Reading Maketh a Full Man...

Ok, so I'm on a Kathleen Norris kick here. What can I say?Kathleen Norris grew up in Hawaii, but went to South Dakota every summer to spend time with her grandparents. She went to college on the east coast, worked for awhile after graduation in New York City, but eventually moved with her husband (also a poet) to her maternal grandparents home in South Dakota to live. A parallel story is Kathleen Norris growing up not really understanding or liking the God she was taught about in the Presbyterian church. In college and in her working years, she substituted poetry and words for religion. Words moved her. Words meant something to her. She loved them.These two stories collide and mesh when she moves back to the Dakotas and lives in the house her mother grew up in. She moves into a small farming community where she is both outsider because she hasn't lived there her whole life, and also insider because her mother and grandparents are from there. A poet on the prairie, she discovers her family roots, and surprisingly also discovers that she loves the God of the Bible. Her love of words and poetry bring her to love the liturgy of ancient Christianity. She is able to live at a Benedictine monastery for 2 different periods of 9 months each. In these times, she comes to love the language of the Bible and the healing balm of singing the psalms. And loving the language of the Bible teaches her about the God of the Bible.So this is an interesting book and I would recommend reading it. I enjoyed the layout she uses, because she intersperses her chapters with weather reports from different times of the year in her small town of Lemmon. Anyone who has lived on a farm or ranch understands how close you are to nature and to the skies when you earn your living from the land. These comments on the weather seem wonderful and happily grounded to me.