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evangelical memoir: little help, please?

I'm beginning work on an article for this summer that takes a look at the relative success of recent "evangelical" memoirs. Why their popularity? How successful are they as memoir? What sort of continuity do they share with Augustine's Confessions, specifically his understanding of the impetus/purpose of public, literary confession? I'm in way over my head, and I'll probably steer away from attempting to do too much technical analysis/lit crit. I'm interested in your response to Augustine and/or any recent spiritual memoirs--anything that's on your mind (specifically Girl Meets God and Blue Like Jazz). Also, I'm using the following paper as a base of operations. I threw this together for one of my MFA Form/Theory classes. It's messy at-points, boring at others, and intellectually stunted almost all the way through (please don't let Dr. Collins see this). But if you're interested in the subject and would like to comment on anything or make suggestions or flat-out say that I'm wrong, that I should stick with creative writing, that's fine, too. Many thanks.

Man Meets Augustine Meets God Meets Augustine Meets Man

I confess, despite over ten years of reading spiritual literature, despite four years of seminary, and despite my own venture into the world of spiritual autobiography, I’ve only recently acquainted myself with Augustine’s Confessions. Were I writing this twenty years before now, I probably couldn’t say the same; due to the recent surge in the publication of orthodox-Christian memoir, I’ve had so much material to read that I had cause to keep Augustine on the bottom of the list. Writers like Annie Dillard and Wendell Berry have been writing about a general spirituality for decades, and writers like Frederick Buechner and Henri Nouwen and Kathleen Norris have written literarily about a narrower, Christian spirituality for as long. The commercial success of Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies made it okay for Christians to come out of the church closet and into the secular publishing world, though Lamott’s success is due, in part, to her “flexible” brand of Christianity. In the last few years, though, a new brand of memoir has begun to make its mark.

In 2002, Lauren Winner published her memoir Girl Meets God, a surprisingly successful conversion narrative recounting Winter’s conversion from Reformed Judaism to Orthodox Judaism to orthodox Christianity while a student at Columbia University. Soon after, both secular and spiritual publishers began looking to publish the next big spiritual memoir. Among the most notable is Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller, which has sold more than 150,000 copies since its 2003 release. One specific step past Winner’s orthodoxy, Miller unflinchingly labels himself an evangelical Christian, one of the first to publish a successful memoir, maybe the first in a long line.

David Wright, a professor at Wheaton College, says that his writing students, increasingly, are turning away from poetry and fiction to creative nonfiction, specifically to spiritual autobiography. Among other reasons for this trend, according to Wright’s colleague Alan Jacobs, is that “for all the development recently of narrative theology, we [evangelicals] 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 . . . would have warmly endorsed: each of us does indeed have a unique personal narrative, one whose essential shape is not always easily discerned” (7). Among those “previous generations of sober Christians” lies the cornerstone, Augustine. Indeed, “the entire justification, validation, necessity, and indeed exemplary instance of writing one’s life, of finding the words that signify the self and its history, are offered to us for the first time [ . . . ] in the Confessions” (Olney 858), and they run, in varied form, through Donne and the Puritans and the confessional poets and Annie Dillard and Donald Miller. To what degree have those and others adhered to Augustine’s project, specifically his “confessing,” and in what ways have they departed?

Both biblically and extra-, “confession” carries a wide semantic range. For the purposes of this paper [1] , which concerns itself primarily with those writers who claim orthodox Christianity [2], I’m restricting the semantic range to the texts of the Old and New Testament, which present confession as primarily two-fold. The first is “to declare publicly a personal relationship with and allegiance to God”—confession of faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—and the second is “to acknowledge sin and guilt in the light of God’s revelation”—confession of sin (Torrance). And within those broad denotations lie varying degrees of connotation. In order to contain the entire semantic range of biblical confession, I offer my own definition of confession based on its biblical Greek correspondent (which differs little lexically from its Hebrew correspondent), homologein. Biblically, “to confess,” homologein, means to “‘say the same thing’—about reality in general, or, more often, about the self specifically—that God says.”

What, then, is the purpose of saying what God has already said, and how does one do that? In the case of confessing to God, why say something that God already knows, and in the case of confessing to others, what does one hope to accomplish?

