Circuitous Journeys: Modern Spiritual Autobiography PDF
Preview Circuitous Journeys: Modern Spiritual Autobiography
CIRCUITOUS JOURNEYS This Page Intentionally Left Blank Circuitous Journeys Modern Spiritual Autobiography DAVID J. LEIGH FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS New York 2000 Copyright 02 000 by Fordharn University Press All rights reserved. LC 99-087373 ISBN 0-8232-1 993-3 (hardcover) ISBN 0-8232-1994-1 (paperback) ISSN 10964692 Studies in Religion and Literature, No. 2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available. Printed in the United States of America CONTENTS Acknowledgments Vii Preface iX Introduction 1 1. Thomas Merton’s Tlze Sever? Storey Mutmtain 32 2. Dorothy Day’s The Lm?g Loneliness 56 3. The Psychology of Conversion in G. K. Chesteron and C. S. Lewis 81 4. The Dual Plot of Gandhi’s An A~ltobiogvqdzy 102 5, Malcolm X and the Black Muslim Search for the Ultimate 137 6. Black Elk Syedks: A Century Later 162 7. The Remaking of an American Jew: Paul Cowan’s AI?0 ryhnr.r in History 178 8. I, Rigobevtn Medlti: The Plotting of Liberation 197 9. Dan Wakefield’s Retu~ttil~g 215 IO. Retraveling the Century: Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom 230 Conclusion 253 Index 257 This Page Intentionally Left Blank ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express myg ratitude to colleagues and friends who have helped with various versions of the manuscript: Philip Boroughs, Hamida Bosmajian, Jeffrey Cain, PeterE ly, John Haw- ley, Tibor Horvath, Patrick Howell, JustinK elly, Janet Blurnberg, Mike MacDonald, Elizabeth Morelli, and Andrew Tadie. It goes without saying that John Mahoney of Boston College and Mary Beatrice Schulte of Fordharn University Press have been invalu- able int he final editing process.F inally, I cannot be thankful enough for the responses by hundreds of students in my classes on autobiography at Gonzaga University and Seattle University. Earlier versions of chapters three and five respectively have ap- peared in The Ridde $-Joy: G. K. Chcstevm nrfd C. S. Lewis, ed. Michael H. McDonald and AndrewA . Tadie (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdrnans, 1989) 290-304, and in Ultimate Reality nnd Aderrfling: Ivlterdisciplinary Stdies 13 (March 1990) 33-49. Permission to re- print has been granted by Wm. B. Eerdmans publishing Com- pany for the Lewis chapter, and by the Institute for the Study of Ultimate Reality and Meaning for the Malcolm X chapter. Several sentences from the chapter on Mencht? also appeared in a chapter in Histoviciziq Clrristiar-1 Emmzters with the Others, ed. John Hawley (London and New York: Macmillan and New York UP, 1998) 182-93. Permission to reprint has been granted by both Macmillan and New York University Press. Excerpts from “Little Gidding” in Fow Quartets, copyright 1942 by T. S. Eliot and renewed 1970 by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company. Excerpts from “BurntN orton”i n Four Quartets, copyright 1936 by Harcourt Brace & Company and renewed 1964b y T. S. Eliot, reprinted by permission of the publisher. Excerpts from “East Coker” in Fotu Qrrnrtevs, copyright 1940 by T. S. Eliot and renewed 1968 by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company. This Page Intentionally Left Blank PREFACE My own story of meeting these ten major religous autobiogra- phers of our century-Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Gandhi, C. S. Lewis, Malcolm X, Black Elk, Paul Cowan,R igoberta Menchu, Dan Wakefield, and NelsonM andela-is no mere ghost story. They haveh auntedm yi maginationf ort hirty years. In 1961, I was studying Augustine’s Corlfessiorzs in Latin as a daily exercise between classes to keep up my reading ability in classical languages for graduate school. In the middle of this exercise, I came across Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountnifz and immediately plunged into its detailed story of Merton’s spiritualj ourney from France to Cambridge to Columbia University and eventually to a Trappist monastery in Kentucky. Although I disputed the stark- ness of some of his distinctions, I became a lifelong devotee of his vision. My memory of my first encounter with Dorothy Day’s The Lorg Lanetitress is now a bit hazy, but it was probably in the late 1960s while I was studying theology in Toronto and working in an urban parish to help build a community organization. It was just a month before my ordination as a Jesuit priest in 1968 that I read thes econdi nstallment of Merton’s life story, The Sign of Jolm, the journalo f his years of entrance into the Catholic priest- hood in the monastery. The balance he maintained amid the ten- sions of being both a monk and a writer (“traveling in the belly of a paradox,” he called it) supported me during that turbulent spring and summer. Although I had once sworn to myself that I would never get trapped in late eighteenth-century British literature, I fell into that period in writing my dissertation in English at Yale from 1970 to 1972. It was in the middle of my thesis on the relationship be- tween autobiographical writingsi n pre-romantic writers like Wil- liam Cowper and in Wordsworth that I first read a new book by M. H. Abrams entitled Natural Srqevtzatwalisn~.I n this controver-
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