What to make of a woman whose father is a celebrated educationist, whose great grandparents on her mother’s side were Jewish, who loves silence and solitude but also the interchange of relationships, who writes of a near death experience in the 1950’s that has left indelible marks on her spirit, whose experience of serial miscarriage did not prevent her having a family of 7 children, who has rediscovered her Jewishness but within a clear Christian commitment, who is now a recognised expert on American religion and religious publishing, and is attached as an oblate to an Anglican monastery, and is now a bestselling writer and compiler of a three volume set of The Divine Hours, the ancient prayer practice of the Church?
I know that is one long sentence-question; feel free to put in any helpful punctuation, copy editing. But the book is also one long question – or rather a meandering account of how a life, like a river, makes its way to the sea – in its own time and never in a straight line. The Shaping of a Life is a mixed read; parts of it are chatty and lightweight in a magaziney (new word?) kind of way; some sections are movingly written describing the evolution of a faith with its wits about it; here and there she clunks a big theological nugget on the wooden floor and you’re left to make of it what you will; some parts are dispensable, adding weightless bulk and perhaps clouding the focus of a book that I have enjoyed reading – except the bits I recognised as skim-worthy.
Brought up within sight of Tennessee’s mountains, and then living in Memphis (in the early days of Elvis fever) she tells of how she ‘walked straight into Western religion’s most ubiquitous pair of twinned metaphors….the mountain and the city’.
I want to think about this – two metaphors that might give us the two handles we need to articulate a balanced spirituality for the 21st century. The lonely bleak thereness of the mountain, there, not built, a place that is given to us, not taken; and the crowded thereness of the modern city, built as human construct, taken and possessed with little sense of it as gift. Yet the urban owned property (real estate) and the isolated grandeur of the mountain each offer clues that might help us live more humanely – it is easy to demonise the city and romanticise the mountain. In Scotland we learn every winter about the inhospitable bleakness, the unforgiving danger, of blizzard blown mountains –
and while urban decay has its own bleakness, the life of our great cities also creates its own kinds of communities where people are cherished, laughter is made and compassion is there to be seen if we look for it.
Isaiah 2.1-5 combines the two metaphors, the mountain of the Lord’s temple and Zion – mountain and city – and the vision is of justice, companionable walking, and the new technology of peace as weapons are recycled into horticultural implements to the benefit of the entire creation. It is one of the great visions – and amongst the key inspirations of my own faith….come O house of Jacob, let us walk in the light of the Lord.
Leave a Reply