Say you finally invented a new story
of your life ...
where you can rise
from the bleak island of your old story
and tread your way home.
~ Michael Blumenthal, "The New Story of Your Life"*

What is your spiritual autobiography? How would you tell that tale? Over the past four months I've had the privilege of convening a small group of Beloit College students to do just that.

The participants in this group were from all over the theological map: committed Protestants, Catholics, and Jews mixed up with atheists, agnostics, seekers and misfits. I think some of them were hoping the process would answer their questions and shore up their beliefs. Thankfully we found such fixed certainties unforthcoming! Instead we unpacked our own stories in good company, finding respect and much common ground. In fact, sacred ground.

College can be such an exciting, upsetting spiritual time, with questions of identity, vocation, suffering, justice, ethics, religion, mystical experience and love relationships all whirling around. Our little group worked to understand how these have unfolded in our lives. Guided by a helpful book, The Story of Your Life, by Dan Wakefield, we rooted around together in memories of early childhood and adolescence, reflected about a special friend or mentor, and learned our respective enneagram types.

Then came the hard solitary work of looking back and staring at that blank computer screen. It's a risk to interpret and organize one's life story. We worried about hubris. "Who am I to have a "spiritual autobiography? How do I acknowledge both the power of my experiences and that quaky, queasy sense that I do not, cannot, really describe them as neatly or know them as firmly as I would like?" Here we were face to face with our very own neurotic, confused, hungry, embarrassed, outrageously beautiful selves! There were twin shoals we had to navigate in this work: narcissism and shame. The first is all about (getting lost in) "me." It's the tendency to absorb within, to make solid little walls and accept or reject everything (and everyone) according to our script for life. Of course the second danger was the opposite: the quietly held belief that one doesn't matter, doesn't have a story worth telling (or at least that story will somehow fall apart under the light of day).

It was heartening to witness group members wrestle with these questions, and come through to a variety of insights, articulations of faith, and affirmations, all humbly gained. One said, "Truly, this was an exercise in getting me to believe in my own importance: the importance of my own life story (because I believe it is one's spirituality which really gets to the essence of what a person's "story" is), which I have always had trouble allowing myself to do."

Of course one's spiritual autobiography is not a product but a lifelong process, a discipline of asking repeatedly, "Who am I? Whose am I? Why am I here, and what am I going to do with that?" It helps tremendously to write it down from time to time, though. And to find the good company of a few folks willing to ask and answer the same questions themselves. I plan to run another one of these groups next fall ... maybe you'll join me?

Say you finally invented a new story
of your life. It is not the story of your defeat
or of your impotence and powerlessness
before the large forces of wind and accident.
It is not the sad story of your mother's death
or of your abandoned childhood. It is not
even a story that will win you the deep
initial sympathies of the benevolent gods
or the care of the generous, but it is a story
that requires of you a large thrust
into the difficult life, a sense of plenitude
entirely your own. Whatever the story is,
it goes as it goes, and there are vicissitudes
in it, gardens that need to be planted,
skills sown, the long hard labors
of prose and enduring love. Deep down
in some long-encumbered self,
it is the story you have been writing
all of your life, where no Calypso holds you
against your own willfulness,
where you can rise
from the bleak island of your old story
and tread your way home.

*published originally in 1987 in Against Romance: Poems, repulished in 2006 by Pleasure Boat Studio.