Book Addled

Wonderfully moving and engaging book describing Kathleen Norris's experience living in a cloister. I read this book years before I converted to Catholicism, so it's clearly not required to have "insider knowledge" to relish this book.

There was a passage somewhere in the book that has stayed with me. I can't remember enough of the wording to even Google it successfully. Norris was speaking to a monk, I believe, who had a view of the many and varied people walking by. She asked him, given that these people represented worldliness in various dubious forms, what he thought of them. His answer, both simple and wise, was something like I see different people on their way to God.

As someone often too judgmental and often unable to turn off my judge-o-meter, the answer stopped me in my tracks, and the monk's response is one I've thought of again and again.

To get the actual scene, I guess I'll have re-read the book or locate it among our many bookcases and book dumping grounds (finding it will probably take more time than re-reading it).