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Washington Post, Wednesday, May 31, 2006; C04
BORN-AGAIN INNOCENT
A PRIVATE HISTORY OF AWE
By Scott Russell Sanders
North Point. 322 pp. $25
By Timothy K. Beal
Born two months after the bombing of Hiroshima, Scott Russell Sanders
grew up in a church-going, working-class white family that lived in
both the segregated South and the rural Midwest, in both military and
civilian cultures; he came to political consciousness, to love and to
fatherhood during the Cold War and Vietnam. Here he has written a brilliantly
self-reflective memoir of post-World War II America, rich with a child's
view of disturbing signs of the times, from "Whites Only"
drinking fountains to Gideon Bibles to radioactive, glow-in-the-dark
wristwatches.
Some will be tempted to herald this book as the recollected voice
of the baby boomer generation. Thankfully, it is far less pretentious
and far more profound than that. I am tempted to call it religious autobiography.
Granted, Sanders is no saint or ecstatic. Although he grew up a Protestant
"churchy boy," and although his literary memory is steeped
in the biblical pool of imagination, he no longer identifies with a
particular religious tradition. Still, as in the best of religious autobiography,
remembering here becomes a contemplative practice, using fragments of
experience as a means of self-discovery. And the narrative is shaped
by a series of momentary revelations of holy mystery -- interruptions
of awe.
Borrowing from Quaker tradition, Sanders calls these interruptions
"openings," in which the self-conscious, worrying, desiring
ego loses itself within the awesome mystery of the "holy shimmer
at the heart of things." Often these outbreaks of "Earth's
prodigal energies" occur on the threshold between the domestic
and the wild: thunderous lightning cracking open the sky and splitting
a giant oak in the front yard, a planned weed fire jumping the ditch
and nearly consuming the farmhouse, a pack of wild dogs whose howls
call forth the wolf in his pet dog Rusty, prophetic images of divine
wrath and pathos in the family Bible, making love for the first time
on his wedding night, the birth of his daughter. Most unsettling and
captivating are those moments when such awesome forces appear personified
in his father, simultaneously sage and incendiary, whose humming accompanies
the thunder, whose cigarette smoke mirrors that of the wildfire, and
whose outbursts of anger recall those of the biblical God.
Though "A Private History of Awe" is deeply personal, Sanders
believes that such extraordinary experiences are, paradoxically, utterly
ordinary and available to all of us. Seeking to describe what is beyond
naming, he draws on Buddhist concepts of interconnection, the physics
of energy and the neuroscience of visual perception, William Blake's
vision of the marriage of heaven and hell, and the biblical poetics
of sublime power.
Not that Sanders's life has been one ecstasy after another. Such moments
have been few and far between, yet they give meaning to existence. As
a reader, I found myself waiting for the next interruption of awe but
nonetheless surprised when it came.
Part of what makes Sanders's memoir so engaging is its frequent return
to the present, in which he spends much of his time with his very elderly
mother and his baby granddaughter, Elizabeth. As his mother's conscious
self disintegrates, his granddaughter's is just emerging, and the child
sends him back into his past with fresh eyes. Once, as he walked back
to the car after visiting his mother in the nursing home, Elizabeth
grabbed his chin and pointed his face to a kingfisher flying overhead.
" 'Burr!' she cries, her whole body wriggling with excitement."
I imagine Sanders knows Blake's question in "The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell": "How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy
way, Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?"
It is testimony to the brilliance of this book that he need not raise
this question explicitly for it to come to mind. Moving between a private
history of awe and a present rebirth of wonder, Sanders invites us to
reflect on our own pasts and presents with like-minded openness.
Timothy K. Beal is professor of religion at Case Western Reserve University and author of "Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith."
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
