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Returning: A Spiritual Journey
Dan Wakefield was a successful writer of novels, nonfiction, and screenplays when he awoke to a private life that was disintegrating in alcohol, depression, and isolation. He fled Hollywood for Boston where he reclaimed a faith he had thought he was too sophisticated to embrace. In this moving memoir, Wakefield returns to his religious roots and his early his Indiana boyhood, his tumultuous student days, and his growth as a writer.
250 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1988
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
May 23, 2018
A fascinating meditation on the meaning of faith that grew out of Wakefield's New York Times Magazine article "Returning to Church." Wakefield's first two sentences grab hold instantly: "One balmy spring morning in Hollywood, a month or so before my forty-eighth birthday, I woke up screaming. I got out of bed, went into the next room, sat down on a couch, and screamed again." A painfully honest chronicle of Wakefield's spiritual journey as well as his secular life, "Returning" explores Wakefield's most intimate experiences- sexual, psychological and above all spiritual. It's Wakefield's honesty that compels- and he concludes his narrative by quoting the Benedictine Father Nicholas, who had come to believe "we must take God as he comes to each of us."
Thought provoking for believers and non-believers alike.
Thought provoking for believers and non-believers alike.
March 24, 2018
A lovely, thoughtful spiritual memoir--essentially a look through the author's life and noticing the ways God was there, guiding him in moments he didn't realize.
I'm reading as part of my project to read 1988 books throughout 2018 (@1988is2018 on Twitter), so I'd like to have a clever comment here about how this fits with the times or something. But if anything, it *doesn't* seem to fit with the emergence of the Moral Majority and other Christian movements I associate with the 80s; instead, Wakefield is open, thoughtful, and wise.
I'm reading as part of my project to read 1988 books throughout 2018 (@1988is2018 on Twitter), so I'd like to have a clever comment here about how this fits with the times or something. But if anything, it *doesn't* seem to fit with the emergence of the Moral Majority and other Christian movements I associate with the 80s; instead, Wakefield is open, thoughtful, and wise.
October 12, 2019
I wish I had more to say about "Returning: A Spiritual Journey" than I do, but it's more a book I respected and appreciated than I actually enjoyed and immersed myself in. As a fairly new member of a local Unitarian-Universalist congregation, I have found myself exploring the world of UU writing and, not surprisingly, Wakefield popped up. Being that I'm also from Indy, I took the chance to read this book that vividly recounts Wakefield's return to church later in life after many years of intellectual pursuits and life indulgences that mostly served to tear Wakefield away from himself.
It's not particularly surprising given Wakefield's desire for ritual yet more intellectual base that he would find himself embracing King's Chapel and the world of UU. In many ways, we have similar reasons for doing so yet in my own case my life has never really been without organized religion.
Sometimes, there are simply books that you respect yet don't speak to you personally. "Returning: A Spiritual Journey" is a valuable book and I appreciated Wakefield's stories but in hoping to grab the essence of why someone turns to Unitarian-Universalism it fell short for me.
It's not particularly surprising given Wakefield's desire for ritual yet more intellectual base that he would find himself embracing King's Chapel and the world of UU. In many ways, we have similar reasons for doing so yet in my own case my life has never really been without organized religion.
Sometimes, there are simply books that you respect yet don't speak to you personally. "Returning: A Spiritual Journey" is a valuable book and I appreciated Wakefield's stories but in hoping to grab the essence of why someone turns to Unitarian-Universalism it fell short for me.
September 23, 2020
I liked this book because it demonstrates that God is working even when we think He's not.
September 23, 2013
This was one of my very favourite reads until the last third where Wakefield’s Unitarian view took centre stage and watered the work down a bit. That portion was not only philosophically disagreeable to me, but also rather boring in that wishy-washy do-gooding liberal vicar sort of way. This religious pluralism seemed contradictory to Wakefield’s earlier narration of personally experiencing what he claimed was the actual presence of the New Testament Christ in the world today.
Still, the writing of the first two-thirds was delightfully crisp, a model of quality prose, and the storytelling was enthralling. I was very moved by the vulnerable and poignant account of his early, adolescent, young professional, and middle life. A friend of Kurt Vonnegut (they both came from my hometown of Indianapolis), Wakefield is a genuine literary intellectual, so the well-crafted narrative is peppered with great quotes from various authors and also anecdotes of luminaries he met in his sojourns in New York City and Boston.
It was very refreshing to hear such an intelligent person be candid about his conscious, intentional, strategic avoidance of the reality of God. Wakefield’s long-practiced atheism perfectly modelled Sartre’s claim: ‘I collared the Holy Ghost in the cellar and threw him out; atheism is a cruel and long-range affair: I think I’ve carried it through’ (Words, 1963). Wakefield frankly acknowledges that he substituted Freud for God and that substitution only enhanced his plummet into darkness. His uncomplicated acceptance of genuinely numinous and supernatural phenomena throughout each of these stages was also a welcome surprise. It was intriguing, however, that these forces and experiences were exclusively benevolent. Even though he unflinchingly recounts some of the darkest personal existential trauma I’ve ever read, he never even hints at any forces of darkness beyond one’s own psyche and social and intellectual trends. He is very open to the existence and influence of actual angels, but strangely quiet as regards any demons but the metaphorical kind we all have.
