Sarah Sayeed, Moderator (Interfaith Center of New York): The first question that’s going to guide us right now is: What is your role within your respective faith tradition?

Fatima Zahra Salhi (Mourchidate from Morocco): My name is Fatima, and I am also mourchidate working with the ministry in charge of religious affairs in Morocco, and I am extremely happy to be here among you because I believe that what gathers us together is more than what separates us.

Mahara’t Sarah Horowitz (Rabbinic Staff, Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, New York): Right before I was going to college, my parents insisted that I take a vocational test to see where my strengths lie. So after this two-day intensive testing, the results showed that I would be best suited for clergy. At the time I laughed, because as a female Orthodox woman there was no opportunity for women to be rabbis.

Rev. Elizabeth Garnsey (Associate Rector, Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest, New York City): I just have an example of a young girl who is eight in my congregation, who grew up in the Episcopal Church. Her grandmother took her on a trip to Virginia to visit the relatives who were of another denomination. In that church there were all male clergy. The little girl said to her grandmother, “Grandma, there’s something wrong with this church. There are no women up there.” She is used to seeing women at the altar. The Episcopal Church just elected, two years ago, as Presiding Bishop, a woman, Katharine Jefferts Schori, who is a former oceanographer, a very brilliant woman and very articulate. She’s the first woman to reach that level of leadership in our church since Elizabeth I in 1500, so it’s a big deal. Among all the provinces in the Anglican Communion she’s the only woman at that level. So at the other end of this spectrum of perception and welcome, her bishop colleagues from certain places of the world will not receive communion if she’s present.

Nezha Nassi (Mourchidate from Morocco): When I counsel women prisoners, they feel more at ease talking to me and opening up to me, and I have the tools actually to talk to them and try to orient them in the right way. Of course, this opportunity was not available to us until the creation of this program, imams and mourchidates. I really don’t feel any difference between the work I do and what the imam does. In fact, I do chair a committee that is composed of imams and mourchidates.

Sarah Sayeed: Is it important to have women doing the kinds of things you’re doing, and is there something new or different that you are bringing as women to this role that your male counterparts cannot do?

Rabbi Stephanie Dickstein (Spiritual Care Coordinator, Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services, New York City): I would say that one thing that is probably different about my rabbinate is that I have never given a sermon using a baseball or other sports metaphor. Another difference I think—and certainly we saw this in chaplaincy work and I see it in my counseling now—is that being a woman makes me more available to people. And so when I walk in the door of someone who has been estranged from Judaism, or never really involved at all—they weren’t rejecting anything; they just never had it—when I walked in the door as a woman rabbi, there was an immediate message, which was: Hey, there’s possibilities for me, even though I don’t fit a certain…I don’t come from a certain background, or I may be angry. If you can be there as a rabbi, maybe there’s possibilities for me within Judaism as well.

Rev. Elizabeth Garnsey: I don’t feel like I’m really on the cutting edge. I feel I’ve inherited the fruits of the hard work of the pioneers in my church and that my responsibility is to take my place as an equal among my colleagues. That’s its own project day to day, and I have to contend with the prejudices of others and assume my role and realize that others can also do the work to learn how to accept and treat females in positions of leadership, just as it happens in the outside world.

Mahara’t Sarah Horowitz: In the Orthodox community it is still revolutionary. Seeing a woman in the forefront of the clergy is revolutionary, however the day-to-day job that I perform is entirely unrevolutionary, entirely normal. A rabbi is a teacher, a role model, a pastoral counselor, somebody who gives guidance in Jewish law as well as life, somebody who facilitates life cycle events. All these roles are functions that a woman can and should and do perform. There are a few things that women in the Orthodox world still do not do. Sometimes these roles are seen as very public. For example—I saw this in some of the restrictions that you have, so I relate—that although on a Shabbat morning, a Sabbath morning, I can address the entire congregation and give a sermon, what I don’t do is lead services.

Nezha Nassi: Concerning leading prayer, we are Malakites. Our doctrine is the Malakites, where woman is not allowed to direct prayer. This is the reason why there was no debate on whether the woman should lead prayer or not, and there was no conflict.

Mahara’t Sarah Horowitz: There are certain areas, of course, that women feel more comfortable coming to me specifically as a woman when it has to do with areas relating to sexuality and other topics that are more sensitive. I’ve found that, whereas women were not coming to rabbis to ask these sensitive questions and they were kind of just suffering themselves, now women have a spiritual leader to turn to.

Ilham Chafik (Mourchidate from Morocco): Concerning the relationship, or what we bring to women, we do feel like we are making a big difference in women’s lives because of sometimes the questions that women cannot ask the imams, and they feel very comfortable asking the mourchidate.

Fatima Zahra Salhi: Just as an example, if there is a conflict in a couple’s life the man actually, given the fact that he trusts the mourchidate, he asks his wife to go and ask advice and counseling from the mourchidate. Whatever decision she takes, or whatever view she gives him, he trusts it.

Mahara’t Sarah Horowitz: I think women bring a unique voice to the table, but I think being in a position of spiritual leadership is about creating relationships and establishing a connection with people.

Rev. Elizabeth Garnsey: I also see my role as bringing along women in the church to assert themselves and to speak up and to have their own voice in the church. The church has long been so male-dominated. There are so many wonderful, fantastic male voices, but there are many lurking in the shadows that are female that need to be brought out, too.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: This coming June Hollywood releases a major motion picture dealing with a difficult ethical issue — genetic engineering. It’s based on one of the novels of Jodi Picoult, who creates bestsellers out of tough moral choices. Bob Faw has the story.

BOB FAW: Squirreled away in her New Hampshire farmhouse and writing at a feverish pace, Jodi Picoult does more than churn out best-selling novels on gut-wrenching moral dilemmas. She also forces her readers to think, even squirm.

