Stalking the Divine ― Contemplating Faith With the Poor Clares

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.

Kristin Ohlson, a freelance journalist, essayist, and fiction writer, has been published in theNew 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 the Cuyahoga County jail. A recipient of the Ohio Arts Council's Individual Artists Fellowship in Fiction for 2003-2004, she lives in Cleveland, Ohio.