For Lent a few years ago, I gave up the other. It was a ridiculously messy process in which I tried, for 40 days, to see myself as part of a larger whole and to strike second and third person pronouns from my vocabulary. I forced myself to use we when I talked about the snippy church member. I reminded myself that the moron who cut me off in traffic was the beloved of God Almighty.

I also spent much of Lent rereading some of my favorite spiritual memoirs to learn from the saints who have gone before me. Memoirs make me feel as if I am friends with all kinds of giants of the faith. Barbara Brown Taylor and I have walked through a crisis of faith and left a church together. I have started a soup kitchen in San Francisco with Sara Miles. Reading memoirs became important because it reminded me that while my story isn’t the same as any other story, my story is just as significant. Memoirs began to say to me, “Come. Find yourself in my story.” They reminded me that I was the same as the other I was attempting to embrace.

So I started Lent with Fredrick Buechner’s Now and Then, moved to Eugene Peterson’s The Pastor and dove right into Ian Cron’s Jesus, My Father, the CIA and Me. In Writing the Sacred Journey, Elizabeth Andrew asserts that memoir helps place human life within the understanding of other lives. She writes, “Every spiritual memoir reaches into mystery, attempting to place human life in a broad sacred context.”¹

Imago Dei as My Imago
Central to my Lenten fast was developing a more robust understanding of the imago dei, examining what it had in common with all humanity. The more I read and studied the imago dei, the more I was drawn to the writings of Karl Barth.

Barth calls for an understanding of the imago dei that is fundamentally relational. Key to a correct understanding the imago dei, for Barth, is a correct understanding God. He is first concerned with understanding the God who created humanity and only secondarily interested in exploring what it means for humans to image that God. Barth begins with an assumption that a distinctly Trinitarian God, fundamentally defined by relationship and existing in “eternal relatedness,” would image God’s self in a relational creature.² This understanding of the community of the Trinity translates into a deep need for human community. The major contribution of Barth’s proposal is that it shifts the location of the imago from the isolated or independent individual.³ It insists that if the whole human is in the imago dei, so then one must “understand the fundamental human community” as in the imago dei, as well.⁴

Imagine for a moment what this means for the students in our youth ministries. The community becomes a formational element in the understanding and expression of their selves. Students need God, but students also need community in order to understand God.

Crafting Identity Through Memoir
As I was beginning to understand imago dei as fundamentally relational, I wanted to find a spiritual practice that centered on relationship. Because I was looking to learn about relationships with God and relationships with human community, I ended up reading spiritual memoirs to look for the imago dei in others. I began to discover that reading spiritual memoirs allowed me to interact with the action of God in a particular life, and it gave me a picture of the authors’ interaction with the communities around them.

I came to learn that spiritual memoir long has been important in the history of the church. “Augustine…is considered one of the most important figures in the ancient Western church and is credited with practically inventing the genre of autobiography.”⁵ His Confessions remains an important text within the canon of early Christian literature.

Eusebius, in reference to the differences between the Gospel of John and the three synoptic gospels, suggested that perhaps John’s Gospel is a spiritual memoir. John’s Gospel has a different tone because “John was not so much interested in the mere facts as in the meaning of the facts, that it was not facts he was after but truth.”⁶ John did not see the events of Jesus’ life simply as events in time; instead, he pressed toward the spiritual meaning of the events and the words of Jesus’ life in a way the other three gospels didn’t attempt.

Beyond that, though, how do memoirs help students craft their identities?

Relationality
Reading memoir to explore the imago dei can be immensely helpful. In much the same way as a study of a relational view of the imago dei, memoirs invite students to reflect on relationships and community.

Memoirs invite students to interact in a distinct way as they explore the relationships that have made up their lives. In his memoir, Jesus, My Father, the CIA and Me, Ian Cron prefaces his book by saying, “This is a record of my life as I remember it—but more important, as I felt it.”⁷ As memoir is more concerned with truth than fact, so students are free to explore all manner of relationships.