JODI PICOULT: I’m not going to tell a person how to think, don’t believe in that. What I want to do, when I write these books, is just to say don’t be so sure of yourself. Let me pull the carpet out from underneath you, and let’s see if you can still find the footing.

FAW: She has done in each of her 16 books, which have sold over 15 million copies — some so provocative, with so many twists and turns, they’ve been turned into films. Next month Hollywood releases her “My Sister’s Keeper,” which explores the implications of genetic engineering.

(Video clip from “My Sister’s Keeper”)

ANNA: Most babies are accidents. Not me. I was engineered — born to save my sister’s life.

FAW: What happens, Picoult asks, when the child conceived to help save her sister decides that she doesn’t want to?

(Video clip from “My Sister’s Keeper”):

MOTHER: What’s going on? Anna, you’re suing us?

ANNA: I don’t want to do it anymore Mom. It’s my body. I want to be able to make my own decisions on what to do with it.

Ms. PICOULT: You may read that book and say it is morally wrong to conceive a child to save the life of another sick child. But if I put you on, you know, underneath the microscope, if I point a finger at you and say you are in that situation, can you honestly tell me, as a parent, that you would not do anything you had to, to save the life of your child? I really defy you to be able to say that you would not do it, too.

FAW: Picoult chooses contemporary topics like that, often ripped from the headlines, for example, examining the death penalty in “Change of Heart.” After the tragedy at Columbine, she wrote “19 Minutes,” which focuses not only on bullying but on the moral dilemma of parents whose son has, as in Columbine, gunned down 10 of his classmates.

Ms. PICOULT: Can you be a good parent and still wind up with a child that commits a horrific act? And if your child does that, how can you love a child that does that? If you’re a good parent how can you not love him?

FAW: What has to resonate with you before you embark on a topic?

Ms. PICOULT: It has to be something that I’m usually worried about — something that keeps me up at night. It’s the thing that’s like a splinter in your brain that won’t go away — that you keep circling back to, over and over. And I keep thinking about it and asking myself questions like what would you do in that situation, or what if this parameter had changed? And I keep thinking about that. I know it’s going to be a great idea for a book.

FAW: In “The Tenth Circle” Picoult explores the moral choices facing a teenager living in a culture of sexuality and drugs. Her latest book, “Handle with Care,” which is already at the top of the charts, centers around a five-year-old girl, Willow, who has a severe disability.

Ms. PICOULT (talking to audience): The family has found, like many other families who are struggling to raise a child with a disability, that money is a big problem, because there’s not a lot out there in terms of insurance or funding, and that’s sort of the situation that we walk into when “Handle with Care” opens. (Begins reading from novel): Pick 10 strangers and stick them in a room and ask them which one of us they feel sorrier for — you or me?”

FAW: The girl has osteogenesis imperfecta, leaving her with bones so brittle she will have thousands of breaks during her lifetime. To pay for her care, her mother files a wrongful birth suit against her obstetrician, who is also the mother’s best friend.

Ms. PICOULT: I think many of my books, including “Handle with Care,” including “My Sister’s Keeper” circle back to how far are we willing to go for the people we love? I think love changes the way we think. It’s the thing that takes you out of what your normal set of beliefs would be.

FAW: Picoult does extensive research for each book—visiting the Rhode Island Crime Lab for an upcoming novel, spending time on death row for “Change of Heart,” or staying on an Amish farm for “Plain Truth.” What sets her apart isn’t just the research and her painstaking attention to detail. What also sets her apart is her refusal to take the easy way out.

This is from “Vanishing Acts,” at the very end, the daughter (reading from book): “My mother and father are both right, and at the same time they are both wrong.”

Ms. PICOULT: I think that’s totally possible, and I do believe very often the closer we are to a person who’s causing us to take these actions, the blurrier that line gets for us.

FAW: It’s a willingness to grapple with all sides of a debate which has won her an almost cult-like following. Sally Crouch and her daughter, Beth, drove four hours to see Picoult at this Baltimore book signing.

BETH CROUCH: Even though it seems like black and white, I think she writes it so you really don’t know. She leaves it up to you to decide.

FAW: It’s a sentiment echoed by many of her readers.

LEAH CARTER: I think she just keeps your mind open to everything. Like, you know, if you have an opinion about one topic, then all of sudden now you can see maybe somebody else’s side of the story.

FAW: And Picoult doesn’t sugar-coat those issues. In her “Plain Truth,” for example, where an Amish teenager is charged with murdering her out-of-wedlock baby, an entire religious community is put on trial.

(From novel “Plain Truth”): In fact, Katie Fitch is the first Amish person in this state to be charged with murder, ever. You know why? Because Amish people don’t commit murder — ever.

FAW: Picoult’s portrayal is harsh. Here the villain is none other than a devout Amish mother.

Ms. PICOULT: I think that what I did was strip away the rose-colored glasses, because we have so idealized their existence, their simplicity of life and, you know, their adherence to faith that we’re not seeing them very clearly. Their citizens run the gamut.

FAW: Religion, says Picoult, has brought comfort and misery. She does not affiliate herself with any formal religion.

Ms. PICOULT: I do believe in God, though, and yet I totally support the fact that there are people who do not believe in God, and I think that if you are Catholic, that’s great, and I think if you’re Protestant, that’s great, and if you’re Jewish, that’s great, and I firmly believe that there is just not one way to do it.

FAW: Even though she forces her readers to think about the unthinkable, Picoult says for herself she’s never been happier in that New Hampshire home she shares with Delilah and Quigley, two miniature donkeys.

