Quotes from Kathleen Norris

For me, preaching is not teaching. It is not about something I know well enough to pass on, but a means of suggesting and pointing to possibilities I have discovered in a text as it interacts with life itself.

Others find it easy to dismiss the Bible out of hand, as negative, vengeful, violent. I can only hope that they are rejecting the violence-as-entertainment of movies and television on the same grounds, and that they say a prayer every time they pick up a daily newspaper or turn on CNN. In the context of real life, the Bible seems refreshingly whole, an honest reflection on humanity in relation to the sacred and the profane.

One so often hears people say, "I just can't handle it," when they reject a biblical image of God as Father, as Mother, as Lord or Judge; God as lover, as angry or jealous, God on a cross. I find this choice of words revealing, however real the pain they reflect: if we seek a God we can "handle," that will be exactly what we get. A God we can manipulate, suspiciously like ourselves, the wideness of whose mercy we've cut down to size.

Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier. [Allein schon das Wissen, dass einen am Ende eines langen Tages ein gutes Buch erwartet, macht diesen Tag zu einem glücklicheren.]

To me, Herod symbolizes the terrible destruction that fearful people can leave in their wake if their fear is unacknowledged, if they have power but can only use it in furtive, pathetic, and futile attempts at self-preservation.

Nowadays many in America seem to regard "Christian" as synonymous with "fundamentalist," an error the media seems bent on perpetuating. The fact that Islam is generally treated with the same ignorance offers me no comfort.

Seen in this light, what strikes many modern readers as the ludicrous attention to detail in the book Leviticus, involving God in the minutiae of daily life—all the cooking and cleaning of a people's domestic life—might be revisioned as the very love of God. A God who cares so much as to desire to be present in everything we do.

Listening to Jeremiah is one hell of a way to get your blood going in the morning; it puts caffeine to shame.

When people speak in the same tone of voice about a "personal deodorant," a "personal trainer," and a "personal Savior," I suspect that what they really mean is "private." I've got mine; too bad about you. But Christianity, like its ancestor Judaism, is inescapably communal.

A prophet's task is to reveal the fault lines hidden beneath the comfortable surface of the worlds we invent for ourselves, the national myths as well as the little lies and delusions of control and security that get us through the day. And Jeremiah does this better than anyone.

Unfortunately, the marvelous understanding celebrated at the original Pentecost has faded into the background, and now the word "Pentecostal" often signifies not Christian unity but sectarian differences. Many Pentecostals are conservative Christians who disdain those of a more liberal persuasion. And mainstream Christians often dismiss Pentecostals as looney tunes; anti-intellectual in their theology, overemotional in their worship.

Prayer is often stereotyped in our culture as a form of pietism, a lamentable privatization of religion. Even many Christians seem to regard prayer as a grocery list we hand to God, and when we don't get what we want, we assume that the prayers didn't "work." This is privatization at its worst, and a cosmic selfishness.