Community
Memoirs also invite students to find themselves in the story of another, to enter the community of someone else. Memoirs “allow us to overhear the sounds of the gospel reverberating through the life of another.”⁸ A memoir allows the reader to interact with the people and communities around him or her.

Particularly intriguing in the genre of spiritual memoir are pastors who write about their congregations. Eugene Peterson’s The Pastor: A Memoir or Barbara Brown Taylor’s Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith allow for a reflection on the unique community between pastor and congregation.

The Practice of Memoir
Reading a memoir gives hope to students who currently can’t see the action of God in their own lives. As the relationship with the community of the Trinity compels Godself into action—namely the creation and the incarnation—so reminders of God’s activities in the lives of others can help compel readers to recognize and name God’s activity in their own lives.

While intimidating to some, the act of writing a spiritual memoir also can be a dynamic spiritual practice for students. Writing a spiritual memoir or essay gives students the ability to look at their relationships with God from a macro level. As the writer, a student is given the benefit of hindsight as he or she looks for the action of God within the personal and communal past, to remember and uncover the activity of God in his or her own life.

Reading or writing a spiritual memoir encourages us to pay attention to our lives and to the lives of those around us. It leads students into Fredrick Buechner’s idea to “Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”⁹

If we were honest, memoirs aren’t the go-to reading for most teenagers. So, here are some ideas for using memoirs in your youth ministry.

Reading Memoirs
• Of course, it’s always a terrible idea to lead students in a practice you’re not engaged with yourself. So grab a memoir and read. Pay particular attention to what feelings the book brings up in you or how the author sees God in ways that are like or unlike the way you see God.

• Use a couple of paragraphs of a spiritual memoir as a devotional for an upcoming youth group. Explain how the characters in the memoir relate to each other. Relate the characters to the students in the group.

• Use a memoir to tell a bigger narrative about God’s activity. Retell the entire story, then relate it to a biblical narrative. Make connections for students so they understand how our stories fit into the story God still is telling through us.

• Use a memoir as small group material, encouraging students to relate the characters to their own lives.

Writing Memoirs
• Buy students journals. This gives them space to begin to craft their stories. Again, it’s best to participate in this practice with them.
• Encourage students to write every day. Ask them to think of a significant spiritual experience and describe the moment. Memoirs typically are made up of several smaller stories; so, encourage students to record these small stories.
• Reading and writing may not be favorite activities for all students, and that’s just fine. Be sure to affirm that just as different students are created in different ways, some practices will connect more easily than others. For students who don’t write, encourage them to draw!
• Host a memoir-reading party at which students show up with their journals and read a page. Offering this space builds community and allows students to speak about who they are becoming, and it gives room for other students to comment on what they see in others.

The goal of this is simple: identity formation, happening through a connection to the imago dei, and happening in community. Through memoir, students are given access to God’s story happening within self and within community. We have the opportunity to help make that happen.

¹ Writing the Sacred Journey – 14
² Paul Francis Sands, “The Imago Dei as Vocation,” Evangelical Quarterly 82, no. 1 (2010): 7.
³ Campbell: 3.
⁴ ibid., 241.
⁵ Regina Brooks and Brenda Lane Richardson, You Should Really Write a Book: How to Write, Sell and Market Your Memoir (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2012), 26.
⁶ William Barclay, The Gospel of John. Vol. 2, New ed., 1 vols., Daily Study Bible (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew, 2009), 10.
⁷ Ian Morgan Cron, Jesus, My Father, the Cia, and Me : A Memoir…Of Sorts (Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson, 2011), 5.
⁸ G. Lee Ramsey, Jr., “Borrowing Inspiration: Pastoral Memoirs and Narrative Imagination,” Congregations 34, no. 1 (2008): 1.
⁹ Frederick Buechner, Now and Then, 1st ed. (Cambridge Cambridgeshire; Hagerstown: Harper Row, 1983), 87.

Laura Larsen currently is a D.Min. student at Fuller, but would be happy spending every afternoon at Sonic happy hour or playing practical jokes on friends. She is most spiritually disciplined in the fall when she is busy praying and fasting for her beloved LSU Tigers.