The Shaping of a Life: A Spiritual Landscape - Hardcover

Tickle, Phyllis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385497555 ISBN 13: 9780385497558

Publisher: Doubleday, 2001

Synopsis

Lively, entertaining, and inspiring, THE SHAPING OF A LIFE is in the tradition of the beloved bestsellers by Kathleen Norris and Anne Lamott, an intimate, lyrical, and thought-provoking memoir from one of the most respected and admired writers on religion in America today.

In THE SHAPING OF A LIFE, Phyllis Tickle recounts her life with honesty and humor, richly conveying both the external events and the internal insights and emotions. She shares stories of her childhood in eastern Tennessee as the only child of the dean at the local college—including her first inkling of the power and comfort of prayer and her realization that prayer required a disciplined routine, that it is "best practiced by a composed mind and spirit." She writes of the sense of freedom and independence she discovered at college, where she fell in love with the language and the teachings of The Book of Common Prayer and decided to leave the Presbyterianism of her childhood and join the Episcopal Church.

As Tickle chronicles her deepening understanding of prayer and the rewards of marriage, family, and a spiritual life, she reaches across the boundaries that separate one denomination from another and presents a portrait of spiritual growth and transformation that will appeal to devout practitioners and their less religious neighbors as well. Within a very personal story, Tickle reveals the keys that will help readers of all faiths find the path that leads from the everyday world of "doing" to the special place of simply "being."

About this title

About the Author

PHYLLIS TICKLE is Contributing Editor in Religion for Publishers Weekly. One of America's most respected authorities on religion, she is frequently interviewed for both print and electronic media, and is a regular guest on PBS's "Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly." The author of more than a dozen books, including the recently published The Divine Hours, she lives in Lucy, Tennessee.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

From the Back Cover

"A deeply moving memoir by one of America's most accomplished spiritual writers of her journey toward God. With consummate skill, Tickle shows us how a busy outer life, filled with school, marriage, family, and a near-death experience, can give birth to an inner life of prayer and hope. A luminous book, one to be treasured."
--Philip Zaleski. editor of The Best Spiritual Writing series and author of Gifts of the Spirit.

"Mrs. Tickle writes very well about American life in the mid-twentieth century, and I am sure that many readers will appreciate her spiritual journey. I hope the book will sell hugely!"
--Susan Howatch, author of Penmarric, Glittering Images, Absolute Truths.

"I have always loved Phyllis Tickle, and reading her personal story tells me why. She is real, honest, human, humorous, and deeply spiritual. Her book is a treasure."
--John Shelby Spong, author of Here I Stand: My Struggle for a Christianity of Integrity, Love and Equality

From the Inside Flap

Lively, entertaining, and inspiring, THE SHAPING OF A LIFE is in the tradition of the beloved bestsellers by Kathleen Norris and Anne Lamott<i>, </i>an intimate, lyrical, and thought-provoking memoir from one of the most respected and admired writers on religion in America today.<br><br>In THE SHAPING OF A LIFE, Phyllis Tickle recounts her life with honesty and humor, richly conveying both the external events and the internal insights and emotions. She shares stories of her childhood in eastern Tennessee as the only child of the dean at the local college―including her first inkling of the power and comfort of prayer and her realization that prayer required a disciplined routine, that it is "best practiced by a composed mind and spirit." She writes of the sense of freedom and independence she discovered at college, where she fell in love with the language and the teachings of The Book of Common Prayer and decided to leave the Presbyterianism of her childhood and join the Episcopal Church. <br><br>As Tickle chronicles her deepening understanding of prayer and the rewards of marriage, family, and a spiritual life, she reaches across the boundaries that separate one denomination from another and presents a portrait of spiritual growth and transformation that will appeal to devout practitioners and their less religious neighbors as well. Within a very personal story, Tickle reveals the keys that will help readers of all faiths find the path that leads from the everyday world of "doing" to the special place of simply "being."

Reviews

Tickle (PW's contributing editor in religion and author of The Divine Hours) offers an enthralling spiritual memoir of her early life in Tennessee, recording academic and religious awakenings and her evolving understanding of prayer. Though her mind is numinous, Tickle's life has never been ascetic. Always the demands of the spirit competed with and were complemented by teaching duties, marriage to a country doctor and the needs of her children. (Although the memoir closes when Tickle is pregnant with her third child, she went on to have four more.) Because of this, Tickle's memoir is reminiscent of the best writing of Madeleine L'Engle, in that the business of spirituality is conducted while stirring the sauce. Several of Tickle's most holy realizations occurred while she engaged in domestic tasks: sorting the china after her wedding or scrubbing out smelly socks in the bathtub. Tickle is quite simply a marvelous writer, continually delighting the reader by her facility not only with the English language but with the human character. In recounting her own life, she pauses to appreciate the mentors, both in the flesh and on the printed page, who assisted in her spiritual formation. Many laugh-out-loud moments balance the frank acknowledgments of dark times, as when she struggled through depression or miscarriage. Even when discussing the more painful memories of her early life, Tickle's writing shines with a joy that is transcendent of circumstance.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

