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In a talk to novices, Trappist Thomas Merton noted that if you want to learn how to
meditate, consider a bank robber: his concentrated focus on the end, on plans to achieve
that goal, on contingencies, etc. Then, Merton adopts an arch Cagney voice to say
something like, "I know all about such things!" Merton says that everyone meditates,
but few do it well. What, then, is the goal of meditation? How's one get there? What
can surface and how's one deal with it? Our age has assembled such a variety of answers
that it's hard to imagine anyone getting anywhere near the bank-vault.
Susan Neville's book Iconography: A Writer's Meditation has the wandering
daily-ness of
a diary along with the discipline of someone investigating motives and consequences,
surroundings and surrenders. In five segments, Iconography chronicles Neville's
"midpoint," in life, work and family as she initially embarks on an icon painting class.
The rigor of the work and self-investigation it prompts defeat her. When the nun teaching
the class calls her, Neville confesses she felt wrong and wasn't ready. "Make a vow,"
Mother Catherine responds, "and try to keep it." While the painting class takes a Lenten
hiatus, Neville vows to write every day, creating the bulk of the book, the essays/entries
written daily throughout Lent in 2000. Since Neville's icon illuminates the cover, she
obviously returns to Mother Catherine's class but completes it only after years.
Writing-as-meditation has two main methods. The first (a la Natalie Goldberg and others)
advocates keeping the hand moving to exhaust the surface of the mind and heart and
engage the powerful, deeper currents. The other approach sifts our days to recognize
moments when the Spirit comforted or challenged us, and when we followed the invitation
or failed to. Both require curiosity, fearlessness, and compassion, but writing itself
guarantees nothing. It can just as easily foster egoism and feed its conflicting desires.
Neville's book demonstrates what else is needed for real meditation, especially for writers.
First, there's honesty. Neville declares she might "leave things out" of her daily writing
but "I'll try very hard not to lie." Even this resolution hedges enough to be trustworthy.
She also confronts the self-absorption inherent in her enterprise. She says, "But how do
you get outside the ego...at times, I'll hear my voice talking to my husband, on a Friday
night, say (that night of perpetual self examination and new beginnings), and I'll hear my
own voice in my ears and go I-I-I-I-I in an attempt at exorcism."
Her integrity about matters of faith is also refreshing. Who isn't worn out by spiritual
writers who desire to seem wise or whose devotion dictates a relentless optimism or whose
faith empowers a thundering authority? If it's going to be a journey, to
adopt the cliché,
allow yourself to say, as Neville does, "I'm a boring person," or more profoundly "I don't
know God. I don't know Jesus Christ." Now we can get somewhere, I think. Now, when she says
she wants to understand about God and Jesus is "the mystery the words originally gestured
toward as something living, something real," Readers go with it. And when she follows that
up with "I do, though, know my own wretchedness," it's clearly not merely a prelude to a
credo previously arrived at. There's discovery going on, and it's energetic, in the writing
and for the reader.
Structurally, Neville energizes the book by admitting the potential falseness of narrative.
In the first weeks of Lent, she begins reading Augustine's Confessions.
Like all stories,
it is shaped after the ending is realized. Hindsight reveals the story's "midpoint," so
the book can build up to it and unravel from it. Continuing her project, she didn't know
what, if anything would come from keeping her secret vow to keep writing. None of us do.
We don't know what "in sickness and in health" will bring or who our kids will become.
After embracing the orderliness of a novel or movie, we return to the indirection of our
lives where an action's significance is usually only discovered afterwards.
The other quality Neville demonstrates is humor. Not only is a wisecrack or ironic phrase
funny, it also introduces another band of the human spectrum, confirming that the holy
moves at all levels of experience, not only the solemn. Neville uses tone to achieve this,
like calling the first part of the book "St. Mary of Ennui." When she tells her husband
her plan to take this class, he reminds her that she's no painter and not Catholic.
"In fact, he said, you have terrible handwriting and you're not even a lukewarm Methodist.
" Self-deprecation allows whatever insights that come to have something to stand out
against.
In Iconography, Susan Neville takes on her regrettable dining room furniture,
the death of
a teenager, her own work as a writing teacher, the legacy of her profoundly troubled
mother's influence, and a host of other concerns, always with sharply observed detail.
In short, as a writer, she meditates well. The book makes you want to take a vow and
keep it, to experience the illumination a sustained discipline can reveal.
© Edward A. Dougherty
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