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 you can follow your heart’s desire, you have to examine your heart closely. It’s a subtle instrument of inquiry, the examined heart.
I don’t know why Thoreau went to the woods, rather than to England or to the Carthusians or to some nineteenth-century Mall of America. Neither could I say why, precisely, I went to the barn. And why did this need for deliberate life well up just then, in 1845 or 1995, for Henry David or for me? Thoreau, who elides as much as he tells, says he wished to transact “some private business with the fewest obstacles.” And what was he looking for? “I long ago lost,” he says, “a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle dove and am still on their trail.”
Oh, yes. I know them. They slipped me, too.
Thoreau’s brief catalog of longing and desire seems to me as unpretentious, tentative, and proportionate a description as I have ever come across of the condition of someone going on spiritual business. How unyielding, on the terrain of this delicate work, seem to me the hard-edged names of God. Years ago I resolved I would go to seminary if only I could somehow stand aside from theology’s relentless dissection and categorization of holy things—a worthy activity for people of a certain temperament, but antithetical to mine. The study of spiritual direction, by contrast, grows out of contemplative tradition, where all the names of God rapidly become moot. “Contemplare et contemplata aliis tradere,” says Thomas Aquinas: Gaze with love on God, share what has been seen with others.
TO SAY, in a work of nonfiction, “I was born in such and such a place, in such and such a year” seems pretentious. It makes one’s individual life appear very important—when what matters are not the facts of a life but the quality of the feelings and affections—what is universal, that is, instead of what is merely local and historical. My individual life could not be more insignificant, and I venture to speak about it not because anything particularly interesting has happened to me but simply because life has happened to me, and it has happened as well to everyone who reads these words. Every book that I care to read or write is a book about the texture of being alive, and only incidentally about the facts of a particular historical moment or gender or ethnicity or skin.
Yet the facts of a life are strings that hold it to the ground. The government is interested in these facts, to be sure, and so is any fair-minded reader who wants a context for evaluating an individual view of the world. Besides, as I think about the scraps of life one shares from day to day, over coffee or traveling into the dark on trains, I realize that the details of my oddly fragmented life present a conundrum to many. “Sometimes you come across like the typical college professor and then you switch on the country-and-western music,” a friend may complain. “Sometimes you seem so solitary, sometimes surrounded by a vast extended family. … Are you a Catholic? A Buddhist? A Quaker?” With apologies, then, but in the interests of clarity, I produce the following facts:
I was born in Pampa, Texas, in an Air Force base hospital, in 1944. My parents were, as parents often were in those days, very young, and they had little money. After the war, we went back to a blue-collar east side neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota, and lived for several years in a fourplex on Case Street. We shared the house with grandparents, aunts and uncles, and, best of all, cousins—five or six of them so close to me in age that I had all the advantages of growing up in the middle of a huge family. My mother had come out of this neighborhood, out of this very fourplex, and her family, the McManuses, were people of note. On the east side, in those days, that was likely to mean you had a job at the telephone company; but in fact, my maternal grandfather and his brothers were even more exalted in station: they were engineers for the Great Northern Railroad.
One day, shortly after the birth of my sister, a moving truck came and made me, for a day, the center of neighborhood excitement: we were going to live in a new house. I did not understand, at five, how permanent this break would be from my fleet of cousins, the wonderful city dump we played in from morning till night, the music of my cousin’s piano, the camaraderie, the protection—and that I would awaken for the next fifteen years or so in a tract house in suburban Roseville, a place that felt as dry to the spirit as if it had been wrung out by huge, impersonal hands.
Like many people after the war, my parents were looking for safety and stability. Their children would not burrow in amusing dumps, they would not be at the beck and call of every manic aunt. Like all the best childhoods, mine was shaping up to be, on Case Street, a machine for producing terror and ecstasy: my parents hoped to put a stop to that. They sought a protected space, planted turf on
