Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion, and Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage, by Robert Coles (Addison-Wesley, 182 pp., $17.95, hardcover; 179 pp., $17.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Deborah Easter, who teaches journalism at Seattle Pacific University.
Cut into the stone facing above Harvard University’s Emerson Hall is a biblical question that is vaguely unsettling amidst these self-assured and secular groves: “What is man that thou art mindful of him?” One Harvard professor who has heard the psalmist’s cry to God is Robert Coles, the Pulitzer prize-winning psychiatrist (CT, “The Crayon Man,” Feb. 6, 1987, p. 14). Like the subjects of his two recent biographies, Dorothy Day and Simone Weil, Coles believes that God put us here to ask and to choose. This awareness suffuses these books with a moral immediacy that is unusual for biography.
Coles wrote these books as “spiritual companions”: thematic portraits in which he explores certain “central concerns, if not passions or obsessions,” of each woman (political life, idolatry and intellectualism, spiritual hunger, conversion, the church). The Day volume has the advantage of drawing upon taped conversations that began some 35 years ago when Coles, in an attempt to counter the abstract pressures he faced in medical school, met Day while he was doing volunteer work in one of her New York City soup kitchens.
As modern pilgrims, Weil and Day have a broad appeal, in part because their lives straddled the religious and the secular in unusually intense ways. They both tried a number of the substitute gratifications of this century—Marx; sensualism (Day); urbane talk, in the cafés of Greenwich Village for Day, and those of Paris for Weil; Freud and other permutations of the therapeutic—before passionately devoting their lives to Christ at about age 30.
Also Reviewed In This Section:
The Spirit of the Disciplines, by Dallas Willard
The Psycho-Social Aspects of Stress Following Abortion, by Anne Speckhard
Aborted Women: Silent No More, by David Reardon
Remembering, by Wendell Berry
Born Brothers, by Larry Woiwode
Merlin, by Stephen Lawhead
Cry Like a Bell, by Madeleine L’Engle
In My Grandfather’s House, by Rien Poortvliet
A Heart Set Free: The Life of Charles Wesley, by Arnold A. Dallimore
The Wesley Hymns, by John Lawson
Noah and the Ark, by Pauline Baynes
Songs of Praise, by Kathleen Krull and Kathryn Hewitt
Seekers On Separate Paths
Though the similarities between the two lives are intriguing, the differences are perhaps more instructive. Weil (1909–43), born of secular Jewish parents in France, exhibited an analytic and imaginative brilliance early on, scoring highest on the entrance exam to the prestigious Ećole Normale Supérieure (Simone de Beauvoir holds second place). In her twenties, Weil was an austere moralist and writer with Marxist inclinations—nicknamed “the Red Virgin”—and allied herself with the French working class, including a stint as a laborer in an electronics factory.
Weil gradually came to believe that political ideology led to false idols, and shortly after she experienced “a visitation of Christ’s love” and converted to the Catholic faith, though she rejected baptism in the church. She died at the age of 34 of tuberculosis in a London sanitarium, a death made certain by self-starvation. Most of this estranged seeker’s social and religious writings found their way into print after her death and startled critics with their radiant originality and depth.
Day (1897–1980), a daughter of middle-class Chicago, also had a turbulent early adulthood, which in her case combined Left-leaning journalism, prison stays connected with women’s suffrage and the Wobblies (an early labor movement), and a common-law marriage that broke up soon after the birth of her daughter and her conversion to Catholicism.
Unlike Weil, who feared the church would stand between her and Christ, Day decided to marry Christ and the church—but with her eyes wide open. Day often felt that priests were “more like Cain than Abel,” but spent her life praying and fighting for the institution’s true spirit. She took her spirituality to the streets and founded the Catholic Worker movement and her Houses of Hospitality for the vulnerable.
Day once told Coles that “what the Lord wants from us is as many steps as we can manage.” It is this arduous, inchlike process that one senses when reading about the fully human complexities of these two lives.
Both women grappled with pride. Weil was given to occasional self-dramatization (pleading with French authorities to parachute her into the war zone so she could aid French resistance fighters) and a willful blindness and hostility to her Jewish heritage.
Day, whose life was embodied (and balanced) in religious community and service, knew well the underbelly of charitable action (the thoughts that say, “You’re God’s gift to humanity”). Yet her wry self-scrutiny did not turn to self-hatred, though she felt the grip of the latter when young. She once became “obsessed” with destroying every copy of her early novel The Eleventh Virgin because it spelled out her youthful hedonism. Her priest reminded her that God does the forgiving.
Living With Reverent Attention
In the conclusion to the final volume of Coles’s award-winning psychological study, Children in Crisis, he describes an eight-year-old girl who lives in a mansion in New Orleans’s Garden District. To her parents’ discomfort, she has begun gazing out her bedroom window at an above-ground cemetery across the street. The tombs cast late afternoon shadows, and the child asks repeatedly about “who those people, who the departed were.”
The family’s black maid, troubled by the mother’s unwillingness to hear her child’s questions, tells Coles: “I’m poor, but at least I know that I should ask myself everyday: where’s your destination, and are you going there, or are you getting sidetracked?”
