Questioning Faith

Where it’s Okay to Ask

Kathleen Norris's Story

Taken from Walking Away from Faith by Ruth A. Tucker

A Confession of "Amazing Grace"

One of the most effective means of evangelizing is through confession. Indeed much more effective than debate is confession—a confession in story form, immersed in humility. One such confession that has challenged me in my journey of faith is a spiritual autobiography by Kathleen Norris titled Amazing Grace. Here she tells about her slow return to the church after many years away. "Whenever I filled out a form that requested my religious affiliation, I would write 'nothing.'" Her return came in fits and starts, and even as her book concludes, she does not exude an air of confidence. Her pilgrimage is tenuous, as she feels it must be. In the preface she writes:

If this book is in a way, my "coming out" as a Christian, I need to remind the reader (and myself) that this was not a forgone conclusion as I began to write it. If anything it seemed unlikely to me that I would ever find a place for myself within the religious tradition of my inheritance. In my previous books, Dakota and The Cloister Walk, I told the story of the move I made with my husband, David, from New York City, where I had worked for six years following graduation from college in Vermont, back to my ancestral home in South Dakota. My four grandparents had come to the state during homestead days to work as teachers, doctors, and Methodist ministers. Since 1974, I have lived in the house where my mother was raised, and have found to my surprise that my move back to my roots proved to be in part a coming to terms with my religious inheritance.In 1985, I joined the Presbyterian church in my small town, which I had been attending sporadically since my move to South Dakota.¹

As I read Amazing Grace, I began to resonate with Kathleen. Indeed, we have some of the same "friends"--particularly one nineteenth-century poet. "I latched on to Emily Dickinson," Kathleen writes. I also appreciate her straightforward talk and her refreshing perspectives on life. She is a feminist, yet she has an appreciation for the King James Version of the Bible despite its noninclusive language and the Lord's Prayer, beginning with "Our Father." The theme of Amazing Grace is reclaiming religious heritage. "Human inheritance is both blessing and curse," she writes. "My inheritance, my story, is of a Protestant Christianity--Methodist, Congregational, and Presbyterian. . . . I am now glad to identify myself as an ordinary Christian. . . . It's been a lively journey. And I am the person who departed, so long ago, and not the same at all."²

Kathleen's story of walking away from the Christian community in which she was raised is one that has been echoed countless times: "Despite having loved church as a child, I found it remarkably easy to walk away from it all when I went to college." But even before her college years, she had a "heady first encounter with Enlightenment and modern humanistic philosophies." At age sixteen, her faith began to waver. "A dose of the Enlightenment, a bit of Bertrand Russell, a dollop of Marx, a dash of Camus, and away with God!"³

What makes her story different from the stories of so many, however, is that she does not testify to losing her faith. After spending time with the Benedictines when she was in her mid-thirties, she began to "recognize that religious conversion had been alive in me during the years when I would have claimed to have no religion at all." Again she testifies, "I came to understand that God hadn't lost me even if I seemed for years to have misplaced God." In speaking of God, she quotes Catherine M. La Cugna: "One finds God because one is already found by God. Anything we would find on our own would not be GOD."⁴

Belief, Doubt and Sacred Ambiguity

One of the most helpful aspects of Kathleen's book is her honest struggle to believe. In a chapter entitled "Belief, Doubt and Sacred Ambiguity," she offers counsel and words of wisdom to those who find belief out of their grasp. She points out that the word belief is often misunderstood:

I have come to see that my education, even my religious education, left me with a faulty and inadequate sense of religious belief as a kind of suspension of the intellect. . . . Yet I knew religious people who were psychologists, mathematicians, and scientists. So I had to assume that religious belief was simply beyond my grasp. Other people had it, I did not. And for a long time, even though I was attracted to church, I was convinced that I did not belong there, because my beliefs were not thoroughly solid, set in stone.⁵

It was through her relationship with Benedictine monks that Kathleen began to come to terms with her doubt and unbelief. They were far less concerned about her doubts than she was. "They seemed to believe that if I just kept coming back to worship, kept coming home, things would eventually fall into place." But that she would be "coming back to worship" was not a foregone conclusion. She offers a gross understatement when she concedes that for someone "anguishing over issues of belief and doubt, worship can become impossible." Not only was it impossible in her case, but the very effort sometimes triggered depression that continued for days.⁶

What seemed to help most was remembering, remembering her childhood—the Bible stories, the believing in God and the Sunday morning singing in church. This is where I resonate so completely with Kathleen. Her story is my story too. These had been "the great joys" of her childhood. "But if I had to find one word to describe how belief came to take hold in me," she writes, "it would be 'repetition.'" The repetition of the words of the hymn "Amazing Grace" and the repetition of the words of the creeds and the psalms and the Bible stories all served to develop her Christian faith.⁷

But even as she absorbed the religious heritage of her childhood, she was not free from doubt and unbelief. She was sometimes tempted to give up her struggle completely. Her resolution came from what might seem like an unlikely situation--one I readily identify with as a writer and believer.

