[.ca] The Shaping of a Life: A Spiritual Landscape (ISBN 0385497563)

From Amazon.com:
Phyllis Tickle's exquisite memoir Shaping a Life ranges across a sweeping Southern landscape where we see the events--highly dramatic and tenderly simple--that shaped her esteemed spiritual life. (Tickle, author of The Divine Hours, is a contributing editor on religion for Publisher's Weekly and is one of America's most respected authorities on religion.) When we first meet Tickle, she is a highly imaginative only child growing up in the mountains of eastern Tennessee in the 1930s. By the end of the book we have followed her through the formative days of college, her migration into the Episcopal Church, and into some of her most riveting moments as a young wife and public school teacher in the 1950s. Tickle has the wisdom of a mature storyteller as well as the humility of a spiritual seeker. She makes meaning out of the smallest details, showing us how a backyard forsythia bush became a sacred hiding place, foreshadowing her lifelong compulsion to find private sanctuaries. We meet her gentle mother, who made a daily ritual out of reading a magazine, manicuring her nails and studying the Bible. This, she concludes, influenced Tickle's adult attraction to the daily psalms. Even the way she sneaked cigarettes in her college dorm offers insight into the nature of her Christian yearnings. Some of her scenes are utterly gripping, like her near-death experience after having an adverse reaction to an anti-miscarriage drug. "Without a care for anything that had ever been or ever was or ever might be, I lifted toward the light as lithely as if I had been a sparrow upon the courses of the early morning wind." Throughout the memoir we are held in this kind of lilting narration. Like a feminine version of Pat Conroy, Tickle is a strong, descriptive author who thoroughly appreciates how Southern landscapes, family, marriage, and death can shape a character as well as a spirit. --Gail Hudson

Interesting but long-winded:
I love "search for faith" stories and am drawn to the Episcopal Church which is why I am reading this book. However, Tickle takes too many jaunts down memory lane and I find myself skimming to get to parts about her faith. Many of her tangents do not seem to move the story forward. I am half-way through and do plan to finish it, hoping I will be rewarded in the end.

BEST SPIRITUAL MEMOIR OF 2001:
Phyllis Tickle has written the most astounding and moving spiritual biography I've read in years. In beautifully detailed prose she recounts her earliest childhood memories when she was first awakened by the sacred. I knew I was in for treat when, early in the book, I felt the immediacy of her experience--she had a spiritual epiphany while crouched in a forsythia hedge during a game of hide-and-seek. As I followed her developing spiritual hunger through her high school and college years, I recognized so many parallels from my own life. But here's what I liked most about this book: the wonderful, thought-provoking meditative reflections on the everyday occurrences of life that, if one approaches life with an open heart, are imbued with spiritual meaning. And the other thing I liked? Just plain, good, old-fashioned story-telling. No one tells a great story like Phyllis Tickle. I loved it!

An Invitation...:
Through one woman's story, we are invited to draw closer to the One who loves us the most. The beauty of Tickle's writing is that her tone is one of invitation to a life of prayer, rather than being preachy or self-congratulatory. By turns poignant and humorous, Tickle kept my attention through the very last page. My only disappointment was that her story ended much too soon. More, please!

Absolutely must read!:
Phyllis Tickle is an enthralling, unique, transmuted specimen of the homo sapien species that I wouldn't have known existed or believed in if I hadn't read her book, The Shaping of A Life. The book made a believer out of me, she is truly a kindred spirit. Reading Shaping of A Life was both a struggle and a delight. I have spent almost as much time with the dictionary as with the book. It is one of the most well-written, intelligent, entertaining, inspiring, sensitive books I have ever read. I absolutely know she has worked very hard all her life and what an extraordinary life it is. Amazing! I am so grateful that she was willing to share parts of it with us. I feel privileged in having had the opportunity to meet her in this incredible book. The Shaping of A Life is a unique experience that must not be missed. Now I want more.

A Well Wrought Sprituality:
This is a lovely book! It isn't at all what one expected from someone religiously famous. Here is fine spiritual insight, wedded to incisive but highly courteous prose. Here is someone who leaps into God through the pages of T.S. Eliot, for Pete's sake. Someone who reads and has read widely, looking everywhere for God and finding Him. Finding Him in the mundane, unchurchy, and unpious events of her very life.