How to Write a Spiritual Memoir

            I wrote a spiritual memoir a few years ago. It was entitled, Not Sure: A Pastor’s Journey from Faith to Doubt. It wasn’t easy—writing a memoir, that is. I actually have some thoughts about that. (By the way, you should read that book! It’s great! Shameless self-promotion, there. You can get it from Eerdmans or on Amazon .com or .ca site. You could also just click the cover picture over to the left of this column to land on my book’s Amazon page).

            My thoughts here are based in part on a talk I gave about the process of writing a memoir at the Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing a few weeks ago. I did that talk with another writer, Christy Berghoef, who wrote Cracking the Pot: Releasing God from the Theologies that Bind Him. (By the way, you should read that book! You can get it on Amazon .com or .ca.)

            But getting back to my thoughts on writing spiritual memoirs.

            I’m pretty sure that, hands down, the number one type of unsolicited article we received at The Banner over the ten years I was editor was the memoir. Most often they were thinly disguised eulogies. As such they were stories about the author’s life with the deceased. But many were pure memoirs: personal recollections of immigration, or founding a church, or conversion, or surviving World War II, or serving as a pastor, and so on.

            Some were well written, but most were not. Still, the very volume of such articles suggested that a talk on how to write a memoir might be a popular offering at the Festival. And, in fact, nearly 300 people showed up for that seminar.

            Since then, I’ve had opportunity to revise the talk a bit—after all, I only gave half of the original one. But here are a few of my main points.

            One—and I don’t say this to be prescriptive—I backed into the spiritual memoir part of the book. I wanted, at first, to write a book about how what Christians thought “faith” was has been a moving target over the past two thousand years. I partly drew on my background in Communication Theory to write that history. And I drew on my theological training to reflect on the significance of those changing ideas about faith. But finally, halfway into the book, I realized that I was writing about how my own ideas about faith had changed over my lifetime, too.

            Two, one of the most common problems with all the spiritual memoirs I received at The Banner was that they were almost all about good people always doing good things—hagiographies. Drunks dried out. Churches were built in spite of financial setbacks. Immigration led to new lives, in spite of stormy crossings.  And so on. The people in such stories encountered obstacles, but they themselves usually bathed others in love, did so with integrity and by relying on deep faith. The problem with such stories (especially when it came to publishing them in a Calvinist magazine!) is that they never touched on the hero’s, or less frequently, the heroine’s dark side, weaknesses, shortcomings, or failures. But no one’s life is so exemplary that it can stand by itself as a moral lesson. Mother Theresa had doubts. John F. Kennedy was a philanderer. Stephen Harper is a control freak. That means stories that ignore the dark side lack honesty—and usually narrative tension, too.

            Three, spiritual memoirs must have a plot! You must write so that from the first page (or chapter) people are asking, “but how will this end?” You need to put people on the edge of their seats. Readers need a sense that they ought to strap on seat belts and crash helmets. Thus, there must be complicating events, surprising (but believable) twists and turns along the way, and an aching void that lasts to the end of the story that may or may not be filled.

            Four, the writing must be good. Spirituality as a topic doesn't guarantee transcendent prose. So don’t use passive constructions. Find the right word. Concentrate on grammar, style, repetition (good and bad), and punctuation. I was always surprised by how many memoirs (and other articles) we received at The Banner, even from well-educated professionals, that failed using most of these measures. The worst offence, often by pastors, was florid writing. Ponderous decoration doesn’t fly and is nearly impossible to edit.

            Five, get used to the fact that you can never be objective about your own story. You will, after all, pick the events in your life to write about and you will colour them as you see fit. Along the way you will lie, you will misremember, and you will be mightily tempted to weight things ever so slightly in favour of your own portrait. It is impossible to do otherwise. But try to minimize this. Check with friends. Ambiguity, paradox, unknowns, mysteries, confessions, errors all have weight because they help any story become more believable.

            Six, journal. I’m not a daily, year in and year out journaler. However, at several key points in my life—when I was finishing high school, in seminary, when I started in ministry, when my brother was dying, and when I’ve gone on retreat I’ve kept a journal. They were invaluable to me for writing my book. I also had monthly council reports that always included a “personal” note, date books, letters written to my parents when I was in college, news stories, interviews to draw on. I found it painful to read some of that old stuff—but it was illuminating too. If you want to write a memoir, journaling is a great first step. And if you want to get into the discipline of writing, journaling is a great activity.

