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).
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?
Among the spate of recent spiritual memoirists, few have received the praise, especially from evangelical readers, that has been directed towards Lauren Winner. I’d heard so much about Girl Meets God that I was recommending it to students for months before reading it myself. They needed models of young writers talking about themselves, especially young Christian writers. And in her early twenties, Winner seemed closer to these earnest young Christians than Lamott, and much more accessible than icons like Dillard or Buechner.
I wasn’t wrong. These students liked Winner’s book. But how did this story of a young Reformed Jewish woman, who becomes Orthodox and then converts to Christianity become a bestseller in the broader market? Published initially in 2002 by Algonquin, Winner’s memoir proved so successful the paperback was picked up by Random House and garnered praise from Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus, and The New York Times Book Review, among countless others.
I’m not sure, but I think Winner’s secret is this: she tells the truth about herself. And Winner’s revelations are not a mere talk show kind of confession – “this is my story, so you all have to respect it” – not the narcissism of people who unburden themselves in public and leave their audience speechless (because, frankly, they don’t want us to say anything except, “oh, you poor thing”). Instead, Winner describes her inner journey in terms of the world; her interior landscape is, as she narrates it, not separated from the exterior settings and relationships that have shaped her.
Certainly there are private, intimate moments of introspection and prayer in Girl Meets God, but just as often readers will find Winner in conversation, in worship, or inside the covers of a book. In fact, when she converts from Judaism to Christianity, Winner characterizes the experience as a divorce with all its attendant relational entanglements. Just as her parents’ divorce requires them to still reckon with one another, Winner realizes that she cannot ignore her Jewish past. She writes:
I gave away all my Jewish books and let go of all my Jewish ways, but I realized, as I spent time with other Christians, that Judaism shaped how I saw Christianity. It shaped the way I read the Bible, the way I thought about Jesus, the way I understood what He meant when He talked about the yoke of the law. I found my heart sometimes singing Jewish songs. I thought I had given away all my Jewish things, but I found that I hadn’t. I’d just given away some books and mezuzot and candlesticks. I hadn’t given up the shape in which I saw the world, or the words I knew for God, and those shapes and words were mostly Jewish.
This tug between the Jewish past that has shaped Winner and the Christian community to which she has turned creates much of the memoir’s tension and interest. And that’s what I mean by telling the truth – the truth of the whole self, which, truth be told, is social, is shaped by all sorts of communal and cultural forces. Annie Dillard and her praying mantis may find the truth alone, but most of us find it in conversation with someone else, at least in conversation with a book or two.
That’s another thing about Winner. She loves to read, everything from Jewish commentary and history to the church fathers to Jan Karon’s kitschy Mitford books. At one point, Winner even confesses that, given her life’s various broken friendships, she prefers books. “I can’t remake all those relationships,” she writes, “but I can rebuild my library.” For Winner, these texts also have been part of the social world that has shaped her life and her new found Christian faith.
In fact, when Winner considers what she might give up for Lent, a friend challenges her to give up books for six weeks. Winner discovers what perhaps many of my own generation suspect – we’re afraid of something, and, mostly, of being alone. Not only does she save money, but without her books, Winner finds she is left “starkly alone – I read, I think, for many reasons. I read for information, I read for pleasure, I read because I want to figure out the craft of putting a sentence together. But I also read to numb any feelings of despair or misery that might creep my way. Even before Lent I had suspected that I used reading this way, as a tonic or escape route.”
If she’s suspicious of anything, Winner is most suspicious of escape routes. While she’s candid about her own failings and her conversion story’s atypical arc (“I had no epiphanic on-the-road-to-Damascus experience. I can’t tell my friends that I became a Christian January 8, 1993, or on my twentieth birthday”), she also exhibits what I would describe as a “harsh eye,” toward herself and toward the rest of us who indulge in either escapist belief or in the fantasy of escaping belief altogether. While some reviewers mention her “refreshing” humor and candor, I don’t think she’s funny, and I don’t find her honesty refreshing. Rather, I find Winner’s gaze withering (and all too familiar). “I am just as likely as the next person to consign people to tidy categories,” Winner says, “and, without much evidence.”
So take up Girl Meets God at your peril. You won’t find a straightforward conversion narrative. As Winner says, “A literature scholar would say there are too many ‘ruptures’ in the ‘narrative.’ But she might also say that ruptures are the most interesting part of any text, that in the ruptures we learn something new.” Rupture seems a rather painful way to learn. I suspect, though, that such lessons remain, and are truer than a narrative shaped in a more prefigured way.