Ms. PICOULT: Even though I don’t write about things that come from my life because I’m — I’m lucky, and I live in a great place with great kids and, you know, a great husband, I think you can find threads of me in the characters, so that’s really what being a writer is, probably. It’s being able to dilute something about you — just a tiny little dollop of it into, you know, the heart or the soul of different characters. You are always bleeding a little piece of yourself into everybody.

FAW: Although some people of faith would say there is always a right or wrong side, for Picoult that choice is not so clear and can be agonizing to make.

Ms. PICOULT (reading from book): “Here are the things I know for sure. When you think you’re right, you are most likely wrong.”

FAW: When you think you’re right, you are most likely wrong.

Ms. PICOULT: You might think you’re on one side of it and find out you’re actually on the other.

FAW: Agonizing choices in a confusing world — the ideal ingredients for a novelist and former teacher.

Ms. PICOULT: It’s certainly my honor to be able to, hopefully, change the world a tiny bit, one mind at a time. If you can make them understand why someone with a differing opinion has that opinion and at least come to respect that opinion, I think you make the world a better place. I think I’m still teaching. It’s just a really big classroom.

FAW: Jodi Picoult, delving into the moral complexities and ambiguities of modern life and helping her readers navigate where choices are rarely black and white, but what one of her characters calls “a thousand shades of gray.”

(Video clip from “My Sister’s Keeper”)

LAWYER: You’re supposed to give her a kidney?

ANNA: I want to sue my parents for the rights to my own body.

LAWYER: Would you repeat that, please?

FAW: For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, this is Bob Faw in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Even though it’s sophisticated coursework, the only pre-requisite for admission to the Barefoot College is that there are no pre-requisites, not even to speak the language.

Until we arrived with a translator, these Mauritanian women who’d been here four months hadn’t spoken to anyone else in Arabic, the only language they know. But language is not a barrier to learning, says the college’s founder.

BUNKER ROY (Founder, Barefoot College): Our job is to show how it is possible to take an illiterate woman and make her into an engineer in six months and show that she can solar-electrify a village.

DE SAM LAZARO: Bunker Roy, a social activist influenced by Gandhi, founded the Barefoot College in 1972. He wanted to use traditional knowledge and sustainable technology to help this impoverished desert region. It began with basics, like finding safe drinking water, then several years later, solar energy.

Mr. ROY: In 1986, no one ever thought of solar electrification. It was far too expensive. But today we have 50 kilowatts of panels on our roofs. All our 20, 30 computers, electronic machines, telephone exchange — all work off solar.

DE SAM LAZARO: Today solar energy drives not just the equipment. This is a larger social experiment to improve the lives of some of the world’s poorest people. It begins in the classroom run by instructors who themselves have little or no formal education. Instruction is delivered with a mix of body language, a few essential terms in English, and lots of hands-on practice.

The students create an illustrated manual they’ll take home. It’s the closest thing to a diploma certifying their training as solar technicians. But just coming here is an unlikely achievement for students like 56-year-old Sarka Mussara, a widowed grandmother. She’d never attended school or even left her village in the West African nation of Mauritania.

Sarka Mussara

SARKA MUSSARA (Student, through translator): At first we did not even have a passport. We started little by little learning the solar energy system. Day by day and little by little we were able to put things together.

DE SAM LAZARO: Roy was educated at elite Indian schools, on a path to medicine or diplomatic service before he founded the Barefoot College. The idea of self-reliant learning was inspired by Mahatma Gandhi — also by a legendary American.

Mr. ROY: Well, it’s Mark Twain who said never let school interfere with your education. School is something that you learn — reading and writing. Education is what you learn from the family, from the environment, from the community.

DE SAM LAZARO: Using grants from the U.N. and private foundations, Roy travels extensively in developing countries, seeking potential students. He doesn’t want city dwellers or, unless they are physically handicapped, men.

Mr. ROY: We’ve come to the sad conclusion men are untrainable. They expect too much. They are restless. If they’re young, they’re impatient. The first thing they ask even before the training starts is, do I get a certificate? They will use that certificate to get the worst job possible in a city, whereas if we take middle-aged grandmothers to be trained I don’t have that problem of migration.

DE SAM LAZARO: Their new skills and income should improve these women’s standing at home and in the community — communities that, like much of the developing world, are not electrified.

Mr. ROY (to students, through translator): How many houses are in the town?

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN STUDENT #1: About 500 people.

Mr. ROY: Five hundred.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN STUDENT #2 (speaking to Mr. Roy, through translator): May God reward you for what you have done, because those people did not have any light and now they will have light.

DE SAM LAZARO: And these women will have an income installing and maintaining solar systems. They are a common sight in villages near the Barefoot campus, where people have replaced lanterns that use dirtier and more expensive fuels.

Bunker Roy

Mr. ROY: We said they should pay as much as you pay today for kerosene, for wood, for batteries, for torches, for candles. Comes to about $5 a month. They’re willing to pay $5 a month for the use of a solar light.

DE SAM LAZARO: Solar has opened new opportunities for work and study, especially for girls. In both the majority Hindu and minority Muslim communities here girls have traditionally been restricted to household chores.

Mr. ROY: It is the girls who go and graze the cattle and graze the goats and the sheep. There is a feeling in the family that the boys should be getting better education — better education, whatever that means. So we started the night schools of Tilonia in 1975, purely from the point of view of attracting more girls who graze cattle in the morning to come to school at night.

DE SAM LAZARO: Today some 7000 children attend night school here and across rural north India. In song, these girls plead to their parents to allow them to study, to delay marriage until they turn the legal age of 18. That law is frequently ignored in rural society

PUPPETEER (during performance speaking with kids, through translator): OK, eight and five make how much?

KIDS (through translator): Thirteen.

PUPPETEER: And 10 plus three?

