The first week of each month has a short, image-backed quote with links to associated resources in the text below it. In other weeks, the short quote is taken from a longer one by the month's author, found below the image. The last week of the month has a short quote and questions to encourage reflection on all the month's quotations and images.
Kathleen Norris, our author for January, began her writing life as a poet but it was Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (Ticknor & Fields, 1993), the non-fiction book from which this month's quotes are taken, that catapulted her work into public consciousness when it was first published.
Read more about Kathleen Norris' book, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (Mariner Books, 2001), from which this month's quotes are taken, by clicking here.
Read more about Kathleen Norris' book, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (Mariner Books, 2001), from which this month's quotes are taken, by clicking here.
Guided Meditation for all quotes:
For a 5 minute audio guided meditation to use with each week's quote, click the play button on the image. To pause, and restart, click in the same place. To see the image full screen as you listen, click the expand screen icon in the corner. |
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Lectio Divina to use with longer quotes:
For an audio guided Lectio Divina to use with this week's longer quote, click the play button on the image. Allow 10-15 minutes for this practice. To pause, and restart, click in the same place. For a text version of the Lectio Divina meditation, click the button. |
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Monday 1st January, 2024
Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (Mariner Books, 2001), 88.
Image: Priscilla du Preez, Alberta, USA, unsplash.com/@priscilladupreez
This short image-backed quote is from Kathleen Norris' book, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (Mariner Books, 2001), 88. To read more about this book, click here.
Kathleen Norris was born in Washington, D.C., in 1947, but spent much of her early life in Hawaii. She returned in 2000 to care for her ageing parents and still lives there today. Norris' childhood summer holidays with grandparents were in Lemmon, South Dakota, to which she returned following the death of her grandmother in 1974. Intending to stay only briefly, Norris' grandmother left Kathleen the family farm: unexpectedly, South Dakota became her home for the next 25 years. Her developing delight in its landscape, which she referred to as 'a crucible', changed her outlook significantly - after university in Vermont she had spent some time in New York where she was associated with Andy Warhol and his associates at The Factory - and ultimately led to her writing Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, from which this month's quotes are taken: see here. Of Dakota, Norris writes, 'Like Jacob's angel, the region requires that you wrestle with it, before it bestows a blessing' (p1). After overwhelming critical acclaim in numerous American book reviews, its initial print run of 8.500 copies soon sold out and a further 100,000 hardback copies were quickly bought up.
Norris' next book, The Cloister Walk (Riverhead Books, 1996) - see here - received similar accolades. Soon after moving to Dakota, Kathleen had developed an ongoing relationship with the monks at Assumption Abbey, a local Benedictine monastery, whom she appreciated for their 'contemplative sense of fun' (p215). Images of the Abbey on its website, here, offer a glimpse into the barrenness of Dakota's 'Plains'. Two, nine-month periods at the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research as St John's Abbey and University, Minnesota - a Roman Catholic, Benedictine community - deepened Norris' understanding of monasticism, RC theology and its practices, and contributed significantly to the richness of this book's 75 meditations on subjects such as the meaning underpinning Catholic feasts, the connections between poetry and religion, the lives of inspirational religious figures of the past and the celibate life. Eventually, Norris became a lay Benedictine Oblate. For more on what this means and entails, see here.
In addition to several other books about spirituality Kathleen Norris has also published seven poetry collections. Of interest to some might be Little Girls in Church (University of Pittsburgh press, 1995): see here. You can find a not quite up-to-date list of her writings, see here. For those who like listening to audio recordings, try out the two-episode interview with Kathleen Norris in the Encountering Silence podcast series, here. Others might enjoy her interview about 'Death, Writing and the Contemplative Life', for America: The Jesuit Review (June 2015): see here. For a 35 mins video of Kathleen in 2018 talking about 'How Hospitality Make Life Better and Easier (Even on Airplanes)' at the Benedictine St John's College, see here.
Norris' next book, The Cloister Walk (Riverhead Books, 1996) - see here - received similar accolades. Soon after moving to Dakota, Kathleen had developed an ongoing relationship with the monks at Assumption Abbey, a local Benedictine monastery, whom she appreciated for their 'contemplative sense of fun' (p215). Images of the Abbey on its website, here, offer a glimpse into the barrenness of Dakota's 'Plains'. Two, nine-month periods at the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research as St John's Abbey and University, Minnesota - a Roman Catholic, Benedictine community - deepened Norris' understanding of monasticism, RC theology and its practices, and contributed significantly to the richness of this book's 75 meditations on subjects such as the meaning underpinning Catholic feasts, the connections between poetry and religion, the lives of inspirational religious figures of the past and the celibate life. Eventually, Norris became a lay Benedictine Oblate. For more on what this means and entails, see here.