Coles gives the maid the last word in his five-volume study. He observes that, like the child, she knows how to wonder, how to take notice, how to think about “the end of things,” and how to pray all the while.
What stays with one after reading Coles’s searching reflections on these two lives is this: his deep respect for the individual ways in which each of these women struggled to live with reverent attention.
Where Do The Disciplines Fit?
The Spirit of the Disciplines, by Dallas Willard (Harper & Row, 224 pp.; $14.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Larry Burtoft, pastor of Valley Vista Christian Community, Sepulveda, California.
The past decade has witnessed the stirring of a renaissance of interest in spiritual disciplines. Beginning in 1978 with Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline, an increasing number of books, periodicals, and even radio programs have urged the recovery of such practices as fasting, prayer, solitude, silence, meditation, and study as a means to a more vital spiritual life.
Unfortunately, this movement has remained peripheral to the primary activities of most churches. Few, if any, have programs structured around a concept of discipleship that focuses on spiritual disciplines. Perhaps one reason is that few Christian leaders are convinced of the essential importance of such exercises for the life of the church. Such discipline may be highly recommended, to be sure, but not essential.
What has been needed is a powerful apologetic, grounded in the biblical witness, which demonstrates the necessity of spiritual disciplines. In this respect, Dallas Willard’s The Spirit of the Disciplines is a tour de force. Willard, an ordained Southern Baptist minister and professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California, has written a significant book that deserves a serious and wide reading.
Willard believes that a major problem facing contemporary Christianity “is one of misunderstanding how our experiences and actions enable us to receive the grace of God.” There is confusion regarding the content of salvation, the nature of the spiritual life, the place of the human body in salvation, and the part we are to play in our redemption. In this confusion, it is not clear where, if at all, the spiritual disciplines fit.
Questions abound: If the disciplines are so important, why are we only lately becoming aware of them? Aren’t they a form of ascetic works righteousness refuted by Luther and the Reformation? Did Jesus or Paul or anyone else in the New Testament practice them? Aren’t we saved by grace through faith alone?
Essentials For The “Easy Yoke”
With penetrating and enlightening analysis, Willard clarifies the central issues involved and builds a most impressive argument for “the absolute necessity of the spiritual disciplines for our faith.” Rather than curious historical artifacts or optional exercises for super-Christians, he says, the disciplines are shown to be the essential activities that allow individuals to experience the “easy yoke” of Christ and to follow him in concrete ways into the gospel’s kingdom.
Although Willard’s argument is strengthened by drawing from a wide spectrum of authors and disciplines, the convincing power of the book lies in his handling of the scriptural evidence. The New Testament’s conception of salvation is shown to be far more than forgiveness, including substantial and progressive transformation of the individual’s moral character, and an increasing power to do good and resist evil.
Chapter 6, dealing with the significance of the human body as it is involved in the process of salvation, will be enlightening for many, as will chapter 7, an analysis of Paul’s understanding of the psychological dynamics of redemption.
While the book is expressly not a practical guide, it includes a helpful chapter describing the most common and time-tested disciplines, presented under two basic headings: “Disciplines of Abstinence,” including solitude, silence, fasting, frugality, chastity, secrecy, sacrifice, and “Disciplines of Engagement,” including study, worship, celebration, service, prayer, fellowship, confession, submission.
In what may be the most controversial chapter in the book, “Is Poverty Spiritual?” Willard attacks what he sees as “one of the most dangerous illusions of Christians in the contemporary world … the idealization of poverty.” This and the final chapter on “The Disciplines and the Power Structures of This World” are must reading for socially conscious Christians seeking to integrate the inner and outer journeys of discipleship.
A thoughtful reading of this book provides a theologically and psychologically sound understanding of the way into vital, life-changing contact with the living Christ and his kingdom. If Willard’s plea for placing the disciplines front and center on the church’s agenda were instituted, the results just might be revolutionary.
The Women Of Abortion Speak Out
The Psycho-Social Aspects of Stress Following Abortion, by Anne Speckhard (Sheed and Ward, viii + 134 pp.; $7.95, paper), and Aborted Women: Silent No More, by David O. Reardon (Loyola, xxvi + 373 pp.; $9.95, paper; $15.95, hardcover). Reviewed by James T. Burtchaell, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, and author of Rachel Weeping: The Case Against Abortion (Harper & Row).
Anne Speckhard writes as a social scientist who is critical of traditional abortion studies in her discipline. These studies commonly inquire into the psychic turbulence women incur by using abortion to deal with what they felt were overwhelming problems. But such studies tend to look at abortion only as a coping device and ignore the possibility that it may also be a new source of stress in its own right.
Speckhard finds their accounts too individualistic. By examining only the emotional aftermath wrought by abortion in the mothers themselves, scholars have been too ready to ignore how it may have estranged these women from their crucially important natural support communities.
