This February, less than three weeks after what is possibly the most fraught and fought-over inauguration in our national history, I’ll be teaching a short course on “Approaches to Spiritual Autobiography.” In light of recent disturbances in public life and in the midst of calls to active, organized response, such self-reflection might seem to some a bit untimely—perhaps a bit too inwardly focused when so many feel we’re at a political turning point or tipping point.
I’ve thought about this. I pay attention to political commentators every day, read independent news, and try, as so many do, to focus my listening on the voices of those I believe are carefully, deliberately, transparently seeking truth and speaking truth. I care that abuses of power not go unaddressed. I care that the arc of the moral universe keep “bending toward justice.” And in the long tradition of those who believe politics and policy are matters of Christian responsibility, I have paused to wonder whether we shouldn’t rather be spending our six weeks of class reviewing the terms of the social contract, the Constitution, and Karl Barth’s Barmen Declaration. Is this not a time, I’ve wondered, to focus on common life rather than personal life?
The answer to either-or questions like that, I’ve found, is often both-and. This is a moment for open, public, purposeful conversation about our shared life and the institutions we rely on, and for supporting those who are trying to restore their integrity. It is also, and urgently, an appropriate moment for reflecting on how we understand our own spirituality—how we have grown into, embraced, wrestled with, perhaps rejected or reframed a particular faith tradition. How we imagine, experience, and practice the presence of God. How we understand our purposes on this earthly journey. How we receive guidance. How we pray, meditate, keep ourselves open to the divine. How we understand and hold the tension between what Augustine called “the city of God and the city of man.” How we find and live into “sure and certain hope.”
I have plenty of frustrations with compromises members of Congress—including some I support--have made of late, but I found myself touched and encouraged when, in the immediate aftermath of a violent attack on the capital and personal threats to her own safety, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a practicing Catholic, spoke these words to her reassembled colleagues:
Today, January 6, is the Feast of the Epiphany. On this day of revelation, let us pray that this instigation to violence will provide an epiphany for our country to heal.
In that spirit of healing, I invoke the Song of St. Francis . . .:
‘Lord, make me a channel of thy peace. Where there is darkness, let me bring light. Where there is hatred, let me bring love. Where there is despair, let me bring hope.’
Speaking from her own faith tradition in such a place on such an occasion could, I suppose, be criticized as a breach of church-state separation, but I imagine her intention was recognized even by listeners of other faiths: in moments of crisis we are driven to consider from whence our help comes, and to reach beyond immediate “danger, toil and fear” for the assurance that comes from awareness that this life, this world and all the stories in it are part of a far larger story, much of it shrouded in mystery, some of it revealed luminously in the light of Christ.
Which brings me back to the question of why write “spiritual autobiography”—and why now? A number of answers occur to me. We need each other’s stories for the encouragement they provide, for the models they offer, for the questions they raise. We need to hear how others have struggled with faith and found their way to a wider or deeper understanding of what it means. We need to engage in conversation that invites us to reexamine our own “God language” the metaphors we invoke, the images that invite us beyond the burning bush and the rugged cross into the presence of a God who is “clothed in light as with a garment,” numinous and almighty and present in the minutest subatomic particle. We need to “account for the faith that is in us” to ourselves and others, challenging ourselves to be as clear and specific as we can about what “spiritual” means—or “sacred” or “mystery” or “awakening.”
Spiritual autobiography covers a wide spectrum. Dorothy Day’s A Long Loneliness serves not only as a record of her evolving faith and moral dilemmas but also, according to the New York Times, an important “document in twentieth-century American social history.” C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy is a conversion story, to be sure, but less a record of a life than of a long reflection on the epiphanic moments, the flashes of joy, the lifting of the veil that beckoned him toward faith long before he arrived at the intellectual conviction or personal commitment that have made him such a powerful teacher for generations of seekers. One collection of writings by African American women, My Soul is a Witness, offers in a single volume a beautiful range of poems, stories, and personal narratives that “celebrate the spirit” in the lives of women whose relationship to self, church, God, and each other has developed in social contexts whose complexity challenges the way white readers hear and use words like “spiritual” and “prayer” and “holy.” The genre widens with each effort to join the “communion of saints” and writers who have shared stories they knew might be dismissed and knew were necessary for their own growth and for the life of their beloved communities.
All our spiritual longings, our journeys, our wrestlings, wanderings, arguments and surrenders take place in political contexts, and all are informed by a force that transcends earthly institutions and social contracts. The Spirit can speak in courtrooms and classrooms, and in the marketplace, and divine Light can shine through windows broken by angry mobs. Pausing in the wake—or in the midst—of crisis in our common life to consider how and where the Spirit speaks may be a useful, and for some a necessary, way toward wiser participation in the world in which we find ourselves, sojourners and pilgrims, as we make our varied ways toward home.
Marilyn McEntyre (Ph.D.), is New College Berkeley’s Adjunct Professor of Poetry and Spiritual Formation, and the author of many books, including Speaking Peace in a Climate of Conflict.