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  • Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging by Joshua Doleẑal
  • Gregory L. Morris
Joshua Doleẑal, Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2014. 181pp. Paper, $19.95; e-book, $19.95.

In his memoir, Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging, Joshua Doleẑal recounts his pilgrimage toward a clearer sense of self, and of self-in-place. His is a story of movement through both belief and space, told with a voice that is compelling, immediate, and genuine.

Born in the rough wilds of northwest Montana, to parents who are an odd combination of counterculture hippie and Pentecostal Christian, Doleẑal spends his youth trying to come to terms with the ways of his home-world. His father, who has spoken in tongues, pushes a domestic spirituality that Doleẑal finds stifling, encouraging his burgeoning doubt. He seeks some better way to connect body and soul, and as a youngster looks to baseball as a form of [End Page 96] physical and spiritual redemption. When the ball finds the sweet spot of his bat, he writes, it is “like the voice of God in my throat” (17), a kind of secular tongue of flames.

But Doleẑal also feels the powerful pull of place in his life and is connected deeply to his Montana homestead and to the Rocky Mountain wilderness. When he leaves that place for a Christian college in Tennessee, he finds himself radically displaced and radically transformed, though even he does not then recognize the extent of his transformation as he undergoes a passage reshaping the self he is so intent on knowing. He falls in love—a failed and betrayed love with a woman, a powerful, enduring love with literature and specifically with the imaginative Nebraska landscape of Willa Cather—and falls out of faith. Doleẑal has, he says, “traveled too far from myself” (119).

Eventually, Doleẑal comes to ground in Iowa, teaching at Central College and living near the banks of the Des Moines River. It is a place he initially believes to be temporary, a place all too unfamiliar, too alien, and too distant from his beloved mountains. But in time he discovers himself “adopting the shape” (154) of this place; it becomes a matter of orientation, locating himself in the geography and the spirit of this prairiescape. Here, Doleẑal meets the woman who becomes his wife. Here, he accommodates himself to the character of the local culture and puts down roots. The impulse toward flight finally gives way to the desire to stay in place, to the need to inscribe a self and a life that fit themselves to the presence of this space. Here, Doleẑal fashions a new form of belief, finding faith in the surprising and not-so-simple act of staying put.

Gregory L. Morris
Penn State Erie, The Behrend College
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