Q&A: Richard Lischer Talks About the Art of Spiritual Memoir
/In Our Hearts Are Restless: The Art of Spiritual Memoir (Oxford University Press, 400 pages), Richard Lischer explores the distinctive genre of spiritual memoir. Emeritus professor at Duke Divinity School, Lischer has written his own memoirs including Open Secrets: A Memoir of Faith and Discovery and Stations of the Heart, and chronicled Martin Luther King, Jr.’s religious development, from “preacher’s kid” to prophetic rage. A lifelong preacher, he honed his oratory talents at the pulpit of a Midwest country church. In his powerful new book, Lischer engages on the page with more than 20 spiritual memoirs across the centuries, from Augustine and Thomas Merton, to Emily Dickinson and Reynolds Price, to surprising contemporary spiritual memoirists: Anne Lamott, who “writes from the edge while hanging on by her fingernails,” and whose uncorked humor makes him laugh out loud; and South Bronx memoirist pastor Heidi Neumark, who provides “Ezekiel-like immersion in the lives of her parishioners.” For The National Book Review, Barbara Mahany, author of several spiritual memoirs, spoke with Lischer about his new book, likening their conversation to “that long-awaited cross-campus stroll after class had ended, and the beloved professor, as always, offered more time and undivided attention.”
Q: Your book reads like a master class in spiritual memoir, and I know that one of your foci as a theologian and as a divinity professor has been on the power of the word—preached from the pulpit or pressed on the page––and its capacity to draw an audience—seekers or not—into the crux of the spiritual message. What are the defining qualities of stand-out spiritual memoir? What are you looking for in a memoir that “sticks”?
A: I am at heart a preacher of the word; I came to the word via that medium. I reverence the word in all its forms, including the spoken word, because in its every shape the word is capable of bearing the divine reality. It is indivisible. Think of James Baldwin’s glorious memory of his days as a boy preacher in Harlem when, as he says, “in the middle of a sermon, I knew that I was somehow, by some miracle, really carrying, as they said, ‘the Word’—when the church and I were one.’” I am drawn to spiritual memoirs from my tradition that take that power seriously. A spiritual memoir makes an implicit offer. It says to the reader, “The path that I have taken is available to you, too. But first, you have to close my book and open your own.” In the unspoken implicitness of that offer some spiritual memoirs function as gospels with a small G. What “sticks” for me in a memoir is the peculiar genius of word that Baldwin executed in so many novels and memoirs. The word, as I rely on it, offers honesty, commonality, and transformation, but always in dramatic and not homiletic form.
Q: Can you talk a bit about how you were drawn into spiritual memoir as a genre, and what about it captured your deep curiosity and led you to read so widely and deeply across the millennia?
A: I was initially drawn to memoir by my personal need to write “what has happened” in my life. I did not begin from an apologetic agenda to make a particular religion or institution look good. Nor did I begin from a scholarly base of interest in the autobiographical genre. I wrote about experiences that exercised pivotal importance in my life and changed me forever—my first ministry in a country church in Open Secrets and my son’s death in Stations of the Heart. The release I found in writing led me to teaching and the study of other memoirs and eventually to Our Hearts Are Restless: The Art of Spiritual Memoir.
Q: In teaching your courses on spiritual memoir at Duke’s divinity school did you assign the writing of spiritual memoir to your students? Was self-disclosure a challenge, or living in an age of so much egocentrism was that a surprisingly and relatively effortless aspect among the possible challenges? How, as either a writer or teacher, do you move the writing beyond the “easier” “low-hanging” revelations to the deeper, hard-to-face truths, the core where the true work of soul-baring begins? And can you expound a bit on “vulnerability” as an imperative, especially, of spiritual memoir?
A: Dorothy Day begins The Long Loneliness by comparing writing an autobiography to going to confession. Both are hard because in both you are “giving yourself away.” I taught memoir-writing in a prison to classes comprised of inmates and divinity students. Not surprisingly, I found the inmates better equipped to go deep than the students. The challenge to students was to help them get inside and underneath the ordinary rites of passage involved in growing up in order to expose something truer and more personal. Memoir is the most intimate of genres. It begins in vulnerability, but never vulnerability for its own sake, and ends in something broader and more universal than the writer’s willingness to bare his or her soul.
Q: One of the great delights of your book is that your literary reach is so broad, and you introduced me to memoirists I might otherwise not have known. Tell me about your reading habits; I call it the “Rabbit Hole School of Reading” where one writer leads to another and another.
A: I think my choice of writers was shaped by my job as a professor. As each semester began, a little voice inside me said, “No theological student should be ignorant of Augustine or Abelard or Julian or C.S. Lewis or Thomas Merton” etc. Then, as it turns out, the class and I would discover the reason why these and other writers like them are essential: They aren’t just old; they are fundamental. In terms of purpose, belief, and literary integrity, they show us how it can be done. We stand on their shoulders. When it comes to my own reading habits, there is no method to my madness, unless it is an unerring nose for serious writing. By which I mean writing that takes the claims of faith and the miracle of human life as matters of life and death.
Q: What one spiritual memoirist has had the most lasting hold on you?
A: Thomas Merton, though not as an exemplar of Catholic monasticism (his triumphalism in The Seven Storey Mountain gets old—it disappears in his Journals), but for his ability to probe the textures of his life with honesty. When you read Merton, you are watching a man make up his mind, then unmake it, then make it up in a new way. As The Seven Storey Mountain comes to a close, you can almost see the narrator leaning into a new formulation of himself. He is so complex that I, at least, am uncertain if he is a triumphant or tragic figure. Yet whatever he is, he never steps away from the invisible canopy of God’s grace.
Q: A few questions about craft: If one chooses to sit down and write a spiritual memoir, how many drafts might it take to lurch toward that unfiltered radiant core that holds the power of epiphany? Before even beginning, is there a single compelling question or series of questions that should frame the writer’s purpose or mission? How have you learned to push yourself toward a deeper and truer place of self-revelation?
A: I can only tell you how I conceived my first memoir (by the way, I never considered that I would inhabit a genre called “spiritual memoir”). When I thought back to my first parish 25 years earlier, I conceived my ministry as series of scenes—perhaps because I wasn’t able to attach a cogent plot to my experiences. Anyway, I took a yellow legal pad, and jotted down scene after scene, as they came to me in no particular order. Then, if that scene still held emotional resonance for me—if it could make me laugh or cry—or if it continued to hold significance for me, I kept it as a possible chapter or sub-section of a chapter. Then, I chose a place from which to begin––“from which” being a key launching strategy—and began to tell it as I remembered it. Much later, I realized that my book needed a plot. In analyzing what I had devised so far, I recognized the inevitable thread of hope, disappointment, conflict, growth, and ultimate completion that is characteristic of a plot. Then, I took the necessary literary steps to highlight that thread without making it a tiresome lesson or moral.
Q: One of the breathtaking aspects of reading your nearly 400 pages was your seamless capacity to draw from a deep well of writers and thinkers across time. Are you a keeper of a commonplace book, a literary compendium of pithy bits and wisdoms and beautiful lines gathered and catalogued over decades of reading?
A: I once had a box of wonderful expressions and commonplaces, but it had disappeared by the time I started writing memoir. My filing tends to consist of scores of yellow sticky tabs with ideas or comments on them. They are fastened to the sides of my tall computer desk, an etagere from another life, in no particular order. They gradually become a part of the furniture in my office, and I forget to look at them. Nowadays, I follow the fire-hose method of immersive reading. I read everything I can find on a given subject and make notes on cards stuck in books to which I later return. The notes are there, but the basic organization of the chapter is in my head.
Q: You make an important distinction in the book between autobiography and memoir, can you explore that distinction?
