The Way of Jesus: Living a Spiritual and Ethical Life by Jay Parini (review)

In an essay published by the website magazine Salon on April 1, 2018—Easter Sunday and the eve of the author's seventieth birthday—Jay Parini explained that while students were enthusiastic about reading Dickinson, Eliot, and Donne, those in his popular "Poetry and Spirituality" course at Middlebury College "show little interest in the practice of religion" essential to understanding the assigned poetry. The same could be said of fiction such as The Winter of Our Discontent and To a God Unknown—or the Easter Sunday section of Sea of Cortez—all written by Steinbeck with specific religious practices in mind. The Way of Jesus is, in part, a veteran teacher's response to this gap in students' ability to understand poetry and fiction by writers they need or want to read. It is also Jay Parini's spiritual autobiography, and the sequel to his Jesus: The Human Face of God (2013), a life of Christ by the versatile author of John Steinbeck: A Biography (1995) and more than twenty books of poetry, fiction, and literary criticism, as well as lives of Robert Frost (1999) and William Faulkner (2005) and a 2015 biography of Gore Vidal—a writer, like Auden, who closely interacted with Parini and influenced the course of his career.

Auden's profile dominates the image that ran above the headline of Parini's piece in Salon ("Whatever Happened to the Christian Intellectual? Progressive Faith in a Secular Age"). Along with the poetry and prose of T. S. Eliot, Auden's writing exemplifies the reconciliation of poetry and faith in the age of anxiety dramatically documented in The Way of Jesus, an updated Pilgrim's Progress for contemporary readers with little knowledge of the Bible and less of John Bunyan. Parini met Auden as a college student and encountered him again in England, when both were at Oxford and they happened to pass on the street. Sensing Parini's panic and depression, Auden took him home and gave him a stiff drink and some saving advice: "I know only two things," Auden said. "There is no such thing as time. And rest in God." Thus grounded, Parini went on to find "a guide to Christian living" in Eliot's Four Quartets, where "The river is within us, the sea is all around us," time meets eternity, and "In my beginning is my end." The intervening process of spiritual experiment and ascent is part of Parini's account of "a wandering path in and out of Christianity"—a deeply personal journey that started early, among conservative Baptists in blue-collar Pittston, Pennsylvania, and eventually led to the embrace of progressive Episcopal belief and parish activity in Middlebury, Vermont, the college town where he has taught English and creative writing since 1982.

The author of well-regarded works of biographical fiction about Leo Tolstoy, Herman Melville, and the philosopher Walter Benjamin, as well as screenplays based on biographical incidents involving Benjamin and Vidal, Parini knows how to position his own life story—briefly, and at the beginning—to give readers a believable picture of the person about to guide them through the thickets of Judeo-Christian theology, scripture, and history. Having found supernaturalism and human suffering "stumbling blocks" to belief in his own life—as thinking people must—he soft-pedals dogma, offering alternative explanations for doctrines such as salvation, which he prefers to call enlightenment because that's "a better translation of the Greek term soteria." The purpose of the enterprise is understanding and encouragement—"what Jesus really meant"—rather than evangelism, and the means employed is admirably ecumenical, with equal time given to the great ethical systems that antedate Judeo-Christianity, in particular Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism. Above all, the approach and emphasis are empathetic and existential—more about behavior than belief—and the avenue offered to understanding Christianity, as with poetry, is human imagination informed by human text.

Judeo-Christianity is a religion of the...