Recollection
This blog takes its title from an essay in Thomas Merton’s classic, No Man is an Island. In common usage, to "recollect" something means to remember some past event. But in Merton’s essay, "recollection is a change of spiritual focus and an attuning of our whole soul to what is beyond and above ourselves." I’ve started this blog as part of a larger attempt to change my spiritual focus.
More accurately, this blog is an attempt to gain spiritual focus. As it is, my ideas, my ambitions, my thoughts, my desires, and my dreams feel as if they are scattered in too many different directions, few of which are Godward. Although I have been a practicing and professing Christian for my entire life, in the last half dozen years my attention has been divided and distracted from spiritual things. So "recollecting" myself means gathering the scattered pieces of my true self and centering them again on the one thing that is truly needful: a life lived joyfully in obedience and gratitude to God.
The point of changing my spiritual focus is not to achieve change for the sake of change, but to be more truly who I am. As Merton writes:
A man is a free being who is always changing into himself. This changing is never merely indifferent. We are always getting either better or worse. Our development is measured by our acts of free choice, and we make ourselves according to the pattern of our desires.
If our desires reach out for the things that we were created to have and to make and to become, then we will develop into what we were truly meant to be.
But if our desires reach out for things that have no meaning for the growth of our spirit, if they lose themselves in dreams or passions or illusions, we will be false to ourselves and in the end our lives will proclaim that we have lied to ourselves and to other men and to God. We will judge ourselves as aliens and exiles from ourselves and from God.
I quote this passage at length because it conveys succinctly what I feel with an uncomfortable frequency these days: a feeling of being alienated from myself, of living multiple lives and wearing multiple faces, instead of presenting one unified self to God and the world. So long as I am living a divided life instead of being true to myself, so long am I in exile from any kind of rest. Thankfully, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob always promises that exiles will be followed by happy returns. In Merton’s terms, when my "inward life" does not line up with my "outward self," "my senses, my imagination, my emotions, scatter to pursue their various quarries all over the face of the earth. Recollection brings them home."
People are too complicated to talk as if they are easily divided between an "inward" half and an "outward" half. But I do often feel as if I have two halves: One half of me is a practicing academic who recently completed a doctoral degree in the humanities. The other half of me is a practicing Christian who was raised within the arms of the church and who hopes one day to rest in the arms of God.
I am surely not the first Christian academic to feel as though these two halves exist in nearly perpetual rivalry with each other, thanks to the fact that the contemporary academy does not take religious faith very seriously as anything other than an object of study. Let me be clear here: I am not one of those Christians who disdains the "secularism" of university life. I have immense respect for the academy and have chosen to live my professional life within it. So by pointing out its general hostility to Christian faith, I do not mean to raise another ridiculous banner in the culture wars or complain that I am somehow marginalized or persecuted because of my faith. I simply mean to state what my own experience has been: in the world of academia, I often find myself feeling embarrassed by my lifelong membership in the world of Scripture and song that I celebrate every Sunday with the church. Because I have been shaped by the habits and virtues of the secular academy, I find myself feeling ashamed of this other world of faith. But because I have also been shaped, more deeply and for a longer period of time, by the rituals and stories of the church, I find that shame even more profoundly shameful.
"Recollection" means trying to put both halves of me back together again. And in a sense it also retains some of its original meaning. I’m trying to recollect, on a daily basis, who I was before I started to forget who I am. I’ve been so long living in two worlds, and presenting a different aspect of myself to each, that in some ways my true self needs recovering. It’s not just that in my "academic" guise I often hide a strong Christian faith, but that I’ve started to forget what my faith actually is. Parker Palmer, who has also written about the challenges of living an undivided life as both an academic and a Christian, pinpoints this problem perfectly in his book, A Hidden Wholeness:
Here is the ultimate irony of the divided life: live behind a wall long enough, and the true self you tried to hide from the world disappears from your own view! The wall itself and the world outside it become all that you know.
In this blog, then, I’m trying to recollect who I was before I started living behind a wall that keeps my "true self" hidden from my academic peers. Starting this blog may seem like a strange way to do that, particularly since I already have another blog which talks primarily about my academic interests. Dividing my spiritual and academic lives into two different blogs may seem like a poor way to start trying to live an undivided life.
It may also seem disingenuous that I do not plan to blog here under my full name. My reason for doing this, though, is less a desire to conceal my identity than to retain the semi-privacy of this space. Putting my full name on this blog (or using my full name in connection with it) would expose it irreversibly to the eyes of Google, and I’d prefer to have the freedom to think things out here without my posts always popping up in searches for my name.
Obviously, I am not keeping these posts fully private, since I am sending them into the blogosphere. But I have reasons, as well, for wanting this blog to be semi-public. For one, because I have been reading blogs for a long time, I have found a variety of writers online who have helped me "re-collect," and I’m hoping that quest might be easier to continue while in the presence of their community. Second, I’m aware that one of the most important things for me to do, if I am serious about changing my spiritual focus, is to nurture some spiritual disciplines — disciplines which I sorely lack. I’ve tried various regimens of regular prayer or private writing, but (and I don’t think this is to my credit) none of them has "stuck" as well as the habit of blogging. I might as well try to use that habit to good purpose: if it takes a blog to get my spiritual attention, then so be it.
Finally, as I’ve already said, part of what I’m trying to repent of (that is, to turn away from) is a shameful fear of being who I really am in some contexts. I realize that my blogging here somewhat anonymously, instead of simply including spiritual reflections on my already existing blog, is just further evidence of the way I’ve tried to build a wall between my "outward self" and my "inward life." But recollection has to start somewhere. You can’t return from exile in a day.