In this deeply personal, ten-part autobiography, Tickle (contributing editor, religion, Publishers Weekly) relates how she prepared to become a practicing Episcopalian and a religion journalist/publisher. She starts by citing two dominant themes in her life learned from her parents: the love of words and discipline in prayer. Most of the book examines her experiences as an undergraduate, the early years after college graduation, and her subsequent marriage. The author introduces many influential individuals, such the college professor who helped her connect linguistics and theology, and weaves together events that both informed her spirituality and honed skills of observation, including a near-death experience following a miscarriage. Although the detailed discussion sometimes becomes verbose, Tickle effectively combines humor with honest, serious reflection. In the tradition of Anne Lamott and Kathleen Norris, her work also recalls two quite different spiritual autobiographies that have recently been released: Brother Benet Tvedten's View from a Monastery (Riverhead, 1999) and Marsha Mason's Journey: A Personal Odyssey (LJ 9/15/00). Recommended for larger public libraries and religion collections.DMarianne Orme, West Lafayette, IN
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1.

My father taught me to love words, and my mother taught me to pray. In his case, it was patient and intentional. In hers, quite the opposite.

The house in which I grew up and in which my first subjective instruction was played out was a determinant in those lessons. Or if not a determinant, then at least a kind of text upon which my memory and understanding have recorded them and to which I have attached their intricacies. This is not to say that the old house was in any way a thing of beauty or even that it could lay claim to any pretensions. It most assuredly was not that kind of house.

Built in the 1920s just before the Great Depression wrought havoc on everybody including the house's original owner/builder, the poor thing was still not entirely finished when my father bought it fifteen years later from the man's widow. The roughed-in, but unfinished, portions of the upstairs that looked out through broad dormer windows onto a line of silver maple trees and then to the street beyond became mine within a few days of our moving in.

"Phyllis's playroom" was the way my mother came to refer to that near-sixth of her new house that yawned, dusty and inviting, at the end of the upstairs hall and just beyond my bedroom door. It was a phrasing that, once she had invented it, allowed Mother to live more comfortably with the notion that her only child was setting up shop on a loose-planked floor and sitting on cross braces nailed to open studs. With or without such euphemisms, however, my mother and I both knew that that unfinished space was my soul's home, just as my father and I knew that so long as I lived as a child among them, the space was to remain unfinished except by my imagination or my own juvenile carpentry. It was a kind of gentlemen's agreement amongst the three of us.

Almost as a result of that agreement, I came in time, subtly but surely, to divide the old house into "theirs" (the downstairs) and "mine" (the upstairs.) I found theirs considerably less interesting than mine for adventures, but rivetingly more absorbing for its revelations about adults and adult ways of living. I spent whole afternoons, in fact, just sitting on the upstairs steps and contemplating the complexities of what was going on below me and what, presumably, I was to become in time. But the house was so laid out that no one seat, not even my favored one on the stairs, was totally satisfactory as an observatory. No, ours was a house that required an inquisitive child to move about a lot.

The floor plan of the downstairs was hardly more imaginative or less phlegmatic than was the house itself. A huge (the most odious chore of my late childhood was having to sweep the whole thing every Saturday morning for the perfectionist who masqueraded as my mother) . . . a huge porch ran the entire front of the house. At the porch's western end was the front door. Made of heavy oak, the door groaned its way into an entrance room the size of most people's bedrooms and that, as a result, no one could ever figure out how to either appoint or use. Ultimately it became a kind of parlor-anteroom that just sat there and, according to my father, used up space and heat. The unruly parlor did serve one good purpose, however; it opened into a living room that was almost the size of the porch and many times more pleasing to me.

The living room ran from east to west paralleling the porch. On its south wall, which it shared with the porch, a bank of broad-paned windows looked across the front yard to the maples trees that, when one was downstairs, totally obscured the street beyond. On its north wall, the room was interrupted in two places. At its western end was the door to the downstairs hall and at its eastern, the double french doors that led into the dining room. The hall, which was far and away the house's greatest impediment to easy living, was a long narrow affair whose only purpose was to connect other necessary spaces in as narrow and dark a manner as possible. It had, I always suspected, been the builder's attempt to conserve the heat and floor footage he had squandered in the entrance hall parlor.