Biblically, confession is always a response to God’s action in the individual’s life. The work of spiritual memoir is, at its most basic level, to present remembered narrative of God’s action in the narrator’s life. The spiritual memoirist responds, and if, in that response, he says the same thing about himself that God says, then he engages in the act of confession. For the memoirist, as for Augustine, remembrance provokes confession. And this confession is made for others, which provokes self-questioning in the reader, which provokes the reader’s own remembrance and response and, thus, confession before God. This is the job of spiritual memoir, to provoke confession via confession.

I’ve been thinking about the function of a narratee in memoir. I’ve been reading narratological tracts and philosophical analyses, and, frankly, I have no business discussing any of that at this point in my education. One thing I did gather from all that reading is that few seem to be talking about God as narratee. If I write a spiritual memoir, and my memoir is taken up with the work of confessing before God, then God is a narratee, whether stated or implied or both, and what might that mean for me?

Maybe, as many have claimed, Augustine’s claim to honest confession before God was really just a rhetorical ploy to push politics or psychology. I don’t think that’s the case, but it’s possible that placing God as narratee certainly has its rhetorical advantages. If nothing else, it’s worth discussing the question that Augustine asks at the beginning of Book 11 of his Confessions: “Lord, since eternity is yours, can you be ignorant of what I say to you?” What other reason could there be besides rhetorical? Why say to God what He already knows?

I think there are several ways to approach an answer, but the most basic is that in opposition to praise, which is a “way of speaking of the Other, confession is a way of speaking of oneself—of a self that eludes itself, that has deep secrets which cannot be brought to the surface; yet one must speak (not to would be a sin)” (Smith 136). If confession is speaking of one’s self before God (saying what He says), then one purpose of confessing to God is that we learn ourselves, learn to ask “Who am I” (Conf. X, 33, 50). Again, confession is a response to God’s action in our lives, which action is revealed primarily in Scripture, so that in order to confess who we are, we are required to meditate, in Scripture, on what God says is true about us, which, in the case of disagreement, always trumps what we say about ourselves. The fundamental answer here is that God requires confession (both of our faith and of our sins), and, like any other act of obedience, confession is for the confessor’s sake, not God’s.

One reason that critics might label Augustine’s confession as rhetorical ploy is that, to a significant degree, he never arrives at a final, declarative conclusion regarding his relationship to God. Charles Mathewes gives compelling argument for that in his article “The Liberation of Questioning in Augustine’s Confessions,” so I won’t attempt to repeat his argument, but a few points are worth highlighting. Mathewes begins his assessment by beginning at the end of the Confessions:

"Concluding his Confessions, Augustine chose as the work’s final word aperietur, 'will be' or 'shall be opened.' The oddity of ending and closing a book on a conjugation of to open provokes reflections into the nature of questioning, reflections that open into a larger investigation concerning how Augustine understood the nature of religious belief and faithful life. For him, faithful life is a project of resisting our always premature attempts at conclusion, in order better to see the project of 'inquiry into God' as an infinite undertaking, in community with others, organized centrally around reading and inhabiting the thought world of the Scriptures.[. . .] Appreciating the Confessions as a story of “learning to ask questions” illuminates not only the work’s content but also its structure, most notably the odd change of tone and topic from books 1-9 to books 10-13." (539)

I don’t have a specific tally of all the questions that Augustine asks, but it’s a lot, and most of them aren’t answered in a clear, precise manner. Which suggests to me that for Augustine, questioning, like confession, is a proper response to, an expression of, God’s activity in his life rather than a prerequisite to faith and faithfulness. If we accuse Augustine of disguising sneaky rhetoric under the guise of confession based on his lack of resolution, then we impose onto Augustine’s project a requirement for legitimate faith—certainty—that God Himself doesn’t require. Moreover, since so much of Augustine’s confessions is grounded in memory, which itself is epistemologically “uncertain” (Augustine calls it “incomprehensible” [Conf. X, 16]), to require certainty would be to ground the project before it begins.

