San Francisco Chronicle

From the Publisher

One of the most eloquent yet earthbound spiritual writers of our time...frequently irreverent and funny...She makes us converts to her simple faith.

San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle

A unique and glorious voice.

Boston Globe

One of the most eloquent yet earthbound spiritual writers of our time...frequently irreverent and funny...She makes us converts to her simple faith.

San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle

. . .[A] collection of meditations on Christian themes with names as intimidating as salvation,. . .[and] judgment. . . .These short pieces on words are interspersed with brief personal narratives that gradually share a little more of . . .Norris' journey from skepticism to faith. . . .If you're curious, if you already feel drawn toward the language of faith, come and visit.
— The Women's Review of Books

Irene Elizabeth Stroud

When poet Norris (The Cloister Walk) found her way back into church in the early 1980s, she was unsettled by what she calls the "vaguely threatening and dauntingly abstract" vocabulary of the church. Many of the words, like "Christ," seemed to her code words churchgoers used out of convenience when they could not find other words to use. Other wordslike "salvation," "conversion," and "dogma"seemed to Norris to be too abstract to reflect meaningfully her own experience. In this "vocabulary of faith," Norris draws upon her considerable poetic skills to refashion the vocabulary of the church into her own religious vocabulary. In each of these meditations, Norris uses anecdotes and humor to invest these words with fresh meanings. On "Salvation," for instance, she tells the story of an acquaintance who had become relatively successful in a new venture with his business partner. But, when Norris's friend realizes that his partner will go as far as committing murder to succeed, he leaves the partnership and returns home. Norris describes this victory as the beginning of salvation, "to make sufficient," because her friend "realized the road he was on was not sufficient; it could lead nowhere but death." In "Conversion: The Scary Stuff," Norris retells the story of Jacob's wrestling with the angel to demonstrate the struggle we all undergo in seeking the face of God. Norris's lyrical prose rings with clarity and grace as she brings life to her experience of the church's vocabulary.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

It's hard to imagine less off-putting or pious writing about religion than this sublimely commonsensical lexicon of words and concepts that, as Norris explains them, have rarely sounded less frightening — or quite so simple to understand.
— Elle

Francine Prose

[Kathleen Norris] writes about religion with the imagination of a poet.

Chicago Tribune

An engaging meditation on the language of faith.
— The New York Times Book Review

Michael Milburn

A unique and glorious voice.

The Boston Globe