Ordinary Time: Cycles in Marriage, Faith, and Renewal.

Spiritual autobiography is not the most respectable of genres these days; in a nakedly self-revealing age, it is self-revealing in all the wrong ways. One risks looking ridiculous, sounding irrational, confessing a sense that one is not in complete control of one's own fate, and is not meant to be. That Nancy Mairs takes these risks as boldly and as knowingly as she does is one of the most refreshing pleasures of Ordinary Time, her memoir of a life spent "against all principles of reason - in an uneasy and unrelenting state of religious faith."

Since Mairs, a convert to Catholicism, was not brought up in the church, she escapes the cliches of many of the Catholic contributions to memoir: the descriptions of cruel nuns, degenerate priests, airless confessionals, lurid statues, itchy woolen uniforms, the rote recital of catechism (of these, the lurid statues are the only part she might be sorry to have missed out on, though she does wonder what it would have been like to have had female saints as role models). Instead, she was raised a proper Yankee Congregationalist, fearful of displeasing both "God and Mama" with unruly behavior (protosexual behavior in particular) and expected to grow up to fit snugly into the role of "the little woman," never to utter a discouraging word or an impolite truth, never to discuss religion, politics, or sex. Under these conditions - as one learns in greater detail in her collections of essays, Plaintext (University of Arizona, 1986) and Carnal Acts (Harper-Collins, 1990), Nancy Mairs almost did not survive. That she did survive - despite attacks of agoraphobia so acute they at one point confined her not only to her house but to one corner of her living room couch; severe depression, six months in a state mental hospital and twenty-one rounds of electroconvulsive shock therapy; two suicide attempts; and the crippling progression of multiple sclerosis - seems something of a miracle, if a miracle of the this-worldly kind. Between the time of her first breakdown, in her early twenties, and the publication of her first book, feminism came into its own and antidepressant drugs and psychotherapy became widely available. Without them, Ordinary Time would most likely not have been written, and Mairs might have gone the way of Shakespeare's hypothetical sister in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.

Mairs is neither vain nor superstitious enough to suggest that God subjected her to these travails and then brought her through them so that she could communicate God to us in her books; she does not see God as the kind of supreme controller who creates and then saves us from adversity, plants obstacles and then helps us over, creating and then testing our characters as in a recipe for personhood. No one, she insists, handed her multiple sclerosis and her husband a cancerous melanoma, for "God is another order of being, upon whom we would do well not to project our nastier predilections." Mairs's view of God is more organic, and often funnier: the "messy and absentminded housekeeper who never puts anything back in quite the same place twice," or, most beautifully: "Not an immutable entity detached from time but a continual calling and coming into being. Not transcendence, that orgy of self-alienation beloved of the fathers, but immanence: God working out Godself in every thing."

The down-to-earthness of Mairs's spiritual reflections is a continual surprise. In her introduction she writes of trying to write Ordinary Time while her husband was in chemotherapy. "|If God is going to be present to me,' I recall reflecting one evening as George hunched in spasms over the pink plastic basin that accompanied us home from the hospital... |she'll simply have to wade through the mess chemotherapy is currently making in our lives. I can't scramble away from it up to some loftier plane.'" She writes of "practical expertise," "the homeliness of the holy," "the protracted process I've come to know as conversion." The chapter describing how Mairs and her husband decided to become Catholics is titled, "In Which I am Not Struck Blind on the Road to Damascus." Mairs is radically unpretentious. Whether her sights are trained on herself or on the Great Mysteries, her honesty and humor come liberally and impartially into play. "I profess each week to believe in |the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.' I figure it's all right to repeat these words, a venial lie, anyway, since I might well believe them if I had any idea what they meant and maybe sheer reiteration will force them to yield up their meaning one day." She does not indulge treacle or cant, nor is she a mystic. Her closest approximation of a mystical experience comes when her multiple sclerosis is worsening by the day, and she begs God to heal her. When the three words "But I am" are articulated in her consciousness, she realizes that she is asking for the wrong thing: what she so desperately wants is a cure for her illness, but what she is getting is a healing more radical and profound (if far messier) than any physical "cure" might provide.

Some in the secular world insist that the one thing all religious people cling to, that secularists are adult enough to do without, is the notion of certainty. Yet if there's one - and there may, in the end, be only one - thing Nancy Mairs seems absolutely certain about, it is "the radical uncertainty of life." Hers is the kind of faith that is not taken for granted but chosen daily, even hourly. The notion that she, whose own legs are prone to collapse beneath her without warning, moves in a world buttressed by certainties, would seem ludicrous to her; she will not separate the physical and the spiritual realms in a way that would allow this to be so even in a metaphorical or metaphysical sense. Others in their atheism, moving soundly and thoughtlessly wherever their strong legs bear them, are more familiar with certainty than she is in her faith.

