The Spiritual Aspect of Memoir: How We Find Stories in Our Quest to Find Meaning

PART ONE

Good morning beloved reader!

After traveling, I cannot tell you how good it feels to be home. Home for me is a place where I restore my spirit. Where I nourish my soul.

Perhaps I’ve become more hermit-like since moving here to TreeTops, our decades-old log cabin set amongst the trees in Southern New Hampshire, with Buddhist monks for neighbors. Perhaps, as a friend offered, in my mid-life, my introversion is expanding and I simply prefer more quiet/solitude.

Maybe that’s true. But at the same time I do love connections with people with like-mind-and-heart. Perhaps this kind of connection is one of the gifts of Substack.

~

While traveling, I had the thought that readers here may appreciate reading the 2017 graduating lecture I wrote while studying Creative Nonfiction writing in the MFA program at at Vermont College of Fine Arts. I’ve decided to serialize it here on Substack in three parts.

Part One of a Lecture I gave in 2017 for the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts: The Spiritual Aspect of Memoir: How We Find Stories in Our Quest to Find Meaning

I’ve heard it said that as writers, we write down our mind.

I believe we also write down our heart and soul.

We write down our soul consciously or unconsciously, knowingly or unknowingly, hopefully with clarity and insight, but sometimes with our own biases that we may be blind to.

As human beings, we all have our blind spots.

And as the author Abigail Thomas says,

“That’s one of the surprising things about writing memoir, you have no idea what you’re going to uncover about yourself that you prefer very much not to know.”

To a certain extent, we’re all a product of our conditioning. One of my own biases is that I agree with the French idealist philosopher and Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, when he said,

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience;
we are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

And, as you know from the title of my lecture, my intention is to explore one of the commonalities between spirituality and writing memoir, which is a search to find meaning.

Memoirs most often tell the story of a crisis, how the narrator made sense of it or how they found meaning through their experience of that crisis, and how they lived in the world afterwards.

To say this in another way, I love how Sue Silverman expressed this idea in her lecture last summer: as memoir writers, we write about the “snocksnarls and clusterfucks” in our lives, then this is how I survived, what I learned (which is tied-in to how I make meaning from the experience) and how I thrived.

Now this is where my lecture gets a bit messy, so please bear with me.

Not only do I believe that we’re spiritual beings having a human experience, but when writing memoir:

I invite you to consider how your own spiritual views and/or religious conditioning may affect your quest to find meaning.

To unpack this a little, first I want to linger on the word spiritual.

In my experience, spiritual means different things to different people, and to many it involves religion.

But as the self-professed Holy Rascal, Rabbi Rami Shapiro says,

“God is real. Everything we say about God is made up.”

And worth noting: many of the made-up stories in various religions have been damaging to so many people who aren’t white, heterosexual males. Those stories have had their time and place—many religious stories were used to control and manipulate people. But perhaps now we’re at a point in the evolution of human consciousness where we can let go of what no longer works.

Personally, I did not grow up with any religious conditioning—some may judge this good, some may judge this bad, and some may simply see that it is what it is.

In fact, you could say I had the opposite of religious conditioning—when my Australian maternal grandmother tried to teach my three sisters and me anything from the Bible, my iconoclastic English father told her, “We’ll have none of that in this house.”

But in my early forties;

after my husband was diagnosed with cancer in 2010,

after he recovered both from the chemotherapy and the cancer,

after we quit our twenty-year lives and careers in New York City and moved to a log cabin among the trees in New Hampshire,

I was serendipitously led to study world religions for two years in an interfaith seminary school.

So, yes, I’m an ordained interfaith minister, but please don’t accuse me of religion.

To add to this idea of the spirituality that may be found behind any particular religious conditioning, I’d like to offer another quote from Rabbi Rami Shapiro:

“To me, religions are like languages:
no language is true or false;
all languages are of human origin;
each language reflects and shapes the civilization that speaks it;
there are things you can say in one language that you cannot say or say as well in another;
and the more languages you learn, the more nuanced your understanding of life becomes.
Judaism is my mother tongue, yet in matters of the spirit I strive to be multi-lingual.
In the end, however, the deepest language of the soul is silence.”

But don’t worry, I’m not going to make you sit through the rest of this lecture in silence, without me speaking.

I will add though, that while religions are like languages, spirituality is the content of what is being discussed in whichever language you may choose.

So while my search for meaning as I write memoir is connected to my spirituality, I also want to consider how religious conditioning may affect a search for meaning.

Let’s briefly look at the three largest religions in the world.

According to The Pew Research Center (a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world, and who conduct public opinion polling, demographic research, content analysis and other data-driven social science research) Christians remained the largest religious group in the world in 2015, making up nearly a third (31%) of Earth’s 7.3 billion people. That’s approximately 2.3 billion people who have been conditioned by the stories in the Bible.

This chart shows the Countries with the greatest proportion of Christians:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_by_country

Even though America is a melting pot of various religions, from this graphic, we can see that this country is 65-80% Christian—i.e., Christianity is a majority.

So let’s consider the possibility that the majority of memoirs written by American authors may be written by writers with some kind of Christian conditioning.

I’m not providing any answers here, but I am inviting you to explore the following questions in depth, with regards to searching for meaning as you write memoir:

What are the affects of a Christian conditioning when an author of memoir looks to find meaning?

Or how does a belief in sin and ultimate judgment by God, affect how a memoir narrator will find meaning?

And how does this differ for men and for women?

To add to the depth of your inquiry, I will say that the New York Times best-selling author, Sue Monk Kidd examines the Christian masculine bias (otherwise known as the patriarchal hierarchy) in her spiritual memoir, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine.

Kidd’s memoir was first published in 1996 to great acclaim, and in 2016 it was re-issued in a 20^th anniversary edition with a new introduction. The review from Publisher’s Weekly, when it was first published in 1996, noted,

“A mid-career realization that she had lived without “real inner authority” and with “a fear of dissension, confrontation, backlash, a fear of not pleasing, not living up to sanctioned models of femininity” produced in Kidd the new mindset that made her journey possible.”

I would offer that we are witness to an evolution of consciousness throughout the past twenty-seven years since Kidd’s book was first published, as we see women finding their own inner authority, and

cultivating the courage

to dissent,

to confront,

not to please,

not to live up to Christian sanctioned models of femininity

—especially as recently witnessed with the January 21^st Women’s March on Washington and all the marches all around the world.

And this evolution of consciousness can be seen in Kidd’s continued success with her fiction. In her new introduction to the 20^th anniversary edition of The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, she writes about how the themes she explored in her spiritual memoir — about the lack and even suppression of the Divine Feminine in Christianity — have informed her writing in her later, very successful novels, The Secret Life of Bees in 2001, The Mermaid Chair in 2005, and The Invention of Wings in 2014. (and a post script — this now includes The Book of Longings: A Novel published in 2021.)

As Christianity is so prevalent in America, we can see how Christian religious conditioning may affect a majority of American memoir writers’ quest to find meaning.

Click here for Part 2 of 3.