In addition to several other books about spirituality Kathleen Norris has also published seven poetry collections. Of interest to some might be Little Girls in Church (University of Pittsburgh press, 1995): see here. You can find a not quite up-to-date list of her writings, see here. For those who like listening to audio recordings, try out the two-episode interview with Kathleen Norris in the Encountering Silence podcast series, here. Others might enjoy her interview about 'Death, Writing and the Contemplative Life', for America: The Jesuit Review (June 2015): see here. For a 35 mins video of Kathleen in 2018 talking about 'How Hospitality Make Life Better and Easier (Even on Airplanes)' at the Benedictine St John's College, see here.
Monday 8th January, 2024
Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (Mariner Books, 2001), 183.
Image: Greg Sellentin, Arkansas, USA, unsplash.com/@sailorgreg123
The short, image-backed quote, above, is taken from this week's longer quote, below, in Kathleen Norris' Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (Mariner Books, 2001), 183-184. For more about this book, click here.
Listen to this week's longer quote:
To listen to the longer quote, below, being read, click the play button on the small version of the image next to or below this text. To see the image full screen as you listen, click the expand screen icon in the corner. |
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'I was recently afforded the unusual privilege of joining a Benedictine community in North Dakota for its annual retreat. …The retreat schedule was simple and liveable, reflecting a moderation that is typically Benedictine. … it was all conducted without any chit-chat. I am a frequent guest at several monasteries across the Great Plains that follow silence at certain hours, but I had never before immersed myself in the kind of silence that sinks into your bones. I felt as if I were breathing deeply for the first time in years.
To live communally in silence is to admit a new power into your life. In a sense, you are giving silence its due. But this silence is not passive, and soon you realize that this silence has the power to change you. I’ve gained a new respect for my contemplative friends, Cistercians and Trappists; to live this kind of silence, day in, day out, must be an act of bravery.
Monday 15th January, 2024
Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (Mariner Books, 2001), 15.
Image: Ola Dybul, Dublin, Ireland, unsplash.com/@oladybul
The short, image-backed quote, above, is taken from this week's longer quote, below, in Kathleen Norris' Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (Mariner Books, 2001), 14-16. For more about this book, click here.
Listen to this week's longer quote:
To listen to the longer quote, below, being read, click the play button on the small version of the image next to or below this text. To see the image full screen as you listen, click the expand screen icon in the corner. |
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'Reading is a solitary act, one in keeping with the silence of the Plains, but it’s also paradoxically public, as it deepens my connections with the larger world. All of this reflects the truth Thomas Merton once related about his life as a Trappist monk: “It is in deep solitude and silence that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brother and sister.”
The silence of the Plains, this great unpeopled landscape of earth and sky, is much like the silence one finds in a monastery, an unfathomable silence that has the power to re-form you. And the Plains have changed me. I was a New Yorker for nearly six years and still love to visit my friends in the city. But now I am conscious of carrying a Plains silence with me into cities, and of carrying my city experiences back to the Plains so that they may be absorbed again back into the silence, the fruitful silence that produces poems and essays.
A side effect of this process has been a change in the way I feel when I’m in a crowd, a situation I now experience so rarely that I have the luxury of enjoying it. …happy to be one among many … I beg[i]n to see each one of us as a treasure-bearer, carrying our souls like a great blessing through the world.'
Monday 22nd January, 2024
Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (Mariner Books, 2001), 16.
Image: Azzedine Rouichi, Zurich, unsplash.com/@rouichi
The short, image-backed quote, above, is taken from this week's longer quote, below, in Kathleen Norris' Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (Mariner Books, 2001), 16 and 17-18. For more about this book, click here.
Listen to this week's longer quote:
To listen to the longer quote, below, being read, click the play button on the small version of the image next to or below this text. To see the image full screen as you listen, click the expand screen icon in the corner. |
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'In Confessions of A Guilty Bystander Thomas Merton writes of visiting Louisville on an errand for his monastery: “At the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the centre of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.” I’ve come to see, as Merton says, that “it is the function of solitude to make one realize such things,” and that it is the separateness of the Plains, like the separateness of the monastery, that teaches me when I am in the city, “there are no strangers,” and that “the gate of heaven is everywhere,” even at Penn Station on Labour Day weekend.
Silence is the best response to mystery. “There is no way of telling people,” Merton reminds us, “that they are all walking around shining like the sun.” New Yorkers are told a great many things by strangers on the streets, holy fools and mad alike. But the monk’s madness is one that shows in the quiet life itself, with its absurd repetition of prayer and liturgy. It is “the madness of great love,” in the words of one monk, that “sees God in all things,” which nevertheless may be safely and quietly carried out of the monastery, into the world, and back again. As Cardinal Basil Hume, a Benedictine, has remarked, the monk is safe in the marketplace because he is at home in the desert.