KIDS (through translator): Thirteen.

DE SAM LAZARO: Entertainment programs promote the Barefoot College and encourage children to attend school. There have also been various other campaigns to promote public health and citizen demands for government transparency. The new economic activity seems to be eroding social barriers. For example, several women work to create solar stoves, a Barefoot College enterprise. The solar cookers made at the Barefoot College are a simple but precisely engineered contraption. These mirrors track and capture the sun’s energy and direct it to a cooker, which really cooks. For these technicians, most with little or no formal education, working here means they can hope for better things for their children.

SITA DEVI (Solar Technician, trough translator): My daughter must be educated. She will be able to do things, to progress so much faster than I can because of going to school more. For me, for example, it takes so much more time to measure out three centimeters when I’m welding here, whereas someone who is educated could do it in no time.

Shahnaz Banu

SHAHNAZ BANU (Solar Technician, through translator): In our village, in our community, women were not allowed outside the house. My husband was reluctant. But I said if we stay behind the veil we won’t have anything to eat. Some people object to women working, but if we can add income to the household that’s a good thing, isn’t it?

DE SAM LAZARO: Roy says a key to sustaining rural jobs and development is to use technology that can be managed by the local community, like solar lanterns and technology that’s more familiar, like rainwater collectors.

Mr. ROY: All the roofs of this whole campus are connected underground to a 400,000 liter tank. We collect every drop of rain that falls on the campus.

DE SAM LAZARO: For Roy, decentralization is the key. It’s a departure from the typical approach of aid agencies, which he says want to bring big infrastructure and big ideas created by outside experts.

Mr. ROY: If you ask an engineer what they think is the solution, they’ll have one power plant of five kilowatts that you saw on the roofs of the campus and then have transmission lines going to the houses, centralized. We say no. The solution is decentralized right down to the household level, where the house actually maintains and looks after the solar unit. It shouldn’t be centralized. Any technology that brings in dependency on anybody on the outside is not a technology that will work.

DE SAM LAZARO: So far, Barefoot College has solar electrified some 350 villages across India and dozens more in sub-Saharan Africa and even war-torn Afghanistan.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, this is Fred De Sam Lazaro in Rajasthan, India.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We have a profile today of the poet and writer Kathleen Norris, whose books have won her many admirers, especially among religious believers. After nearly 10 years of literary silence she has a new book out called “Acedia and Me.” Acedia, Norris says, is a kind of spiritual gloom that she has endured on and off since she was 15.

Kathleen Norris

KATHLEEN NORRIS (Author and Poet): It’s an ancient word that basically means the inability to care, even to the extent that you can’t care that you don’t care anymore. It’s sort of a really drastic, nasty form of indifference.

ABERNETHY: Norris first became popular in the ’90s with a story about her life on the Great Plains, to which she and her husband had moved from New York City. The book was called “Dakota.” In the Dakotas, and then at St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota, Norris discovered Benedictine monasteries and the ancient practice of chanting the psalms five times a day. She wrote about monastic life in “The Cloister Walk.” Next, in “Amazing Grace,” Norris offered her thoughts on Christian language, and in “The Virgin of Bennington” she wrote primarily about poetry.

“All thought of writing was shoved to the side.”

And then, nothing more. The books stopped coming. What happened was that Norris had to become a full-time caregiver — now, to her 91-year-old mother in Hawaii, where Norris grew up. Earlier, it was her father who needed care, and her sister, and especially her husband David, who suffered severe mental and physical illness for many years until his death from cancer in 2003.

Ms. NORRIS: The last 10 years, I would say, have been really rough, and in some senses this book is a miracle to me because I was able to finish it at all. There were so many temptations, especially after my husband died, to just give up and say, “Why write at all? Why bother?” Which is — the ultimate question with acedia is “Why bother? Why care? Why do anything?” All thought of writing was sort of shoved to the side for me.

ABERNETHY: Norris thinks acedia is different from depression.

Ms. NORRIS: If I’m depressed I tend to know the reasons why. With acedia there is no cause. It just sort of pops up, and I might wake up in the morning thinking, “Oh, this is going to be a good day,” and then all of a sudden the thought, “No, it won’t be,” and maybe I shouldn’t get out of bed.

ABERNETHY: Slowly, eventually, Norris managed to get back to her book. On the day it was finally published, she was at the Washington National Cathedral recalling how hard the process had been.

At Washington National Cathedral

Ms. NORRIS (speaking at Washington National Cathedral): Coming back to the project always felt like climbing a mountain in a raging hailstorm. On more days than I care to recall, I would settle for reading thrillers or even watching “America’s Next Top Model” marathons.

ABERNETHY: Norris had learned from the Benedictines that one way to combat the indifference of acedia was praying the psalms. Other remedies were physical work, exercise, and baking bread. Perhaps most important for her was accepting her family responsibilities.

Ms. NORRIS: One of the reasons I decided that I’d better not have children is because I really didn’t want to be a caregiver. So it is something that has been imposed on me, and I have really had to learn how to cope with that, how to be patient and loving instead of irritable and impatient and, believe me, it is a struggle, and I don’t always make it. To think, if I’m with this person, helping them do this ordinary task, like going to the bathroom, that’s the most important thing I can be doing with my life at the moment — to convince myself of that every day.

ABERNETHY: One thing that made Norris want to get the book finished and published was her sense that acedia might be a problem for the whole country.

Ms. NORRIS: I realized that acedia was not just a personal problem, but really it’s one that we suffer as a society. I think we often adopt that attitude of indifference because we’re being asked to care about so much. We just are exhausted.

ABERNETHY: Ever since she was a schoolgirl, Norris found refuge at Hawaii’s main public library, from which she borrows and returns books by the bagful. Meanwhile, she says she’s also learned a lot from taking care of others.

