Taking it personally

Christian Century, April 24, 2002 by Trudy Bush

IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND, spring was the time to set out on pilgrimage. As the earth turned green and the air warmed, renewing people's energy and also engendering a certain dreaminess and introspection, it seemed time to clean house, to put things in order mentally and spiritually, or to set out on a journey.

Perhaps a similar impulse guided me this spring to these four books about spiritual journeys. One of these journeys takes 30 days--the time needed to complete St. Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises. One is tied to the days of November, the month in which Abraham Lincoln prepared and delivered his Gettysburg Address. Another follows the first two years of a child's life as experienced by his mother. The fourth charts a woman's churchgoing experience in eight congregations.

Paul Mariani is a perfect guide to one of the great Christian spiritual traditions. A critically acclaimed poet who has written biographies of William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, John Berryman and Robert Lowell, Mariani is skilled at examining and imaginatively reconstructing lives. He writes with grace and depth, even if he often feels as if writing "seems rather like gathering my experiences in a colander, only to see the fullness of things flow out through the gap between the worlds." Former professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, he now teaches at Boston College. The decision to leave one university for the other is one of the issues that propelled him to undertake a 30-day silent retreat at the Jesuit-run Gonzaga Retreat House on Eastern Point, just outside Gloucester, Massachusetts.

For many Protestant readers, the intensity and prescribed order of the Spiritual Exercises may take some getting used to. The first week focuses on sin, collective and personal. The goal is to empty the disordered self so as to make room for God. This is designed to prepare the seeker for the path of the second week--"to follow Christ in love and to share in his saving mission." The third week is devoted to meditation on Christ's passion, and the final week to the resurrection.

Mariani brings to these meditations his guilt over a particular sin--he is haunted by the long-ago affair that led him briefly to walk out on his wife and sons. Though he has rebuilt his relationship with his wife, he realizes that he will carry to his death the expression of shock and disbelief on his youngest son's face when he announced that he was leaving the family. He wrestles also with his pride, and with various sins of omission and commission, finally finding release during a prayer in which he asks for forgiveness and for the welfare of those he has hurt.

As he moves deeper into the Spiritual Exercises, through boredom and frightening dreams--of suffocating, drowning, or choking on his own blood--Mariani finds helpers: his spiritual director, with whom he meets each morning; a history of the Jesuits; the life of St. Ignatius; the works of the great Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins; Raymond Brown's Introduction to the New Testament; the winter landscape; memories of things his friends have said and written; and, above all, his family. Gradually the frightening images fade, replaced by a sense of God's love and care for him.

In the middle of the book Mariani reaches his dark night of the soul. He has a sense of being stuck, of being unable to move on to full surrender to God. Drawing on The Divine Comedy, he remembers that Dante himself says that "he had to be lowered or lifted to the next level of the journey if he was going to make any further progress." Mariani realizes that he, too, must wait patiently to be lifted by God's grace, that "however bright and independent I might think I was, there were certain spiritual realities I could not get at by any human ladder."

As he goes into the third week, it's obvious that Mariani has become more focused. He concentrates more on the Gospels themselves, bringing in fewer additional helps and talking less about himself. His spiritual director calls him to consider his own place in the gospel story. "And what about the washing of the feet? Did you [in your meditations] let Jesus do that for you?" In a moving passage, Mariani imagines himself in that story, allowing Jesus to wash his foot scarred by a childhood accident.

A recurring question for Mariani is the one Jesus put to his disciples: "Who do you say that I am?" But Mariani concludes that an even more important question is "Who does God think I am?" After all, he wouldn't be on this retreat if he didn't think Jesus was central to his existence, that "He is in fact the Son of God, and therefore intimately God."

Later, Mariani decides that he had been asking a biographer's question. He had been trying to discover who the real Jesus is. "But the mistake is to fully equate the real Jesus with the historical Jesus, a figure who can only be recovered--like any of us--to one degree or another." Writing biographies has taught him that "in trying to reconstruct a life, the best we can do is to create a necessary fiction." There is another Jesus, "the Christ of the Resurrection, transformed and transforming, the one who acts upon me and remakes the questioner, the pilgrim, the seeker. It is this Jesus I have spent these past weeks trying to approach." And Mariani is, at the most unexpected moments, touched and transformed by this Jesus.