            Seven, consider employing what Kenneth Burke called “perspective by incongruity.” Burke thought that when you put two things together that don’t belong together, you will see new things. So, for example, there is Robert Persig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Or, how about a bus in the Alaska wilds, as in Jon Krakauer’s, Into the Wild? Or even A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, by Mark Twain. In my own book, I draw some parallels between the faith story of a little boy growing up in St. Catharines and the faith of illiterate peasants in Europe, fifteen hundred years ago. Perspective by incongruity can by paradoxical, mysterious, or simply add interest to your writing.

            Eight, a bit more Kenneth Burke. He suggested that there were five loci that any cultural artifact will have built into it. Act (what happened), scene (where did it happen), agent (who did it), agency (how was it done), purpose (to what end). In my experience as an editor, many of my beginning writers focused almost exclusively on fleshing out the agent. It is a memoir, after all. But scenes contain and constrain acts. It matters what sort of family you grew up in, or what seminary was like, or what your neighbourhood was like. Memoirs ought to explore all five loci, but I think Scene offers some of the most imaginative possibilities.

            Naturally, this is the sort of topic that whole books could be written about. So I offer my eight thoughts as part of a much larger conversation. Still, lots of people have interesting and instructive stories to tell. Hopefully these hints will help you write yours.

The End of Denominationalism

            Most of us are suspicious of institutions. They’re big, out of touch, impersonal, pushy, and so on. Our gut says, “less government.” We don’t see bank tellers or develop relationships with them anymore. Kids get lost in today’s factory schools and are too often bullied by peers. Facebook changes privacy settings without asking us about it. Security breaches allow hackers harvest our personal data from Target and many other corporations—sometimes even from the government. And at church, we want spirituality rather than religion. This does not bode well for denominations.

            Denominations—like many religious institutions—have been in trouble for a long time. I thought I’d sit down and try to list a few reasons why.

1.  Historically, and still theoretically, denominations coalesce around theological distinctives. Where there was choice, long ago, matters such as predestination or the nature of Jesus’ presence at the Lord’s Supper or children’s baptism played a part in helping people to join different, competing camps. Of course, long ago there often was less choice than we imagine now. You joined the church of your sovereign, or your nation, or your village. And if you didn’t, you were in trouble. My own Mennonite ancestors fled persecution in Reformed Switzerland to find religious freedom in somewhat more liberal, but still Reformed, Netherlands. Their children mostly married Reformed spouses. The truth is that most people actually belong to the church they do due to accidents of birth, race, location, and even war even if the denominational roots of those churches are in ancient doctrinal conflicts. Churches have never really examined the causes (simpler) and consequences (much more difficult) of this reality, and what it means in light of its own story that it is all about distinctives. Unfortunately for denominations, the big “accident,” of history these days is secularism and religious relativism.

2.  These days, however, people know about as much about that history, or theological distinctives, as they know what is in those User Agreements you click in order to download new apps. For most people, the “original” doctrines are anachronisms. It isn’t necessarily that they disagree with them. The vast majority of denominational members don’t know much about them. If they do, they know the content of their own doctrines, but have never seriously wrestled with alternatives. The reasons for this lack of understanding in the pews are complex. The issues that led to the formation of denominations don’t seem very relevant anymore—so much junk DNA. We don’t go to war with Mennonites or Catholics. Most issues that separate today’s denominations seem irrelevant, abstract, or are not at all understood. Not nearly as many people read theology as in the old days—say from about the seventeenth century till about fifty years ago. So people are poorly informed.

3.  In the absence of deep understanding of theological distinctives, people sometimes coalesce around moral issues instead: abortion, homosexuality, premarital sex, corporate crime, the environment, poverty and so on. They find communities on the Internet, and in media, that loudly trumpet particular moral positions on these issues. These virtual communities are like silos—all filled with a single point of view, and separated from other communities with different points of view. People become very emotional about their perspectives. In this environment, denominations find it hard to keep everyone on the same page. People would rather stick with their virtual community’s perspective on these issues than bow to 

what the denomination (tries) to insist on.

4.  One of the largest groups of leaders and paid employees in most denominations, the seminary faculty, is understandably deeply engaged in doctrinal distinctives. They seem unable, unwilling, and always unimaginative when it comes to helping denominations deal with this massive shrug of the shoulders when it comes to what they as theologians care deeply about. Few know their names, look for their opinions on the internet, or can understand the relevance of a life spent trying to understand Rupert of Deutz on the sacraments.

5.  Denominational bureaucracies (including most seminaries) are deeply committed to the status quo. You can hardly blame them. Fundamental change is always controversial, and that risks (at worst) schism and (at best) the slow erosion of dissatisfied members elsewhere (or more often than not, out of church altogether). Holding the line on budgets and staff while churning out more and more memos and workshops and reports is safe, but inspires no pastor or member in the parish.

