Affecting for Good

Each and every one of us has one obligation, during the bewildered days of our pilgrimage here: the saving of his own soul, and secondarily and incidentally thereby affecting for good such other souls as come under our influence.

~Kathleen Norris (1947- )

Asking to be changed

Prayer is not asking for what you think you want,
but asking to be changed in ways you can't imagine.

~Kathleen Norris (1947- )

Recognizing Grace

If grace is so wonderful, why do we have such difficulty recognizing and accepting it? Maybe it's because grace is not gentle or made-to-order. It often comes disguised as loss, or failure, or unwelcome change.

—Kathleen Norris (1947- )

The daily and the mundane

The Christian creeds used to seem like a ‘grocery list’ to me, and I found them very difficult to incorporate into my fledgling faith, as I made my way back to church after twenty years away. But now I see them as an admirably compact form of storytelling, and this makes me glad, for story places the creeds in the realm of the daily. It is in ordinary life that our stories unfold, tales of conceiving, bearing and giving birth, or trial and death and rising to new life out of the ashes of the old. Stories of annunciation, incarnation, resurrection, and the spirit, the giver of life, who has spoken through the prophets and enlivens our faith.

As wondrous as these mysteries are, Christianity is inescapably down-to-earth and incarnational—I say ‘inescapably,’ as most of us, at one time or another, try to avoid the implications of incarnational faith. The Christian religion asks us to place our trust not in ideas, and certainly not in ideologies, but in a God who was vulnerable enough to become human and die, and who desires to be present to us in our everyday circumstances. And because we are human, it is in the realm of the daily and the mundane that we must find out way to God.

—Kathleen Norris, The Quotidian Mysteries

It's not your creed. It's ours.

Kathleen Norris writes the following of the creeds in her book Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith,

I recently read an article that depicted a heated exchange between a seminary student and an Orthodox theologian at Yale Divinity School. The theologian had given a talk on the history of the development of the Christian creeds. The student's original question was centered on belief: "What can one do," he asked, "when one finds it impossible to affirm certain tenets of the Creed?" The priest responded, "Well, you just say it. It's not that hard to master. With a little effort, most can learn it by heart."

To learn something by heart is a concept more in tune with the ancient world than with our own, and the student, apparently feeling that he had been misunderstood, asked with some exasperation, "What am I to do...when I have difficulty affirming parts of the Creed—like the Virgin Birth?" And he got the same response. "You just keep saying it. Particularly when you have difficulty believing it. You just keep saying it. It will come to you eventually." The student raised his voice: "How can I with integrity affirm a creed in which I do not believe?" And the priest replied, "It's not your creed, it's our creed," meaning the Creed of the entire Christian church. I can picture the theologian shrugging, as only the Orthodox can shrug, carrying so lightly the thousand-plus years of their liturgical tradition: "Eventually it may come to you," he told the student. "For some it takes longer than for others..."

What the Orthodox theologian had said made sense to me. It reflected my own experience in the years when I had been trying to make my way back to church, and I felt fortunate to have found my process of conversion conveyed so well and succinctly: the years of anguishing over creeds and the language of belief, a struggle that I had endured only because I dared hope that eventually the words wouldn't seem like "theirs" but also "mine." It was the boring repitition of worship language, and even the dense, seemingly impoderable, words of the creeds that had pushed me into belief. And, yes, it had taken a very long time.

See also: To believe is to give your heart a religion column from the Tribune & Georgian.