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A Feature Review of
Everlasting is the Past: A Memoir
Walter Wangerin, Jr.
Paperback: Rabbit Room, 2015
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Reviewed by Joe Krall
*** Read our interview with
Walter Wangerin, about this book.
A lonely, despairing graduate student walks and walks out into the countryside till he finds himself before a flock of sheep grazing, placid and content. He is filled with rage, wanting nothing more than to run at them, scare them into stumbling – until a farmer steps out of the woods, makes a “nickering sound in his throat,” and leads the sheep away. The student is alone once more.
“The sight of the sheep had broken my soul. I said, ‘I want to be a sheep.’”
So prays Walter Wangerin, Jr., in his memoir Everlasting is the Past (Rabbit Room, 2015). There are many beautiful passages in this book, but as for me, this short passage, in its lyricism, in its precision (“nickering” – what a fine adjective!), in its poignancy and spiritual power, is by far my favorite. In our recent interview with him, Wangerin mentioned that he had been thinking about “the episode with the sheep” for a long time. His thoughtfulness shows: the passage, jewel-like in its beauty, caught me on first reading, and reflected its light on what comes before and comes after.
The memoir itself is in three parts. In the first part, “The Seventh Seal,” we meet a young man, driving through the snowstorm in a VW bug (as depicted on the book’s cover – and may I add in this parenthesis that Rabbit Room has made a beautiful volume). Wangerin is the graduate student, a pastor’s son who has slowly awakened – not to a loss of belief, but to a felt absence of God, the silence of heaven. How can God, in His infinitude and transcendence, be aware of the dreams of one human being?
In part two, “Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones,” we see a man who has changed direction, now married, teaching, and receiving an unexpected call to ministry. In inner-city Evansville, Indiana, Wangerin is called to Grace Lutheran Church, a historically African-American congregation, where twenty-five to thirty souls could be found on any given Sunday. When Grace and Wangerin are caught in a schism within the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, they choose each other: Wangerin pastors the church through the next sixteen years. Part three, “Supernal Anthems Echoing,” tells stories from those sixteen years: birth, illness, and death, Christmas and Easter, day-by-day heartache and unexpected joy.
If you are looking for the author of The Book of the Dun Cow to shed light on the writing process and the inner life of the artist, be forewarned. Wangerin does not idolize the vocation of the writer. We do see a portrait of the artist of the young man early on, who writes poems at night and in the morning finds not one is “not a failure.” But Wangerin is interested in the transformation of this young man into – not an award-winning author, but someone willing to follow the Shepherd. The arc of the book is out of the hell of “self-serving love” and into a world that is frightening, heartbreaking, and beautiful. And despite Wangerin’s long and prolific career, Everlasting is the Past is not focused on his writing. There is humility in this memoir, because I think Wangerin recognizes this story is not ultimately about him.
This is a book of memories, childhood memories of looking under the pews to find Jesus, bemused memories of graduate school, impatient and sad memories of church politicking, painful and hopeful memories of Grace’s choir confronting racism on tour. Wangerin’s style, polished over years, makes the stories flow together, gives them both punch and elegance. And even so, the personal character of the book is never compromised. This is a vulnerable memoir, borne out of that same humility.
Indeed, these stories sometimes touch the limits of both word and faith. Seeking to comfort one of the oldest members of Grace, a “pillar of the church,” as she prepares to die, Wangerin tries to comfort her with salvation’s promise – only to be decisively and achingly turned away. “Jesus’ love is certain,” he pleads. “Maybe for others,” she replies. In the wake of her death, Wangerin confesses that he had wanted her to believe for his own sake: “If she believed, then I could believe. If I succeeded, then I was a proper minister after all.” He ends the chapter with his confession and his own cry for God.
In that liminal space, between the end of one memory and the next, we reach a place where doubt and belief embrace so closely that they become one. As I said above, this is not a memoir that triumphantly arcs from failure to success (whether artistic or pastoral). The arc of this book takes us from darkness to light to darkness, and begs us to see what God is doing in both the joy of daylight and, as Wangerin put it in our interview, “the dark night of the soul.”
“My past is so heavily present that I can scarcely bear it,” Wangerin writes towards book’s end. “But I am my past.” That wisdom is what gives Everlasting is the Past its humble power. In recounting his past, Wangerin finds all “the various people I have been,” every ghost of his past self, caught up in the story of God. Not a myth of the self lost and found, Everlasting is the Past is instead a witness to a Shepherd faithful to a sheep, to “the God who is not gone at all, but is here and in my heart.” And that makes it a story well worth reading.
——-
Joe Krall was an ERB intern this past summer, and is a senior at The University of Indianapolis.
C. Christopher Smith is the founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books. He is also author of a number of books, including most recently How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church (Brazos Press, 2019). Connect with him online at: C-Christopher-Smith.com
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