6.  You have to do the Exegetical Twist to justify denominations or their central concern for doctrine Biblically. Churches were named by the city they were in. Theoretically faith, hope and love are the most important realities. While much in the New Testament over time morphed into a thousand theological views, doctrine itself is rarely presented there as, “you must believe this version of the truth,” rather than, “that version.” I realize this oversimplifies things. But it is hard to imagine anything other than a friendly “maybe this, maybe that,” discussion between the apostles about words such as “begotten,” “virgin,” “catholic,” “descended into hell,” never mind whether or not women could preach or whether Mary bodily ascended to heaven, or the practice of naming saints. Ironically, one doctrinal matter they probably all agreed on—the immanent return of Jesus—was something they were all wrong about.

7.  Denominations have always been about doctrine, in theory. But in truth, the glue that holds people in denominations is usually ethnicity or community. Modern culture, on the other hand, is increasingly multicultural. Every new generation has a harder time understanding why they ought to go to mom and dad’s church with other Dutch or Scots or Lithuanians than the previous generation.

8.  Denominations, while having a semblance of unity and homogeneity based on their shared dogma, are ironically much less homogenous than they seem. When I worked as editor for a denominational magazine I travelled from one end of the denomination to the other. I was constantly amazed by how dissimilar the churches I visited were. Many were aligned with right-wing evangelical politics and attitudes. Others were most definitely not. Some were still very focused on doctrinal distinctives, while most were not. Some were deeply committed to being ethnic islands (though few admitted it). Others were cosmopolitan. Some leaned charismatic, others Baptist, others to piety, others to political activism or social justice, and others again to nothing much of anything. When so much substantive difference exists between different congregations in one denomination, the unity they share is more imagined than real.

9.  People might care about doing something with the Baptist or Catholic congregation down the street, but could care less about national or international ecumenical organizations. All politics, and nearly all church, is local. I’m not saying this is a good thing, but it doesn’t bode well for denominations because the lack of interest for stuff happening beyond the town line is the same lack of interest people have for denominations. This is doubly so when being on the boards or being sent as a delegate to these ecumenical organizations is usually understood as being a reward for especially well-connected clergy or church bureaucrats. It just doesn’t get traction in the pews.    

10.  Pastors are often stuck with their denominations for very practical reasons--pensions, denominational jobs, the trouble that goes with convincing a congregation to change course. And of course, there is legal recourse that denominations use to keep congregations on board, too. But pastors resent these practicalities, and congregations don't like the coercion.  
          

          So, as I noted above, people are suspicious of institutions: their coercive ways, their fine print, their focus on what seems irrelevant to life here at home. This distrust is easily projected on church doctrines and documents and rules and regulations and bureaucracies and old boys’ clubs and national personnel. I sympathize with some of these objections but worry about others. The bottom line, however, is that it is hard to imagine that much time or energy ought to go into preserving a largely unresponsive, tone-deaf, sixteenth-century, nexus focused on less than strategic realities. Real church, basic church is congregational. If we could undo the ties that bind us into denominations, I’m pretty sure we’d soon develop new ties for community and education and mission that make a lot more sense, would be far more responsive, and much less coercive than what we have now.

           Or maybe a few denominations will pioneer new ways of being denomination. The United Church of Canada is floating ideas for a radical new structure in a document called “Fishing on the Other Side” ( http://tinyurl.com/p5u9vdy ). It offers a vision for a great strategic retreat from the structures that bind us today, and bears careful examination—even by people who belong to other faith communities.

Why (Many) People Really Go to Church

This morning, while walking the dog down a switchback trail from the G. Ross Lord reservoir to the West Don River, I came upon an elderly woman dressed in many layers of Middle-Eastern garb, including a headscarf. Her clothes were old and drab. She walked with a limp and a pronounced stoop. No one else was around.

She was bending over and rising, bending over and rising, putting something that she was finding down by her boots into a plastic bag. As I approached her, I said “Hello! What are you collecting?”

She looked at me with real fright. I smiled, tried to disarm her. I pointed to her bag. She showed me—still, with real fright in her face. The bag was full of young dandelions, not yet flowering. She put her free hand to her lips and said, “Eat.” But she was also completely unnerved.

Maybe she was scandalized by meeting me alone, a man. Maybe she was afraid of me because it was a desolate place. Maybe she was worried about how to handle conversation, her English being nonexistent. Maybe she was ashamed to be collecting dandelions, or ashamed of seeming so out of place, or maybe it was all the above.

Walking home, it struck me that it can be very hard to be an immigrant, a stranger in a strange land. No wonder so many immigrants stick together in whatever places they can find to do so. When I was a teen I worked in a chicken processing plant where most employees were either of Portuguese or Dutch extraction. When I used to go for a walk in the park in Cobourg I was always amazed that so many Pakistanis beat me there, especially since I didn’t think any of them lived in town. But then I remembered meeting the Dutch clans, as a kid, on the beach at Niagara-on-the-Lake, also on Saturdays.

It is hard to be an immigrant. No wonder, then, that so many also stick together in church or mosque or temple or synagogue. One thing that many of us—the Muslim woman picking dandelions, my many Jewish neighbors near Toronto’s Bathurst St., and I as a child of Dutch immigrants have in common is that ethnic religious services and communities play a huge role in helping us adjust to life in the diaspora.

At the same time, as children and sometimes even their elders adjust, the role such faith communities play in immigrants’ lives usually plummets. The faith communities themselves slowly wither away, usually while trying hard to deny their ethnic reasons for being, and while spinning off conservative splinter groups that continue to deny they’re ethnic groups in part by yelling louder and louder about their doctrinal distinctives.

But ethnic churches usually do go into decline. Since I’ve left the Christian Reformed church I’ve started noticing others who have done so. I have realized I can make lists many, many names long. These lists include family, friends, people I grew up with, people I went to parochial school with, and readers of my book, blog, and Twitter feed. My guess is that less than half of the Christian Reformed kids I grew up with still belong.

But it isn’t just the Christian Reformed Church. When I drive through my mother’s neighbourhood, in Brampton, just outside of Toronto, I’m struck by how many Sikhs walk the streets. They’ve mostly done very well. Of course, there have been racial and ethnic tensions along the way, but people are finding ways to get along. They’re a part of the landscape now.

How do I know they are Sikhs? Well, there were newspaper articles about how and why Brampton has become a favourite destination. There is a Sikh temple around the corner of my mother’s home. But mostly, Sikhs look like Sikhs: turbans and flowing robes and hairnets for younger men and great majestic beards and long hair and no earrings. Sikhs are hard to miss, and their dress is definitely a lot less boring than most of ours!

But last time I was in Brampton, it struck me how many people in my mom’s neighbourhood also looked like lapsed Sikhs. These were mostly younger men and women, who had the same beautiful olive complexion and dark hair, who often walked with other Sikhs, but who also wore miniskirts and t-shirts and jeans, colored hair highlights in many styles and bling—people who were obviously not participating in anything like Sikh orthodoxy. Many, many younger Sikhs must be leaving their temples and striking out on their own. Not so different than in my old Dutch Christian Reformed community.

What does it mean? Well, to the degree a temple or church or mosque relies on ethnicity to thrive (whether this is acknowledged or not) it probably will, but only for a generation or two. The thing is, like sticky notes, ethnic glue is not strong and dependable for the long term. Many who belong to such ethnic communities will leave when the protection and support such communities provide is no longer needed. Their leaving will also demonstrate that the spiritual convictions that were supposed to be at the heart of these communities are not and were not nearly as compelling as the spiritual leaders, professors, and teachers thought they were. Most people belong to spiritual communities for reasons other than what those communities teach from their pulpits or podiums.

Don’t get me wrong. I now belong to a denomination that has been bleeding members for nearly as long as my previous denomination has been in this country. Deep-seated conviction about theological confessions of any kind is not much in favour anywhere these days, in almost any faith community—again, except among the professors and professionals.

I’m reading a just-published (fascinating, too) book by United Church historian Phyllis Airhart. She describes how in the face of massive foreign immigration into Canada of non-Protestant people over a hundred years ago, part of the motivation for the United Church’s founding was the idea that it would missionize these people in order to help the Canadian state build a unified Christian society. The book is titled, A Church with the Soul of a Nation. It turns out to have been a lofty Constantinian-type goal that was never achieved. But it goes to show, once more, that the intersection of faith and ethnicity—in this case fear of new immigrants and what they meant—has a long history.

At the same time, this real function of many churches—being a safe place for immigrants and their children and (hopefully, they think) their children’s children—this actual function reveals the hubris that most denominations display in teaching that their way is the best way. That sort of confessional bluster is just smoke and mirrors for the real reasons churches succeed, sometimes, for a while. Or, at the very least, this confessional bluster is just a small part of why some churches succeed for a short time.

So what? I’m not sure. I’m thinking that someone, somewhere, needs to think creatively about what is going on when churches say they’re all about their confession or teachings or dogma, but the truth is that they fill quite a different social function.

And, given that community and love of neighbour gets so much stress in scripture, maybe that is something that should be more openly and strongly embraced, while doctrine ought to be given the public place in churches that it actually has in our hearts.

Why Do Institutions Tie Us Up in Knots?

It happened again, this past week. I went to Calvin College’s Festival of Faith and Writing. I was there to make a presentation with Christy Berghoef on how one goes about writing a spiritual memoir. We had fun. The seminar was well attended. People seemed to enjoy it.

Walking around campus afterward, however, I felt disquieted. I’m not sure I can pinpoint why. Maybe it was because I am very introverted. I don’t enjoy floating like a butterfly in a big crowd.

But some of my disquiet also had to do with my deep emotional attachment to Calvin College—and even more so, the Christian Reformed Church. Or rather, I should say my disquiet was rooted in no longer being attached to those institutions.

We all know the legal fiction that makes corporations—institutions like the church or its college or seminary—people. The law generally treats institutions as if they are persons. The law treats institutions as independent centers of will and action. They can earn profit, make donations, pay taxes, sue and be sued, and so on—even though they are not flesh and blood.

But there is actually more going on here than the necessary legal fiction. The truth is we often become deeply attached to institutions, just as we become attached to real people. Attachment to people is a basic human need. Adam needed a helper who could be a partner. Children are born pining for mothers. We need friends and community to thrive. And institutions, like people, can partly fulfill that need for attachment. Mostly through their human proxies, institutions love and nurture, accuse and forgive, embrace and reject. People are deeply affected by such actions and respond emotionally. Thus they often become deeply attached to their institutions.

Being back at Calvin disquieted me because it brought home with great emotional force the injury I’ve suffered by abandoning my lifelong attachment to the Christian Reformed Church.

The best analogy I can think of is a story that a former parishioner told me, years ago. This older person had been married for over thirty years but was abandoned by his wife. They divorced. They had no children. While married, they had also moved around a lot, often far from family and old friends, never putting down deep roots.

The parishioner told me that his thirty years of marriage now seemed, to him, a big black hole. There was no one to talk with, anymore, about those thirty years. No one could recall with him his mountaintop experiences or triumphs. No one would remember with him the pain or defeats that punctuated those years. Without anyone to speak to who was there those thirty years, it was almost as if they had never happened. “Sharing memories, good and bad, is how we process things,” this man said to me. “But I can’t process. It is as if someone imposed a press blackout on half my life. No one will ever know what happened.” He had become "unattached," as they say.

Now, I’m sure that leaving an institution behind isn’t as painful as leaving the one person you were daily and deeply attached to behind. Besides—I still have a spouse I’m happily married to, family is an important part of my life, and I’ve got many good friends of long-standing both inside and outside the Christian Reformed Church. Still, much of what I believed in and worked for in the Christian Reformed Church seems insubstantial now, thin and watery, like soup stock. Thinking back on it alone isn’t fulfilling. It makes the past thirty years seem, if not a great black hole, then at least a long excursus. An emotional loss.

Some readers will wonder, then, why I left. Why not—like a couple in crisis—get some counseling, work on the relationship, and repair what was going wrong? But here institutions are utterly unlike people. They cannot negotiate relational issues. Where people can engage in self-examination, change their habits or even their minds, confess sins and make promises to do better next time—institutions rarely do any of these things. When they try, only herculean and time-consuming effort will lead to change. There are, after all, bylaws to follow, creeds and confessions to uphold, and conflicting factions to balance and appease. I’m reminded of what a former Anglican Bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, wrote in his autobiography, Leaving Alexandria. “All institutions over-claim for themselves and end up believing more in their own existence than in the vision that propelled them into existence in the first place. This is particularly true of religious institutions. Religions may begin as vehicles of longing for mysteries beyond description, but they end up claiming exclusive descriptive rights to them” (p. 151).

My problem with the Christian Reformed Church—which I loved—is that I have changed my mind about those mysteries beyond description. And the church isn’t about to change its mind. The thing is, when potential change in a relationship can come only from one side, counseling and repair isn’t an option. The relationship is over.

Just so that no one misunderstands—I recognize that my new denomination, the United Church of Canada—is as hide-bound an institution as any other. This is especially true when it comes to its government and administration. The great difference, for me, is that the United Church is also institutionally committed to not “claiming exclusive rights” to any specific mystery, unless it is the mystery of loving neighbors (however imperfectly we actually succeed). Right now, the wide-open space my second church relationship allows me is also perfect for me.

But still, I was very sad at Calvin this past week. I’m reminded of something (a bit naughty) that my great-grandfather is reputed to have said, long after both of his wives had passed away. “When you remarry, you go to bed with your new wife. But you always sleep with your first love.”

Institution-wise, at least, I think I know what he meant.