historians of the actual

Reverence may be the road to the sacred and wisdom may be the natural song of the spirit, but story is the text of God and the groundkeeper of prayer. (24)

The Shaping of a Life is autobiography bent to the purpose of spirituality, story-telling as the medium of theology. And Tickle is alert to the dangers:

Compressing long years of gradual understanding into single epiphanies or even tying revelations to singular events may allow us to organize our spiritual autobiographies, but it certainly does not make us fine historians of the actual. (34).

So her honesty, and the correctives and disclaimers she inserts, make what might otherwise be an exercise in introspection and self-explanation best kept for a private journal, into a helpful example of how to map the way we have come. Glad I read it – but it’s a hundred pages too long. That’s a pity because the other 280 pages both as connected narrative, and as a mosaic of shorter stories where God is encountered in ordinariness, make the book worth the effort. None of us can so stand outside ourselves that, when it is our own story we are telling, we perform as ‘fine historians of the actual’.