Ms. NORRIS: A friend asked me after my husband died, “Well, have you lost your faith?” And my gut reaction, my instant response was to say “Of course not.” I mean, people die. This is what happens. That’s not God out to get me. That’s just a fact of life is that people die. So it really — it didn’t shake my faith, really. It made me feel just more like everyone else in the universe. You know, people you love are going to suffer and die, and you somehow have to learn how to cope with that.

The opposite of acedia is love.

ABERNETHY: Norris says the opposite of acedia, and its most powerful antidote, is love.

Ms. NORRIS: I think part of the struggle just of everyday life is remembering that the love is there. It’s just, it’s a constant. And to wake up in the morning and realize that love is there in the world, it’s there in your relationships — if I can do that, that’s half the battle.

ABERNETHY: In Honolulu, Norris continues to take care of her mother. She says acedia remains a part of her, something she just has to live with. She would like to write more poems, she says, or in a perfect world she would follow a book on acedia with a comic novel. But she knows very well that the world is not perfect.

Kathleen Norris

Q: Let’s start out with “acedia.” What is it?

A: It’s an ancient word that basically means the inability to care, even to the extent that you can’t care that you don’t care anymore. It’s sort of a really drastic, nasty form of indifference.

Q: It’s not depression?

A: Not exactly. There really are distinctions. One of the things I had to tackle in writing this book was to talk about why depression is not exactly the same as acedia, even though it shares a lot of the same symptoms, and I believe that depression is a medical condition — clinical depression — that can be treated by medicine and therapy and a number of — there are a number of ways to treat it. But acedia is something, I think, that’s just more common. Most of us probably have experienced it in some form or another. When you’re totally restless and totally bored but can’t think of anything that you want to do, or you are restless in another way and you try to escape from it by becoming hyperactive, being a workaholic, that’s another form that acedia takes.

Q: It sounds as if it covers a whole lot of things, but tell about your own experience with it. What have you felt?

A: Acedia just sort of will creep up on me. If I’m depressed, I tend to know the reasons why. There tends to be something I can point to in my life in saying of course I’m depressed, this has happened. You know, my father is dying, or my husband is dying, or something really drastic is going on in my life, and there’s a reason why I’m depressed. With acedia, there’s no cause. It just sort of pops up, and I might wake up in the morning thinking, “Oh, this is gonna be a good day,” and then all of a sudden the thought, “No, it won’t be, and maybe I shouldn’t get out of bed.” There’s no reason to get out of bed. Or if I do get out of bed, instead of going to read a good book, I’ll watch “America’s Next Top Model” or something and, you know, throwing me off things I either really know I want to do, or ought to do, whatever. It sort of throws me off, and that’s one of my common, I guess probably my most common, experience of that is that just really sour mood that just takes hold for no reason at all.

Q: But you’ve indicated that it’s more than that. It’s a spiritual problem that you liken to sin.

A: Well, I tend not to use the word “sin.” I really prefer — because there’s so much baggage with that, and so many people think when you use the word “sin” when it comes to acedia or depression you’re trying to make people feel guilty about being mentally ill, which is crazy. You shouldn’t do that, or you’re, you know, so I tend not to use the word “sin.” The word I prefer is what the ancient monks used, which is “bad thoughts,” because we all have bad thoughts. We all have temptations, and that’s a much more useful designation than the word “sin.”

Q: And it began a long time ago for you?
A: Well, really, probably in adolescence, and this was one of the reasons I wrote the book was because, all of a sudden, I was looking at this book by a fourth-century monk, and he was basically describing an experience that I’d had at the age of 15, or first had at the age of 15, and I read this passage, where he just — a monk named Evagrius, he was describing something I knew very well, and I was thinking, well, this guy’s writing 1600 years ago.

Kathleen Norris

How can this be? But in a way, it’s not different from anybody who’s reading a book, and you find the writer has put into words something that you know but have never been able to name. It’s that wonderful experience, I think, that keeps us reading, because that’s why we — one of the reasons we love to read is because writers will do that for us. But here was a man writing 1600 years ago, and so it was really thrilling to me. And I thought, I wonder if there’s a book here, because this was such a powerful experience, and it certainly led me to want to know more about acedia.

Q: What you’ve been through in the last five or six years or more is enough not only to have produced a lot of grief, but probably a lot of depression, and probably acedia. If you would, just remind us of what happened to you within these last few years.

A: Well, in the last, I guess, six years I lost my father, who was a wonderful man that I was — I was very close to my father. And the year after that, five years ago, my husband died. So that was — neither death was unexpected, but of course you’re never prepared, and for really five years even before that, for a full ten years my husband was very gravely ill. He had a number of medical crises. So, really, all thoughts of writing were sort of shoved to the side for me, and acedia is the kind of thing that can take advantage of that and look — you look at your life and you think, “Well, I used to write, but why bother anymore?” Depression also can come into play. It’s certainly [there] when grieving. Again, that’s a thing you can look at your life and you understand why you’re depressed, because very depressing things have been happening. So, yeah, the last ten years, I would say, have been really rough, and in some senses this book is a miracle to me because I was able to finish it at all. It — there were so many temptations, especially after my husband died, to just give up and say why write at all? Why bother, which is — the ultimate question with acedia is why bother? Why care? Why do anything?

Q: How do you combat it once it comes to you? What do you do as an antidote?