I’m reminded of the oft-quoted passage in Book XI wherein Augustine describes what happens when he recites a psalm. This passage follows discussion on the nature of time, which Augustine divides into “a present of things past [memory], a present of things present [sight], and a present of things future [expectation]” (XI, 20). He then proceeds to describe what happens when he recites a psalm, that, essentially, he moves from expectation to sight to memory, both through the psalm as a whole and through each word and line and, analogically, through life. Thus, life is circuitous, confession breeding confession, question begging question, hearkening back to Book IV, 1, where Augustine offers justification for the structure of the Confessions: “Allow me, I beseech You, grant me to wind round and round in my present memory the spirals of my errors” (Peter Brown trans.). I find it not only appropriate, but necessary, that the form of the Confessions follows the content, that all this begging and provoking is paralleled by the structure, and the reason that it’s necessary is the same reason that it’s epistemologically irresponsible to require certainty from Augustine: The act of confession is itself a tool used in the face of incommensurability, is required by the tacit nature of both our knowledge of our selves and our knowledge of God.

Just as the circuitous structure of the Confessions is a tool, a form, used to represent the content of Augustine’s heart, so, too, are individual words signs used to make explicit the inexplicable, the incommensurable, the heart engaged in the act of confession, the act of self-discovery. Augustine confesses as much in Book I, 6, 10: “Even at that time I had existence and life, and already at the last stage of my infant speechlessness I was searching out signs by which I made my thoughts known to others.” Confession, in this sense, is the vehicle that runs between transcendence and immanence, between God and man and, once written for an audience, between God and men. Thus, in the case of the reader of a confessional text, language is the mediator between the self, the inexplicable interior, and the intended exterior, the reader. As Augustine writes in De Magistro,

"God does not seek to be taught or reminded by our speaking in order to provide us what we want [in reference to the command to pray]. Anyone who speaks gives an external sign of his will by means of an articulated sound. . . . There is accordingly no need for speaking when we pray. That is, there is no need for spoken words—except perhaps to speak as priests do, for the sake of signifying what is in their minds: not that God might hear, but that men might do so and by remembering might, with one accord, be raised to God." (I, 2)

Again, confession provokes confession. Ending where I began this section, the purpose of inquiry, of self-examination, for Augustine is to provoke the reader to consider life as response to God in the form of inquiry, understanding, and confession, which provokes others to the same cycle. Thus, the goal of self-examination, especially in a memoir with an intended audience, is not simply internalized contemplation but contemplation for the sake of externalization and communion with others, all of it prompted and directed by God through His revealed Scriptures. To label Augustine’s questioning and weaving and non-arriving at certainty as mere rhetoric or evasion is to miss a central feature of the Confessions, that it is a narrative of learning who we are by learning to ask questions, so that we might “be opened.”

I’ve already mentioned that language is the mediator required to make explicit the tacit, to avoid the narcissistic claim of singularity [3]. Taking that one step further, what kind of contextual grounding is required for those words to plant properly in the reader? Basically, the external world—a pear orchard would do. Because the confessor’s knowledge of himself is always changing, always inquiry, his analogies will never fully disclose, never fully explicate, so his confession will always be an imperfect analogy. Thus, there will always remain a barrier between the spiritual memoirist and his reader. To try to collapse all distinctions between narrator and reader is to fail to understand the nature and purpose of confession as a communal act, a corporate process, a dialogical worship. But in order to invite the reader to dialogue, the one confessing must ground his confession in the external world, the “book of the world,” as I and others would categorize Books I-IX of the Confessions.

This grounding in the external world, this searching for apt analogues for our interior worlds, is, in my opinion, the activity that does now, and will continue to, make or break the current crop of spiritual memoirs as effective confessions. Maybe some of these authors aren't approaching their texts with a delineated hermeneutic strategy for dealing with the tacit nature of their incommensurate selves, but they do understand both the need to communicate private experience and the need to avoid narcissistic, talk-show-type confession that merely seeks pity. Winner’s book Girl Meets God is successful in this regard because she communicates her inner journey by way of her outer journey; “her interior landscape is, as she narrates it, not separated from the exterior settings and relationships that have shaped her” (Wright 3). In an attempt to communicate her journey from Orthodox Judaism to Christianity, Winner connects moments of that journey to her parents’ divorce and all the requisite disentanglements. She later describes her inability, like her parents’, to completely ignore the past:

"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."

Wright writes, “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” (3).

