4 Authors With a Need to ‘Confess’

Blame it on Augustine.

About 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 and a visit to Lourdes--with thoughts on social issues such as Hollywood’s treatment of religion and explorations of theology in sections such as “Disruptions and Achievements of Vatican II.”

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).

Named after the Greek astronomer, Tompkins grew up in the shadow of his eccentric father, Peter, who explored pyramid power, searched for Atlantis and wrote the 1970s bestseller “The Secret Life of Plants.”

His father’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.

Another 1970s bestseller 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 travelogue, which winds through a series of gurus and swamis, drug-induced hallucinations and impersonal sexual encounters.

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 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.”

Although she will never be a card-carrying anything, Adler finds spiritual solace in neo-paganism, a grass-roots movement she first described in her groundbreaking 1979 book, “Drawing Down the Moon.”