River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey by Helen Prejean

Author:Helen Prejean
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Autobiography, Memoir, Religion, Spirituality, Theology
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2019-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

I can see that everyone else at Divine Word is going to the library and writing regular, footnoted papers, and when I hear my classmates talk about this or that theologian they’re referencing, I don’t say much. What I’m doing feels edgy, arrogant, even. But it’s what St. Augustine did in his Confessions. He was the first Christian who drew on his own personal life story as the basis for theological reflection. He couldn’t have made it more personal, writing about his childhood acts of vandalism, his struggles with lust and how he prayed “Give me chastity, but not yet!,” and about how one day in a garden he heard a child’s voice say, “Take and read,” and he picked up a Bible and went right to one of St. Paul’s epistles and it was a thunderbolt moment of revelation, and he changed his ways and realigned his entire life to follow Christ and never turned back. That’s what I call a Jesus explosion, and that’s what I’m hoping for, though it’s not happening for me in one fell swoop as it did for Augustine. It’s happening more in dribs and drabs.

At this point in my life, I am still pretty much smack-dab in a very enclosed world of personal, privatized religion. The suffering all around me in the larger world does not exist for me. It’s not that I’m trying to block it out. I simply haven’t awakened to it. But I guess when you’re not awake, you’re not awake. That’s why when I do wake up to the call of the Gospel to resist injustice and get to work in the public square, I have to call it grace.

Cheeky or not, I’m doing it, writing my paper straight out of personal experience, and that carries me still. I’ve been keeping a journal for three years, and here in London my relationship with William fills a lot of pages. Sometimes, when the spirit moves me, I write down my conversations with God—which, I’m afraid, turn out to be mostly me talking and God just sort of nodding and going along. It’s hard to know when exactly God is talking, or only me doing the talking for both of us.

In “Sparrow Song” I’m determined to write about what is real, so I write about getting past “shell reality,” in which external forms substitute for the real: “We write a paper to meet a deadline, visit a person because social pressures demand it, work for the paycheck.”

From Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye I love Holden Caulfield’s exquisite castigation of fake Christianity, where he said “old Jesus would’ve puked” if he could see what people are doing in his name. In “Sparrow,” to illustrate “shell reality,” I turn to Salinger’s description of one character’s concept of marriage in his Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters:

My beloved has an undying, basically undeviating love for the institution of marriage itself. She has a primal urge to play house permanently. Her marital goals are so absurd and touching.

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