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This week we touch on four exemplary memoirs. Each would merit a column of its own; I hope these glimpses will prompt you to read more. Every sentence in each one of these four books bears the mark of its authorial DNA. Here are four samples, a taste of four lives, like the trailers for coming attractions at the cineplex.

Pelzer, South Carolina. Autumn 1961. Phyllis Tickle has been living in this mill town since 1958, brought by her husband's work. Sam's a physician. Later that year they will go with their two young daughters to Memphis, where he will begin a residency in internal medicine and she will be a lecturer at Rhodes College.

Living next door is Earl King, the pastor of the Presbyterian church they attend, a "straight-line Calvinist" and a missionary in Africa for more than 35 years, recently retired because of his wife's poor health. He's a displaced person, not easy to talk to, but deeper than he seems at first. On a cool, sunny afternoon, conversation has turned to Africa, as it has a way of doing with him, and all of a sudden he's saying something outrageous:

"Every faith's got its charlatans, but the real witch doctors scorn such conniving. A real witch doctor kills by the spirit, not tricks."

There was the longest pause on record just there. I looked at the previously dull man, and he looked back as naturally and unflinchingly as if he had just announced they were having pot roast at his house for dinner. He believed what he had just said. "That's not true," I said. "There's no such thing as killing by thinking about it or willing it or hexing or whatever!"

"Why not?"

What gives this story and its aftermath extraordinary resonance is the larger story in which it figures. It is a story that begins with a little girl in Tennessee in the late 1930s and early 1940s, an only child, learning about prayer from her mother—not by instruction but by daily example. It's a story in which seemingly random occurrences are seen in retrospect as connected, parts of a pattern not fully grasped but intuited. Who would have guessed how a college student's encounter with a great language teacher would connect with her childhood discovery of prayer and the discovery years later (by the woman that child became) of a breviary in a heap of old books? What is prayer, anyway, and what happens when we pray? What does the Spirit in action look like? Read Phyllis Tickle's The Shaping of a Life: A Spiritual Landscape (Doubleday).

New Cana, Illinois. Pop. 250, more or less. Early 1970s. Richard Lischer is 28 years old, a Lutheran seminary grad and Ph.D. (London University) newly arrived at his first parish:

A day in the country—this was not a novel experience for me but an alien world. I might as well have been touring Nepal as motoring through the dead cornfields of Illinois. …

The first to speak was a man named Leonard Semanns. He said rather cheerfully, "Well, I didn't vote for you, but I know we will have a good church with you as our pastor" or some such thing. His wife studied the carpet intently, as if she had dropped a contact lens. The next man—only the men spoke in this exercise—said without a hint of embarrassment, "I didn't vote for you either, but I agree with Leonard." …

In my my first sermon I explained the meaning of an epiphany, not the Epiphany of God in the person of Jesus—no, that would have been too obvious—but the category of epiphanies in general. … Before I could talk about Jesus, I apparently found it necessary to give my farmers a crash course in the angst-ridden plight of modern man. …

Any cultural anthropologist would have warned me not to rearrange the furniture in our church.

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July (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45