Seasons of a Family's Life: Cultivating the Contemplative Spirit at Home (review)

Seasons of a Family's Life is Wendy Wright's contribution to the new Families and Faith Series from Jossey-Bass. Wright's book functions as a sequel to her Sacred Dwelling: A Spirituality of Family Life (Crossroad, 1989), a classic in the field of family spirituality. Of her most recent book, Wright explains:

More than anything else I have written, this book ... has emerged out of who I am, in contrast to what I do or what I know. . . . I wrote Sacred Dwelling when my children were between the ages of two and ten, both of my parents were alive, and most of the elder generation of my husband's family was living. In the intervening years, our children have grown and we are nearly empty-nested. . . . We have passed through not only the experiences of 'the sandwich generation' but have become. . . . the 'older generation.' We have endured the traumas of job loss, critical illness, and all the attendant complexities of negotiating over a quarter century of marriage. Thus my perspective on the experience of family life is much richer and more complex than it was when I sat down thirteen years ago to explore the 'spiritual experience of family' (xiii-xiv).

Thus, Seasons of a Family's Life is the story of one woman's spiritual journey, but it captures and explores experiences that will resonate with many of us. Wright's characteristic writing style recreates her remembered experiences in vivid detail, then uses these smaller stories to illumine a larger, timeless, foundational human story—of encounters with God in the beauty of the created world, and in the high and low points of our closest human relationships. Meanwhile, each chapter aims to display common threads between the author's own family narrative, the trans-cultural story of human encounter with God, and the interpretive Christian narrative which gives Wright's own life experience "coherence and meaning" (42).

Chapter One sets the tone for the book by explaining Wright's understanding of a "contemplative approach." For her, it is a "listening awareness" (6), or a "ready receptivity" (7), wherein a person allows him- or herself to be formed in unpredictable ways by God, as God becomes known through the "facts" of one's particular relationships. Wright explains: "Facts are the stuff of contemplation. But we must approach these facts with reverence, not primarily as problem solvers. . . but as people willing to allow God, through our practices and the events of our lives, to pry us open so that our seeing and our loving begin to mirror the clarity and compassion of God's" (9).

Besides the contemplative tradition, what other elements of Christian heritage have given meaning to Wright's spiritual journey? Wright's prose exudes deep incarnational and sacramental sensibilities, true to the Catholic tradition she embraced as an adult. Throughout the book she recounts layer upon layer of sacred times, sacred places, sacred rituals, and recurrent liturgical seasons of change. Family vacations, walks in one's neighborhood, memories of family gatherings or of pregnancy, and children going off to college comprise some of these sacred moments. In Chapter Three, which is devoted to the theme of Emmanuel, or "God with us," Wright entertains an important two-pronged question posed by a gentleman who attended one of her workshops: "What makes this sort of spiritual reflection Christian, and what differentiates it from sentimentality?" (33). Wright agrees that genuine spirituality is more than sentimentality. Sentimentality has a tendency to remain cozy amongst one's immediate relatives. Genuine Christian spirituality opens us to move beyond what is known, predictable, and comfortable. At its root, says Wright, a contemplative Christian spirituality asks us "to continually let go of our familiar ways of knowing and encountering God" (8). Specifically and practically, it calls us...