The most exciting and helpful parts for me were his reminiscences of childhood and family, good and bad, and his encounters with the God he at first welcomed but then ended up trying so hard to suppress and avoid (none other than the Christ of Scripture as Wakefield recounts it). He sees with hindsight a world full of providential grace and guidance. These elements and his critiques of popular trends, both Freudian and Fundamentalist Christian, were the strengths to me. Indeed, Wakefield’s acerbic and insightful repudiation of the Jesus of 1950s respectable America (the attractive, friendly, positive-thinking, upwardly mobile businessman in a grey flannel suit – still with us today in ever fresh upgrades and permutations) makes his acceptance of the equally suspicious Unitarian New England Jesus, who’s just everybody’s tolerant pal (except those damn oil-loving, war-mongering conservatives, of course,) a bit baffling. I guess a more notorious Indiana celebrity captured our tendency here with his album title: Use Your Illusion. We all do it. My own idolatrous Barnacle-Jesus is no doubt encrusted with misleading cultural accretions too. I hope that those of us who claim the Nazarene can work toward undeceiving ourselves and pursuing truth together.
Having read Wakefield’s first novel, Going All the Way (1970), and now this ‘spiritual autobiography’, I definitely want to check out more of both his fiction and non-fiction. I think he will continue to be a worthwhile conversation partner in the strange pilgrimage of faith.
Still, the writing of the first two-thirds was delightfully crisp, a model of quality prose, and the storytelling was enthralling. I was very moved by the vulnerable and poignant account of his early, adolescent, young professional, and middle life. A friend of Kurt Vonnegut (they both came from my hometown of Indianapolis), Wakefield is a genuine literary intellectual, so the well-crafted narrative is peppered with great quotes from various authors and also anecdotes of luminaries he met in his sojourns in New York City and Boston.
It was very refreshing to hear such an intelligent person be candid about his conscious, intentional, strategic avoidance of the reality of God. Wakefield’s long-practiced atheism perfectly modelled Sartre’s claim: ‘I collared the Holy Ghost in the cellar and threw him out; atheism is a cruel and long-range affair: I think I’ve carried it through’ (Words, 1963). Wakefield frankly acknowledges that he substituted Freud for God and that substitution only enhanced his plummet into darkness. His uncomplicated acceptance of genuinely numinous and supernatural phenomena throughout each of these stages was also a welcome surprise. It was intriguing, however, that these forces and experiences were exclusively benevolent. Even though he unflinchingly recounts some of the darkest personal existential trauma I’ve ever read, he never even hints at any forces of darkness beyond one’s own psyche and social and intellectual trends. He is very open to the existence and influence of actual angels, but strangely quiet as regards any demons but the metaphorical kind we all have.
The most exciting and helpful parts for me were his reminiscences of childhood and family, good and bad, and his encounters with the God he at first welcomed but then ended up trying so hard to suppress and avoid (none other than the Christ of Scripture as Wakefield recounts it). He sees with hindsight a world full of providential grace and guidance. These elements and his critiques of popular trends, both Freudian and Fundamentalist Christian, were the strengths to me. Indeed, Wakefield’s acerbic and insightful repudiation of the Jesus of 1950s respectable America (the attractive, friendly, positive-thinking, upwardly mobile businessman in a grey flannel suit – still with us today in ever fresh upgrades and permutations) makes his acceptance of the equally suspicious Unitarian New England Jesus, who’s just everybody’s tolerant pal (except those damn oil-loving, war-mongering conservatives, of course,) a bit baffling. I guess a more notorious Indiana celebrity captured our tendency here with his album title: Use Your Illusion. We all do it. My own idolatrous Barnacle-Jesus is no doubt encrusted with misleading cultural accretions too. I hope that those of us who claim the Nazarene can work toward undeceiving ourselves and pursuing truth together.
Having read Wakefield’s first novel, Going All the Way (1970), and now this ‘spiritual autobiography’, I definitely want to check out more of both his fiction and non-fiction. I think he will continue to be a worthwhile conversation partner in the strange pilgrimage of faith.
September 19, 2013
Dan Wakefield was a successful writer of novels, non-fiction, and screenplays when he awoke to a private life that was disintegrating around him due to alcohol, depression, and isolation. On a balmy spring morning in Hollywood, a month or so before his forty-eighth birthday, Dan Wakefield woke up literally screaming. His private life had been crumbling for years and alcohol barely numbed the pain.
Those horrifying morning screams drove him back to Boston, his former home, where he changed his entire life. He stopped drinking, started exercising, and discovered, much to his surprise, the power of Christianity. Dan had become an atheist while in college, and did not return to church until 1980 - when he initially heard a Christmas Eve sermon that seemed directed especially at him.
This book is about Dan Wakefield's return to his past life: his boyhood in Indiana, his student years at Columbia University being taught by Mark Van Doren, his bitter disappointment with Freudian psychoanalysis, his sexuality, and his writing career. It is also the story of a spiritual pilgrimage, a courageous and comforting return to faith.
Getting into the flow of the story was slow going for me at first; there were a couple of places during my reading where I thought that the pace was slower than I would have liked, but that could have just been my own experience while reading this book. Overall, I actually enjoyed this book much more than I thought I would. I give this book a B+!
Those horrifying morning screams drove him back to Boston, his former home, where he changed his entire life. He stopped drinking, started exercising, and discovered, much to his surprise, the power of Christianity. Dan had become an atheist while in college, and did not return to church until 1980 - when he initially heard a Christmas Eve sermon that seemed directed especially at him.
This book is about Dan Wakefield's return to his past life: his boyhood in Indiana, his student years at Columbia University being taught by Mark Van Doren, his bitter disappointment with Freudian psychoanalysis, his sexuality, and his writing career. It is also the story of a spiritual pilgrimage, a courageous and comforting return to faith.
Getting into the flow of the story was slow going for me at first; there were a couple of places during my reading where I thought that the pace was slower than I would have liked, but that could have just been my own experience while reading this book. Overall, I actually enjoyed this book much more than I thought I would. I give this book a B+!
October 15, 2024
Confusing (to me) connection between recovery from alcoholism and his growing Christianity.
January 14, 2015
Very Personal religious journey. Read in anticipation of spending an evening with the author. Very interesting.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews