Our Hearts Are Restless: The Art of Spiritual Memoir
The personal narrative, be it autobiography or memoir, tells what it is to live and die in the world. Spiritual memoir adds two further dimensions. First, belief or unbelief in God is not incidental to the narrative, but crucial. The narrator and other characters must determine how the judgment or grace of God will influence the conduct of their lives. Some memoirs tell how the narrator came to faith; others examine what Augustine calls “the life of faith.” Second, spiritual memoir entails the (usually) implied offer: “What happened to me, reader, can also happen to you, but in a different way, of course.” This is the gospel of memoir. Our Hearts Are Restless explores the nature of spiritual memoir via a close reading of twenty-one memoirs or memoir-like works. The author engages in personal reflection with the memoirists. The work displays the diversity of spiritual memoir by following seven paths: conversion (e.g., Augustine, Merton), mystical vision (Julian of Norwich, Emily Dickinson), excruciating doubt (Bunyan), devastation (Abelard, C. S. Lewis), life-long pilgrimage (Harriet Jacobs, Dorothy Day), daily adventures and challenges (Lamott), and nomadic, sometimes angry expressions of faith (Baldwin, Rodriquez). These names are meant as samples of the book’s diversity. If there is a theological argument in this study, it is this: there is no argument and no authoritative theology apart from the lives of God’s people and the circumstances in which they live. “The glory of God,” said St. Irenaeus, “is a human being fully alive.”