But for whatever reason, the downstairs hall was and remained a domestic bottleneck that led, straight as an arrow, north from the living room to the back of the house. On the way, it opened first onto my father's study--onto that sunny, book-lined room where, as a college professor, he spent so many hours at his desk and where he taught me how poetry could give body to the soul and how the voice speaking words aloud could give life to the printed page.

Just beyond the study door, the hallway accessed on one's left what has to have been the world's largest linen closet and on one's right the landing of the steps to my upstairs world. Beyond the closet and landing, the hall squeezed past my parents' bedroom door, pretended to terminate in their bathroom, and then abruptly bent around the corner past the basement door to actually terminate in Mother's industrial-sized, white-and-red kitchen.

If one wished to come at the kitchen from the other direction, one had to pass through the living room and then through the dining room doors, or more correctly, through the open doorway where they were. (I never remember the doors themselves being shut except on Christmas Day when they hid the coming feast, the better to tease my excitement.) Directly across the dining room from the french doors, positioned in its own kind of arrow-straight alignment, was our breakfast room. While there was no door at all, only a doorway, between the kitchen and that breakfast room, there was most definitely a door between the breakfast and the dining rooms. It was one of those somewhat antique, heavy swinging doors that allow the cook to move easily from kitchen to table while carrying hot dishes and full trays. It was a rule of the house that this door, unlike the glass double ones across from it, was always closed. Always, that is, except from about three-thirty until about four-thirty in the afternoon. That was when my mother prayed.

If we had, as a family, early reached the accommodation of splitting the house by layers between parents and child, so likewise had my mother and father managed early to split it by rooms between his and hers. The study was his, the living room hers. This is not to say that their division was as complete as was theirs with me.

My mother rarely if ever came above stairs except to clean or to deliberately visit for a while. Visiting was a great skill with her, in fact. She was a brilliant and widely read woman as well as a gifted conversationalist, and I remember those times in her company with quiet pleasure to this day. But when Mother came up, it was always purposeful rather than coincidental; and her presence was never actively enough a part of my upstairs life for me to feel her rhythms after she had left or to discover the faint traces of her perfume in my quarters a day later.

My father came upstairs only by my insistent invitation, frequently because I lacked some skill of carpentry that I needed and he possessed or because, almost as often, I needed his sheer strength to accomplish some construction or other. Many of those command visits, of course, were also close to trumped-up excuses; all too frequently I just wanted to show off something I had done and had assumed, in my naivete, that my petite and very feminine mother could never fully appreciate.

In much the same way, below stairs there was a similar kind of arrangement. My mother cleaned and straightened the study very respectfully each morning, and every evening she sat in the rocker beside my father's desk and read or talked or listened as the case might be; but one never thought, even then, that the study was her room. It was his and, while she was clearly the life of his life and his most honored guest, she was still nonetheless in his space. The living room was an almost exact reversal of this pattern.

Though we all shared with laughter and gossip and deeply sensual pleasure the kitchen and the breakfast and dining rooms as well as the gardens and porch and even the cool basement where we dried produce and repaired everything from tricycles to chairs--even though we shared all of this seamlessly and unselfconsciously, it was understood that the parental bedroom was theirs, though I could visit if need be, and that the shaded living room with its cool, papered walls and its wine-dark drapes was Mother's.

Admittedly, when my father came in from the university just at dusk each afternoon, he as a rule came directly from the back door through the kitchen, breakfast and dining rooms to the living room, which by that hour was always empty. His favorite easy chair was there in the corner; and he liked to read the afternoon paper, listen to the early evening news on the Zenith radio, doze for a few minutes in the room's quiet before he began his evening. But even snoring lightly in his own chair, he looked to me, when I would slip in to watch him, as if he were there only in passing, so strongly impressed upon her living room was Mother's aura, her imprint, her perfume.

Just under the porch windows and parallel to the living room's south wall was a long sofa that my mother referred to during all my growing-up years as "a long bench." I always found the term singularly appropriate in attitude if not in absolute accuracy. The piece really was a sofa--velvet-covered with seat cushions, substantial curved arms, and a tripartite design. It was also the most uncomfortable and unforgiving contrivance I have ever tried to sit on. Originally my grandmother's, the long bench must have had some associative or sentimental value for Mother, or maybe it just eased her constantly painful lower back. For the rest of us and for most of our friends and guests, it not only lacked emotional connectedness, but also positively discouraged any lingering. Not so for Mother.

Every afternoon at three-thirty and with little waffling on either side of that appointed time, Mother left th...

Edition details

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385497555
• ISBN 13: 9780385497558
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400