{"id":8739,"date":"2023-11-15T14:40:58","date_gmt":"2023-11-15T14:40:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=8739"},"modified":"2023-11-15T14:41:03","modified_gmt":"2023-11-15T14:41:03","slug":"leaping-from-the-burning-train","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2023\/11\/15\/leaping-from-the-burning-train\/","title":{"rendered":"Leaping from the Burning Train"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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I Nominate Faith<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Jeanne Murray Walker\u2019s new memoir illustrates both the dangers and the ultimate rewards of exchanging certainty for faith.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Sarah Clark
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When I heard that Jeanne Murray Walker had a new memoir coming out, I was excited to read it for two reasons. The first was that Walker is the author of one of my favorite poems, \u201cStaying Power<\/a>.\u201d As only a poem can, that one has put some of my own unsayable experience into words, and I have loved it since the first time a friend read it to me. The other was that Walker grew up a fundamentalist Christian, and this book was purported to tell her story of her leaving fundamentalism behind, but without her leaving the faith\u2014and to tell the story \u201cwithout the self-righteousness that sometimes accompanies contemporary memoirs by those who have left conservative Christianity,\u201d as the back cover avers.<\/p>

As a former fundamentalist myself, I was intrigued. To leave behind a community and philosophy as intentionally insular as fundamentalist evangelicalism without rancor against those who remain behind is, as I have reason to know, no small feat. But I felt that I had spent enough time being angry about my upbringing, and if Walker could put my ineffable longing for God\u2019s presence (and the equally indescribable\u2014if only intermittent\u2014certainty of his existence and love) into a poem, I was hopeful that her account of getting less conservative<\/em> (a truly terrifying prospect to my younger self) might again help me make sense of my own journey, and to step more firmly into the acceptance and love I aspire to feel for people I have come to disagree with. In short, I began with high hopes.<\/p>

Nor was I disappointed. Walker\u2019s account is subtitled \u201cA Poet\u2019s Journey of Faith,\u201d and though she doesn\u2019t spend much (really, any) time on her own poetry, she traces the ways that the language of poetry has formed and shaped her. In structure, Leaping from the Burning Train<\/em> is less a linear narrative of Walker\u2019s life and more a series of related essays exploring different aspects and eras of her life and faith. The timeline is at times confusing, with a few significant gaps in the narrative (for instance, the story goes directly from Walker moving for her freshman year of college to Walker, married with a child, laboring to produce a Ph.D. dissertation), but that\u2019s because it\u2019s the story of Walker\u2019s relationship to language rather than a straight autobiography\u2014and it was, for me, a deeply relatable tale.\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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As limited, mortal creatures, we humans can only be so certain about anything.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Walker begins by recounting the same sort of familial creation myths that I believed in so implicitly as a child: stories about one\u2019s own family, repeated over and over, that explained why you lived where and how you did, why the way your family did things was right<\/em>, why they were essentially ordained by God<\/em>. In Walker\u2019s family, it was the story of the night her parents, disquieted by a weekend they had spent partying with friends, burned their playing cards in the furnace and resolved to live holier lives, set apart from such activities. (In mine, it was that when my parents were invited to be missionaries to South America, my mother responded, \u201cIsn\u2019t God blessing us here in North Carolina?\u201d but then changed her mind and agreed to go after a weekend\u2019s silent prayer retreat.) Repeated often enough, stories like these can take on almost Biblical proportions. In describing a childhood organized around these family myths and full of church, Christian community, Bible memorization, shared meals, and more, Walker writes, \u201cI had no inkling then, of course, that their fervent beliefs and language could be called an ideology. I thought it was just obviously and simply the truth.\u201d I was nodding along: yes, exactly, that\u2019s exactly how it was for me too<\/em>.<\/p>

But for most of us, that kind of absolute certainty can\u2019t last for long. What makes this book so lovely is that Walker doesn\u2019t discount the experiences she had before the cracks appeared. Instead, she lovingly and compassionately paints a picture of the cracks\u2014from her love for a glow-in-the-dark plastic cross necklace that violates her church\u2019s proscription of religious images, to the jealousy and cattiness of the teenage counselors at Bible camp, to making a friend at school who is Not Fundamentalist and who Walker worries is therefore Not Saved (the friend\u2019s family is Lutheran). Wherever she comes in contact with the outside world, in short, her certainty grows a little thinner\u2014until, as she describes in the prologue, she\u2019s sitting on her bed one day, aged 16, listening to \u201cThe Purple People Eater,\u201d and the thought suddenly occurs to her: \u201cSuppose none of this is true?<\/em>\u201d Looking back, Walker can see that that is the moment when her journey of faith began, but she manages to show too how utterly unmooring an experience like that can be\u2014how \u201cfraught with grief and confusion and astonishment.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>

Looking back at her parents, Walker writes, \u201cMy fundamentalist parents were always driven by anxiety about change\u2026 they wanted something they could count on at any cost.\u201d But there is a cost to the kind of denial that that sort of certainty demands. If you are going to maintain the kind of absolute certainty that fundamentalist belief calls for, the world you are going to inhabit will have to be very small indeed. Like Walker\u2019s mother and many of her fondly described \u201cfundamentalist people\u201d (and like my own father, a staunch fundamentalist until the day he died), there are those who are capable of maintaining that stance all their lives, firmly shutting their minds to doubts (or maybe even not experiencing doubt, even though that\u2019s difficult for me to imagine). Some, perhaps many, of those people are loving, generous, and deeply sincere. Walker depicts those she knew and loved with humility, acknowledging her own faults and missteps along the way\u2014the ways she clung to certainty in her own right, and the painful process of letting go.\u00a0<\/p>

But, she writes, \u201cCertainty is one of the fundamentalist values I don\u2019t believe is possible anymore. I say that with sadness. Who doesn\u2019t long to be certain?\u201d In its place, she says, \u201cI nominate faith.\u201d As limited, mortal creatures, we humans can only be so certain about anything. For the things we hope for but cannot see, faith is all we have. Faith is much scarier than certainty, Walker writes, but, like the rickety steps that lead up to the dome of St. Paul\u2019s Cathedral, it has held so far, no matter how many pilgrims entrust their weight and lives to it. It can sustain things like the loss of parents and brothers and communities as well as, if not better than, certainty\u2014as Walker has reason to know. And the further gift of that faith was, for Walker, \u201ca more capacious world, [and becoming] someone who, through sustained attention to the imaginative language of metaphor and symbol, allusion and ambiguity, came to inhabit a wider and more vibrant sense of the world\u2014and of God as its creator and redeemer.\u201d In carefully narrating the ways in which that gift has come to her, again and again, Walker has done a great service to people like me, who have also left behind certainty and entrusted ourselves to faith. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Sarah Clark<\/strong> lives in New Hampshire with her family. She is a founding editor of Fare Forward<\/em> and the current editor-in-chief, and she owns Scale House Print Shop<\/a>, a letterpress printing studio. She graduated from Dartmouth College in 2011 and received an MAR from Yale Divinity School in 2022.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Leaping from the Burning Train<\/strong> was published by Slant Books on November 7, 2023. Fare Forward <\/em>appreciates their provision of an advance copy for our reviewer. You can purchase a copy from the publisher here<\/a>.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jeanne Murray Walker\u2019s new memoir illustrates both the dangers and the ultimate rewards of exchanging certainty for faith. 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