I would recall the wise words of William Stafford, who once said that he never had writer's block, because when a poem failed to come, he simply lowered his standards and accepted whatever came along. So, I lowered my standards. . . . Fortunately, believing, like writing, is more process than product, and is not, strictly speaking, a goal-oriented activity. There is no time limit.⁸

But if she lowered her standards for belief, it seemed reasonable that she should lower her standards for unbelief as well: "Perhaps my most important breakthrough with regard to belief came when I learned to be as consciously skeptical and questioning of my disbelief and my doubts as I was of my burgeoning faith."⁹ Kathleen, who was away from the church for almost twenty years, is able to speak about unbelief in a way that challenges other "walk aways" to contemplate their own situations. In reflecting on apostasy, "the abandonment of one's religious faith," she writes:

There is a certain pride inherent in apostasy, which often manifests itself as a remarkable faith in oneself, as in "I alone know what is right for me." Teachers, traditions, the family stories, and the beliefs of the common herd are all suspect; suspicion rather than trust is what defines the apostate. And it defines our age. The individual stands alone, a church of one, convinced that he or she is free of the tyranny of any creed or dogma. . . . If I had to come up with a synonym for apostasy . . . it is simple vanity.¹⁰

Roots

Perhaps the most important reason that Kathleen Norris's story speaks to the "walk-away" is because she emphasizes tradition—ancestry and roots. In apostasy, "the individual" stands alone. But in returning to faith, one is acknowledging the need for community, and frequently that community includes one's family, living and dead. So it was for Kathleen:

Fear is not a bad place to start a spiritual journey. . . . It has meant coming to terms with my fundamentalist Methodist ancestors, no longer ignoring them but respecting their power. Conversion means starting with who we are, not who we wish we were. It means knowing where we come from. . . . And this is what I hope I have done, beginning with my move back to Dakota. My path of conversion may have a few elements of Indianness, because of the spirits of the land where I live, and because I understand that my faith comes from my grandmothers. . . . It came as an unwelcome surprise that my old ones led me back to church. It continues to surprise me that the church is for me both a new and an old frontier. And it astonishes me as much as it delights me that moving to the Dakota grasslands led me to a religious frontier where the new growth is fed by something very old, the 1,500-year tradition of Benedictine monasticism.¹¹

In this area of coming to terms with one's tradition, Kathleen speaks with particular understanding and familiarity to the one who has walked away from faith. Some people have warm memories of childhood faith and all the rituals that attended it, while others may have many more negative than positive memories. Kathleen serves as a model in both her affirmation and recognition of her tradition and her pursuit of a fresh understanding of the faith.

Step by Step . . . I Made My Way Back to Church

For Kathleen, faith and community go together. She has absorbed the concept of community from the Benedictine monastery and recast it in her own ancestral religious community in her small-town South Dakota Presbyterian church. The church is a community of corporate belief. Individual belief and spirituality are part of a woven fabric of faith, and the weaker strands are secured by overlapping and by ties and knots that hold tightly. Yet there is always a careful balance: when too many strands are frayed by faithlessness and fractiousness, the fabric falls apart. But the tightly woven community of faith is the ideal; here we seek true communal worship:

Communal worship is something I need; that it is an experience, not a philosophy or even theology. Whatever the pitch of my religious doubts, it is available to me for the asking. It seems a wonder to me that in our dull little town we can gather together to sing some great hymns, reflect on our lives, hear some astonishing scriptures (and maybe a boring sermon; you take your chances), offer some prayers and receive a blessing. . . . Step by step, as I made my way back to church, I began to find that many of the things modern people assume are irrelevant—the liturgical years, the liturgy of the hours, the Incarnation as an everyday reality—are in fact essential to my identity and my survival. I am not denying the past, or trying to bring it back, but am seeking in my inheritance what theologian Letty Russell terms "a usable past."¹²

Notes

¹ Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (New York: Riverhead, 1998), p. 6.

² Ibid., pp. 22-25.

³ Ibid., pp. 41, 258.

⁴ Ibid., pp. 41-42, 104.

⁵ Ibid., p. 62.

⁶ Ibid., pp. 63-64.

⁷ Ibid., p. 64.

⁸ Ibid., p. 66.

⁹ Ibid., pp. 66-67.

¹⁰ Ibid., pp. 202-3.

¹¹ Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1993), pp. 130-31.

¹² Ibid., p. 133.