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[ Back to index of November articles ] BEARINGS: By Martin L. Smith Every few weeks my mother sends me from New Zealand a fresh manuscript chapter of a memoir she is writing of her childhood so I can transcribe it on my computer. She had never dreamed of doing such a thing until my brother suggested it as a legacy for her grandchildren - and the great grandchildren she is hoping for - who might want to know something of that distant life in an English north country village in the 1920s. But her sudden eagerness to tell her story stems, I'm sure, from something deeper than merely the good idea of a family legacy. As she negotiates her closing days, her childhood has laid claim to her. "How childhood tries to reach us…" exclaims Ranier Maria Rilke in one his wonderful poems. My mother needs to tell these stories to round out her life just now. The stories are full of freshness and energy, they are so eloquent of her playfulness and vitality. In the next installment she is going to deal with some terrible and painful times she is only just coming to terms with. Those need facing too. This isn't a game. There is an inner, spiritual work that can only be done by writing our life stories down. Last weekend I was visiting a friend who belongs to a women's spirituality group and I picked up a little booklet of short spiritual autobiographies they had written and collected. Simple as they were, each was a distinct achievement of insight and self disclosure. Clearly in this work of writing they had supported each other and had brought each other a tremendous blessing. Sometimes, writing our story out is almost the only way forward. In my ministry I have helped many people write out for themselves the full life story of their own brokenness in preparation for making their first sacramental confession, and this lead me to write my first book Reconciliation: Preparing for Confession in the Episcopal Church. It is an incredible privilege as a priest to keep a sister or a brother company as they dismantle the survival apparatus of denial and self-justification and claim their identity as sinners sought by a wounded God. These are life stories that don't get told by daydreaming, they need telling and writing down so we can hand them over to God, and tear up the pages after we have taken to heart the word of absolution. The last time I wrote out my own story was in therapy. I had always been clever in telling a censored version of my life story that effectively banished suffering, that put a brave face on everything. My regular story was a pious blarney of interesting 'achievements' and experiences. It took the pitiless discipline of psychotherapy in middle age to make me write out a hundred pages that for the very first time included all the unmentionable stories of abandonment and injury and resentment. Writing a spiritual life story, though, doesn't have to be a response to crisis. And it is never about nostalgia or visiting the past for its own sake. We tell the past in order to bring us fully into the present. The adventure is learning that my story has never been just 'my' story - what appears like my story is and always has been from birth our story, the story of Christ-in-me, me-in-Christ, Christ with me, me with Christ. It's not all about me, but about us. The pencil and paper, the laptop, is ours, and it is as if Christ is looking over my shoulder and encouraging me to tell my life stories in terms of the ups and downs and in and outs of our relationship. Times I was aware of divine company, and times when that was hidden from me. Times of discovery and times of loss. Times of growth and times of betrayal and unraveling. The pages are not all that important in themselves, but the process is. The product isn't a little book to feed reveries. We might seldom read it again. The most important result is when we arrive at today. By writing what has been, we arrive at the blank page of today. And the work of spiritual biography - telling our story as the history of a relationship with God in Christ - comes to fruition in the realization that the blank page of the now, the present moment, is an invitation to be co-creator of our lives with God. To be fully alive is to co-create; "working together with God," as the Eastern Orthodox saints loved to call it, taking their cue from Scripture (1 Corinthians 6: 1). Christ behind us, Christ supporting us tenderly, looking over our shoulder, is saying "What shall we make of today?" Martin L. Smith is a well-known spiritual writer and priest. He is on the staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. [ Back to index of November articles ]
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