Returning

...Returning is a profoundly biblical story, for the biblical traditions call us not to escape the flesh, but to live in the flesh with grace and with justice...

...Its particularity evokes our own...

...In Returning, Wakefield is graphic but never self-indulgent...

...Wakefield acknowledges that going to church did not, in fairytale fashion, solve life's problems, and that after his "return" he still had to deal with' 'the all too common afflictions of the human condition, from broken furnaces to broken hearts...

...they wear no masks...

...His return to religion has certainly coincided with radical changes-the abandonment of drugs and alcohol, the daily discipline of prayer, a return to concern about the poor and disenfranchised that he had left behind since writing in the sixties about Spanish Harlem and the civil rights movement...

...there is not one compartment for sexuality, one for mind, and one for adventure with God...

...This is no whitewashed, pious essay...

...the return to living Judaism of Paul Cowan, but as the list makes clear, few stories of a vital return to the "mainline Protestant" traditions...

...To talk about the spiritual life is to talk about the whole of life...

...All was raw and open, there was nothing you could hide...

...Wakefield's religious autobiography takes us from his Midwestern childhood and adolescence-with tales of Sunday School, Boy Scouts, passion for sports, family tension, and anxiety about masturbation-through college at Columbia as a firmly atheist intellectual, to his adult years as a writer in New York, New England, and Hollywood, during which professional success and warm friendships coexist with emotional turmoil numbed by drugs and alcohol...

...The man is Dan Wakefield, the novelist, journalist, and screenwriter whose works of fiction include Going All the Way, Under the Apple Tree, and Starting Over...

...This candor comes as no surprise from a writer whose fiction about the sexual and emotional coming of age of Midwestern youths frankly paints those years in which, for him, "life was like a close-up, in which every detail was enlarged...

...Wakefield's story will be a comfort to many for yet another reason: he has not, to date, entered a monastery, become an evangelist, or founded a new institution...

...Wakefield does...

...But whatever our background, Returning leads us into our own sense of memory, place, and holiness...

...Wakefield writes from his own experience as a non-fundamentalist Protestant, a white man, an intellectual, rooted in both New England and the Midwest...

...Will there be, in this most public aspect of his life, a visible "turning...

...Wakefield writes not to persuade us that his journey is extraordinary, but to testify that the spiritual life is in fact a common matter, "common" in the sense of "daily," and in the sense that it belongs to us all...

...Wakefield "comes to himself" with a return to Boston, finding a geographical home on Beacon Hill, a community of kindred spirits in the congregation of King's Chapel, and a home for his heart with God...

...dozens of names come to mind, among them Alice Walker, Mary Gordon, Ntozake Shange, Carol Christ, Toni Morrison, Susannah Hes-chel, and Mary Hunt...

...But his spiritual journey consists of living in the world...

...Jane Redmont Discovering anew the story of the prodigal son, Dan Wakefield is especially moved "by the moment the prodigal son knew it was time to go home and so-in that simple and profound summation-'he came to himself.'" Returning is the story of a man "coming to himself...

...In the past decade or two, some of the most powerful and inspired voices in this chorus have been those of women, writers of poetry, fiction, essays, autobiography and theology...

...Returning will take its place alongside these other autobiographies, not as' 'the'' ideal model-there is no such thing-but as one of the many strong voices in the rich American chorus of religious experience...

...Conversion, according to Dan Wakefield is a "turning" more than a rebirth-"as if I'd been walking in one direction and then, in response to some inner pull, I turned-not even all the way around, but only at what seemed a slightly different angle...

...Not many successful white, Protestant men outside the fundamentalist fold have taken the same risk...

...Wakefield speaks of the mess of real life and the discovery of a God who is alive in the very midst of the mess...

...ible "turning...

...In our culture, this takes courage...

...Returning is subtitled "A Spiritual Journey," but it is also a tale of coming home...

...It is the author's newfound view of life "as a 'journey' rather than as a battle I was winning or losing" which gives him peace and stability...

...In a recent sermon at King's Chapel, titled "Writing About God," Wakefield told the congregation: "Thinking about God, and worshipping Him (or Her) in church, and in daily private prayer at home, became an essential and natural part of my life as a writer as well.'' One wonders, after reading Returning: Will Wakefield's fiction change...

...the Evangelical conversion of Charles Colson...

...Even in the bleakest of times, Wakefield has a remarkable sense of place, an unerring intuition about the locations which will make his heart whole and place him more squarely at his own center...

...Wakefield's particular vantage point does make a special contribution: we have the Catholic conversion stories of Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and Emi-lie Griffin...

...All these women speak openly of personal religious experience...

...Wakefield is candid about the hills and valleys of his life...