Edited by
Michael Steinberg and David Cooper
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Reader to Reader Capsule Review David Cooper Writing about spiritual experience tests the boundaries of narrative possibility like few other subjects. To borrow the title from Nora Gallagher's book, writings about spiritual life and matters of faith encompass "things seen and unseen."They take the writer to thresholds and passages of inner reflection, turbulence, and fulfillment that, by their very nature, often defy - indeed, ridicule - description. At the same time, no writer of spiritual experience and reflection today can avoid the pressing issue of contemporary religion's social witness: the challenge faced by any community of faith, as Philip Turner (former dean at Yale Divinity School) puts it, "to form a moral and political community which is something more than a lonely crowd in pursuit of private ends." Knowing what they re up against, writers like Gallagher, Kathleen Norris, and Thomas Merton approach the challenges, demands, and paradoxes of spiritual memoir (broadly and awkwardly defined) with respect, trepidation, imagination, courage, and, above all, with a precision and a perseverance that are absolute prerequisites for compelling self-exploratory writing. These writers can be read, then, with great profit - even by those who, like me, have a tin ear for theology, little taste for muscular God-Talk, and zero tolerance for the slightest scent of proselytizing. When Thomas Merton says something like "because we love, God is present," that I understand.Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, by Kathleen Norris. Riverhead Books, 1998. 384 pages, paperback, $12.95. Kathleen Norris uses the lexicon as an organizing template to tell the story of her "coming out," as she puts it, as a Christian. It is a story about the pull that a religious vocabulary has on her identity and purpose as a poet, teacher, and writer. After she began attending church after a 20-year hiatus, she had to contend with the "scary vocabulary" of the Christian church as well as the astonishment of her poet and academic friends who wondered, How can you believe this stuff? How can you find good where I see only prejudice, sexism, evil, intolerance, oppression? She twines these challenges into a fascinating skein of reflections that bring life and wisdom to such Forum on Nonfiction hoary theological contraptions as "Eschatology," "Apostasy," and "Revelation." Meanwhile, she answers her doubting contemporaries that the lived experience of faith is of far more existential relevance and moral value than the politics and ideology of potent religious concepts like "Antichrist." Norris is at her best when she directly engages the uneasy tension between the prescribed calisthenics of religion and the lived authenticity of spiritual experience - as in her entry on "Idolatry" that turns into a fine meditation on learning to love, or in her section on "Evangelism" (the broccoli of my Spartan theological diet) that becomes a penetrating self-exploration of humility. Her writing springs to life when she takes the most excessive legalisms of Christianity and embeds them in the most ordinary conditions and circumstances of everyday life. In her treatment of "Exorcism," for example, Norris tells us what it was like to be persecuted in the seventh grade by classmates who picked on her because of her weight, her hair, her voice, clothes, and shoes. Elsewhere, a portrait of a tough and taciturn old rancher facing terminal cancer is the center of narrative gravity in an entry on the Bible. Norris writes out of a "firm conviction," she says, "that human beings are essentially story telling bipeds" who search for sources of reverence in their lives. That's why these reflections on religious life and heritage are all narrative and no homily. Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith, by Nora Gallagher. Vintage Books, 1998. 241 pages, paperback, $12.00. For Nora Gallagher, the calendar serves as the narrative axis in her intimate chronicle of a year in the life of her Episcopal congregation in Santa Barbara, California. Like Norris, Gallagher's embrace of a faith community is a prodigal story. She dropped out of church at 20 and returns at midlife in what has become a signature of the baby boomer life course. What she finds is an Episcopal church in a state of flux, vastly changed and oddly static, "both a familiar and a foreign planet." Gallagher struggles - and succeeds, for the most part - in linking the durable ritual and liturgical celebrations found in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer and the Christian calendar (Advent, Christmas, Pentecost, and so forth) to the shifting, unpredictable happenings of her personal life as well as the life of her congregation and the community of Santa Barbara at large. What I most respect about Gallagher's narrative journey is the way these personal, congregational, and civic lines of development gradually merge into a sustained worship and meditation. "If it can be put into words," she writes, "what I yearned for was to embody my shaky faith, to feel my faith in my flesh, acted out, incarnate." It is impossible to overestimate the value and the importance of words and narrative strategy throughout the book in helping Gallagher locate the elusive nexus between "inner" contemplative reflection, communal fulfillment and self-completion, and the social witness of traditional Episcopal teachings. She never finds the exact sweet spot. Work in the world never becomes completely inseparable from the life of worship. But that is the reach and the narrative energy of Gallagher's story of "a year lived in faith." It is also the challenge of contemporary religion: to find a way to assuage our ache to grow spiritually while sustaining a community responsive to social needs and political realities. The Intimate Merton: His Life from His Journals, edited by Patrick Hart and Jonathan Montaldo. HarperSanFrancisco, 1999. 374 pages, cloth, $28.00. As a seeker of spiritual truths, Thomas Merton headed off in the opposite direction from Kathleen Norris and Nora Gallagher, but as writers they all end up in the same place. Early on, Merton sought to distance himself from ordinary expressions of faith through his athletic embrace of Catholic monasticism and, later in life, the rigors of Zen. But he eventually came to believe in the moral vitality, the responsibility, and the literary power, to borrow the title from one of his bazillion books, of "contemplation in a world of action." Like Norris and Gallagher, "the intimate Merton" is a spiritual writer with both feet firmly grounded in what Kathleen Norris describes as "the world we live in as mortal and often comically fallible human beings." What is so interesting about The Intimate Merton - a compilation of excerpts from the seven-volume set of Merton's private journals' is that the editors preserve a narrative line that tracks Merton's intense, almost daily obsession with journal writing and unrelenting selfinterrogation. We are witnesses to the way those obsessions collide with the demands of Merton's monastic formation. In effect, that becomes the crucible of Merton's creativity. As he admits, "I have tremendous . . . personal preoccupations with whatever is going on inside my own heart, and I simply can't write about anything else." He has an equally prodigious capacity as a writer for meditating on what he calls the "crisis of conscience and confession" that comes with being a best-selling autobiographer and a chronic journaler who is at the same time a monk vowed to silence and selflessness. Disappearing into God, Merton admits, "I can't give up writing." The Intimate Merton is a valuable resource for those of us interested in the self-exploratory possibilities of the fourth genre. Whether coming to terms with "the enormous proportions of the ambiguities in myself" or indulging in lyric riffs about a thunderstorm rumbling over the monastery grounds or a pig shrieking in the barn, whether pressing a case for social justice or nuclear disarmament, or thinking clearly and honestly about his mistakes and faults, Merton always struggles to follow his own advice: "I am not going to write as one driven by compulsions but freely, because I am a writer, because for me to write is to think and to live and also in some degree even to pray." Striking a slightly less lofty note, Merton also implores "God [to] defend me from stuffy academic language and from pious jargon." Amen to that! | |