A: Oh, for acedia, you know, the antidote that the early monks recommended still helps. You go to the psalms and start reading the psalms, and let them help kick you out of that mood that you’re in, and that is still, for me, a pretty good remedy, because the psalms are so emotional and so direct and so personal. So that sometimes works. Often just going for a walk. One abbot that I talked to said, you know, when a young monk comes and says, you know, they’ve lost that romantic image of their monastic life and they’re just dying to get out of the place, he recommends physical labor — anything to get them out of what he called “the closed circle of the self.” And he said if they’re clinically depressed, he said he would send them to a psychiatrist or a doctor at least to check that out. But he said often just mopping the floors, gardening, going for walks, you know — getting out in the world and realizing how beautiful it is — that will help with acedia. With depression, it might not. If it’s clinical depression, that might not be enough to help. But with acedia, it usually works.

Q: For a long time you have been primarily a caregiver. How do you see that role? What has it done to you to be a caretaker?

A: Well, one of the ironies that occurred to me when I was writing this book is the fact that I really have been caregiving now for ten years for my husband, for my father a little bit, and then now for my mother, who’s 91. One of the reasons I decided that I’d better not have children is because I really didn’t want to be in the role of a caregiver. So it’s something that’s been imposed on me, and I’ve really had to learn how to cope with that, how to be patient and loving instead of irritable and impatient, and believe me it is a struggle, and I don’t always make it. You know, there are days — but it’s been, I think, for me a deep spiritual struggle to overcome my resistance — to think if I’m with this person, helping them do this ordinary task like going to the bathroom, that’s the most important thing I can be doing with my life at the moment, to convince myself of that every day. And then you can have fun. My mother still has a wonderful sense of humor. We joke, you know, about our poop emergencies, or whatever it is, and we can laugh about it, and that just relieves everything. But it is a constant struggle, and I think anybody who’s been doing caregiving understands that it is a constant struggle.

Q: What do you do to get through it?

A: That whole thing of telling myself this is the most important thing I can be doing with my life, to be with this person right now doing this stupid, ordinary, household task. That’s important, and we’re going to do it together, and that helps. It really does. Because otherwise I’m thinking of other things I could be doing. I’m wanting to hurry up someone who can’t hurry, you know, that kind of thing. There’s no future in that. That’s stupid, and so you just kind of — I find myself, the impatience arising, and I’m thinking wait a minute, you know. Put a hold on it. That’s not going to work.

Q: What does all that do to your writing?

A: Well, it complicates things, I guess, and I think that keeping the spirit of writing, the desire to write, alive is a big struggle with caregiving. I can always get up a little extra earlier in the morning. I can always get up earlier in the morning to set aside some time for writing, and if I have a big project set aside some time where I know I’m going to do that. But, again, it — that’s part of the big struggle, because if you’re a freelancer you have all this free time that you can devote to writing or to caregiving. But you have to figure out how it’s going to work for you.

Q: Are you planning to stay in Hawaii?

A: Well, it’s up in the air. Hawaii is an easier place to visit than it is to live, in many ways. It’s a very expensive place to live. But of course my family has been there since 1959, since actually before it was a state. So as long as my mother is going strong and living there, I will be there a good part of the time. It is a great place to go in winter, especially if you’ve wintered so often in South Dakota.

Q: Why were you drawn to monks and their monastic life? What was it about that that was especially meaningful for you?

A: I think one of the strangest, the most delightful serendipities in my life, really, was discovering the Benedictines, and I really didn’t go out of a spiritual desire. I didn’t really know much about monasteries at all. But there I was in western South Dakota, and there was this monastery 90 miles away that was offering some talks and lectures and music concerts and things like that, and out there those are hard to come by. So I went up there with a clergy couple, friends of mine, and had a wonderful time, and I stumbled into Morning Prayer, and I thought, “Well, this is great.” I didn’t even know what the monks were reciting. But they were reciting the psalms. But they — “Come on,” you know, “sit down, join us” sort of thing. Their hospitality’s extraordinary. So I discovered this group of people that was a men’s community first, and then the women are five miles away. So the two communities of men and women who were living this life based on literature, based on reciting and praying the psalms all day, based on poetry. I mean, the psalms are poetry. And I thought — then I found out they’d been doing this for 1700 years. All of it just really attracted me. And I started — what I normally do any time I discover something new for me is I start reading. And so they had a great library. They decided I was trustworthy, and they would loan me some books, and a number of the monks there are scholars, and so they’d recommend this book or that book to me. So it just got me on a whole course of reading. But it really was an accident, one of the happiest accidents of my life.

Q: And St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota? That came later, did it?

A: That came later.

Q: And you became an oblate of the first place, didn’t you?

A: Yeah.

Q: What does that mean?

A: An oblate of a monastery is someone who is affiliated with them. They’ve become an associate through studying the Rule of Benedict, sometimes praying the same book of prayers that the monks or nuns are using — just someone who wants a closer connection with the Benedictine community.

Q: Talk about St. John’s Abbey. I think you wrote THE CLOISTER WALK about that, or while you were there, or both maybe. But talk about that and what it does for you to be there.

A: I finished my first book of prose, DAKOTA, at St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota, and I had the opportunity to go there really for a whole school year, to go to a place called the Collegeville Institute that’s on the grounds. My husband and I had an apartment on the grounds of the monastery, and I could walk up to the prayers at their beautiful church, and also I had a study in their library to use. So it was a wonderful opportunity for a writer. And then I went back a second time a few years later, and I hadn’t really intended to write about Benedictines. But I thought these people are living such an interesting life, and they’re such interesting people, and nobody knows about them. I mean, they don’t advertise, you know? They don’t put up signs in neon saying monastery here, you know, drop in. But they’re so interesting, and I thought, I have to write about them. So I started the book THE CLOISTER WALK about my relationship with Benedictines at St. John’s, in North and South Dakota — a number of communities. I’m very grateful to St. John’s for really providing me that time and space to write, and it’s a beautiful setting. They’ve got 2500 acres, mostly woods and lakes.

