When I reflect on the spirituality I was raised on, I’m deeply grateful. No spirituality is perfect, but what I have been given through our rich Christian tradition stands up to the challenges of life and of faith. But if I had one criticism it would be this: For all its richness, Christian spirituality hasn’t always given us permission to own and deal with our own complexity. At least in its popular expression, it has not always taken seriously how complicated it is to be a human being.
It’s no simple task. As Nicole Krauss writes in her novel, The History of Love, we live with the “insoluble contradiction of being animals cursed with self-reflection, and moral beings cursed with animal instincts.” Yes, we are creatures of dust carrying the breath of God.
In our deepest center we bear the Image and Likeness of God, but that is not to be imagined as some beautiful icon stamped in our soul. No. It’s fire, divine fire. In each of us there is a breath of infinity which keeps us congenitally restless, gives us hungers we can never fully satisfy in this life, and, as the biblical writer Qoheleth says, keeps us forever out of sync with the seasons. As St. Augustine famously wrote: You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” As humans, we are pathologically complex and restless.
And here’s what that can look like in a life of faith.
When you read Terese of Lisieux’s The Story of a Soul, you see a paradox, a near contradiction. On the one hand, she embodies wonderfully what Christian detachment is meant to be. She’s a paradigm of selflessness. Yet, she’s also strongly attached to certain things, like her family, and could fall into a minor depression if there was a missed visit by her family. Terese was a complex woman, not a saint without struggles, and her honest sharing of those struggles is one of the reasons why her writings touch people deeply.
The same is true of the renowned scientist, spiritual writer, and mystic, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Here’s how he defined himself (in words to this effect): “I was born into this world with two great loves, love of God and love of the world. When I think of God, it takes my breath away; but when I look at the world and its pagan beauty, it also takes my breath away. My life is a struggle between genuflecting before the divine and genuflecting before the pagan.”
I give this background as a way of introducing and recommending a recent book by Maria Shriver, I Am Maria – My Reflections and Poems on Heartbreak, Healing, and Finding Your Way Home.
Many of us are familiar with Maria Shriver as a member of the famous Kennedy family and as the former First Lady of the State of California; but her memoir book introduces her to us in a very different way. This is not a celebrity writing a memoir based on her popularity. This is a book of depth, in effect, a contemporary The Story of a Soul.
Shriver articulates the struggle of a sensitive soul as she shares her own journey, both as woman of the world and as a woman of faith. Like Terese of Lisieux, she is healthily detached, even as she clings to some things in this world. Like Teilhard de Chardin, God and faith can take her breath away, even as do some earthy consolations in this world. She takes both her body and her spirit seriously and names, with honesty, the tensions she lives with because of that. She manifests a deep piety, even as she is healthily iconoclastic. She carries these tensions well.
Her journey is one of hope and of realism, all at the same time. For example, she ends her poem, My Morning Meditation, with these words:
Sure things scare me like being alone for the rest of my life
But if that’s what happens so be it
I will continue to surround myself with beauty
So I can access the beauty, the spiritual, the feminine part of me.
Carl Rogers suggests that “what is most personal is often what is most universal.” Shriver shares deep personal struggles which we immediately recognize as universal. And she is ever the artist in sharing them, deep and intimate, yet never exhibitionist. She never makes you want to turn your eyes away, the mark of a good writer.
When I first read Henri Nouwen, I had a sense of being introduced to myself: How does he know me that well? Is he writing just for me? If you are someone who struggles with a sensitive soul you will have that same experience reading Shriver’s book.
Someone once said this about the late singer Karen Carpenter. When you hear her sing you have the feeling that she is singing just for you and singing directly into your ear. Maria Shriver’s book will give you that same sensation.