A recent example that fails in this regard is Betty Smartt Carter’s Home Is Always the Place You Just Left: A Memoir of Restless Longing and Persistent Grace. Whereas Winner’s confessions are grounded in the external world—books and rituals, e.g.—Carter’s confessions fail to extend significantly into society, fail to use the world to name “the ways that [the] world resides inside of her” (6), thus giving the reader no recognizable ground on which to sit and hear her confession. Because the reader never quite knows where to dwell in Carter’s journey, the reader never quite knows where Carter dwells, and the result is that reader feels detached, voyeuristic, maybe even led to pity, as if Carter were asking the reader to do away with all distance, all distinctions, and enter completely into her space. “Whatever our spiritual narratives might do to foster insight and community,” Wright says, “they can’t—and probably shouldn’t—collapse the distinctions between us” (6).

As I consider my own spiritual narrating, I recognize my failures in that regard. Rather than provide a story or a poem or a TV show or a book as an invitation for my readers, my tendency is to skip to the abstract, the interior space of my daily life. This is to rob my readers of the social analogues they need to join me so that they don’t end up merely pitying me. So that they might be provoked to think about themselves and, thus, offer their own confessions.

Many modern memoirs resort to, as Gertrude Himmelfarb calls it, “familial cannibalism” (34). Rather than confessing one’s own wrestlings for the sake of prompting the reader’s own, these authors abuse self-inquiry by making it the occasion of exposing the faults of others, whether family, friends, or public figures. This is happening not only in secular memoirs, but in spiritual memoirs, as well, and more the shame. There are various reasons for this kind of abuse, but the one that concerns me most with regard to evangelicals is that we often claim for ourselves some sort of “victim status,” which, we feel, gives us the right to name our various offenders for the sake of “therapy.” This is egregious for a number of reasons, but chief among them is that it absolves the self of moral culpability, of the responsibility to engage in honest self-examination and confession in response to what God says to be true about us. This is, then, to obliterate the impetus for the spiritual memoir in its entirety—Augustine’s project of self-inquiry converted to a project of self-justification, which itself is anathema to the undertaking of confession. The Christian with a rudimentary understanding of Scripture knows this.

Why, finally, would one undertake such a project? Augustine, and any other spiritual memoirist, writes from compulsion; she confesses in response to God’s gracious work in her life. All Christians, like Augustine reciting a psalm, move constantly between memory (narrative) and (in)sight. Sometimes, we feel that we can ground some of that narrative in the external world in a way that will prompt readers to their own confession. For the spiritual memoirist, this is both an obligation and a decision. To ask why is about as fruitful as to ask how God can be sovereign and man can be morally culpable. Frankly, I don’t know. Neither does Augustine nor any other contemporary spiritual memoirist. We are only responding, confessing our ignorance and our finitude and our desire to find rest in God, and the best we can hope is that our readers will respond likewise. 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” (Wright 8).

I have been told that in my own writing, I’m guilty of diverting my attention to myself alone; that is, either I skip “the present of things past” altogether or, having begun with memory, I fail to exteriorize in a way that allows my readers access. Or, to put it more simply, I fail to offer story. I confess, I’m guilty. In the spirit of Augustine, and of attempting to learn what I warn other spiritual memoirists against in this paper, let me tell a story, one grounded in the external world.

Donald Miller, author of Blue Like Jazz, began auditing classes at Reed College in Portland a few years ago. Reed College is notorious (depending on your point of view) for its antagonism toward Christianity. Miller’s hope in auditing classes was simply to be present on campus, to listen to and attempt to understand those unsympathetic toward his worldview. Every year on campus, students hold a gathering called Ren Fayre, which is, when it boils down to it, a few days’ worth of “pleasure.” Miller and his friends decided that they would get involved in Ren Fayre. They decided that they would set up a confessional booth in the middle of campus, believing that confession is the starting point for bridging social distance, for establishing genuine relationship. But their confessional was not to be, as Miller would find out, for the sake of receiving confession:

"‘Okay, you guys.’ Tony gathered everybody’s attention. ‘Here’s the catch.’ He leaned in a little and collected his thoughts. ‘We are not actually going to accept confessions.’ We all looked at him in confusion. He continued, ‘We are going to confess to them. We are going to confess that, as followers of Jesus, we have not been very loving; we have been bitter, and for that we are sorry. We will apologize for the Crusades, we will apologize for televangelists, we will apologize for neglecting the poor and lonely, we will ask them to forgive us, and we will tell them that in our selfishness, we have misrepresented Jesus on this campus.[ . . . ]" (Miller 118)

Miller realized that Tony was right, that the important work to be done was to confess, to apologize for himself (so counter-intuitive, so against the grain of our culture’s infatuation with claiming victim status).

