Wickman, “Life to the Whole Being” (Reviewed by Charles Inouye)

Title: Life to the Whole Being: The Spiritual Memoir of a Literature Professor
Author: Matthew Wickman
Publisher: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship
Genre: Memoir
Year Published: 2022
Number of Pages: 248

Reviewed by Charles Shirō Inouye

Matthew Wickman’s Life to the Whole Being takes its title from Parley P. Pratt’s description of the Holy Ghost as “. . . marrow to the bone, joy to the heart, light to the eyes, music to the ears, and life to the whole being.” A “spiritual memoir,” (77) this biography notes the influence of the spirit in the major events of the author’s life: deciding to go on a mission; dealing with the disinterest of those he encountered in France; finding solace in his study of literature; meeting his future wife upon the death of his dearest friend, who was her sister; employment at BYU in the English department; raising a family; considering a position in Aberdeen, Scotland; but returning to BYU, where he became the director of the Humanities Center and teacher of a senior seminar on Literature and Spirituality. The book’s narrative arch takes us through a series of crises to a point of resolution, which Wickman explains as a coming together of literature and spirituality.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in either literature or spirituality; and for those who might be attracted to both, I declare it a must read. As a life-long, and sometimes troubled, member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Wickman is able to ponder his own experiences, to take company with literary lights and prophets whether ancient or contemporary, and to come to a number of extraordinary insights about what it means to live in a world created by a poetic God who sings, “All things unto me are spiritual.” (D&C 29:34) (189)

For Wickman, spiritual growth is a traumatic, often-painful disturbance that opens one up to new possibilities. Rewarding, yes. “However, when I live more closely to the Spirit, I also become more aware of my personal failings, more mindful of my natural limitations, more conscious of the ways I curb God’s influence in my life. The Spirit opens, or at least reveals, the wounds it also heals. And such wounds find expression in song, in story—in literature.” (60)

Life to the Whole Being is a devotional, spiritually focused biography that is also a literary treatment of deep wounds, attending to the all-too-human ways we come to understand God. “That is why I wrote this book, one that seeks to communicate something of the dynamism and diversity of spiritual experiences— their wide range of feelings, impressions, and ideas, their amplitude across mind and heart, their status as both singular events and states of being encompassing the breadth of life.” (17) As a biographical account of a spiritually-minded Latter-day Saint intellectual, it speaks to the possibilities of the reader’s own eternal progression. “For all of us, to have an experience with the Spirit is to perceive the world at least partly as God does.” (20) Wickman insists. There will be no seeing God without coming to see what God sees.

Religion is one thing, spiritual life quite another. “Spiritual experience perpetually surpasses the limits of our religious understanding, revealing new things about the religious principles in which we believe. In this way, spiritual experience is ‘bigger’ than religion, for it recasts religion as a living organism in process of perpetual change.” (95) “For this reason, there is no spiritual experience that does not involve, that does not introduce, at least a small measure of faith crisis.” (95) Here, Wickman quotes the late apostle Richard G. Scott. “Spirituality yields two fruits. The first is inspiration to know what to do. The second is power, or the capacity to do it. These two capacities come together.” (97)

What I most appreciate about Wickman’s very vulnerable and honest narration is the way it continually refreshes my thinking about possibility and capacity. “The Spirit makes life more itself, which means it puts life in relation to itself. I am more—or less—myself depending on how spiritually I live” (61).

Spirituality is a newness. We know this because it brings surprise. “Spiritual experiences frequently inspire feelings of surprise and wonder. Even when we expect such experiences, when we grow accustomed to them, we rarely manage to anticipate their effects on us and others. Whether dramatic or subtle, these effects open a window onto a world vaster than the one with which we are familiar; they carry with them the aura of ‘things which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor [have] yet entered into the heart of man’” (D&C 76:10; cf. Isa. 64:4). (161)

Surprise. What does it mean to be surprised by our lives? Wickman makes the case that God blesses us in ways we cannot predict or even imagine. What is a miracle, if not a surprising “better than”—better than we expected, better than we deserved, better than we could have done on our own. As if this insight weren’t enough, Wickman goes on to explain the connection between this sort of spiritual expansion and the enlivening function of literature.

“As such, literature is a precursor of emergent realities, both in the world and in ourselves: it forges new neural pathways, new capacities to think and feel and be.” (25) “More than just comparative, metaphor is transformative: at the very least, it changes how we think about the objects, ideas, or experiences it names” (34) So saying, Wickman’s focus is more poetic than prosaic, more concerned with the metaphoric than with the fictive. As such, he wisely dodges many modern epistemological criticisms of imaginary this and that. In Wickman’s world, the imagined is real in a personal, non-symbolic way. “Conversion is actually a synonym for metaphor, signifying a transformation of one thing into another.” (35)

Literature, including the scriptures, provides us with metaphors that become true. “What, then, is a poem but a miracle whose source is not, or not only, the poet herself? This makes a poet less a creator than a receiver of miracles—a recipient of transformative spiritual experiences. Such experiences introduce the unimaginable into the mundane, the otherworldly into the texture of everyday life.” (42)

The spiritual breathes into us these necessary metaphors—the god-like man, the woman-like God. “As time would eventually reveal, I was blessed by these illusions, many of them. Better said, I was blessed by God’s poetry—by the regular, almost metrical procession of small events, the series of elegant metaphors evoking better things (“Not this exactly, Matt, but something like it, something more beautiful, even. . .”; “You’re almost there, just one more horizon. Good, now one more. . .”). I now see that if God had answered many of my prayers without any varnish of illusion, I could not have handled the truth, not at that moment.” (150)

As the postmodern world now turns away from prosaic realities of a dead-ended modernity and its different secular promises of “better than,” as we move both backwards and forwards to the poetry of ancients as a contemporary flamboyance of posthuman, post-secular expression, a golden era of Latter-day Saint writing unfolds—where poets, prophets, and professors work together to give to these end days an ultimate surprise: our intellectual lives and our spiritual lives coming together in ways we could not have imagined. In the end, the Restoration of past losses is actually happening, even if we mistakenly thought, for almost two hundred years since Joseph’s vision, that our religion was a modern extension of the Enlightenment.

To the bookshelf at the end-of-the-world, this collection of “best books” that push us past our modern bickerings and towards an awareness of where we might be headed—one service project, one Sunday School lesson, one poem at a time—I would add Wickman’s Life to the Whole Being. Line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little, there a little it tells the story of a man who was blessed in asking for what he wanted most: the spiritual experience that would give to the world God’s understanding, creativity, and compassion.