Consistent with the earthiness of Mairs's approach is her route to Catholicism, which was at least partly through left-wing politics. In Arizona she and her husband discovered a Catholic community where nuns in tennis shoes "spent their summer vacations with the farm workers, in the fields, in the camps, in the jails." The presence of others visibly committed to the faith, a lifelong exposure to the aesthetic richness of Catholic culture, a sense of social justice, an attraction to the concept of grace - somehow these elements combined, and Nancy and George became Catholics. Certainly it was not out of any attraction to the institutional stability and dogmatic rigors of the church. Mairs describes her position on (if not her past practice of) marriage as "conservative," but that may be all she's conservative about, and her characterizations of the church hierarchy and its views are decidedly irreverent. At times her approach might be too "nontraditional" for some whom it might otherwise have reached. She calls God "she," has no use for the concept of Mary's virginity (an outlook many of us must secretly share), and, in evoking God's parental feelings towards us, notes casually that "perhaps even Jesus was a father." Clearly it doesn't matter to Mairs much whether he was or wasn't: she is heterodox not to challenge the orthodox, but simply because her reflections have led her there. What she cares about is the emotional truth of the relationship between God and creation, and the nature of God as we can conceive and approach God through the truths of our own experience.

Yet although Mairs promises in her introduction "to avoid the temptation to withdraw into abstractions, whether intellectual, moral, or spiritual," she does occasionally toss in abstractions that are political: patriarchy, capitalism, Western thinking. There's a predictability and a glibness to the references to these Bad Guys (George Bush, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Star Wars). Among a number of other quotes and references to liberation theologian Leonardo Boff, Mairs approvingly quotes his description of capitalism as "the most complete and sophisticated and enduring form of totalitarianism which human social consciousness has yet devised." This rather bold statement is not presented as a matter for discussion or debate or justification, but instead as an article of faith, one of a number that clot her otherwise lucid prose style with phrases like "characteristic of patriarchally shaped consciousness" and "(re)productive and/or consumptive markers." These instances are relatively few (and often leavened by humor), but where they do appear they seem borrowed, undigested. What Mairs has done for the teachings of the church fathers she does not seem to have done for those of her more contemporary mentors: shaken down their words for their essential reality (if there is one), reinterpreted them in more concrete terms, breathed the life of originality into them.

In her notes on sources Mairs describes how she reads for an hour or two each day before beginning to write, and I find myself wishing she would just plunge in and save her reading for the end of the day, so she wouldn't have less felicitous voices in her head as she writes to interrupt her own eloquent writing voice, which is lean, agile, surprising, both graceful and disarmingly direct - a voice both conversational and literary. The most effective moments in the book are those when one feels, as if right on the other side of the membrane of the printed page, her very individual presence. Yet in the moments of what seems like borrowed prose the membrane becomes opaque - behind it one sees a book, and behind that another book. It suggests some vestigial dependence on authority (nonpatriarchal, perhaps, but authority nonetheless) that doesn't quite go with the irreverence, the hard-won independence, and the authority of personal experience which characterize the rest of Mairs's prose and thought.

For those of us who see the institutional church as a hopelessly stubborn old relative with failing eyesight whom we love anyway and who may yet cough up bits of wisdom we might not have discovered on our own, the unrelieved portrait of it as patriarchal oppressor - and of Catholicism as "of all the not-notably woman-friendly forms of Christianity ...the most radically and intransigently misogynistic" - seems a little rough. Certainly the particular intransigence of the church on issues like women priests and birth control is hard to justify, as it is hard to fault Mairs for hewing too closely to feminist theory when one realizes that without it she might never have found within herself and her own life the makings of these books. Yet within the world of contemporary American Catholicism, this view is more the rule than the exception, and it becomes easy to forget that modem feminism grew out of the bias of Judeo-Christian culture toward emphasis on the individual; and that though a church dominated by women might not fall into identical kinds of error, it would no doubt fall into error all the same.

There are the politics of the church, and then there is the faith of the church. Mairs's work goes to the heart of what matters, to the elucidation of faith embodied in an everyday life - a life of devastating illness, marital distances and infidelities, the rebellion of children, debilitating depression, and caring for difficult strangers (including the welfare mother and the emotionally disturbed teen-ager who, at different times, move into the Mairs's home). Her unassuming tales embody, in themselves, the mystery of incarnation; her belief, grounded on the rock of her own being in the world, reveals itself as something miraculous, full of grace.

In writing about facing death, she describes the task of "bringing the whole of life to consciousness," including its sorrows, pains, incongruities, and terrors. This she does in her work, and if the whole of life includes some undigested chunks of abstract feminist theory and unsupported reflections on the evils of capitalism, so be it. At least she has the integrity to confess an inability to balance a checkbook on the same page as she offers her opinions on macroeconomics. For those of us who grapple with a world view that is both secular and religious and who, rather than sacrifice one for the other, are intent on muddling along in the grey area in between, Nancy Mairs offers evidence for just how fertile a place that can be. This is a woman who grasps the word of God and embodies it in her own very human life. Whatever skepticism one might have had about liberation theology or potluck Catholicism, one is, with one's stereotypes and arrogance and middle-of-the-road line-toeing, brought to one's knees in admiration. Here is a good woman.

In the "companion volume" to Ordinary Time, a memoir rich in sensory detail called Remembering the Bone House (HarperCollins, 1989), Mairs compares skipping over the introduction to that book to entering a house through the back door and sitting down to a cup of coffee in the kitchen. (A similar metaphor applies at the end of Plaintext, where she invites the reader to come by for a cup of almond tea.) A convivial sharing of a warm and satisfying brew is truly what reading Mairs's work, in its best moments, is like; one leaves grateful to have spent ordinary time in that place, in the company of an extraordinary woman with whom one is proud to share the family name "mortal."