Q: What about praying the psalms? Talk about what that means to you.

A: I’m very grateful to the Benedictines for sort of reintroducing me to the psalms, or even introducing me to the psalms, because as someone who grew up in churches all my life, I knew the psalms from Sunday morning readings, which tend to be snippets of the more cheerful, happy psalms, I guess you’d call them, or hymns of praise. So I knew a little bit about them. But when you go to visit a monastery and join a bunch of Benedictines in prayer, you really get the whole book of psalms, and you get to know the psalms, and they have — every human emotion is there: the desire for revenge, anger, jealousy, along with great joy. Every human emotion is sort of laid bare before God. And it’s quite extraordinary, because sometimes when you run across the vengeful psalms you think, I don’t want to pray this. This is really negative. But you realize, well, yeah, I have felt that emotion, or that’s part of being a human is to feel the desire for revenge. I might as well pray it and send it up to God and then not act on it. I mean I’m not going to act on my desire for revenge. I’m just going to get rid of it or vent it, really, through this psalm. It’s really an extraordinary book, and I think, like a lot of Christians, I had very little exposure to it, because I only had heard the snippets on Sunday morning, and so discovering this book of really deep, human psychology, in a way, was one of the Benedictines’ great gifts to me.

Q: How did all that suffering you endured for ten years or more, the deaths of those people who were very close to me, affect the way you see things? How did it affect your spiritual life? How did it change you?

A: When I look at my husband’s suffering, because he was the one who was suffering all of these medical crises, and of course I suffered along with him, but he was the one who was really suffering the worst of it. I think I learned a lot from him about what it means to accept suffering that you can’t get out of. You accept and go on living with gratitude and even with joy. Even though, you know, here was a man who used to walk six miles a day around Honolulu, and he was confined to a wheelchair and even using a walker to walk around our little apartment because he was so afraid of falling, and he could somehow cope with that diminishment in a way that didn’t diminish him. He didn’t lash out. He was wonderful. And I’m thinking, oh, you know — I learned a lot about how you really — how to live, I think, just from observing him and how he handled all of this awful stuff, and I also learned that I needed to take care of myself and to go to exercise class faithfully and just sort of do things that would help me keep going.

Q: What I really want to do is get you to speak about how your own view of the world, of life, and your own spiritual life was affected by all that suffering that you had to endure.

A: You know, when you accompany someone to a chemotherapy ward, you know, you’re concerned with their suffering, but you see so much suffering all around you and people in all sorts of stages of anger and denial and pain, and I guess it just gave me a perspective on life itself, really valuing any kind of health that you have, any kind of good thing that comes your way, valuing and respecting that and not letting the little things get you irritated or angry — keeping things in perspective. Benedict says it beautifully in the Rule of Benedict: “Remind yourself daily that you’re going to die,” which can be a morbid preoccupation. But I don’t think it has to be if it helps you value life, if it helps you value the daily life that you have, just ordinary life, because you’re — especially the experience I had watching my father die over six years of anemia, and my husband’s struggles — that, you know, life is beautiful. It’s worth living, and it comes to an end, and just keeping that all into perspective. I think the last ten years have taught me a lot about that, about how to let the little things go and focus on what really matters.

Q: Did you feel abandoned by God?

A: In fact, you know, a friend asked me after my husband died, “Well, have you lost your faith?” And my gut reaction, my instant response was to say, “Of course not.” I mean, people die. This is what happens. That’s not God out to get me. That’s just a fact of life is that people die. So it really — it didn’t shake my faith, really. It made me feel just more like everyone else in the universe. You know, people you love are going to suffer and die, and you somehow have to learn how to cope with that, you know, in a way that doesn’t diminish you and narrow your perspective so much that you reject other people and you reject the good things that life has to offer.

Q: How do you think about acedia and not just you, or me, or others, but our whole country, or the whole modern world? How do you think about that?

A: One of the things that convinced me that I had to finish this book was when I realized that acedia was not just a personal problem, but really it’s one that we suffer as a society with our workaholism and our glorification of indifference, two poles or two things on opposite poles. I think our society really does suffer from indifference. It’s communal, and ultimately it affects not just me but the people I love, the people at my job, the people at my church, people I know, but also the broader society, and it was interesting, when I would talk to people about what I was writing about I couldn’t just say “sloth,” because that sounded like, well, physical laziness, who cares? When I would say “acedia” no one knew what it was. But when I said spiritual sloth and indifference, then people could connect. I said, “Don’t you think indifference is a big problem in our society?” “Well, yeah.” And the inability to care even that you can’t care and people moving on restlessly seeking something better but forgetting that they’re going to take their problems with them when they go. Our lack, our inability to commit to relationships or to long-term situations, like jobs, that — oh, something else might look better. That’s a real symptom of acedia, when you keep moving on because the grass looks greener. But when you get there you find out that you still have the same old problems you had. You haven’t left yourself behind. And you can’t. So all of that, I think, strikes me as a big problem that we have as a society. Sometimes we’re bombarded with so much to care about that we can no longer determine what it is we really should care about and what we shouldn’t care about it. Is it Britney Spears or the price of oil or child abuse? We get it all at once on the news media, and we don’t know what to care about. And the other thing that happens, I think, we often adopt that attitude of indifference because we’re being asked to care about so much we just are exhausted. One of the other aspects of acedia, and this is from the ancient literature, is that it drives people to seek a better place, someplace where they might be better appreciated: because nobody I work with or live with now really appreciates me, I’m going to move on to a better place. And, of course, that’s a real symptom, I think, in our society. We’re reluctant to commit to a marriage, or a job, or living in one place because someplace else, some other person, something might be better. And the problem with that is, if you keep pushing on, if you keep moving on to the next best place or you keep pushing yourself to move to the next best place, you find that you still have your old problems with you because they’re part of you. You’ve brought them with you.

