Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew | Spiritual Memoir Author and Teacher

Author: Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • Bound Together: “Religion” turned inside out

    I was on the massage table receiving some care for my chronic plantar fasciitis when the conversation turned to religion. I’d just come through (yet another) intense conflict at church, the tension from which had locked itself into my muscles. “Religion’s important to you,” my body worker commented.

    Religion? I would have said spirituality or faith, not religion. But the origins of the word popped into my mind, perhaps because she was working my over-tight calf muscles: Religion comes from the Latin re-, again, and ligare, meaning to bind or connect. The word ligament shares the same root. I suppose the word religion developed to describe how the sacred and material world are bound back together, although we associate this word so closely with the institutionalization of this union with tradition, ritual, and polity. As the pain in my feet fanned up my calves to my thighs and lower back, however, religion seemed to me, momentarily, fancifully, as a surprising lattice linking my love for church, my overcharged sense of responsibility, the tightness of my back and the hurt soft tissue of my feet; it was as though my poor body was a small part of this immense web of relationships called religion, much like a single word is integral to a story or how every interaction with a child contributes to their personhood.

    How stunning, then, a few days later to hear Ilia Delio, neurophysicist and Franciscan scholar, say in a lecture that creation itself is inherently religious! A member of the audience asked for clarification: Religious? Really?! Delio dismissed the concept of institutionalized religion with a wave of her hand—it’s too small, inaccurate, misleading. Religion is a dynamic in evolution moving creation to ever greater diversity and unity. Religion is what binds the smallest spinning particle to the largest turning galaxy. Religion is why each of us finds our deepest self in others, why our every thought and every act matters—why, in the end, Delio believes that returning to our inner selves is our most important work because without inner connection we’ll never recognize our outer connections and will never behave accordingly. Religion for us humans is the work of binding ourselves back to the whole.

    That afternoon, hurting on the massage table, I felt my body as one cluster of cells in this tremendous network of creation. Yes, yes, all of me said; religion is indeed what matters.     –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • In Praise of Being Thwarted

    Writers have an unfortunate habit of complaining, perpetually, about not getting enough time to write.  Ask us, “How’s your project coming?” and we’ll say, “Slowly.”  Read any stack of grant proposals and you’ll see us desperate not for money but for time.  It’s as though artists’ real lives reside in an alternative universe and we’re eternally frustrated that we’re here in this one.

    Years ago, when my daughter was an infant and my creative space had consequently been decimated, my spiritual director probed me for my deepest longings.  Intimacy with God?  World peace?  Nope; “More time to write.”  She was professional but I could tell she was annoyed.  “Maybe these are exactly the conditions you need to do your best work,” she told me. (more…)

  • Put Down the Ducky!

    There’s a classic Sesame Street skit where Ernie wants to play the sax with cool-dude Mr. Hoots in a jazz band. But he’s clutching his rubber ducky, for security I suppose, and whenever he joins the jamming the duck quacks get in the way. As the drummer flings his hair and cameos parade through, the owl wisely sings, “You gotta put down the ducky if you wanna play the saxophone!”

    Obvious, right? As a parent I’ve come to appreciate PBS’s insights into child psychology, and this is one of its best. I can’t tell you how often I ask my ten-year-old to “Put down the ducky.” She tries to eat while clutching her stuffed cat. She holds a book in one hand and picks up Legos, inefficiently, with the other. She gets her backpack and then tries to squirm into her coat.

    I suppose children are developmentally unable to prioritize their actions; sooner or later, putting the coat on first will become intuitive. Still, I can’t seem to get that jazzy refrain out of my mind. Ernie, wearing his famous stripes, holds that rubber ducky so tightly because, as he says, “I really love my ducky and I can’t bear to part with him.” He wants the comfort, familiarity, and companionship ducky brings and he wants to join the music-making. So he’s faced with a dilemma: Clutch what he loves and never fully participate, or let it go in favor of an untested activity that seems pretty great. The band bounces and jives around him. Ernie’s stuck.

    This morning during my meditation, I finally realized why this PBS ditty has become an earworm. I love my thinking mind. I have awesome thoughts; they keep me responsible, help me earn a living, form my sense of identity, entertain me. I’m scared to put them down. Now that I see this, I recognize the pattern everywhere. My house is just north of a municipal golf course that these days, with our changing climate, regularly floods, and the golfers are having a terrible time putting down the ducky. My church has four stunning tapestries that women lovingly stitched over decades but which portray images deeply hurtful to Native Americans and people of color; the congregation is in crisis over putting down the ducky. Our country is polarized because we’re all squeezing our duckies; the quacking is deafening. Fossil fuels are one big petroleum-product ducky.

    Ernie’s turning point comes after Mr. Hoots says, “You don’t have to lose your duck! You can pick it up when you’re finished.”

    Ernie, amazed, flings ducky over his shoulder.

    Would it were so easy for us grown-ups! In meditation, I practice releasing my grip on something I love for the sake of something I don’t yet know or trust—silence, rest, peace. I pray this exercises my capacity to welcome new loves, because I really need this ability in the real world where my attachments are so hard to relinquish. Especially when I don’t even know I’m attached.

    After the song ends, Ernie retrieves his pal: “Oh, ducky, I missed you so much!” What the reunion doesn’t show is Ernie’s internal transformation from which there’s no turning back. Now he also knows the delight of making music. He also knows he can thrive without his security object, and this is both slightly sad and pretty wonderful.   –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

  • Warning: Writer in Denial!

    Three years ago, after a magnificent evening launching Living Revision, my daughter asked me what I was going to write next.

    “All I know,” I told her, “is that I’m not going to write about writing.”

