Review: Our Hearts are Restless by Richard Lischer
Rosalie Riegle reviews Richard Lischer’s Our Hearts are Restless: The Art of Spiritual Memoir
Richard Lischer reminds us that “memory is an imperfect guide.” (4) How true it is!! I once wrote a monograph in which I discussed that idea, using the works of Augustine, Rousseau, and Dorothy Day. [1] So I enjoyed immensely reading Our Hearts Are Restless: The Art of Spiritual Memoir (Oxford University Press: 2022) as it brought me back to many memoirs.
The memoirs discussed in this deep book are those of writers who define their lives “in [their]own terms and on a stage of [their own making.” (96) But I’ll start with a few caveats: I agreed to review this book because I thought it was an anthology of actual memoirs. It wasn’t, unfortunately.
Instead, it was a thoughtful discussion of many memoirs by Dr. Lischer of Duke Divinity School. In it, he gives an insightful look at the works he discusses, and I loved most of them, especially these: Harriet Jacobs, Dorothy Day, and James Baldwin. Most of them are fascinating, but not all. Reading John Bunyan put me to sleep, literally, and I think Lischer should have omitted Dennis Covington’s discussion of snake handling as unworthy of the genre. Another tendency, which I sometimes found disturbing, was Lischer’s sometimes inserting his own autobiography into the narrative.
But there’s much to learn and to ponder in this large volume, divided into seven sections: Search and Surrender, Revelations, How Goes the Battle, The Stripping of the Altar, Pilgrimages, New Every Day, and Nomadic Faith.
Augustine is the first one discussed, and he writes his Confessions directly to God, which makes good sense. Augustine sees a spiritual life as a “prolonged conversation with God” (18) and Lischer seems to agree in his re-telling of significant memoirs, as he frequently refers to Augustine.
In introducing Part III, “How Goes the Battle,” Lischer quotes Flannery O’Conner: “Most people don’t realize how much faith costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe.” The travails of the memoirists described in that section tell that tale. God’s promises are only validated by personal experience. Etty Hillesum, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Peter Abelard and his Heloise, C.S. Lewis, and Reynolds Price all suffer mightily for their faith. Bonhoeffer knows as he suffers that Jesus suffered, too. Both Bonhoeffer and Hillesum know that God is depending on them to remain true to themselves. And they do, going to their death, as Christ did.
Experiencing spiritual dryness is nothing new but I was surprised to learn that even Therese of Lisieux experienced it. One knows more of St. Theresa of Calcutta’s spiritual aridity through much of her life, but Lischer speaks of her mostly to relate her to St. Therese of Lisieux and records that St. Theresa of Calcutta sought out Dorothy Day. Actually, Day visited her in India and spoke to her novices. When she was finished, Theresa gave her one of her profession crosses and said, “You are one of us.” [2]
I loved Lischer’s discussion of Dorothy Day as she has been important in my life and in the lives of thousands in the more than 184 Catholic Worker houses in the United States and around the world.[3] Lischer gives an excellent summary of Day’s life and loves, including her education in the papal encyclicals and other European authors by a surely heaven-sent Peter Maurin. Together they began to publish a newspaper, and their work soon grew into what became the Catholic Worker movement.[4]
Day always thought of herself as a writer and she wrote voluminously, but she was also a traveler and a speaker and always, always feeding and housing people and resisting war with a strong and steady pacifism. Lischer divides her adult life into four segments: Writer, Leader, Mother of the Poor, and Woman of Prayer. All true and well done.
Former slave Harriet Jacobs’ memoir was one of the most exciting chapters. I had not known that she hid in an attic for almost seven years, nor of her sexual abuse. She is shocked by the docility with which she sees free blacks in the North facing segregation and she is finally officially freed because a white benefactor purchases her freedom. She certainly does more than endure—she persists, and her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is surely worth a read.
I learned much about James Baldwin in reading Lischer’s “James Baldwin: Autobiography as Exorcism.” He first exorcises his own demons, then the Christian churches so guilty of racism, and finally, our American society as a whole for our continuing racism. The Fire Next Time, published in the heart of our civil rights movement, ensured Baldwin’s lasting popularity. Go Tell it on the Mountain was his first autobiographical novel, and it, too, spread his fame as an intellectual who was saved by the Spirit in a floor-threshing experience. If you’ve ever come close to this emotion, as I did once, in an African-American church, you will understand. Baldwin travels back and forth from Europe to the US and is profoundly influenced by the pacifism of Martin Luther King, Jr.
In an Epilogue, Lischer muses on the infinite richness of spiritual memoir and deftly summarizes those about whom he writes and concludes that, through memoir, “God and the human heart meet” (360). Perhaps we should all try writing a memoir, even just for ourselves to read, so our hearts can meet God.
[1] Riegle, Rosalie. Memory Matters: Reflections on Autobiography and Identity
[2] PDFX Dorothy Day and St. Teresa of Calcutta
[3] https://catholicworker.org/a-list-of-all-catholic-worker-communities/
[4] You might want to read my first oral history, Voices from the Catholic Worker (Temple University Press, 1993)
