buddhism

When she was six, Kristin Ohlson believed and wanted to become a nun. As she grew older, she not only forgot her ambition, but also drifted from Catholicism.

Years later, feeling alone on Christmas morning, Kristin finds an advertisement for mass at Cleveland's St. Paul Shrine. She attends with a few others, but felt she belonged. Still she wondered about the sixteen remaining cloistered nuns at the monastery, who are the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration praying to God 24/7 to lift the sorrows of humanity. Ohlson using the Poor Clares as a spiritual guide has begun a journey to find her own faith though she lacks their dedication and belief and falters often. Thus while committed she wonders if she is crazy.

This is a strong biography due to the author's conflicting dualism and her comparison to her model the Poor Clares. Unlike many books in which middle age crisis leads to healing faith-finding nirvana, Ms. Ohlson admits she teeters back and forth. She confesses that while STALKING THE DIVINE: CONTEMPLATING FAITH WITH THE POOR CLARES whose beliefs encourages her but also frightens her as she pales next to her role models. Readers will feel the same way yet will find they are motivated for the better good.

Harriet Klausner

Kristin Ohlson has filled a void in religious writing and done so beautifully. Not only has she employed her luminous prose to chronicle the history and current state of the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration, a small group of nuns who pray 24/7, she has delved into her own search for faith in a way that is never preachy, cloying or reductive. The best nonfiction writing makes us read and contemplate things we didn't even know we were interested in; frankly, I was not terribly captivated by the subject of cloistered nuns before I started this book. Now, having read Stalking the Divine, I want to know more and I deeply regret never having gone to see the Poor Clares' church and hear them sing when I lived in Cleveland. And I'm a secular Jew, for crying out loud.

This book would have been terrific had it only dealt with the Poor Clares. But for me, the more profound pleasure came from reading about faith from the point of view of a skeptic, someone who recognizes the value of religion and the good it can embody while never ceasing to ask questions. Ohlson craves faith but is too smart to simply jettison her doubts. Thanks to her clear and incisive writing, I found it easy to empathize with her cognitive dissonance: the desire for God on the one hand and the recognition that human beings are fundamentally restless and inquisitive on the other. And that despite being created in God's image, we have a tendency to screw things up a lot of the time.

The world is full of human suffering and all kinds of other crazy, irrational and awful things. Why? Ohlson articulates this question as well as it can be done. She also takes solace in the fact that, behind the grates inside a big old church on a run-down block somewhere in Cleveland, Ohio, a group of women has dedicated itself to prayer in the hopes that things will get better. Amen, Sister.

Whether a spiritual searcher is stalking or being stalked by Divine love and grace, Kristen Ohlen's, Stalking the Divine, is a hope-filled book. She takes us along on her search for 'something' that will speak to her deadness, spark her hope, and fill the void that threatens to engulf. She discovers what lovers of God for thousands of years have discovered, that the God of love, of faith and of hope dwells among us and can be apprehended in the rituals and traditions of her childhood faith.

How blessed are we who long to "fill up with grace, with the radiance of belief" that there are Poor Clares and other faithful comtempletives who pray 'unceasingly.' Through their prayers one day we too may be so full of that Divine Presence that we will be able to shine on others who suffer with "withered hopes and wounded hearts."

Thank you Kristin for your hope-filled book.