Two women, both middle-aged spiritual seekers, trying to find a deeper reality and to give it expression to a wide audience, appeared together last week as part of a book fair. Their presentations offered much to think about and pray over.
Joan Anderson told of leaving her husband and her home to live by herself for a time on Cape Cod. She did not want a divorce, nor did she cease caring about her husband; she simply felt the need of a radical change.
So, as she describes it in her new book, A Year By the Sea, Joan Anderson did things that established contact with the world in novel ways. She took a job in a fish market; she dug clams on the beach; she took long walks along the ocean’s edge; she went swimming with the seals.
Most important of all, perhaps, she made friends with a stimulating older woman. This woman, Joan Erikson, by then in her 90s, was famous as a psychologist whose marriage to the influential psychoanalyst Erik Erikson had lasted more than a half century.
Of their getting acquainted, Joan Anderson says: “When the pupil is ready, the teacher appears.” The benefits that the older woman gave to the younger were many. Perhaps the most important was that, as Anderson says, “She taught me how important it is to use all your senses.”
One Joan also taught the other about what it meant to become old. Mrs. Erikson was developing further an eight-stage scheme of human development first devised by her husband. She herself spoke about the ninth stage of life, a period that she called “transcendance.”
When she was dying, Joan Erikson at one point gave up morphine because she wanted to feel some pain rather than to have her perceptions entirely dulled. From this experience of her friend’s dying, Joan Anderson has been inspired to live more fully.
At the end of her year by the sea, Anderson and her husband reestablished their common life but she had become a woman changed by her chosen retreat. Among the changes she has implemented is the resolution not “to instruct him” for a period of one year, a resolution that she has thus far broken only once.
The other woman, Kathleen Norris, has already established a wide reputation for her books about the life of the spirit. When she was younger, she had broken off contact with organized religion but later, as she explains it, “I wrote my way back to church.”
Her latest book, Amazing Grace, details some of the tasks involved in this conversion. She has had to redefine for herself many of the theological terms used in the Christian tradition. Thus she offers her own down-to-earth understandings of words like “incarnation,” “judgment,” “commandments,” “ revelation,” and even “God.”
Another word, “ecstasy,” holds deep meaning for Kathleen Norris. This notion which literally means “standing outside,” she calls “resoundingly physical, yet profoundly spiritual.” She goes on to say: “Without ecstasy, there is no love; without silence, there is no ecstasy.”
Life, to this writer, is full of “little nudges and turns.” They serve as reminders of the world that goes beyond ordinary day-to-day perception. They help make us aware of the wonders that normally go unnoticed.
A few years ago, Kathleen Norris, though not a Catholic, joined the Benedictine order of monks as a lay associate. To her, monastic life has been the source of many spiritual gifts. She has absorbed the rich lore of St. Benedict’s legacy, a tradition going back to the sixth century.
To Norris, writing has an intimate relationship with her inner life. “There is a spiritual component to writing,” she says, “and probably to all forms of art.” For her it helps to have some metaphors by which to live and she recommends this discovery to every-body.
She would undoubtedly approve such phrases as “the Lord is my shepherd” or “peace is a flowing river,” which can serve as leading images to unify one’s life. Metaphors like these “come to everybody,” she believes, and help orient us toward the spiritual.
Kathleen Norris finishes her remarks with a warning. In speaking often about God, she says, “Christians are too glib.” She believes that, in their reluctance to mention the sacred name, “the Hebrews had it right.” It is important, she emphasizes, to keep the divine name transcendent.
Richard Griffin