NEWS FEATURE: Old genre _ spiritual biographies _ finding new life

c. 1997 Religion News Service UNDATED _ Blame it on Augustine. Some 1,600 years ago the Christian saint was writing his”Confessions,”which detailed his loss of faith, his search for solace in sensuality and philosophy, and his return to God _ a book that invented the spiritual autobiography and set the contours of the genre. More […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ Blame it on Augustine.

Some 1,600 years ago the Christian saint was writing his”Confessions,”which detailed his loss of faith, his search for solace in sensuality and philosophy, and his return to God _ a book that invented the spiritual autobiography and set the contours of the genre.


More recently, Frank McCourt helped boost the popularity of spiritual autobiographies with”Angela’s Ashes,”his 1996 best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir of his”miserable Irish Catholic childhood.” Recent months have brought a handful of new spiritual memoirs _ from a Catholic conservative, a neo-Pagan journalist, and two representatives of something that, for lack of a better term, might be called the New Age. Their stories show that the search for transcendence is both broadly universal and peculiarly individual.

Of these four recent books, William F. Buckley Jr.’s”Nearer, My God”(Doubleday) is most like Augustine in its intellectual breadth and wit. Plus, it’s the only one to actually mention the saint.

Five years in the making, the book mixes reflections on personal matters _ his mother’s faith, a nephew’s consecration to monastic life, a visit to Lourdes _ with thoughts on social issues such as church and state, Hollywood’s treatment of religion, and explorations of theology in sections titled”On the Uniqueness of Christ”and”Disruptions and Achievements of Vatican II.” Buckley augments his usual argumentative style with writing that is more winsome, even devotional in tone.

Firm and resolute, Buckley movingly explores the implications of a faith he has questioned, but never doubted.”My faith has not wavered,”he writes.”I grew up … without even a decent ration of tentativeness among the lot of us about our religious faith.” The other three books reveal the tentativeness and doubts that often accompany the spiritual quest, but none so eloquently as Ptolemy Tompkins'”Paradise Fever: Growing Up in the Shadow of the New Age”(Avon), a book that does for American alternative religiosity what”Angela’s Ashes”did for Irish Catholicism.

Named after the Greek astronomer, Ptolemy grew up in the shadow of his eccentric father Peter, who explored pyramid power, searched for Atlantis, and wrote the 1970s best seller”The Secret Life of Plants.” Peter’s sudden fame brought a stream of utopians and opportunists to the barn where his family lived. Young Ptolemy’s encounters with these seekers revealed a strong undercurrent of selfishness under all the sublime-sounding”we-are-God-ourselves”rhetoric.”Something rotten was lurking within my father’s idealistic universe,”he writes.

Raised to believe in potentiality and sold a series of”Great Plans,”such as his father’s decision to bring a second woman into the family whom he would love equally with his wife, Ptolemy grew despondent and became increasingly dependent on drugs and alcohol. “My childhood and adolescence unfolded amidst a cluttered, absurd, yet oddly heroic attempt to remake the world into the garden that my father was so convinced it could once again become,”he writes.

Another 1970s best seller was”Be Here Now,”the hip spiritual journal written by Timothy Leary sidekick Richard Alpert (Baba Ram Dass) that introduced readers to Bhagavan Das, a young American living in India. Now, with”It’s Here Now (Are You?): A Spiritual Memoir”(Broadway), we have Bhagavan Das’ own trippy travelogue, which winds through a series of gurus and swamis, drug-induced hallucinations, and impersonal sexual encounters.

He travels the globe; sings in a whorehouse; flees phantom dogs; loves and leaves numerous women; meditates with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, guru to the Beatles and founder of Transcendental Meditation; meets Krishna Consciousness founder Swami Bhaktivedanta Prabhupada; hangs out with Buddhists; tours with Allen Ginsberg; records an album with Monkee Mike Nesmith; sells cars, encyclopedias and solar power; becomes a born-again Christian who has”an


amazing love affair with Jesus”and a love affair with a fellow church member; and he still hasn’t found what he’s looking for.

Veering wildly between seeing God in just about everything, and concluding that much of the pop spirituality he waded in”didn’t feel genuine,”Bhagavan Das is left hearing voices, but not being sure where they’re coming from, or whether they can be trusted.

After political activism, sexual experimentation, and intense spiritual seeking and doubting, National Public Radio’s New York bureau chief Margot Adler found a home in paganism, a belief system that’s allows her to”open (her) mind to non-ordinary reality but keep the skeptic.” In”Heretic’s Heart: A Journey Through Spirit and Revolution”(Beacon), Adler describes the 1960s as”luminous.””We believed that anything was possible and that everything was open to re-examination,”she writes.”We were alive to the deepest spiritual values.” Adler, granddaughter of psychologist Alfred Adler, was a front-line foot soldier in Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement, the struggle in Mississippi for civil rights, and Cuba’s revolutionary experiment. And during the height of the war in Vietnam, she corresponded with a U.S. soldier, whom she later met. Their unusual relationship fills nearly 100 pages of the book.

Though she’ll never be a card-carrying anything, Adler finds spiritual solace in neo-paganism, a grassroots movement she first described in her groundbreaking 1979 book,”Drawing Down the Moon.”It’s not a path for everyone, but at least it’s a path, which is something that seems to have eluded so many others:”The earth traditions allow me a life of balance, and allow me to remain optimistic; they allow me the grace of perceiving the cup as always half full, never half empty.”

MJP END RABEY

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