the book is about US (the two of us, our spiritual direction work, our mutuality, our connectedness), it seems essential that you include Tutu in the celebrity chapter.
He is a great figure in your life—and also in the world. Such links need to be made. Actually including him should make your work easier because obviously you have material about Tutu on hand that you can incorporate here. This heightens interest and excitement, assists the task of communication, and draws you closer into your necessary orbit. The book becomes ever and ever more fascinating. It’s far more than “a biography.”
All this is becoming infinitely more fascinating than either of us initially had in mind. A truly original, creative work.13
Fortunately, I didn’t need a spiritual director for my two years in South Africa because I used Tutu’s own spiritual director, the Rev. Francis Cull. It was fascinating working with Cull, who resembled a character from Tolkien or C. S. Lewis stories. His very presence stimulated a sense of unusual reality which helped in spiritual direction. It was easier to talk about God and unusual things with Francis.
When I returned to the United States in 1995, I no longer had a spiritual director. And sadly, my Nome-like spiritual director had passed away. As my public ministry developed as a professor of spirituality, retreat leader, theologian, and Episcopal priest, I was living in the hypocrisy of giving spiritual direction without being in it myself. These years accumulated because I was too picky and could not settle upon an ordinary spiritual director. One day, in August 2007, as I was walking through the Cathedral Center in the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, I overheard someone say that Malcolm Boyd gave spiritual direction. Malcolm became my spiritual director.
How Malcolm discovered his gifts as a spiritual director was interesting and surreptitious. It wasn’t as if he signed up for a course in spiritual direction or climbed a Tibetan mountain to attain a particular acumen to do it. In the 1980s Malcolm served as an associate priest at the parish of St. Augustine by-the-Sea in Santa Monica, California. The Rev. Fred Fenton, rector of the parish, invited Malcolm to “come out” as a gay priest in his first sermon there. Some people walked out and some pledges were cancelled, but Malcolm remained there for nearly fifteen years. In past years Malcolm had counseled dozens, if not hundreds, of men and women in Indianapolis and Colorado and as a college chaplain. Yet he had never thought of this work as “spiritual direction.” In other words, he had not engaged a group of individuals in spiritual work over a sustained and lengthy period of time as a regular, ongoing enterprise.
At St. Augustine, he was sought by an Episcopal priest who had long been a member of an Anglican religious order. He asked: could Malcolm become his spiritual director? Although he felt untrained and perhaps inadequate, Malcolm said yes. He would give it a try. He and the priest/monk entered into what became a fifteen-year spiritual relationship. Malcolm says: “I had the finest on-the-job training in the world.” Soon several other men and women requested that Malcolm enter into a dialogical pattern of spiritual direction with them. Malcolm says his approach has always been improvisational rather than tightly scripted or adhering to a rigid mode. In a seemingly idle conversation, suddenly a nerve is struck; maybe a childhood experience comes to the fore in a startlingly relevant way; an “elephant in the room” stirs and is identified.
Now Malcolm acts as spiritual director for a dozen men and women. His range has included bishops, both younger and older persons, a Lutheran pastor, a Methodist pastor, gays and straights, mostly Episcopal clergy but also deeply committed lay people. Individual sessions can run to three hours. Malcolm’s approach is to be as open to his directees as they are to him. So the sessions are intimate rather than distanced, impersonal, or bureaucratic. Spiritual direction, as Malcolm practices it, is less a process of crisis management than it is a long, ongoing, patient process of discovery and self-discovery. It is marked by both simplicity and humor. Faith is not perceived as a museum piece but as a living and present force.
In a letter to someone seeking spiritual direction, Malcolm describes his own unusual style of doing spiritual direction. Malcolm writes one of his directees:
I honestly don’t know who would be a good spiritual director for you! My own approach is so out of the ordinary, not formal, built on relationship and dialogue. I’ve simply related to a number of individuals who asked me to “be” that role in their lives. However, I’m not a “member” of a “group of spiritual directors.” God knows who could “be” this for you. (God undoubtedly does, yet that doesn’t help us very much right now.) Take a deep breath, look around (and closely, and pray).
Someone is writing my biography! This is a strange, altogether new experience for me. Requires much emotional and mental digging into my past.
Mark is fine (and, of course, has a new book just out). Diocese of LA is chugging along well. The two new suffragan bishops are splendid. All blessings, Malcolm.14
Malcolm’s style of spiritual direction was indeed that of being—being present to the seeker of God. There was no pretense of technique or getting the words exactly right. As I asked my own narcissistic questions about prayer, God, justice, bad religion, and much more in front of Malcolm, narratives and wisdom flowed from Malcolm’s life experience. It was impossible to be self-absorbed while hearing Malcolm’s staccato laugh or to despair while listening to him read one of his provocative poems. After a year of being in spiritual direction had almost passed, I experienced an epiphany. “Malcolm, you need a biography,” I said. We both pondered the thought. A few days later Malcolm writes the following letter:
Dear Michael: Pursuant to our conversation re: a book you might write, I have some thoughts. I don’t “want” or “need” a biography, which seems pretentious and premature. Nobody (including myself) cares about all the intricate details of my life!
What has my life represented? Its “Rosebud”—its deepest significance—seems found in my somewhat unexplainable passion for justice which found basic expression in my participation in what we call civil rights. I’m also thinking along similar lines as a possible focus of your work and in line with both your skill and your image.
I’m thinking of a book title: “Black Struggle, White Knight.” Obviously this is a suggestion. My point is: I was not “unique” in this. There were many “white knights,” volunteer men and women who sacrificed in different ways to enable a movement. I am not an “exemplar” or “role model.” I was (and am) one of many. All of us, in our small and varied ways, paved the way for the phenomenon of Obama.
I remember often being told by blacks in the movement “Your job is with whites, not blacks.” I disagree because I see this as not being “either/or.” I have always seen it as “both/and.” I believe it is time for a prominent/skilled black figure to write about deep white involvement in the historic and ongoing movement. In beneficial ways this could open up a more meaningful racial dialogue.15
Biography cum Autobiography
In postmodern literature, we have learned that the genre of memoir or testimony is the best vehicle of truth telling because it provides the context of a particular perspective coinciding with multiple interpretations. Such a genre written in the first person creates art out of concrete experience. Malcolm’s art is in his articulation of the beauty of this strange brooding world that we live in. Like Malcolm’s own writing, this biography is an attempt to break new ground in how one learns about a significant life. I do not attempt to tell a chronological story. Nor do I want you as the reader to think that I am an innocent narrator. In some ways this is both autobiography and biography at the same time. Malcolm writes me a letter and puts it this way:
Dear
