Spiritual Memoir: Telling Lives
Traditionally, the memoir was the province of the “great man” who embodied the achievements of his age and helped steer the course of historic events, who now, with some leisure on his hands and in need of cash, has agreed to write about it. The chief purpose of the memoir was to provide an insider’s perspective on external events, such as wars, treaties, and scientific explorations. Among famous memoirist Presidents, Ulysses S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs epitomizes the category, though we could add to the list many others from Julius Caesar to Barack Obama.
Many of today’s memoirs, however, are cut from different cloth. A Times article characterized our generation as “the Age of Memoir,” pointing not to the “greats,” but to the average and ordinary people among us who are determined to share their stories. Thus, we have memoirs written about depression, drug addiction, obesity, abuse, migraines, grief, and the perennial favorite, boarding school. The misery of boarding school is chronicled by the likes of St. Augustine, the poet Robert Graves, Thomas Merton, C.S. Lewis, and Emily Dickinson. And these are only the published records. Life-writing clubs and seminars continue to incubate thousands of unpublished stories written for family members and private circulation.
I began teaching courses on religious memoir when I wrote one myself, Open Secrets: A Memoir of Faith and Discovery. It too belongs to the category of the “average,” in this case, the story of a young and inexperienced pastor who is assigned to an ordinary country church. A memoir offers a thick sampling of a life, written from a single period or thematic perspective. An autobiography purports to give an account of a whole life “so far.” Augustine wrote Confessions when he was 43 and Thomas Merton published The Seven Storey Mountain at the ripe old age of 33, thereby seeding the reader’s imagination with events yet to come.
In a “religious” or “spiritual” narrative, God may not be a character in the story, as in the Book of Job, but the decisions and actions of the narrator are shaped by an awareness of God’s presence in the warp and woof of a life. Unlike most secular reporting, spiritual life-writing recognizes the claims of religious faith to be essential and not incidental to life in its truest sense. It is unwilling to create a “world” from which God is absent or where God is not an object of desire or a reflection of the narrator’s growing understanding of what it means to be a faithful human being. The plot turns on a conversion, a spiritual insight, or a faithful encounter, occurring most often in the ebb and flow of an ordinary life. As theologian Karl Barth said, “God is so unassuming in the world.” One thinks of the novel Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, whose painstaking evocation of small-town clerical life reads more like a memoir than a novel. It is even written in the form of a letter, which is one of the genres key to memoir and autobiography.
A spiritual memoir may not issue a direct appeal to the reader, but by virtue of its art—its narrative , characterization, and dialogue—it implicitly invites the reader to identify with the story or its characters. Memoir makes an implicit “narrative offer” to the reader, as if to say, this path is available to you, too. When the offer is made explicitly, from beneath the canopy of the pulpit, we have a sermon, not a story. There may be no better example of this than Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness in which she characterizes the art of writing a spiritual autobiography as an act of “giving yourself away.” Her autobiography opens in a dimly lit confessional in which she promises to reveal only her own sins and not the sins of others.
One of the factors in the contemporary resurgence of memoir is the availability and goodness of experience. The novelist Martin Amis writes in his own memoir, Experience, “Nothing, for now, can compete with experience—so unanswerably authentic, and so liberally and democratically dispensed.” One thinks of the proliferation of blogs and web sites and other online cafeterias of experience that feed our desire to share our own lives or to enter into the lives of others. Life-writing fully emerged toward the end of the ages of Romanticism, political individualism, and psychoanalysis, periods when the “I” ruled. It dominates today because we have the technology to make it all available.
On the other hand, contemporary memoirs may be viewed as a push-back against that same technology and the Centralization of Nearly Everything. I wrote about life in a country church because I wanted to preserve the texture of that experience in a culture in which the small congregation, like the neighborhood hardware store, is having a hard time staying in business. And words are disappearing too: 90% of text messages draw on a vocabulary of fewer than 400 words; Shakespeare used 24,000.
Christians have deep and abiding reasons for telling the stories of their lives. We understand our lives to be inextricably bound up with another’s life. The sacrament that brings believers into the church, baptism, is plot-driven. It encapsulates the death and resurrection of Jesus and the believer’s new life in him. The fact that the Christian plot turns on a death reminds us that, no matter how successful feel-good religion and the prosperity gospel may be, we follow the rhythm and curve of a different and more challenging narrative. Spiritual narrative does not indulge in the self-puffery of the ego-trip because, as the Apostle reminds us, the Christian has a radically different view of the ego. “I am crucified with Christ. It is no longer I (Greek, ego) who live, but Christ who lives in me.”
The characters and plots of both ancient and modern autobiographies emerge from the fountain of the Word: Abraham’s journey, Hagar in the wilderness, Jacob and Esau, the temptations of Christ, the Prodigal Son, Mary Magdalene, Doubting Thomas. These and many others are not hard to find in the stories we tell about ourselves.
It might come as a surprise to contemporary readers that autobiography was invented by a Christian for Christian purposes. We are not sure why Augustine chose to write his autobiography, but Confessions stands as a monument and an inspiration to the life of faith. Socrates said, “Know thyself,” and a millennium later the bishop of a middling North African city named Hippo did just that. In a searching account of his interior life, he examines his motives for converting to Christianity. When he writes, “Before you Lord, I lie exposed, exactly as I am,” or, “I have become a problem to myself,” he echoes the ancient psalmist or, more likely, anticipates postmodern angst.
Unlike most autobiographies, Augustine addresses his exposed life to God in the liturgical language of confession and praise. By opening his story with the words, “God, you are great,” he deftly deconstructs the values and pretensions of the heroic ideal in Roman society. Thanks to Augustine, it is possible to conceive a life not as a showcase for achievement but an act of worship. It takes more than a thousand years and a Renaissance, but when Jean Jacques Rousseau pens his epoch-making Confessions, it opens in a completely different key—the Key-of-Me: “I am made unlike anyone I have ever met; I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world.”
Since Rousseau’s Confessions, the ancient quest narrative, older than Homer, has shifted from salvation of the soul to discovery of the self. One unspools the self to arrive, labyrinth-like, at the epicenter of agency—the self-conscious and self-propelling person. Modern autobiography mirrors every child’s move from identification with the parent to separation and individuation. Most modern autobiographies are organized around the transition from the repressiveness of the group toward the realization of individual consciousness.
The encouraging thing about this burst of spiritual memoirs is not that there are so many of them, but that they are increasingly focused on the corporate life of the people of God. Among the new group of writers, the life of faith means life in community, either in the church or in devoted tension with it. Despite its intensely personal quality, the Christian memoir avoids the self-indulgence of the Key-of-Me by grounding writer and reader alike in the community of our common story.
Most religious studies curricula include Confessions and other memoirs and autobiographies because literary non-fiction evokes another, valuable kind of learning: not a rule but a fleshly instance of a rule. Not a definition of grace to be memorized, but the experience of grace as perceived through the window of another person’s life. Who is to say which comes first: the Rule or the Life? We read the stories of others and temporarily cross over to meet them. There we encounter another person’s experience of faith in a world very different from our own. Then we cross back into our own time and place of responsibility, newly enriched by a deeper spiritual understanding and better prepared for our own life of faith. We read their books, then open our own.