    How is it that I’m neck-deep in another writing text?! I have two dozen essays on various back burners but I find myself, almost against my will, writing about the final stage of writing. Ugh. If ever there’s a self-referential subject, this is it.

    When this latest idea arrived, I figured I could take care of it in the course of a summer. What I had to say could fit into a pamphlet that I’d then distribute to my classes.

    Three months of drafting later, I admitted that my idea needed more space. Maybe this is a downloadable booklet, I told myself, and kept writing.

    Three years later, having recently run my eighty-page “booklet” past two dozen beta-readers, I’m humbled once again. Dang it all—I’m writing a book, almost against my will. (more…)

  • When Your Body’s Your Teacher

    A bout with neck and back pain recently sent me to a few different body-workers (physical therapy, Feldenkrais) who promptly identified the source of my problems as sitting. Too much time on my rear end, hunched over the keyboard. Contemporary work demands things of our bodies that they’re not evolved to do, and I was suffering the consequences.

    I’m working around the pain with exercises, a standing desk, stretches, a commitment to not stay in one position for too long, and by sitting the way I was designed to sit. I have these sitz bones that support me like concrete footers for my spine. I just need to sit on them.

    Which is ridiculously obvious except that the vast majority of chairs in our culture don’t allow us to do use this foundation and instead force us to lean back. I was shocked the first time I paid close attention to a healthy seated position and then got into my car; the seat dictated that I curve my spine and hunch my shoulders. It prevented me from sitting properly. (more…)

  • Memoir’s Small Frame

    (I’m on a hiatus from writing about writing. In the meantime, here’s an excerpt from Writing the Sacred Journey.)

    Memoir revolves in an orbit of its own choosing, and therefore its pieces are often unified by a theme or period of time. The material is always the author’s life, and the narrator, (the speaker, or “I” voice), is always the author. Unlike autobiography, which attempts as complete an account of one’s life as possible, starting from the beginning, memoir begins where it wishes and concludes when its story is told. Memoir is more elastic, unpredictable, and crafted than autobiography. Because memoir does not strive for a complete accounting of one’s life, it depends on other elements, typically themes, to give it form. (more…)

  • Dreams You Don’t Remember

    I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas: they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.            –Emily Bronte

    Some mornings, before I’m fully awake, I lie in bed swimming in a sea of dreams. Their images (a cup, a pew, a panting dog) float around me in nets of narratives but then dissolve as I climb into consciousness. Every rare once in a while I can pull one into the air. Once I realize I’ve done this, I repeat the dream to myself until I can reach pen and paper. Even if I have no idea what the dream is about, the fact of harvesting the dream feels significant. I’ve heard you, my remembering seems to say. The gift of you, I’ve received. (more…)

  • The Writer’s Three Priorites

    Over the next few months I’m sharing excerpts from Writing the Sacred Journey so I can take a break from writing about writing to actually do some writing!

    One spring I attended the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and was privileged to hear Jane Yolen speak. Yolen, the author of over a hundred children’s books, identified herself as a Jewish Quaker. She spoke on the hazards of addressing spiritual questions in books for children, explaining that children’s book buyers are primarily public schools and libraries, which tend to shy away from spiritually inclined literature. Nonreligious publishers are often unwilling to take on material that might prove controversial. Yet as Yolen pointed out, children ask spiritual questions: Where did Rover go when he died? Why do some people attend church and not others? Who is God? Yolen argued that we do wrong by our children when we censor stories that might aid them in their seeking.

    After Yolen’s lecture a member of the audience asked, “To whom do you think children’s authors should be accountable for the moral quality of their books?” The questioner was concerned that indoctrinating content might wind up in her children’s hands. Yolen responded fiercely, “Every writer has three responsibilities: first to the story, second to yourself, and finally to your audience.” (more…)

  • What’s Next?

    One evening when I was in college, I attended an orchestral concert in the large Gothic Revival chapel. The atmosphere was elegant, subdued. The space was dim, candles on two grand wooden candelabras burned up front, and hundreds of listeners were swept up in the rise and swell of the music.

    I sat toward the back. In my late teens and early twenties I was terrifically shy; I avoided talking to professors, stuck tight to my core group of friends, and did my best to avoid any limelight. The student body at my college was extreme in its intelligence and talent, which intimidated me terribly; for three years I was convinced admissions had made a mistake by accepting me, and I struggled mightily to prove to myself or anyone that I belonged. I’m not sure when or how that feeling dissipated, but the night of this concert certainly helped. (more…)

  • Writing as Longing

     Over the next few months I’ll periodically share excerpts from Writing the Sacred Journey–I’m taking a break from writing about writing to actually do some writing!

    When I was attending Sleepy Hollow High School, I’d occasionally forsake the rowdy bus ride home and walk two miles down the steep streets of North Tarrytown, New York, over the infamous bridge where Ichabod Crane is said to have disappeared, and down to the Hudson River… Once I reached the beach, I…ran to a log polished silver and reclining on the sand.  Here I could have the river to myself–the murky water and the private tuck of shoreline that lay flat like a vast, open palm.  In that rare moment of solitude I felt a terrific ache.  I wanted to cleave my heart to that dynamic, undulating force that smelled of sea salt and spanned boundless distances.  My teenage life was small–fretted with self-consciousness and my peers’ misguided expectations.  Still, I knew the passion buzzing in my adolescent body was also rolling in that tide.  I watched the waves push and pull, and the coarse sand simmer before absorbing the water.  I breathed the moist, kelp-scented air.  Passion fused me to the river, but there was no release.  I was still my lanky, lonely self.  I could never dissolve into such magnificence. (more…)