Spiritual Biography

A Glimpse of the Self

Photo taken in Pfeiffer College Library, 1969

When I first contacted Noel to propose writing a spiritual biography, I wasn’t thinking about the path that led me to that moment. In an earlier post I wrote about my love for biography when I was in elementary school. My first encounter with religious biography was in course on 18th English literature during my senior year at Pfeiffer College. The professor, knowing of my Methodist connection and plan to go to grad school in English the following year, suggested that I read for independent study John Wesley’s Journal. It was not only an autobiographical window into the spiritual growth of the founder of Methodism but also an eyewitness account of life in 18th century England.

My interest in biography lay fallow until my senior year at Vanderbilt Divinity School in my late twenties when I signed up for Sallie McFague’s course on spiritual biography. I’d never heard of the term, but it sounded interesting. Sallie was a pioneer feminist theologian who over her academic career taught and wrote about theology and literature, metaphorical language, the place of humanity on the planet, consumerism, and ecology. Her course on spiritual biography was about people who try to live their faith, not simply “believe it.” The reading list included works from a variety of religious traditions: Christian, Jewish Muslim, Hindu, and Native American. Our class read some classics like Augustine’s —Confessions and The Journal of John Woolman.  Woolman was a Quaker merchant, journalist, and early abolitionist. The reading list also included books by or about Malcolm X,  Dorothy Day, Mahatma Gandhi, Black Elk, and Richard Ruebenstein. Over subsequent years of teaching that course, Sallie included other biographies of people of faith who had a “working theology,” one that actually functioned in their lives—among them Sojourner Truth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Around the time I took her course, Sallie published Speaking In Parables: A Study in Metaphor and Theology, which contains a chapter on autobiography. In working on this book with Noel, I’ve gone back to that chapter many times for better understanding of what readers might learn in a “good” autobiography, that is, one that reveals the writer’s growth. Sallie maintained that the questions raised in a good autobiography become questions about ourselves. The action and language become a metaphor or parable of the person telling the story so that both readers and the writer are “able to glimpse the self and say ‘aha!  There it is!’” 

In our book Noel and I are reaching for the stories that illustrate his growing into the singer/songwriter, the entertainer, the husband and father, the advocate for justice, the citizen, the mentor and role model, the self-deprecating comic, the seeker, and the spiritual, compassionate person he is today. We’re asking ourselves, “Will our readers regard those stories as a metaphor or parable in which they glimpse not only of the “self” that is Noel but also themselves in all their particularity?” 

Sallie also taught that in a “good” autobiography there is “harmony between outward events and inward growth.” In Noel’s autobiography we hope readers will see how his coming of age and becoming famous as a performer and an activist in the ‘60s shaped his character, how his successes and failures influenced his decisions  and how his spiritual search and determination to keep growing have shaped his spirituality.  

We hope readers will find an alternative vision of a life well-lived in contrast to the individualistic, consumerist vision so prevalent in our society and in contrast to the zero-sum vision of winners and losers, quid pro quo, and self-made persons.  Noel’s story offers not a template for success, but a model for human flourishing and the message that music can change hearts and minds.

Noel’s autobiography also subtly offers a theological understanding that sustains and encourages the journey. In this age of Trumpism, the “theology” that makes the press is often narrow, hateful, cruel, rigid, and fearful. The language of this “theology” taints Christianity for many. It is the opposite of the two great commandments—to love God and  to love neighbor. Noel's life and music speaks of the God of love, the God who is Love, and the God whose love sustains a life worth living. That's the hope, that's the possibility, that's the encouragement. 

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Connections

Frederick Buechner’s spiritual memoirs were not included in Sallie’s class, but I add them here because they have been formative in my  life and work—Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation; Telling Secrets; The Sacred Journey: A Memoir of Early Days; and The Eyes of the Heart:  A Memoir of the Lost and Found.  Buechner, who died in 2022, was a master of English prose, and this beautiful website dedicated to him is a wonderful place to get acquainted with him and his work.

Most book proposals include a list of comparative titles—“comps” for short—published in the last 4 or 5 years. Our list includes Bono’s Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story; Bill McKibben’s The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon; Faith, Hope, and Carnage by Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan; Brandi Carlile’s Broken Horses; and Arlo Guthrie’s  Rising Son.

Vibrations

Noel’s overview of his spiritual life is musically and visually expressed here in “My Father’s House.”

Resonance

What spiritual biography (in the broadest sense of the word “spiritual”) has encouraged you to reflect on your own life or helped you better understand other people?  In what way?

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