Spiritual Memoir

3 units

Everyone enjoys a good memoir or autobiography. It’s a pleasure having a writer open up to you, share secrets, admit failures, celebrate triumphs, and tell how they came to be who they are. The pleasure is the writer’s, too. How many of us have, in effect, written our own memoirs, bit by bit, in diaries, emails, or social-media stories? A sub-genre has emerged, spiritual memoir. Spiritual memoirs on the writer’s relationship to invisible worlds: spirit, religion, mysticism, the numinous, the divine. They may tell stories of conversion; of loss of faith; of inexplicable encounters with spiritual forces; of heightened experience (maybe heightened by drugs, fasting, meditation, other aids); of joining a community centered on a relationship to the divine. In this course, we read spiritual memoirs for insight into the psychology, and sometimes, physiology, of spiritual change; to learn about religions; to see how spiritual life fits into culture; to understand how spiritual identity relates to, complements, or is in tension with other identities (racial, sexual, political, class, etc.); and to understand literary techniques that make a piece of writing effective or good. But mostly for pleasure. These books are fun, spicy, and interesting, and they get to the heart of what makes humans unique: we think about eternity, cosmos, ultimate meaning, why we are here. Dogs—in many ways our superiors—do not.