Among such ruptures, you also won’t find in Winner’s memoir a feel-good romance between a lover and her God. Winner suggests she’s lost, at the mere age of 24, the ability to have lovely dreams of God or to fall in love again with a religious tradition. If she’s to have a sustained faith, she concludes, “It will have to come from God’s place of faithfulness, not from some pot of faithfulness all my own. … How to fall in love is not, now, what I need to learn. What I need to learn, maybe what God wants me to learn, is the long grind after you’ve landed.”
Another confession: though I lead off this essay with Winner’s book, I didn’t read it first. Instead, I read Betty Smartt Carter’s Home Is Always the Place You Just Left: A Memoir of Restless Longing and Persistent Grace, a book that Winner, even with her harsh eye, saw fit to blurb, despite its unspeakable title (and I really do mean unspeakable—just try to say this awkward thing aloud).
I picked up the book because it was in the Wheaton College bookstore, on the alumni shelf, and because, standing in the bookstore, I laughed out loud when Carter described her arrival on campus in 1983, how she found her “cynical self” in Edman Chapel being addressed by “evangelicalism’s finest: Billy Graham, Francis Schaeffer, Charles Colson – all the great heroes of our branch of Christendom drifting over the chapel stage like floats in a slow motion parade.”
When her parents leave her in her room, the strains of Amy Grant’s “Father’s Eyes” resonating in the dorm, she says, “I’ve died and gone to Christianity hell.” That’s a promising mixture of candor and humor.
But this is not a funny book. Betty Smartt Carter’s memoir begins in a poignant and decidedly serious way as she describes her childhood. She is the daughter of a prominent conservative Presbyterian pastor, very often away on preaching engagements, and his wife who “complains to herself (if not to Daddy) that our kind of Presbyterianism is too intellectual.” In truth, it’s Carter’s childhood, and her father in particular, that haunts the entire narrative – much like those giant evangelical “floats” haunt her in Wheaton’s chapel.
Carter writes lovingly but critically of this upbringing. The narrative has an immediacy to it; it seems at times as if she’s surprising even herself by what she recalls. While drawing a picture of Jesus for a school project, Carter feels dissatisfaction with what she’s made. Thinking that something is missing, “I found a red marker and went to work, lovingly adding rosy sores and lacerations, broad streams of blood from hands and feet.” All her kindergarten teacher can say: “Thank you Betty … That’s a very vivid picture.”
Obsessed, in a sweet, childlike way, by this suffering Jesus, Carter describes how she feels inspired one Sunday afternoon to tie herself to a lamppost in front of her home, reveling for a time in the sensation of being suspended until her parents and siblings untie and pull her down. She can’t tell them why she’s there, but she suspects she was
playing at the cross, remembering Jesus, trying to show the Lord’s death till he comes. Although I loved the story of Christ’s death, I could only see it through the eyes of a well-loved child. I hardly knew what suffering was. Blood took its color from plums in the front yard; a cross was a place you climbed up to by yourself. Here my family came now to rescue me from my own little cross – dust me off, set me up straight, spank me soundly, and send me off to play.
Having spent part of my own childhood in a strict Presbyterian congregation, and having taught at Wheaton for nearly four years, I found this section of Carter’s memoir to be helpful and telling, offering a “very vivid picture” of how the language of Christian faith might translate in the mind of a young girl trying to become a woman. Carter’s distance from this period of her life gives the prose a sense of both courage and restraint. We understand that her father is compelling and difficult to figure, that his version of God is frightening. We understand that her mother’s steadiness keeps Carter going and offers a vision of God as “a selfless servant of small children, old people, and rowdy teenagers. He was a busy and efficient world manager who held everything together with tireless ambition.”
What gets less clear as the memoir progresses is how Carter’s own sense of God, and of herself in relation to God, has grown. The restless longing of the book’s title refers not only to her father’s travels in her youth but also to her own constant dissatisfaction with her life’s circumstances. She wants something, and she knows it ought to be God, but she desires it here and now. She turns to, yes, Augustine and his insight that desire, any desire betrays a longing for the Divine. As Carter summarizes it, “Desire is our map, and restlessness is our compass. Their accurate destination is heaven.”
However accurate this insight, though, Carter still stops at many rest stops on the way to heaven. A crush on a Wheaton professor, her courtship with her husband, and her intense friendships with other women all demonstrate her insatiable need to be connected to someone earthly. She tells a friend that she thinks, “In heaven, we’ll all be completely connected – no barriers anymore, no distance. We’ll be like one person.” Her friend responds, “That sounds like hell.”