The first person to sit in the booth was a guy named Jake. After convincing Jake that the booth was there so that the Christians could confess their sins to the non-Christians, Jake, now shocked and wanting to listen, heard Miller’s confession, heard him apologize for all the ways that both he and Miller could think of in which Miller had wronged him.

“‘It’s all right, man,’ Jake said, very tenderly. His eyes were starting to water.
“‘Well,’ I said, clearing my throat, ‘I am sorry for all of that.’
“‘I forgive you,’ Jake said. And he meant it” (123).

They continued to talk for another 5 minutes, a dialogue made possible by confession. Near the end of their conversation, according to Miller,

"He looked at me very seriously. ‘It’s worth it,’ he said. He shook my hand, and when he left the booth there was somebody else ready to get in. It went like that for a couple of hours. I talked to about thirty people, and Tony took confessions on a picnic table outside the booth. Many people wanted to hug when we were done. All of the people who visited the booth were grateful and gracious. I was being changed through the process. I went in with doubts and came out believing so strongly in Jesus I was ready to die and be with Him. I think that night was the beginning of change for a lot of us." (125)

This is not my story, and yet it is.

A few weeks ago, the pastor of my church in Browne’s Addition asked me how we (the church) might better love our neighborhood. I told him that I think the most appropriate place to start would be to post signs in the neighborhood inviting all of the residents to come to us with their complaints, their grievances, their insults, their abuses at the hands of the church so that we might hear them and confess our sins. My pastor was shocked. He said that was the scariest and best idea he’d ever heard. Confession leading to confession.

Works Referenced

Gill, Joanna. “Someone Else’s Misfortune: The Vicarious Pleasures of the Confessional Text.” Journal of Popular Culture 35.1 (Summer 2001): 81-93.

Himmelfarb, Gertrude. “A Man’s Own Household His Enemies.” Commentary 108.1 (Jul/Aug 1999): 34-8.

Mathewes, Charles T. “The Liberation of Questioning in Augustine’s Confessions.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 70.3 (Sep 2002): 539-60.

Miller, Donald. Blue Like Jazz. Nashville: Nelson Books, 2003.

Olney, James. “Memory and the Narrative Imperative: St. Augustine and Samuel Beckett.” New Literary History 24.4, Papers from the Commonwealth Center for Literary and Cultural Change (Autumn 1993): 857-80.

Smith, James K.A. “How (Not) To Tell a Secret: Interiority and the Strategy of ‘Confession.’” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 74.1 (Winter 2000): 135-51.

Torrance, J.B. “Confession.” New Bible Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1994.

Winner, Lauren. Girl Meets God. Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2003.

*Wright, David. “Reading Spiritual Memoir: A Reader’s Spiritual Memoir.” the New Pantagruel: Hymns in the Whorehouse 2.1 (2005): 8pp. Winter 2005 newpantagruel.com/issues/2.1/reading_spiritual_memoir_a_rea.php.

*I owe a heavy debt here.

[1] I’m working under several presuppositions at this point and throughout the paper. First, I presume that God is personal, and that He has revealed himself to man and continues to do so, the texts of the Old and New Testament being the primary locus of that revelation, and, thus, the biblical texts addressing confession are the primary means of ordering confession. Second, when I use the word “spiritual,” I mean interaction with a personal, monotheistic deity, specifically the God of the Old and New Testaments; mainly, I do this to exclude memoirs borne of new age spirituality and all other pluralistic or universalistic definitions of “God.”

[2] I include any conversion narrative or spiritual memoir as essentially confessional in nature since confession is ultimately enacted in God’s presence, regardless of its rhetorical or inter-textual function.

[3] I mean “narcissistic” in the sense of thinking that one’s experiences are so private as to be rendered completely incommunicable and irrelevant to others. Otherwise, why publish?

Posted by ghetto monk at May 24, 2005 11:52 PM | TrackBack