Customer Reviews

The Shaping of a Life: A Spiritual Landscape

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Phyllis Tickle has written the most astounding and moving spiritual biography I've read in years. In beautifully detailed prose she recounts her earliest childhood memories when she was first awakened by the sacred. I knew I was in for treat when, early in the book, I felt the immediacy of her experience--she had a spiritual epiphany while crouched in a forsythia hedge during a game of hide-and-seek.

As I followed her developing spiritual hunger through her high school and college years, I recognized so many parallels from my own life. But here's what I liked most about this book: the wonderful, thought-provoking meditative reflections on the everyday occurrences of life that, if one approaches life with an open heart, are imbued with spiritual meaning.

And the other thing I liked? Just plain, good, old-fashioned story-telling. No one tells a great story like Phyllis Tickle. I loved it!

Phyllis Tickle is an enthralling, unique, transmuted specimen of the homo sapien species that I wouldn't have known existed or believed in if I hadn't read her book, The Shaping of A Life. The book made a believer out of me, she is truly a kindred spirit. Reading Shaping of A Life was both a struggle and a delight. I have spent almost as much time with the dictionary as with the book. It is one of the most well-written, intelligent, entertaining, inspiring, sensitive books I have ever read. I absolutely know she has worked very hard all her life and what an extraordinary life it is. Amazing! I am so grateful that she was willing to share parts of it with us. I feel privileged in having had the opportunity to meet her in this incredible book. The Shaping of A Life is a unique experience that must not be missed. Now I want more.

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!

The title of this book misled me a bit. Reading the title, "Shaping of a Life: a Spiritual Landscape", and reading the jacket blurbs about Tickle's books on prayer, I expected something along the lines of "a guide to a better prayer life".

And while prayer is an important component of this book, the book is really an autobiography. And it's an autobiography that supplies what we seek in autobiographies and biographies. I read a lot of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs -- and I'm disappointed so often that I wonder that I continue. Too often they relate events, yet the reader gains no sense of how the events affected the character.

Not so with Phyllis Tickle. She imbibed early Socrates' maxim, "The unexamined life is not worth living." She examines the events in her life, and thoughtfully identifies how they impacted her, how they molded her character, her beliefs, her actions. She is not skittish about talking about her inner life.

Besides this, Tickle is a literate and captivating writer. I couldn't put it down. I especially enjoyed reading her experiences as an undergraduate at Shorter College. She participated the "intellectual orgasm often anticipated but seldom experience.

A very satisfying read.

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.

This book was a very tough read for me, and not in a good way. Mrs. Tickle's writing is very difficult to follow. The narrative of her story (this happened and then that) is clear enough. But the substance of the various spiritual awakenings and growing understandings that I was really reading the book for are terribly difficult to figure out. Just when you think you've waded through and a revealing point is coming, it gets cloaked in so much ambiguity and curcuitous reasoning that you're left uncertain what it is that was learned or what was momentous about that moment. (And for the record, I am a reader with a degree in Literature and am a member of Mensa. If I found the book this hard to follow, then it's hard to imagine that others won't struggle with it as well.)

Also, be perfectly frank, at times the substance of Mrs. Tickle's life was rather hard for me to deal with. She had such a charmed upbringing and young life, yet never seems to quite realize how different this is from so many others. I had to put the book down for several days after a section where she begins to understand original sin while sorting through the hundreds of wedding gifts she and her husband had received. Along this vein, despite being set in the south during the 40s, 50s and early 60s, there is no mention of race or segregation in the book until the last few pages when she speaks a bit about MLK and a conversation with an old missionary about the sameness of tribalism in Africa and racism in America. I know from talking with other relatively privileged white Southerners of that era that the issue wasn't really part of their awareness. Yet, one would think that a person writing an autobiography about that era would at least have something to say about the very fact that they were so unaware of the injustice happening just beyond the comfortable sphere in which they moved. In fact, there was one section extolling the ability of Southerners, by and large, to accept the underdog Jewish people into their midst as something of kindred spirits. I was more than a little surprised that there wasn't so much as a caveat regarding the unwillingness to accept the even more downtrodden African American population into their midst.

The book is at its best when the messy, painful and unpredictable lives of the people residing just outside Mrs. Tickle's own sphere intrude. The stories of dysfunctional neighbors and the town where her husband first worked as a doctor are by far the best parts of the book, in my view.

All in all, I am glad I made it through the book. I can't say that I'm sorry to have read it. And it certainly wasn't a complete waste of time. Even if one can only figure out half of what it is Mrs. Tickle is trying to communicate about her spiritual journey, that half is thoughtful, sometimes provocative and interesting. However, the frustration and confusion of reading the book makes me wish I had spent my time reading something else.

If it weren't for the fact that I know some nice, down to earth Episcopalians, I would have the impression from this book that the Episcopal church was for fancy highly educated people who think they're more intellectual than normal folks. The portion of the book dealing with Pelzer, SC was the most interesting, but it seems here Tickle indicts herself when she notes how the church membership in the company town fell along socio economic lines, then says she attended the Presbyterian church because it had a more charming building and a grander organ (and of course, it was the church the top status people went to). Heaven forbid she should go to a humbler building with the lower classes! I really did like the book, but two days after finishing it, the implied snobbery in it still bothers me. I wonder if Tickle was so steeped with ideas of privilege and "breeding" in her early life that she is just unaware of how her attitude comes across.

Why Kindle Edition costs $12.86 while paperback edition costs $9.66 and some other vendors sell it for as low as $7.00? Doesn't encourage e-book shopping at all. If no one has to cut trees, produce paper, print that paper, bring printed books to warehouses, why e-format is more expensive? I can't understand it, and I don't buy it. Not ready to pay extra money for less work involved.

Deeply spiritual, cultured, aware and intellectual. Phylis Tickle is a remarkable woman: author, inspiration and story teller.

The book is enjoyable as autobiography, history of the mid-south, chronicle of a coming of age in the 1950's, hints of what family means, and a backdrop for someone whose life became a model for millions of modern seekers of a fulfilling spiritual life.

This book does not provide the clear path, the blueprint, or the rationale for her career and impact, but it tantalizes the reader with her appreciation of the fullness of life in its many dimensions.

If you are seeking the spirit, paused in your spiritual journey or navigating a higher path, this is an enjoyable and insightful work. Phyllis deftly notes the coming impact of Paul Tillich's The Courage to Be (1952) in the last few pages. This book serves as a great summary of one individual's preparation for the next half century of post-existential awareness.

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.