Stalking the Divine: Contemplating Faith with the Poor Clares

By Kristin Ohlson
Published by Theia Books
July 2003; $23.95US/$34.95CAN; 1-4013-0025-1

"I had made my annual checklist of things I wanted to accomplish in the coming months, and sidling up to faith, as usual, was one of them—it had been on the list for several years, along with lifting weights and reading Proust."

One lonely Christmas morning, Kristin Ohlson followed a life-changing impulse. As part of a custody agreement, her children were spending the holiday with her ex-husband, and Ohlson was feeling bereft. While she had been raised Catholic, she had long ago left religion behind and no longer even believed in God. But that day, a newspaper notice about an inner-city Cleveland church sparked her interest, and she decided to attend Mass. Once there, she was moved by the traditions of her childhood, but more than that, her curiosity was captured by a group of nuns cloistered in a monastery at the back of the church. Ohlson discovered that they were part of a religious order called the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration. She wanted to know more.

Stalking the Divine: Contemplating Faith with the Poor Clares, like Kathleen Norris’s The Cloister Walk, is both an exploration of what it is to devote one’s life to God and the author’s own quest to discover whether reconnecting with her religious faith can help fill the emptiness she feels in her life. She approaches her subject simultaneously as a journalist seeking to profile and understand an intensely private group of women devoted to a life of "perpetual adoration" and as a woman in middle life trying to figure out if there is a divine thread that holds together the disparate, quickly moving pieces of her days-and of life in general. As she becomes acquainted with the rituals, practices, spiritual crises, and personalities of the Poor Clares, she begins to understand that even for them, faith is about acceptance, but also about struggle. During Ohlson’s three years of dialogue with the Poor Clares—all the time longing for a spiritual epiphany of her own—she learns some essential lessons about commitment, love, and what really constitutes faith.

Author

Kristin Ohlson, a freelance journalist, essayist, and fiction writer, has been published in the New York Times; Salon.com, Ms.; O, The Oprah Magazine; Discover; New Scientist; Food & Wine; Tin House; Poets & Writers; and many other publications. A teacher, she occasionally works with creative writing students at Cleveland State University and women prisoners at Cuyahoga County jail. A recipient of the Ohio Arts Council’s Individual Artists Fellowship in Fiction for 2003-2004, she lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

Reviews

"Kristin Ohlson is a scrupulous observer and a wonderfully intent writer. She brings us right up against the mysterious silence of the Poor Clares and gets us to feel the pressure of their devotion. A fascinating book."—Sven Birkerts, author of My Sky Blue Trades and The Gutenberg Elegies

"One of those beautiful rare books that churns in a reader’s heart long after you put it down, Stalking the Divine elegantly and honestly articulates the ache for faith in our world, in the solitude of the modern self—faith in anything, anyone, if not God—and Kristin Ohlson’s lucid prose and deft reportage have persuaded me that this quest alone is the fundamental act of grace available to humanity. Indeed, the journey defines our humanity, shapes it, expands it, haunts it."—Bob Shacochids, author of The Immaculate Invasion

"Kristin Ohlson’s honesty, intelligence, and charm make this book irresistible. A nonbeliever who longs for a convincing spiritual experience, she writes about a community of cloistered nuns: women as honest, intelligent, and charming as she, who have centered their lives around prayer. Stalking the Divine is a delightful story about curiosity, by a writer who can’t be dispassionate about her subject and also can’t lie to herself."

--Alice Mattison, author of Hilda and Pearl

"What is faith? How do you know when you have it? Ms. Ohlson does a wonderful job of weaving her own personal journey into the story of the Poor Clares. It’s a book worth reading for anyone who has ever had religion, lost religion, or needed it. Which is just about everyone."—Sarah Willis, author of Some Things That Stay and The Rehearsal

Excerpt

The following is an excerpt from the book Stalking the Divine

by Kristin Ohlson

After my first month regularly attending mass at St. Paul, I called my sister out in California and told her that I was trying out church.

"Sure," she said. "You were always the holy one." Me? Me, the former radical communist atheist who’d taught her children to believe that belief in God is as fanciful as a belief in fairies but far more insidious? Me, whose children worried that my new interest in church might be evidence of an impending breakdown?

"Yes, you," my sister said. "We were laughing at your expense the other night. Mom and Dad pulled out a box of old photos and papers. There were a bunch of letters you wrote in second grade, going on and on about angels."

"The nuns made me do it!" I replied.

But yes, I remembered a few times in those early years when I’d felt rapturously happy in church. It was very much like the drifting-out-of-your-skin ecstasy that I later felt at political rallies, or when I was falling in love, or when holding my children in my arms. I wondered if I was going to church because I imagined this kind of heated exuberance could happen to me again. And did I even want to be that kind of believer?

After that first month, I began to recognize a few of the St. Paul regulars from a distance. Some of them looked well suited and stylish, as if they had just driven their SUVs in from the suburbs, while others looked broken and dusty, as if they’d spent the night sleeping under a bridge. There was the woman with foreboding eyebrows who always sat by the confessionals, the tweedy couple who whispered to each other throughout the service, the woman who always wore a ski hat, sneakers, and a cross the size of a potato masher around her neck. During the part of the mass when the congregants were supposed to turn and greet each other, some people had to stretch over empty pews to shake hands but the potato-masher-cross lady blew kisses at me instead. At the end of each mass, she often walked up to the front of the church and also blew kisses into the Poor Clares’ enclosure.

I began to wonder what kept these faithful few coming to St. Paul Shrine and what fueled the aging cadre of priests who maintained this church. I found myself wanting to ambush them all in the church lobby and ask why these two-thousand-year-old stories meant so much to them, to demand that they explain how belief is even possible. I was especially intrigued by the Poor Clares. As I watched them disappear from view every Sunday, I wanted to drift behind them like vapor, swirling invisibly in their wake as they led a life so dedicated to—to the pursuit of God? to the pleasures of God? I wanted to watch them as they sliced apples or searched for the cord to the curtains or swung their feet to the floor after a night full of dreams. Did all these ordinary moments have greater meaning because of their faith? Was their faith more powerful because it was compressed between the walls of their monastery? How had they converted from ordinary women to these hidden brides of Christ? I knew I couldn’t vaporize, but still, I wanted to tag along with them like a little kid asking why, why, why?

And then I had an idea: I would write about them. They might be willing to take time from their mysterious lives if they knew I might use their words to create a book. I had interviewed enough people for magazine articles to know that sometimes questions aren’t even necessary: often, people tell me things I wouldn’t even think of asking. There’s an odd, exhilarating intimacy that forms during an interview—pleasantly safe intimacy, too, as I get to ask all the questions and it’s very rare that someone tries to probe me. People who like to write generally do so because it gives them a way to explore and understand things, whether these things are out in the world, buried in the vault of their own memory, or have sprung unbidden from their imagination. In my case, writing about St. Paul Shrine might help me construct a framework for trying to make sense of their faith and, perhaps, learn to build some kind of faith of my own. I sent a letter to Father Senan and told him I wanted to write about St. Paul Shrine—the building, the Poor Clares, the Franciscans, the congregation, the whole package. I acknowledged that much of my interest was personal, that I was a long-estranged Catholic with a wistfulness for faith. I told him that I wanted to discover what there was to learn about faith from those who had never left it in the first place, that I wanted to explore whether someone who had walked away from belief might find it again. And I told him that I thought there were many people like me.

Copyright © 2003 Kristin Ohlson