Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith

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Summary: A Journey of Faith
Review: Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith is a poetic dictionary--A Christian's lexicon and guide to the journey of faith. In her newest book of essays Kathleen Norris shares her own particular Methodist-Presbyterian-Benedictine conversion story. Every bit as much a page turner as the latest Grisham novel, Norris's book drew me in. Like an addict who can't get enough, I raced through the pages unable to stop and savor each image and story. Now I await the leisure to return, pencil in hand, psalter and prayerbook beside me. It has been said that the true measure of ones inclusion in a group is a vocabulary test. Norris helps us pass the test by breaking open the words of faith. Amazing grace, indeed, that brings a poet's voice to the telling of the story of faith.

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Summary: A progressive faith requires a progressive vocabulary...
Review: Being someone who comes from a right-wing fundamentalist background, I have been a victim of an overly-abused vocabulary of faith. And also being someone who happens to be gay, words like "judgment" and "hell" can be especially painful things to hear from the mouths of people who call themselves "Christian". In "Amazing Grace", Norris takes some of the words used in the hateful religion of my childhood and shows me how they can be applied to a more progressive faith, centered around love and inclusion, not hatred and exclusion. After reading this book, the Christian vocabulary has taken on a whole new meaning for me - a meaning that needs to be defined on my terms with my ideas - not those of an overzealous preacher or televangelist. Norris says it so beautifully in her book: "I refuse to be shaken from the fold. It's my God, my Bible, my church, my faith. It chose me." And like so many others out here in the Christian wilderness, my faith has chosen me and not the other way around. My thanks go out to Kathleen Norris for showing me how to redefine the basics of the Christian faith - the vocabulary - with definitions that won't be found in any dictionary.

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Summary: Not a "comfortable" book, a good book
Review: In Amazing Grace, Kathleen Norris challenges her readers to take the Christian faith seriously, just as the she has struggled to do. Her book affirms a call I am receiving, at 26, to embrace my tradition. There is exclusivism, I am realizing, in embracing a religious tradition. This is what makes traditions different--they don't agree on certain points. "Amazing Grace" takes as a point of departure the particularities of the Christian tradition expressed in the language of faith. Norris challenges Christians to find meaning in this vocabulary, even in its exclusiveness, which is, as she knows from experience, not an easy thing to do. If you are interested in a thoughtful, intelligent, and poetic interpretation of what makes Christianity a living religion, this book will be a blessing along your journey.

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Summary: Finding grace in a "dictionary"
Review: Kathleen Norris explores the language of faith that often puts people off or leaves them feeling estranged. Her meditations are not definitions of grace, faith, sin and so forth, but in what was for me a suprisingly spiritual way, she brings the vocablary that puzzles and confuses even regular church attenders up the the present time and present words and concepts in a manner that can have meaning and resonance. She uses personal experience and stories that allow the reader to relate and identify.

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Summary: A model of reflection for adults re-turning to religion
Review: Norris's wide-ranging and carefully written account elicited my respect and admiration for the endeavor, although I am a bit troubled by the too easy equation of faith and Christianity (or religion) throughout the book. Yet it is an account of a return to Christianity, and reportedly, a faith of any kind, so I am understanding of the "beginner's" tone to it all. At the outset, Norris describes her effort with the analogy of an infant and writes of "rudiments of words" forming in her response to the language of Christianity (page 2). "Religion came to seem just one more childhood folly that I had to set aside as an adult," Norris continues. "In my mid-thirties, however, it became necessary to begin to reclaim my faith." And later, on page 169 she writes, "faith is still a surprise to me, as I lived without it for so long." What I find surprising is how someone with such obviously well-honed reflective skills seems to be implying that she lived without faith prior to the return to Christianity. It just doesn't seem likely, at least from my perspective as a seeker with a similar spiritual story . Must experience be Christian to be faith-filled? God, I believe, is present in all of life, and faith experiences within or outside a particular tradition (even prior to affiliation or return) provide a "surplus of meaning" which religions never fully capture, I suspect. Religions do help illuminate experience in a particularly helpful way, so they can be useful partners in the journey of personal transformation, helping us to discern God's presence as the "hidden wholeness" (Merton) in those times when we thought we were without faith. Maybe Norris will reflect on this aspect in the future for those readers who sense that if a return to church (or religion) is not also a return to the world of profane experience, then it may seem cloistered indeed. What Norris may find in such an effort, to borrow a phrase from Caroline Myss, is just how "richly guided" our lives have been at all times. Now that is truly amazing grace.