In the Labyrinth

Can reading good books bring one closer to God?  Nancy Malone believes it can and cites long experience as a Roman Catholic nun to support her view.

Can personal humiliation lead a person to a deeper appreciation of God’s role in her life?  Again, Sister Nancy finds in a personal crisis the way to a more honest spirituality.

These are the main messages in her book: “Walking a Literary Labyrinth: A Spirituality of Reading,” recently published by Riverhead Books. As an old friend of the author, I read this work with particular interest and I value its insights into the life of the spirit.

The author does not intend simply to deliver messages, however. She writes a memoir, tracing her life from the early days in Bridgeport, Connecticut to the present, on City Island in the Bronx. Along the way she details many varied experiences leading up to her major crisis.

As Sister Nancy searches for the God within her, she does not proceed by straight lines but by an erratic course of abrupt turns and swings away from the center and then back again. This progress she compares to a labyrinth that brings the traveler to an unseen destination through byways where one often feels lost.

Along her way, she had to discover that “spirituality is meant to be the living breath, the soul, enlivening the creed, moral code, and cult – worship – that constitute any religion.”

She also came to a new appreciation of what reading can do for the spiritual life. In fact, from another author she learned the phrase “book providence” to indicate “that certain books come into our lives at certain times for some God-given purpose.” For Sister Nancy the books she was reading while recuperating from a serious illness led her to change fields and prepare herself to teach theology.

Throughout her book, the author shares appreciation of the books that she has found most valuable. After the last chapter she adds a short list of the writers and books of special value to her and offers appraisals of them. She makes a point of including books that are not considered “spiritual” but which speak to her of human beings in all of our God-given complexity.

The great crisis that has transformed Sister Nancy’s life lasted from 1975 to 1983.  During this period she experienced what she describes as a “dark night.” She felt her spirit to be dead and she could no longer pray or even read. Worse still, she felt “hopelessness, self-loathing, and shame.”

Finally, in January of 1983 she admitted to herself that she was an alcoholic. Facing this fact involved for her the humiliation of acknowledging how far drinking had led her to contradicting the ideals of the religious life to which she had dedicated herself. Recognizing herself as an alcoholic, she gradually came to see that her life would have to change radically. This in itself was painful, to accept the need for transformation of a life that had once seemed straightforward.  

It was through Alcoholic Anonymous that Sister Nancy’s life turned around. Thanks in large part to AA, she has been able to put off the false self that brought her such pain. She praises the AA text “Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions” because “it offers as good a description of spirituality as any I’ve read elsewhere.”

Of herself, she now says: “In the years since 1983, I have been in recovery, never cured, with every kind of support in fellowship and from God that I could ask for – and this is where I always hope to be.”

She feels herself to have discovered anew “the meaning of life, a portrayal of who I am called to be.” This discovery now seems to her “what I have been looking for in all the reading that I have done.”

At the same time she continues to feel a deep human aloneness, something she connects with her vow of life-long celibacy. But she also feels it to be an invitation into “God’s interiority.” As she now sees it, that is the destination to which her labyrinth will finally bring her when she completes her adventure of the spirit.

Richard Griffin