Retelling of a Spiritual Life Often Vague

It’s been said that the hallmark of a genuine spiritual experience is its ineffable quality: The words needed to do it justice simply do not exist.

In “The Shaping of a Life,” a memoir that focuses on the turning points of the author’s spiritual journey, Phyllis Tickle hits this conundrum head-on. A contributing editor in religion for Publishers Weekly, as well as a prominent writer on religious issues, Tickle seems to recognize the limits of words. Here, she constructs a lyric narrative that introduces readers to defining moments in her life without interpreting those moments in concrete terms.

“The Shaping of a Life” takes place primarily over a 10-year period during the 1950s, beginning when Tickle goes off to college and encounters her own rich intellect, as well as the spiritual delight at her core. The tale moves to courtship and early years of marriage, including the twin difficulties of living jointly with another person while becoming aware of one’s own separateness. It’s only in the kind of intimate relationship she describes, it seems, that one crashes so brutally into existential aloneness. Later, she limns young motherhood and dawning maturity, coming full circle as the 1960s burst on the scene. By that point, she’s become a thinking, discerning, committed spiritual being.

To her credit, Tickle refuses to over-explain the spiritual locus of her journey and allows readers to leap--or not--toward a shared faith. The drawback of this approach, and it’s a major one, is that she gives few specifics on how or why such a leap might be taken.

After drawing an analogy between a butterfly bursting from its cocoon and the process of human becoming, Tickle writes, for example, that a neighbor’s death represented her own chrysalis eruption. It was “the pivotal, thin tear through which I would move out into the world of my own mature identity. He had loved as I wished to love, and he had seen as I wished to see--the Spirit at large in the world and ever at the ready, the soul as life’s inescapable result, the self as the dear, enticing, mortal construct that our order of creatures must lay aside in time.”

While these are poetic words, without a tangible context they’re vague to the point of near meaninglessness. Throughout, she withholds details--perhaps in deference to the ineffable--but without them, the narrative can only hint at the larger story, stopping many paces shy of actually telling it.

Instead, the account is pocked with phrases such as “I do not know nor do I pretend to know how . . .” and “[s]uddenly I was home and knew not by what means I had arrived.” While that honesty is commendable, it belies Tickle’s attempts to address the ineffable, which ostensibly is the focus of the book. Repeatedly, the reader is told of events that were “ah-ha!” moments for the author but is unable to experience the gravity of those moments in a palpable way.

The result is a series of meandering reminiscences and a handful of riveting scenes. Describing a near-death experience after taking an anti-miscarriage drug, for example, Tickle captures the reader’s full attention. But when she intimates that the experience caused a rift in her marriage--her husband didn’t want her to discuss the great white light and the voice she heard--she becomes reticent on how this rift manifested itself, withdrawing instead into over-intellectualization. By her own account, Tickle’s spirituality is shaped greatly by intellect: “If ever any human being came to religious enthusiasm in a more cerebral way than I, I hope to meet him or her before I die.” Using intellect to interpret spiritual experiences, it seems, can be just as ineffective as words.

That said, the narrative is beautifully written, if a little verbose and overwrought. Her diction is clearly from another era, and many of the scenes appear incredibly naive when viewed from the 21st century. However, it’s in those places where she describes the accretion of maturity in a conscious life and day-to-day living in big-city Tennessee and small-town South Carolina during the 1950s that the book most excels. If “God is in the details,” then maybe Tickle does explain the inexplicable, because the details of those years are fully rendered and painstakingly retold. It just may take her readers a few ineffable experiences of their own in order to understand the deeper meaning.