The Shaping of a Life: A Spiritual Landscape

by Phyllis Tickle

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

Genres: Spirituality, Memoir, Biography, Nonfiction, Religion, Faith, Christianity

400 pages, Hardcover

First published April 17, 2001

About the author

Phyllis Natalie Tickle was an American author and lecturer whose work focuses on spirituality and religion issues. After serving as a teacher, professor, and academic dean, Tickle entered the publishing industry, serving as the founding editor of the religion department at Publishers Weekly, before then becoming a popular writer. She is well known as a leading voice in the emergence church movement. She is perhaps best known for The Divine Hours series of books, published by Doubleday Press, and her book The Great Emergence- How Christianity Is Changing and Why. Tickle was a member of the Episcopal Church, where she was licensed as both a lector and a lay eucharistic minister. She has been widely quoted by many media outlets, including Newsweek, Time, Life, The New York Times, USA Today, CNN, C-SPAN, PBS, The History Channel, the BBC and VOA. It has been said that "Over the past generation, no one has written more deeply and spoken more widely about the contours of American faith and spirituality than Phyllis Tickle." A biography of Tickle, written by Jon M. Sweeney, was published in February 2018. Phyllis Tickle: A Life (Church Publishing, Inc), has been widely reviewed.

Reviews

[Christie Purifoy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I sped through this book and could hardly put it down. I'm not sure that would be every reader's experience. I think Phyllis Tickle's memoir of the earlier years of her life and her spiritual education and awakening will appeal primarily to those who already know and love her writing, especially her prayer books, The Divine Hours. Yet, I give this five stars because Tickle's story is so perceptive and intelligent. It illuminates a particular life as well as an era of American religious culture. Until reading this book, I did not know it was possible to turn such an observant and critical eye on one's own mental and spiritual processes. Brilliant.

[Allison Joy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful and compelling book. It was slow at first, and verbose throughout, but by page 100 I was sucked in and returned to it as often as I could. Tickle approached her spiritual reflections in an intellectual and relational way; her memoir is funny, sorrowful but not sad, and demonstrates a self awareness about the fact that there is nothing new under the sun, and yet, God is personal and loves us each relationally and individually, and grants us each our own set of good gifts.

[Abbey Dupuy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Phyllis Tickle is a kindred spirit, and I have enjoyed her company over these weird months of moving and moving again and becoming a full-time student in the midst of already being a full-time mother. Today, I appreciate most about her sharing of her life’s story how unapologetic she is for obviously discerning more than one calling and how rooted she is in praying the Office, even before she knew that’s what she was doing. These things are clear connections to my own life, but that’s not why I appreciate them...it’s more that in this retracing of her story, one can clearly see that both these invitations (the multiple vocations and the praying of the Office) are from God and are embedded in her life from its earliest years. As someone who has discovered similar invitations in my life, I am grateful that she shared them with me. I don’t think everyone will love this book as much as I did, but I hope if there are dinner parties in heaven, I will be able to sit at Phyllis Tickle’s table.

[Elizabeth]

I literally have no idea how to rate this, so I won’t. At times it was riveting, at times odd, often way over my head. Phyllis Tickle obviously has a fine and erudite mind. Wow. And her writing is wonderful and would bear up well to re-readings to see how she is weaving together the story of her early life.

I guess what’s holding me back from rating it is my own expectations. I knew Phyllis Tickle’s name from her writing on the Divine Hours, etc., so I expected this memoir to be more overtly about those things. Instead we get whispers of them. As a person who leans towards Anglicanism myself, I was looking forward to hearing more about it from someone who had been Presbyterian and moved over. I am also very interested in the Divine Hours and liturgy. So I was disappointed that Tickle didn’t explore these things in more depth. But I’m not sure how my expectations were set in the first place for what I thought the book would be as opposed to what it actually is. All this to say, it’s not the book’s fault. It was just less like Kathleen Norris’ religious memoirs than I anticipated.

[Ellie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been inspired by Phyllis Tickle’s The Divine Hours, so gaining a glimpse into her formative years was truly special for me. Though slow paced, The Shaping of a Life is an inspiring read as Tickle navigates her life experiences through childhood and early adulthood with honesty and insightfulness. Seeing how this early path inspired and equipped her to write The Divine Hours was a gift for me.

[Leah Shepherd · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed Tickle's insights on religion and spirituality, but I got turned off by passing comments that seemed racist and anti-Semitic to me (usually in a subtle way, not a blatant or upfront way). She sympathizes too much with the Confederates of the South and several times refers to the Civil War as The War Between the States. Not acceptable to me.

[Tammy Aden · Rating 5 out of 5]

This woman is brilliant and writes so beautifully.

[Traci Rhoades · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very thorough memoir (more closely an autobiography). But for those wanting to celebrate the life and ecumenical accomplishments of Ms. Tickle, this book delivers.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is definitely on my favorites list. I became interested in it after hearing she was a contributor to the Voice scripture project and that she was the religion editor at Publisher's Weekly (which I love thumbing through.)

The Shaping of A Life was an excellent title for this because it was exactly that. This book blurred the lines somewhere between a memoir and an autobiography, covering roughly the first thirty years of her life (from 1930-1960.) She is incredibly introspective, incredibly intelligent and does an excellent job of identifying and describing the moments and periods of her young life in which she, say, became an adult, identified the most important lessons learned from her parents, and discovered her love of reading.

I was also drawn to her wonderful ability to describe her emotions accurately and concretely without flowery language. I envy her writing abilities and her contemplation. Hopefully in my late seventies, I can be so insightful and so accurate in my portrayal of events and experiences of over half a century before.

[Justin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had to give up on this one part-way through. While the author seems very intelligent, her rather intellectual presentation of spiritual matters is generally not what I look for in spiritual biography. Rather, I hope to be spiritually uplifted- the ability of which to do so I found somewhat lacking in this book.

[Maria Ramirez dodson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This woman had an amazing life and is one of my spiritual heroes. I've taken my time with this book but now that I'm almost done it's like a good friend. It does drag. A little in the middle but life is like that some times.

[Sylvia Jeronimo · Rating 1 out of 5]

I tried. I really tried to get into this book but to no avail. It's not that Tickle doesn't have a good handle on language but the use of words was so superfluous as to render them distracting and meaningless. Very disappointing.

[Kristen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book. And there were moments I really enjoyed. But I did not love it, nor did I find it as engaging as many other spiritual memoirs.

[Jenn Zatopek · Rating 5 out of 5]

deeply insightful and spiritual autobiography of an accomplished writer/religious expert from eastern Tennessee.

[Linda Rodrigues · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully written memoir of a spiritual journey, "The Shaping of a Life" is an academic masterpiece and a portal to the divine.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

An inspiring read of one woman's faith journey through life that follows her journey through school, marriage and children, and how these events reflect on her spiritual inner self.

[Dianne Oliver · Rating 1 out of 5]

Potentially a good book, but she is dreadfully long-winded, and any interesting tid-bits are quite buried in a lot of non-sense.