In some ways, this book is very much like my other books because it’s a personal memoir, but I’ve contained it within a larger subject. I like to do that. You know, with DAKOTA it was the farm crisis and life on the Great Plains in the 1980s. With this book, I realized I had to try to tie together a number of things: my personality, which is susceptible to acedia, much more than to depression; my life as a writer, because writers are very susceptible to acedia, to not believing in themselves. So I had to tie in some of my personality, my life as a writer and, above all, my marriage, because my husband and I represent — I mean he was sort of a classic depressive. He was analyzed, you know, by doctors as being depressed, while I pretty much suffer from acedia. All of these things had to somehow come together, and I think that’s one of the reasons it took me so long to write this book. I started collecting material for this book over 20 years ago. But I think to try to tie all of that together, to see how it could be done really took a long time.

Q: I want to invite you to talk about your spiritual life, your way of looking at things, even more than you have. After all this time, all these things that have happened, the acedia, everything, you know, where do you come out? How do you see the world? How do you see life? How do you see your spiritual life? How do you see God after all this?

A: Well, I will always be grateful to the Benedictines for introducing me to the word “acedia,” because it really has helped me understand my life. And of course the monks wrote about the bad thoughts, but they also wrote about the virtues — that you work through the bad thoughts to get to the virtue on the other side. And of course the opposite of anger is depression. They realized that in the fourth century. The opposite of acedia is love. So if you can work your way out of your own little personal whatever you’re going through, you know, you’re bored, you’re indifferent, a little angry here or there, whatever it is, you work through that to love — then you’ve made it. Then you’ve got something to hold onto that won’t go away. Love really does spring eternal. It’s there. It’s just often we can’t see it, we can’t find it in caregiving. You know, you’re angry, you’re impatient with this person, and you realize, “Wait a minute, I really do love them, so let’s just calm down here and do what needs to be done.” In this book I really try to tie all of that together: my marriage, my relationship with monks, and the fact that they introduced me to this whole concept that really has helped to define my life.

Q: Can you talk just a little bit more about working through what’s bothering you to love? How do you do that?

A: I think part of the struggle, just of everyday life, is remembering that the love is there. It’s just — it’s a constant. And the days when you can’t see it, you might be suffering from anger, pride, boredom, or acedia, whatever it is. But the love is there. It’s not going away. You know, the love of nature, the love of other people who are close to you. That’s what you — it’s hard to keep that in mind. But that is there. It’s there all the time. And the person who really points it out, that love is the opposite of acedia, not only are they monks, but Thomas Aquinas. My eyes cross when I try to read Thomas. I don’t have his kind of mind. But he is really right that acedia tempts you to really reject all of the demands that love is going to make on you. It’s just too much work. You don’t want to care that much. But if you can work your way past the acedia and the self-interest that’s always going to come up into really loving someone, you’re going to be able to help them if they need help, or be with them, or share their joys, or share their griefs. So I think that’s the constant. And to wake up in the morning and realize that love is there in the world, it’s there in your relationships — if I can do that, that’s half the battle. If I wake up in the morning and say, “Oh hell, why give a damn?” then I’m already starting off on the wrong foot. I think when crises come, you know, when the people you love die, it really helps to have some kind of family. It could be friends. It could be a favorite place you like to go and hike, and just looking at the birds and listening to the sound of running water. It can be a number of things. But for me, having close family relationships and having a church family have been really godsends in this situation that — because I remember the — my husband died on a Friday, and on Sunday I went to church, and I think I was still in shock because for several months afterwards I had a hard time going to church. But on the Sunday after he died, I went to church and immediately was surrounded by widows, older widows who’d been through this 20, 40 years before who had all these wonderful words for me that really meant something. You know, “Don’t do anything rash. It does get better,” just these things I needed to hear. You can count on a church family, really, to provide for you during those times, because you are with a group of people that you haven’t chosen. It’s just this group who have come together, you know, to worship God. But because of the nature of a church community, you’ll find people with a variety of experiences. They have been through what you’ve been through. If you have a sick child, you’ve lost your husband, somebody else in that congregation knows what you’re going through, and that really helps a great deal, and then there’s also the fact that you’re listening to scriptures and stories that kind of take you out of yourself for a moment or two. And the Sunday after my husband died the gospel was Jesus asking some man, “What do you want me to do for you?” I went, okay, I think I’ve got my little question for the week, or the month, or the rest of my life. Jesus is asking me this, and I have no idea how to respond. But that helps. Having a church family really helped.

Q: Aside from praying the psalms, how else do you pray?

A: Oh, how do I pray? Well, I am officially on the prayer chain of my church. We email each other. That’s how we keep our list up-to-date, and I think just having this group of people that I’m committed to praying for every day helps me to remember to pray. Because it’s — you know, I’m not so virtuous that prayer is the first thing that leaps to mind every morning. Not at all. So the psalms help. Having other people sort of counting on me, knowing that I’m praying for them kind of helps. And I think there’s just, you know, prayer doesn’t have to be a certain thing. I think you can live a prayer. I felt this very strongly when I was caregiving for [my husband] David. I talk about the prayer of the commode, that for a couple of years there the first thing I had to do every morning when I got up was clean my husband’s commode, which is not really fun. But at the same time, it meant my husband was still alive, so it was not as bad as it could be. I sort of joked with myself about it: “I think I’m making the prayer of the commode this morning.” Just to be able to do that in a way that wasn’t resentful or angry or even disgusted with the human stuff there. It was just something that had to be done, and I didn’t mind doing it. That was a prayer. The prayer of the commode.