At such times I go off alone, in silence, as if listening for God.
I am saying these things to explain why, in the middle of my life, I found myself wandering away, as children do, sometimes alone, sometimes in silence. I went to Anna’s sheep farm in England, to a Buddhist monastery in France, to a parsonage in rural Maine. I completed a certification program in spiritual direction, learning to talk to people who wanted to talk to God. I went back to serious work in my first college major, music, and traveled around singing and playing fiddle duets with Robin, the man who has long been my music partner and life’s companion. My university job no longer interested me as much as it once had. Teaching English is (as professorial jobs go) unusually labor-intensive and draining. To do it well, you have to spend a lot of time coaching students individually on their writing and thinking. Strangely enough, I still had a lot of energy for this student-oriented part of the job. Rather, it was books that no longer interested me, drama and fiction in particular. It was as though a priest, in midcareer, had come to doubt the reality of transubstantiation. I could still engage with poems and expository prose, but most fiction seemed the product of extremities I no longer wished to visit. So many years of Zen training had reiterated, “Don’t get lost in the dramas of life”; and here I had to stand around in a classroom defending Oedipus.
Or maybe it was twenty-five years of Quaker discipline that had made me suspicious of fiction; Quakers have, after all, some theology in common with that clique who shut down the theaters in 1642. The Society of Friends, with its practical focus, has tended to produce natural scientists, botanical illustrators, and manufacturers of chocolate bars. Quakers seldom write fiction and I can’t, offhand, think of any who write it well. Our rather unimaginative testimonies about literal truth lead us away from what we, erroneously, take for its opposite: story. Once I was staying at a Quaker community that suffered flooding in the night from an ice dam on the library roof. Fortunately—or as it turned out, ironically—one of my goddaughters was staying with me, a young woman employed professionally as a museum preservationist. She sprang into action. “I’ll call a friend of mine who knows how to dry out books,” she volunteered, looking at the sodden volumes, many of them rare. “Oh, don’t worry about it,” the librarian told her. “It’s only the fiction section.”
I would not have majored in English and gone on to teach literature had I not been able to construct a counterargument about the truthfulness of fiction; still, as writers turn away from the industrious villages of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, I learn less and less from them that helps me to ponder my life. In time, I found myself agreeing with the course evaluations written by my testier freshmen students: “All the literature we read this term was depressing.” How naive. How sane. One night I begged Robin, a scientist by training, to watch Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” with me on PBS. He lasted about one act, then turned to me in horror: “This is how you spend your days? Thinking about things like this?” I was ashamed. I could have been learning about string theory or how flowers pollinate themselves.
I think his remark was the beginning of my crisis of faith. Like so many of my generation in graduate school, I had turned to literature as a kind of substitute for formal religion, which no longer fed my soul, or for therapy, which I could not afford. With therapy, given luck, time, or medication, the neurosis wanes and one no longer makes appointments. Teaching English, the neurosis wanes as well, and then … well, why do you think so many English teachers become administrators, or throw themselves into abstract contemplation of critical theory? For my part, I became interested in exploring the theory of nonfiction and in writing memoir, a genre that gives us access to that lost Middlemarch of reflection and social commentary. Quakers are, as a group, pigheaded individualists. George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends, issued a famous challenge to his followers: “Christ saith this and the Apostles say this, but what canst thou say? Art thou a child of Light and hast thou walked in the Light?…” What could be more validating to the journal keeper?
I do not think, however, that a memoir is intrinsically more truthful than a novel. Indeed, the diarist should remind herself daily how subjective her occupation is, because she has the overwhelming advantage and responsibility of inscribing her version of events. She should keep in mind, at least—as should her readers—the old country-and-western song, “We live in a two-storey house. She has her story and I have mine.” One kind of nonfiction is, I think, a subspecies of poetry, and poetry is a way to honor the stream of things by observation. Poetry affirms the hunger of our condition: for each other, for comprehension, for God, for the landscape outside self. But it is not botanical illustration.
Having come to doubt the reality of (literary) transubstantiation, I needed, as I do in any crisis, a practical focus. So I became a shepherd: a hireling shepherd. It’s a job with good Biblical antecedents. I went to work in the agricultural division of a land grant college and took on two hundred sheep to be my spiritual teachers. It was a toss-up between that and joining an enclosed contemplative order. “Ora et labora,” the Benedictines teach: work and pray. That’s what I wanted to do. Though what would it mean to pray? I had no idea.
Thoreau—whom I could still read with pleasure—under similar duress had formulated his famous pronouncement:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear …
Lovers of Walden will observe that in my quotation I have stopped short of Thoreau’s full agenda: the part about sucking out the marrow of life, living sturdily and Spartan-like, cutting swaths and shaving close, driving life into a corner. Even as a tubercular thirty-year-old, he had more energy than I, as well as more tolerance for austerity. Besides, it was not my first foray into living deliberately: convent life had wakened that impulse in me. Marriage, bearing children, divorce, single parenting, work: all had confronted me with certain essential facts of life. I wasn’t even unhappy. The fact is, living (somewhat) consciously, like eating wonderful food, had given me more rather than less of an appetite. I had found living so dear that I wanted to do it full time.
How is one to act as if? Start with what you know. What are your deepest instincts? What have you long denied? Over and over, through the years, I had denied the deep peace that came to me in a barn full of animals. I think that, to the extent we’re well socialized, we habitually ignore impulses in our lives that don’t fit the cultural script. Yet people frequently tell me about longings that arise as though from nowhere—the stock analyst who wants to write film scripts, the lawyer with a dream of building houses for the poor. When my friends tell me these things, I feel that I’ve been put in the presence of a tender mystery, yet they often reveal their hearts with a sad, dismissive laugh: “Oh, I know it’s just a crazy fantasy.” We fear these impulses because they have the potential to disrupt our social house of cards, our livelihood, our families. A fellow teacher who longed to sing opera made fun of herself this way: “It’s as crazy as Zelda Fitzgerald wanting to dance ballet.”
Cultural wisdom says, “Don’t quit your day job.” Yet I think these desires represent our psyche’s stretch toward wholeness. And to be whole, as many religious traditions teach, is to make manifest a unique face of God in the world. We don’t want to be irresponsible, yet for every accountant who deserts his family and sails for Tahiti, ten American men have heart attacks at their desks, after hours. And so I usually say to people who bring their longings to me, “Is there a way you can incorporate this need into your daily life, on a kind of trial basis, to see where it leads you? Take singing lessons, learn Italian?”
These kinds of conversations often happen in the course of spiritual direction—by the way, coming out of an egalitarian Quaker tradition, I prefer the term “spiritual companioning.” Whatever you call it, it’s different from psychology, but it makes a parallel effort to translate the subtle codes of the unconscious. I could not, back when I made the decision to tend sheep, understand the language of my desire. I didn’t know what the barn was “about.” In fact, I think it’s a mistake to be too literal in our response to inner directions—it’s when we’re too literal that we make regrettable mistakes about sailing to Tahiti. Before