A: An autobiography tells a whole life from birth on. A memoir offers a slice of life, whether a period of time, a particular theme, or a significant problem. For example, the novelist Reynolds Price wrote several autobiographies, chronicling his childhood, teachers, his growth of sexual awareness, and his development as a person and a writer. He wrote only one memoir, in which he delves into one all-consuming reality—his paraplegia. I’m not sure that one form as opposed to another is more congenial to spiritual pilgrims. There are possibilities of power in both, since the spiritual life is often depicted as a journey and the church as a “community of pilgrims.” It seems to me an autobiography might have several turning points or moments of revelation, whereas a memoir might only have one. In a comment attributed to Albert Camus, he writes that art seeks those “two or three great and simple images in whose presence [the writer’s] heart first opened.” Memoir does not begin with an event but, in Sven Birkerts’ phrase, “an intuition of meaning” on the part of the writer. In my book I suggest that because of its compressed nature memoir may prove more emotionally intense than autobiography.
Q: Spiritual memoir, or at least the finest and most lasting spiritual memoir, is predicated on intimacy. There is a critical distinction between self-disclosure and intimacy; what qualities or characteristics push disclosure across the line into intimacy? Why is it necessary for excellence in memoir?
A: It seems to me that self-disclosure is exactly as advertised: the disclosure of the narrator’s self. Intimacy, on the other hand, allows the reader to probe her own motives and experiences. There is a sense in which reader and writer become soulmates. They make a pact. The author promises to tell the truth, in so far as it is possible, and the reader promises to trust the narrator. (In the Confessions, Augustine’s notion of the “ideal reader” is someone who knows how to trust.) The author writes in such a way that invites the reader to cross over into another’s life, then to return to ones’ own, enriched, educated, and encouraged. That transaction is the interpersonal basis of memoir.
Q: An important aspect of the architecture of your book is the way you paired the memoirists, stimulating conversation across time and space: Augustine and Thomas Merton; James Baldwin and a snake handler from Alabama; Julian of Norwich and Emily Dickinson on life’s ecstasies, and on and on. What did these pairings reveal that you otherwise might have missed, say if you’d simply laid them out chronologically? And, therefore, what does this particular aspect of book-making tell us about the importance of re-thinking or thinking outside the box when it comes to conceptualizing a book’s architecture?
A: I think Henry James’s “figure in the carpet” says it all. The figure is sometimes hidden. One has to study the carpet or tapestry to see it. And it is a repeating pattern—just as our lives are laced with repeating patterns of love, sorrow, loss, hope, and so on, from one generation to the next. For that reason, I didn’t arrange the book chronologically: Augustine is “answered” by Thomas Merton; Julian of Norwich is “answered” by Emily Dickinson. The answering pattern is represented in the liturgy by the practice of call and response, verse and antiphon. Which is why I refer to Emily Dickinson’s poetry as an antiphon to Julian of Norwich, but from another room.
Q: Finally, and perhaps to put a fine point to this whole litany of questions, when considering sacred text, from the Torah to New Testament, would you argue that spiritual memoir belongs spine to spine on that religious bookshelf. And if so, or if not, how and why?
A: No, not spine to spine! Both Torah and New Testament claim divine authorship; both are communal and cumulative endeavors engaging many authors over long periods of time. They carry the inimitable status and authority as scripture. They reach vertically across a much broader spectrum of audiences than the reading-interests of a particular generation. Is it too obvious (or hidebound) to say that individual memoirs can make no such claim? But—and here's the catch—both scripture and spiritual memoir are revelatory. The latter are witnesses to or mirrors of the former, but they are also revelations of God’s presence in the world and, in their own way, they open the heart. Today’s readers may not have read through the epistles of Paul or the sagas of Genesis, but they have read memoirists Anne Lamott, Maya Angelou, Nora Gallagher, and Patricia Hampl. These and many others are performing valuable introductions to the life of faith.
Barbara Mahany, a longtime writer at the Chicago Tribune, is the author of five books, the latest of which, titled The Book of Nature: The Astonishing Beauty of God’s First Sacred Text (Broadleaf Books, March 2023,) includes elements of spiritual memoir. Her first book, Slowing Time, was named one of Publishers Weekly’s Top Ten religion books in the fall of 2014, and described as “a field guide to the depths of your holiest hours.” And her latest book, a meditation on the ancient theology that sees all creation as godly revelation, has been described as “a field guide to the depths of your holiest places.”
