1. Why a Memoir?

I have reached an age when it is time for me, as a writer, to look back, take stock, face a lot of life’s past troubles and episodes head-on, and try to understand who I was and why I consistently behaved in such angry, hurtful ways over the years. I am essentially a religious person who has lived a very secular intellectual and moral life—if I may summarize it that way. I have moved back and forth between the worlds of higher education and the Church (in its largest sense), between being a college professor and a clergy person, between a passion for studying secular communication theory and practice and a deep attraction to theology and the religious communicative act called preaching.

In a sense, I have lived what can be labeled a “postmodern” life, meaning a life in an almost constant state of chaos, constantly on the move, seemingly without anchors or clear cut ideals or goals. I hope in these writings to explain how, as best I can tell, all of that came about and how, in utter disjointedness, it has played itself out now into my 60s. I did not plan to live this way. In fact, all the way through college and into the late 1960s I was pointed in a specific religious direction and taught specific conservative religious things. In the early 1970s, though, everything about my life came unraveled. The chaos set in with a vengeance.

I fully understand that in setting out to write about one’s own awkwardly lived life—I don’t know if I should say “badly lived” life or not, though some whom I have hurt will say “yes” I should—I do understand that my life has no inherent importance or notability, so an interest in what I write will be low at best. One does this kind of reflecting, though, for oneself, to “sum up” what one has been given and how one has dealt with it. That is certainly my motivation here and I have no illusions about its lasting import.

At the same time, though, when things have not gone well in one’s life, or things have not gone as one had hoped, dreamed, or planned, leaving some record behind of “what happened and why” can sometimes be of some value to younger folk who are also setting out on or trying to live through their own plans and hopes and dreams. It is like “here is what I wanted in life, along with why I didn’t get it, as I had expected that I would.” Here I try to describe the circumstances and shifts in life that I could not control, along with the mistakes, angers, bad decisions, and regrets that I wish I could go back and fix.

Mine is a religious story, a deeply religious one, actually—though the nature of what I was taught through college ended up changing in ways no one, and particularly not me, could have foreseen. For a long stretch of time as an adult, I rebelled intensely against my religious upbringing, against even the ministerial profession that I was well prepared for. I returned to religion in time, never ever quite giving it all up, but I did so in a way both similar to yet profoundly different from where I had begun in my 20s. All my life I had wanted to write religious books, books for clergy, for the minister and theological professor I could not, as it turned out, ever be. But even that could not happen until relatively late in my life.

In short, I have led, as the old spy once put it, two lives, one a relatively public life and the other the “postmodern” life, that hidden life that kept me perpetually frustrated and lashing out. While intensely personal, that second life was not as private a life as I would like to think it was: a lot of people saw it and a lot of people were repelled by it; some got hurt by it. While I mean no comparison to St. Paul, I empathize with what he described in Romans 7 as a “sacred wretchedness.”

The more public life, that “other” one, is what is reflected on my resume, my “vita,” as we call it in higher education. It has some value, I suspect, and for the most part in that life I have been blessed. I did get to write my books, one of which has done remarkably well among clergy. The record of that is readily available on a web site of my writings, sermons, and other work—at http://www.webbspreachingwithoutnotes.com/. With all that material compiled, though, this memoir focuses on the “private” side, my “non-vita” life, on why and how my overt vita unfolded in such an odd and disjointed fashion.

In retrospect, this inner life of mine has a bizarre—I use the word “postmodern”—logic to it, even from the beginning, as I can now see in hindsight. I would like to think that, as I settle down these days in rural North Carolina, owning a little piece of property for the very first time in my life, that the anger I have lived with for almost half a century is finally abating. It is, I guess. But the minute I write that, I am vaguely aware that it probably is not.

For the most part, I will write these ten or so page reflections chronologically, memoir-like. I invite you to read and respond, if you are so inclined. Particularly do I invite you to read if you are a young or mid-life religious professional, a minister or would-be minister, who is struggling to comprehend, or even stay true to, the religious, intellectual, moral, or professional dimensions of what you are living through. Others have faced all or most of it before you. This is the story of one such person’s travail.