the New Pantagruel

Reading Spiritual Memoir: A Reader’s Spiritual Memoir

by David Wright

Books mentioned in this essay:

Augustine. Confessions. Trans. Albert C. Outler.
    Online at: http://www.ccel.org/a/augustine/confessions/confessions.html
Augustine’s Childhood: Confessiones Book One. Trans. Garry Wills. (Viking, 2001).
Betty Smartt Carter, Home is Always the Place You Just Left: A Memoir of Restless Longing and Persistent Grace (Paraclete, 2003).
Lauren Winner, Girl Meets God: A Memoir (Random, 2003).
Lauren Winner, Mudhouse Sabbath (Paraclete, 2004).

Mea Culpa

Actually, that’s not completely true. I read all the way through Garry Wills’ translation of Saint Augustine’s Childhood: Confessiones Book. Then I read Wills’ biography of Saint Augustine.

If you’re an academic, it’s not hard to say that reading two books, mostly about something, qualifies as having read something. And then, after saying I would write this essay, this confession, I went to the Outler translation and read a lot more. Most of it. Really.

But back to last spring. Here’s what’s most lamentable about my first confessions reading: I was reading as an angler, trying to catch what I could use for a paper at a conference and a few funny poems that would clinch it all. (One poem was going to be called “Confessions Augustine Should Have Made.”) I had, in my usual postmodern and less-than-as clever-as-I-like-to-think-it-sounds way proposed a canned reading of a text, a really important text from a language I don’t speak, a text that I’d only glanced at vaguely, taught a few portions of in an introductory lit class.

My smart-ass proposal quoted Levinas, and Adorno, and Frost, and made claims about the social nature of the private voice in Augustine. Augustine was constructing a fully rhetorical self that would do political, theological, and psychological work in the guise of honest confession, a self that only “seemed” private. In my paper, I could be hipper than the Bishop of Hippo by pointing out how “constructed” and “social” was his voice.

But, dear reader, as any good spiritual memoir must contend, I was converted, changed, convicted by what I had not expected. “Pick up and read, pick up and read.” It’s good advice, wherever you hear it.

WHAT led me to Augustine (and to my conversion), was not merely my academic bad habits. Instead, it was my growing interest (and that of many, many contemporary readers) in spiritual memoir. Augustine may have started it all in Latin, but for American readers, Annie Dillard, Frederick Beuchner, and Henri Nouwen have garnered plenty of love lately for their closely examined spiritual lives. Someone else’s candor, self-revealing failure, and redemptive time with nature, family history (and the paintings of Rembrandt) fills spiritual voids many of us seem to have. And then comes Anne Lamott in Traveling Mercies, attempting to swear her way to holiness in ways previously unimaginable. I love all these writers, have tried to be them. Sadly, the swearing comes easier to me than the honesty or the holiness.

My writing students also want to write this way – to tell the truth, so far, of their lives with God, of their struggles to believe and their struggles to tolerate the rest of God’s failed creatures. Sure, they could do this in poems, or as thinly veiled fiction, but more and more of them tend toward creative non-fiction (the genre’s most-recent label). What compels these young writers to offer their lives this way in language? And what draws contemporary readers of all sorts, especially Christian readers, into this both ancient and all-too-contemporary kind of writing?

The answer lies, in part, in scholar James J. O’Donnell’s description of the Confessions as writings that “assume that the soul is a scene of narrative, and that the narrative of the soul is the deepest and truest story of the person.” Or in Augustine’s words, we desire to believe that we matter to God. Here Augustine inquires why God attends to his life:

Why do you matter so much to me? Pity me enough to let me say. Why, indeed, do I matter so much to you that my loving you is something you require, that you should be angry and threaten me with heavy punishments if I love not? Then can my not loving you be a slight thing? Not it cannot, to my sorrow (Wills, Childhood 35).

So to what ends do we take up the act of examining and representing, through language these scenes of narrative? And to what ends do we read such deep and true stories of people?

Boy Meets Girl Meeting God

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