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 Rachel Helps
This book is not a memoir. A memoir is a like a series of home videos tinged with memory, with a bit of elaboration for entertainment. This book is more like an album of photographs from Wickman’s life, dissected into layers, with additional commentary and connections from poems. I fully expected to be drenched in personal experience and got a really good teacup of it.
Maybe a little explanation is in order.
I met Professor Wickman in 2011 when I took his graduate seminar on literary theory. “You can look at him and tell that he’s a literature professor,” is how my friend describes him today, and there were rumors that he was a model in his youth and that his dad was a GA. We called him the silver fox. Combined with his penchant for unexpected arguments, he was vibe goals. I had just gotten married and wasn’t the most focused on my studies, but I really wanted to like literary philosophy. It was just a bit opaque. I squeaked out a B, and haven’t discussed Kant via his own writing since then. Professor Wickman was sooo excited to work in Scotland. That was about the extent we grad students knew about his personal life.
So yeah, my curiosity was piqued over ten years ago! But somehow reading Professor Wickman bear his soul, reading his love letters to his wife, and reading about his spiritual struggles did not really satisfy my curiosity. I wanted to know the stupid, gossipy details about if his acting career ever went anywhere (apparently not?), how he pined after his crush for years, and how he was “obnoxiously, implacably idiosyncratic” (55). I also wanted a more detailed explanation about why he returned to BYU after working in Scotland (his dream job?). Why did the realization that he couldn’t separate his love of God from the love of the Church (185) result in his return?
One of the cover quotes describes the book as a shift away from “destructive positivism” and is nourishing to “Latter-day Saint humanists.” These are some great signals for the philosophical bent of Wickman’s work here. This is no breezy memoir of baguettes and social missteps. It’s incredibly intense self-analysis from a philosophy/literature professor. There is a lot of wordiness that could be cut away and sentence structures that seemed difficult-to-read on purpose. Telling instead of showing. I had to look up “apophatic” again (was Heike’s Void not enough of a definition for me??). After I forgave Wickman for not having a style typical of a “creative writer,” I could relax and enjoy the many gems of wisdom he offers, especially since I identified with his experiences of spiritual doubt and fulfillment. And I found his optimism, faithfulness, and desire to cultivate the Holy Spirit in his life inspirational.
I have transcribed my favorite quotes (and some of my favorite ideas weren’t able to be encapsulated here):
“To work at BYU means claiming the Church, inheriting the legacy of the pioneers, and continuing to build and to sing as one walks and walks and walks and walks. In a sense […] it means becoming a missionary all over again. […] I wanted, finally, to come off my mission once and for all, leave that labor to others. I wanted the spiritual rewards of learning, but I wanted to enjoy them anonymously.” (11)
“I also feel most authentic when I am a little unsettled in my religious beliefs and attitudes, when I seek and await further light and knowledge I know I do not yet possess.” (17)
“For me, spiritual experience thus usually entails acclimating myself to feelings of reassuring and expansive unrest.” (17)
“[…] the Spirit, I find, is a gentle contrarian: it resists the dogma of the status quo, refusing to let us rest in the complacency of narrow ideas and shallow understandings, stirring us to expand our minds and deepen our capacity for feeling and action, and causing us, therefore, to revise our relationship with our faith and reexamine our religious practices.” (28)
“[…] every laptop threatening a tweet of infamy” (39)
“If we cultivated the gift of the Holy Ghost, would our lives acquire more color, a different sound? If the Spirit were a more constant presence, would our pain feel different somehow? Would it carry a purpose, and a promise, that it otherwise seems to lack? And would our joy have an amplitude, a resonance that would cause it to linger, to echo? Wouldn’t the Spirit make things more alive to us and to them?” (48)
A spiritual life “reveals hard truths, disclosing more fully the reasons for my struggles and the nature of my limitations.” (49)
“‘The best books’ serve as bridges to spiritual lessons we might learn some other way.” (62)
“God was not dead for me, not ever. But certain conceptions I held of God needed to die.” (80)
“I had grown accustomed to approaching God seeking answers; now I needed to attend to the abiding mystery, the darkened corners, in the answers I received.” (81)
“When we encounter silence as an answer to prayer, we may be finally asking questions big enough or facing situations complex enough to merit from God the respect of a sigh, a nod of empathy, a renewed promise of grace.” (85)
“For me, God’s shadow was a sign of depth, his silence a form of speech.” (87)
“Truth, it seems, is about discerning God’s presence in unimaginable, seemingly random situations.” (116)
“The challenge […] is not to “believe” in divine love but to perceive it.” (120)
“I would occasionally find myself overwhelmed by a sense of God’s presence in the most random times and places, like the morning when I sat in despondency and began a prayer with the words “Well, I’m still here” and felt overcome with divine love” (122)
“Is [poetry] the vehicle for an answer to prayer, or is it the answer itself–that is, what is given in place of the concrete answers we seek?” (148)
“[…] to some questions I asked in prayer, […] I do not believe there is a single word or sentence God could have communicated that would have pacified me. […] The answers I sought were, often unbeknownst to me, too intricate, composed of too many parts and too dependent on timing. They had to unfold piece by piece. In effect, they weren’t poems as much as novels, and I just had to keep reading. All the way to the end.” (152)
“[…] in many cases, scriptural passages are too larded with layers of cultural expectation […] to capture properly the spiritual impressions that suffuse me.” (157)
“[…] the exercise of spiritual gifts implies a partnership with God, a kind of apprenticeship that brings us closer to God even as it transforms our lives.” (177)
On “nourishing an aesthetic relation” to his religion (a not-great way of distancing onesself):
“I could be in the Church but not of it–remain attached to it without investing too much credence or hope in it. When it was good, I could appreciate it, and when it was bad, it would give me something to talk about, like I would a novel, a poem, a film, a painting. I could analyze what was “problematic” about it; I could speculate on things that would make it better. Religion could become, for me, an object of critical engagement.” (181)
“That aesthetic relation to my faith, that reflective wedge I had inserted between my beliefs and the Church’s truth claims, was exposed as a mere shadow of reality.” (185)
“But religion is not truly itself until we ask it to do the impossible–until, fasting, praying, and serving, we petition it to help bring us, mere mortals, into the presence of what is most sacred. To know we ask for the impossible […] but to ask for it anyway, […] to believe and even know that our religious devotion to God will be met by his devotion to us: that is faith.” (198)