Product Description

In The Shaping of a Life, Phyllis Tickle recounts her life with honesty and humor, richly conveying both the external events and the internal insights and emotions. As Tickle chronicles her deepening understanding of prayer and the rewards of marriage, family, and spiritual life, she reaches across the boundaries that separate one denomination from another and presents a portrait of spiritual growth and transformation that will appeal to devout practitioners and their less religious neighbors as well. Within a very personal story, Tickle reveals the keys that will help readers of all faiths find the path that leads from the everyday world of “doing” to the special place of simply “being.”

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #529907 in Books
• Published on: 2003-01-21
• Released on: 2003-01-21
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

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

From Publishers Weekly
Tickle (PW's contributing editor in religion and author of The Divine Hours) offers an enthralling spiritual memoir of her early life in Tennessee, recording academic and religious awakenings and her evolving understanding of prayer. Though her mind is numinous, Tickle's life has never been ascetic. Always the demands of the spirit competed with and were complemented by teaching duties, marriage to a country doctor and the needs of her children. (Although the memoir closes when Tickle is pregnant with her third child, she went on to have four more.) Because of this, Tickle's memoir is reminiscent of the best writing of Madeleine L'Engle, in that the business of spirituality is conducted while stirring the sauce. Several of Tickle's most holy realizations occurred while she engaged in domestic tasks: sorting the china after her wedding or scrubbing out smelly socks in the bathtub. Tickle is quite simply a marvelous writer, continually delighting the reader by her facility not only with the English language but with the human character. In recounting her own life, she pauses to appreciate the mentors, both in the flesh and on the printed page, who assisted in her spiritual formation. Many laugh-out-loud moments balance the frank acknowledgments of dark times, as when she struggled through depression or miscarriage. Even when discussing the more painful memories of her early life, Tickle's writing shines with a joy that is transcendent of circumstance.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In this deeply personal, ten-part autobiography, Tickle (contributing editor, religion, Publishers Weekly) relates how she prepared to become a practicing Episcopalian and a religion journalist/publisher. She starts by citing two dominant themes in her life learned from her parents: the love of words and discipline in prayer. Most of the book examines her experiences as an undergraduate, the early years after college graduation, and her subsequent marriage. The author introduces many influential individuals, such the college professor who helped her connect linguistics and theology, and weaves together events that both informed her spirituality and honed skills of observation, including a near-death experience following a miscarriage. Although the detailed discussion sometimes becomes verbose, Tickle effectively combines humor with honest, serious reflection. In the tradition of Anne Lamott and Kathleen Norris, her work also recalls two quite different spiritual autobiographies that have recently been released: Brother Benet Tvedten's View from a Monastery (Riverhead, 1999) and Marsha Mason's Journey: A Personal Odyssey (LJ 9/15/00). Recommended for larger public libraries and religion collections.DMarianne Orme, West Lafayette, IN
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

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.

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.

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!