Life Writing in Contemporary Theology
I have argued that the earliest forms of spiritual life writing within the Christian tradition demonstrate the tugs of conflicting forces pulling them towards coherence and also displaying elements that defy easy resolution into narrative wholeness. These tensions are part of the gene code of the biographical genre itself[1] and continue to be evident in life writing today. As theology, increasingly drawn towards theopoetics, turns to life writing as a significant resource its ambivalenceis both resisted and welcomed.
This can be illustrated in relation to two important recent books by feminist theologians which both use life writing as their chief resource. I shall briefly compare Sally McFague’s Blessed Are the Consumers (2013) with Claire Wolfteich’s Mothering, Public Leadership, and Women’s Life Writing (2017).
[1] This point is made by Linda Anderson in her influential text on biographical writing (2004). She argues that Augustine can be credited with establishing the autobiographical tradition with its authoritative narrative ‘I’. Yet, at the same time, he undermines this project through his creaturely acknowledgement of the illusory nature of the independent and singular self; coherence and chaos struggle together in his writing (2004, p. 27).
Both works address pressing theological challenges and do so by looking to the lives of significant people of faith in order to root their theological thinking in lived experience and develop a truly incarnational theology. Neither book is naïve or simplistic in its use of material from faithful lives. Both acknowledge the complexities of this process and the need to avoid easy generalisations or idealized hagiographies. However, we will find that McFague and Wolfteich take very different approaches to their material and these differences will be most apparent when they in turn come to reflect upon the life of that most attractive, prophetic and difficult woman: Dorothy Day.
As the title suggest Sally McFague’s work concerns the need to discover holy and healing ways of living in the context of a consumer culture that is impacting disastrously upon the fragile ecologies of our planet and the wellbeing of its peoples. In order to do so she is seeking models of lives lived in deep devotion to Christ which have the potential to point us towards ways we can also embody radical obedience and counter the destructive tendencies that threaten our common good. She expects to discover through reading exemplary lives (she chooses as her models the Quaker John Woolman, the radical mystic Simone Weil and the self-sacrificial activist Dorothy Day) confirmation of a religious insight that ‘happiness is found in self-emptying and satisfaction is found more in relationships than in things, and that simplicity can lead to a fuller life.’ (2013:x). She is particularly interested in how each of these stories can become a form of pedagogy illustrating how contemporary readers might respond to God’s love and call today.
In this pedagogical intention McFague is fundamentally aligning herself with a dominant Augustinian motif which we previously described as the melodious resolution of the movement from sin to grace. Indeed, it is the journey of the self from alienation towards reconciliation with the divine that is her chief concern as she hopes that close attention to this process in those she studies will help her readers to undertake this same pilgrimage. McFague considers that all her exemplars undertook forms of the same archetypal spiritual journey. Like Augustine’s this entailed an awakening to the divine resulting in a process of transformation and realignment of the will and orientation towards the other. In the particular context of this work McFague has chosen as her examples people who experienced the transformative process particularly in terms of voluntary kenosis, the relinquishing of personal rights and comforts and the full acceptance of voluntary poverty. It is her conviction that this spiritual process enabled Woolman, Weil and Day to overcome self as they were caught up within a universal spiritual vision. This new worldview allowed them not only to achieve personal sanctification but also to make a decisive public and political contribution. It is within this frame that McFague presents her reflections upon Dorothy Day.
For McFague it was Day’s gradual recognition that she must renounce those things that prevented her full self-giving to Christ and others that marked her spiritual journey. This process included a painful separation from her lover and the renunciation of direct maternal care for her daughter Tamar. As Day was drawn more and more into the kenotic vision of St Francis and the communitarian ideals of St Benedict through her engagement with the Catholic Worker Movement she also renounced her privacy, space, enjoyment of good books and good music. Her time was devoted to the service of others. Her efforts to make hospitable provision for the poorest and her corresponding commitment to political change required what McFague evocatively terms a ‘wild’ self-emptying passion; a quality she hopes to invoke in her readers. Through narrating Day’s life story in terms of an idealized form of spiritual quest McFague seeks to make enliven and enflesh the teaching of the Church on personal responsibility, social duty and sacrificial service to others.
Claire Wolfteich takes a rather different approach in her work on mothering as a personal and public role. Her intention is to interrogate the messy ambivalence inherent in our experiences of maternal love and to discern what fresh theological understandings might emerge as we reflect without sentimentality upon this key aspect of many women’s lives. Strong themes emerge from her study of women’s maternal and spiritual life writing across the centuries and from a variety of cultural contexts. These lead Wolfteich to present many challenging ideas concerning the lack of theological engagement with the need for rest, self-nurturing and care. She makes a more radical theological intervention, however, through deconstructing the division between private, personal and political in relation to maternal relations. In so doing she presents a revisioned understanding of mothering as a paradigm for political engagement and theological thinking.
There is much in this work that disrupts the boundary walls of established, gendered theology. However, the use of life writing means that this work is not simply an intellectual challenge to dominant models. The work draws life from the lives it narrates and is nowhere more powerful than in its discussion of the personal trials and conflicts experienced by Dorothy Day. Although she draws upon the same autobiographical writings and contemporary sources as McFague, Wolfteich presents a very different picture of this iconic figure. Wolfteich describes how Day came to faith through her experiences of sensual love and found a mystical satisfaction in her experiences of feeding her baby; holding her close and looking into her eyes. In this frame the renunciation of intimacy, and particularly the prolonged separation from/desertion of Tamar which enables Day to undertake her kenotic witness take on a very different appearance. Wofteich does not present a conventional picture of the melodious qualities of the spiritual journey. While all the maternal narratives she narrates contain ambivalence Day’s is marked by particularly deep suffering, conflicts and trauma. Her life writing speaks in the ‘double voice’ of a person unable to find an easy reconciliation between her sense of spiritual calling and her maternal love. There is an ‘unresolvement’ here that cannot be smoothed away into the familiar contours of the spiritual journey. For Wolfteich Day represents in some ways the Biblical figure of Rachel inconsolable for her children. Daringly Wolfteich suggests that the unspoken, uneasy, unknown experience of maternal trauma might be understood as apophatic – in the sense that it is both unspeakable and an epistemology of affect. Wolfteich carefully attends to this particular quality in the life narratives she studies and gives theological voice. Her work calls us to move beyond the saccharine simplicity that still characterizes theological understandings of motherhood and build an understanding of mothering that is mature and complex. This project pushes ambiguity and pain to the heart of our theological imaginings and spiritual understanding.