Kathleen Norris in her book, Dakota: A Spiritual Biography (1993) describes her time praying and singing Psalms at Benedictine monasteries. The pace of life is too fast, and as Norris wrote in 1993 she saw that people were coming to recognize that time at the monastery just might slow us down. Norris says:
The
attraction is real. For all our secular preoccupations, our fascination with
lifestyles of the rich and famous, twentieth-century Americans are
flocking to monasteries for retreats in record numbers. The poor and
humble are so popular, in fact, that when I tried a few years ago to
arrange on short notice a retreat at a monastery in New England, I was told an
apologetic monk that the guest facilities were booked solid for the next six
months.
****
The Psalms are the word of God, which is alive and active. It's not surprising that for Norris the experience of the monastery is life changing:
She says:
Often, when I’m sitting in a monastery choir stall, I wonder how I got there. I could trace it back, as I can trace the route from back East to western South Dakota. But I’m having too much fun. The words of Psalms, spoken aloud and left to resonate in the air around me, push me into new time and space. I think of it as the quantum effect: here time flows back and forth, in and out of both past and future, and I, too, am changed
****
The Psalms are the word of God, which is alive and active. It's not surprising that for Norris the experience of the monastery is life changing:
She says:
Often, when I’m sitting in a monastery choir stall, I wonder how I got there. I could trace it back, as I can trace the route from back East to western South Dakota. But I’m having too much fun. The words of Psalms, spoken aloud and left to resonate in the air around me, push me into new time and space. I think of it as the quantum effect: here time flows back and forth, in and out of both past and future, and I, too, am changed