While Carter spends her first ten chapters taking us through childhood and college, she marries, moves from Wheaton (and learns, at a distance, to appreciate it) and has a baby or two all in the space of the book’s final two chapters. At this point, I find myself growing more and more uncomfortable with Carter’s writing. What is the end of her memoir, its goal? It’s hard to tell. While in Winner’s memoir, she shows how she relates to God and to the world, Carter seems to collapse that space. It’s as though she wants me to take care of her – not me personally, but her readers. Winner extends herself into the social world and names the ways that world resides inside of her, but Carter loses that perspective in these final two chapters.
Now I recognize this impulse from my own writing, the urge to invite the reader not into a poem or story but into my daily living. But it’s an urge to resist. How does Carter expect her reader to stand in relation to her story, especially when she tells us that she’s developed an obsessive addiction to a friend, a woman who doesn’t really want to be “worshipped” and who tells Carter on the phone to stop acting “like a stalker?”
Carter claims this experience woke her up. She discusses obsession, depression and grace, but it’s impossible to tell where we are to dwell as readers in any of this, and she doesn’t offer much explanation of how her actual community, her spouse, or her children view this development. It’s quite claustrophobic, and as she talks on the page to herself, I realize that I’d rather not be eavesdropping on Carter, at least not yet. Where Winner seems to know we’re listening, looking for analogues, and perhaps standing in judgment at times, Carter loses this sense, almost as if she’s waiting for her readers to come take her down off the pole and save (or spank) her. Or perhaps she’s trying to get us to connect to her with no barriers or distance. Whatever our spiritual narratives might do to foster insight and community, they can’t – and probably shouldn’t – collapse the distinctions between us.
Perhaps the popularity of spiritual memoir has developed because, as my colleague Alan Jacobs has written, for all the development recently of narrative theology, we have neglected to figure out how to engage “the narrative dimension of individual Christian lives.” Jacobs goes on to suggest that if one can pierce through the layers of narcissism and sentimentality … these popular writers are reminding us of something that many previous generations of very sober Christians, from Augustine of Hippo to the Puritans of seventeenth-century England and America, would have warmly endorsed: each of us does indeed have a unique personal narrative, one whose essential shape is not always easily discerned.”
There is no precise formula, I think, for how to shape such stories. However, because there is no formula does not mean there are no forms that might be useful, for showing us what we might not otherwise see.
In Winner’s newest book, Mudhouse Sabbath she mourns for the spiritual rituals and disciplines of her Jewish past, the observances that gave her life rhythm, and “to be blunt, spiritual practices that Jews do better.” What she suggests is that, yes, Christians will view such practices differently from their Jewish neighbors. As Winner puts it, “Spiritual practices don’t justify us. They don’t save us. Rather, they refine our Christianity; they make the inheritance Christ gives us on the cross more fully our own. … Practicing the spiritual disciplines does not make us Christians. Instead, the practicing teaches us what it means to live as Christians. … The ancient disciplines form us to respond to God, over and over always, in gratitude, in obedience and in faith” (xiii).
So, to paraphrase Eliot from Little Gidding, what is the use of memoir, how might it be such an ancient, informing form, a spiritual discipline? Let me return to Augustine’s Confessions, Book Eleven where he meditates on time, hoping, in part, to enter into that mystery as a way of entering into God’s mystery. At one point, he offers this description of how memory and anticipation work (the translation here is from Wills’ biography of Augustine):
Say I am about to recite a psalm. Before I start, my anticipation includes the psalm in its entirety, but as I recite it, whatever I have gone over, detaching it from anticipation, is retained by memory. So my ongoing act is tugged between the memory of what I just said and the anticipation of what I am just about to say, though I am immediately engaged in the present transit from what was coming to what is past. As this activity works itself out, anticipation dwindles as memory expands, until anticipation is canceled and the whole transaction is lodged in memory. And what happens with the whole psalm is equally what happens with each verse of it, each syllable – and with the whole liturgy of which the psalm may be a part, or with the whole of any man’s life, whose parts are his own acts, or with the whole world, whose parts are the acts of men. Confessions 11.28.38
For both readers and writers, it seems, Augustine suggests that entering into the mystery of memory in language shows us how our lives, like the sounds of liturgy, do not exist merely for ourselves, but connect to the acts of the “whole world.” And so, the point of such reflection is not to face backwards or forwards, but to teach us how to exist in expectatio mea, which O’Donnell calls “the tension between distention and attention (time-as-lived and eternity-as-sought).” Our readings, then, might convert our attentions from ourselves alone, to live our lives in relation to those of others, and to figure out how we might attend to the attentions of the Divine.
Copyright 2004-2005 :: The New Pantagruel 2.1.