Speckhard conducted extensive interviews with 30 women for whom abortion had been a highly stressful memory. The typical woman had become pregnant while in a longstanding sexual partnership, which then unraveled; she was 15 to 24 years old at the time of the abortion, and still in the process of achieving independence from her family; and she was knowledgeable about birth control but did not use it.
The women reported emotional reactions already well described in earlier literature: intense guilt, anger (primarily at the abortion providers), depression, fear of discovery, loss of ability to experience emotions, and painful reactions when encountering pregnant women or small children.
More original is Speckhard’s report of behavioral aftereffects not well noticed in other studies: eating disorders, extreme weight loss or gain, drug or alcohol abuse and addiction, sexual promiscuity, a prompt repeat (or “compensatory”) pregnancy, flashbacks, nightmares, hallucinations, and “visitations” by the aborted child.
Attitudes also had changed. At the time of their abortions, 35 percent of these women considered abortion as their right, while another 27 percent had not even regarded it as a moral issue. But in the aftermath, 96 percent now regarded it as wrong.
Facing Crisis In Isolation
Speckhard’s most valuable finding, however, is that abortion compounded the stress of those women by estranging them from their most important loyalties. Fearful that their sexual activity and pregnancy would strain their parents’ loyalties beyond the breaking point, they confided neither in them nor in any friends they thought might tell their families. Thus these women underwent both the crisis and its aftermath isolated from their closest natural supports.
They did find emotional companionship in other friends who supported their choice of abortion, but that support went bad later. “Many subjects reported that friends who had been enthusiastic supporters of the abortion decision were unwilling to listen to any accounts of the stress produced by the abortion. It appeared to be a protective strategy on the part of friendship systems to avoid having to deal with the pain of abortion.”
The decision to abort meant they were refusing to make a commitment to their sexual partners or their children, and the decision to do it furtively hid them from their original families. Their isolation from family was therefore stark and complete.
Abortion was also religiously alienating. The typical subject, religiously inactive, had thought of God as punitive and vengeful. “Such a perception led to a great deal of fear and anxiety, as it was not uncommon for these subjects to report a fear that God would punish them for the abortion by denying them future fertility.”
These women were to find eventual peace in surprising company: not with their families or their friends, but in prolife groups or in ardent religious communities. “In these social systems subjects found members who allowed them to discuss freely their feelings of grief, guilt, loneliness, anger, and despair. They also found that members of these systems were not adverse [sic] to discussing the details of the abortion experience, particularly with reference to concerns over pain that the fetus may have experienced and damage that may have occurred to the subjects’ reproductive organs. In other social systems these concerns had not been validated.”
The women found religious reintegration by accepting the church’s negative appraisal of extramarital sex and abortion, by embracing a greatly modified view of God (as cherishing rather than punishing), and by discovering the possibility of forgiveness as a final resolution for their fault and the stress that had followed.
Speckhard’s findings seem to confirm this reviewer’s earlier observation that women at risk for irresponsible pregnancy and abortion have tended to be too weak either to confront their sexual partners or to reveal themselves in crisis to their dissenting families and friends. They have tended to be acquiescent and passive, victimized by families that turned a blind eye towards what was going on, and victimized by partners who wanted sex but not commitment.
The Most Exploited
Aborted Women: Silent No More is built on a survey David Reardon conducted of 252 women who have had abortions and who are members of a national support group known as Women Exploited by Abortion (WEBA). Typical in most respects of all women reported as aborters in America, they stand out in one way: They all have come to deplore their action.
The accounts of their experiences are remarkably parallel to what Speckhard found in her interviews. Most of the women had been familiar with contraception but had not been using it when they became pregnant. The decision to abort had been made quickly—often within hours of detecting pregnancy. Most women felt they had been “forced” to abort by pressure from others, and 90 percent claimed they had been given incomplete information by the abortion providers. They remembered the abortion not as an act of emancipation, but as a yielding to the preferences of others. The aftermath effects include what Speckhard discovered: “atonement” pregnancies, eating disorders, alienation from family and from God.
Of first-hand value are 20 extensive and well-written profiles, edited from extensive interviews. The women represented here narrate some of the most complex situations: they are victims of coerced abortions, women who chose to be weak and others who made abortion a take-charge moment, women who had therapeutic abortions or illegal ones, those who aborted after rape and incest, women who were hustled into abortion because of economic or racial disadvantage.
The hard cases are chronicled here in the women’s own words. They are angry now, not weak. And they are articulately persuasive that abortion had been a way for women to be used, not an occasion of self-governance.
Courses Of Destruction
Of what significance are these studies for a Christian moral understanding? Those in the community of faith should appreciate that one of the primary gifts of the Spirit is insight into what various courses of moral behavior do to people. One of the primary sources of moral teaching is our communal insight into how certain actions tend to destroy us personally: those who lie, or embezzle, or seduce, wither. They are enfeebled in their characters, their persons.
These recollections by women who destroyed their children and were later transformed are a valuable source for reflection by those who believe we have nothing better to do with our lives than to make room for the most helpless. This is not merely social science research. It offers us insight into one of the ways that those who kill, themselves die—and can be raised to new life.
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