... It was the Plains that first drew me to the monastery, which I suppose is ironic, for who would go seeking a desert in a desert? Plains and monasteries are places where distractions are at a minimum and you must rely on your own resources, only to find yourself utterly dependent on forces beyond your control; where time seems to stand still, as it does in the liturgy; where your life is defined by waiting.
The deprivations of Plains life and monastic life tend to turn small gifts into treasures, and gratitude is one of the first flowers to spring forth when hope is renewed and the desert blooms.'
'In Confessions of A Guilty Bystander Thomas Merton writes of visiting Louisville on an errand for his monastery: “At the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the centre of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.” I’ve come to see, as Merton says, that “it is the function of solitude to make one realize such things,” and that it is the separateness of the Plains, like the separateness of the monastery, that teaches me when I am in the city, “there are no strangers,” and that “the gate of heaven is everywhere,” even at Penn Station on Labour Day weekend.
Silence is the best response to mystery. “There is no way of telling people,” Merton reminds us, “that they are all walking around shining like the sun.” New Yorkers are told a great many things by strangers on the streets, holy fools and mad alike. But the monk’s madness is one that shows in the quiet life itself, with its absurd repetition of prayer and liturgy. It is “the madness of great love,” in the words of one monk, that “sees God in all things,” which nevertheless may be safely and quietly carried out of the monastery, into the world, and back again. As Cardinal Basil Hume, a Benedictine, has remarked, the monk is safe in the marketplace because he is at home in the desert.
... It was the Plains that first drew me to the monastery, which I suppose is ironic, for who would go seeking a desert in a desert? Plains and monasteries are places where distractions are at a minimum and you must rely on your own resources, only to find yourself utterly dependent on forces beyond your control; where time seems to stand still, as it does in the liturgy; where your life is defined by waiting.
The deprivations of Plains life and monastic life tend to turn small gifts into treasures, and gratitude is one of the first flowers to spring forth when hope is renewed and the desert blooms.'
Monday 29th January, 2024
Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (Mariner Books, 2001), 185.
Image: Finn, Adelaide, Australia, unsplash.com/@finnyc
The last week of each month offers some questions to help you reflect further on its quotations and images, and how they resonate with your own spiritual journey and relationship with God.
You can engage with these using the written text or the audio version of the questions, below.
Listen to the reflection questions:
To listen to the reflection questions, below, being read, click the play button on the Reflect ... image next to or below this text. To see the image full screen as you listen, click the expand screen icon in the corner. |
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Reflection questions:
Before reflecting on this month's quotes and images, take time to re-ground yourself in your body.
Perhaps take a few slow breaths, feel your feet on the floor and be aware of how your body feels in this moment.
1) Read back over or listen again to this month's quotes and spend time looking at their associated images. As you do so, note a phrase or image that draws your attention. If this is a phrase, you might like to write this out in a journal or on a piece of paper where you will see it regularly. Consider reading aloud several times what you have written to help the words sink more deeply into your heart. If an image resonates with you, let your gaze rest lightly on it for a couple of minutes, allowing it to speak to your heart. Consider using it as a screensaver for a while, or perhaps print it out and place it somewhere that you will see it often.
2) What emerges as you sit with the phrase or image that attracted your attention? Does a new insight or a question, emotion or sensation arise? Take some time to write down and ponder on whatever you notice.
3) Where can you see hope in the midst of what is emerging in you, for yourself, your neighbour, your community, or the planet? How might this impact your daily life and those with whom you share it?
4) In the days and weeks to come, how can you stay open to what you have discovered from your reflections?
Take some time to give thanks for the hope that you have found in this month's quotes and images.
Before reflecting on this month's quotes and images, take time to re-ground yourself in your body.
Perhaps take a few slow breaths, feel your feet on the floor and be aware of how your body feels in this moment.
1) Read back over or listen again to this month's quotes and spend time looking at their associated images. As you do so, note a phrase or image that draws your attention. If this is a phrase, you might like to write this out in a journal or on a piece of paper where you will see it regularly. Consider reading aloud several times what you have written to help the words sink more deeply into your heart. If an image resonates with you, let your gaze rest lightly on it for a couple of minutes, allowing it to speak to your heart. Consider using it as a screensaver for a while, or perhaps print it out and place it somewhere that you will see it often.
2) What emerges as you sit with the phrase or image that attracted your attention? Does a new insight or a question, emotion or sensation arise? Take some time to write down and ponder on whatever you notice.
3) Where can you see hope in the midst of what is emerging in you, for yourself, your neighbour, your community, or the planet? How might this impact your daily life and those with whom you share it?
4) In the days and weeks to come, how can you stay open to what you have discovered from your reflections?
Take some time to give thanks for the hope that you have found in this month's quotes and images.
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