by Father Robert Lauder

Autobiographies and published diaries can be a mixed blessing.

What is wonderful about them is that readers can receive the view of a life from the perspective of the person who is living it. However, who is to say that the author really understands himself or herself and the important decisions that are reported in an autobiography or a published diary?

Several events have set me thinking about firsthand reports of a life. One is that John Paul’s spiritual diary, which he specifically said that he did not want published, is going to be published.

Every semester at St. John’s University, Jamaica, I cover the philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), the first existentialist philosopher. Evaluating his life, he claimed that he wanted his engagement to his fiancée Regina Olsen to be terminated because he thought she would be an obstacle to his apostolate.

Years later, personalist philosopher-theologian Martin Buber (1878-1965) claimed in his book, “Between Man and Man” (New York: The Macmillan Company, Third Printing, 1967), that Kierkegaard had misunderstood religion. Buber wrote the following:

“‘In order to come to love’ says Kierkegaard about the renunciation of Regina Olsen, ‘I had to remove the object.’ This is sublimely to misunderstand God. Creation is not a hurdle on the way to God, it is the road itself. We are created along with one another and directed to a life with one another. Creatures are placed in my way so that I, their fellow-creature, by means of them and with them find the way to God.” (p. 52)

Both Kierkegaard and Buber were profound thinkers, giants in the history of philosophy and theology. If I had to choose between both philosophers’ views of other persons, I would side with Buber, even though I believe in the value of celibacy. However, I believe that even celibacy has a communal dimension. Actually, I have always wondered if Kierkegaard wanted out of his engagement because he and Regina were incompatible, rather than for religious reasons.

I believe in the value of journals and diaries even though I have never successfully kept one. At one point in my life, I started a journal for reflections on my spiritual life, but I was not faithful in recording my reflections. At another point in my life, I thought it would be interesting to keep a “dream journal,” but I was not faithful in putting reflections in that journal either. My failure in keeping journals says more about me than about the value of keeping journals.

What has set me thinking about autobiographies and published diaries is the recent publication of some excerpts from Flannery O’Connor’s prayer journal. While studying at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in January, 1946, at about age 21, O’Connor, for about a year-and-a-half, filled a notebook with her reflections on faith and prayer and her hopes for her fiction. Today, O’Connor is considered by many critics to be the finest American Catholic writer of fiction in the 20th century.

The excerpts that I read from O’Connor’s journal are fascinating. If I had to sum up in one word the excerpts from the journal that I read, the word would be “sincerity.” The excerpts reveal what those of us familiar with her short stories and essays already knew: She took her Catholicism very seriously.

The following, I think, is a beautiful excerpt:

“Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see; but what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing.

“I do not know you God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.

“I want very much to succeed in the world with what I want to do. I have prayed to You about this with … an eagerness for what I want and not a spiritual trust. I do not wish to presume. I want to love.”[hr]Father Robert Lauder, a priest of the Diocese of Brooklyn and philosophy professor at St. John’s University, Jamaica, writes a weekly column for the Catholic Press.