Composing a Further Life

on was not as hard for me as it was for other actors who have been very identified with beauty and youth and all that. I’m told that I was, too, but I never really owned that. You know, leaving the ‘good old days’ was not so hard for me because they were really so-so old days. When I was trying to inhabit an exterior that I didn’t really own, that was hard. And as I was getting older, I was suddenly feeling that I could move back into myself. There’s something to be said for having that happen later in life.
    “Well, during my ten years with Ted, which reached from about fifty-two to sixty-two, I began to change. I knew that I was becoming much more internal, much more introspective and spiritual, which I had never been in my life. And I felt a need to begin to alter the way we lived to be more vertical than horizontal. We were skimming along the surface. I wanted to start drilling down more, and he couldn’t, because his locus of well-being came from outside, and mine was shifting to in here.” Jane touched her chest, indicating her heart. “I wasn’t sure how I would answer the question Who am I? but I began to know how
not
to answer it, and I tried to tell him.”
    Turner was not receptive, and he responded to Jane’s search almost as if it were an act of defiance or infidelity. “He is a man who doesn’t like surprises,” she said, “and this took him by surprise.” Judging by Jane’s description of his whirlwind courtship, Turner also seems to be a man who knows what he wants and goes after it, determined to possess it, and now suddenly Jane was revealing a side of herself that no other person could claim to own. Men are often jealous even of their own children and of the maternal devotion of their wives. “When you decide to move back and take up residence in your skin again,” Jane said, “when that happens and you’re conscious of it happening, it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful.”
    A search for the relationship between spirituality and age was clearly an important aspect of Jane’s interest in her forthcoming book, and she began to ask me questions about my own experience and what I might know as an anthropologist about differences in spiritual development across the life cycle. I told her my story, describing my own history as having been both more connected to institutional religion than hers and more contemplative at earlier stages. I am not comfortable with the sharp distinction that has become common between “religion” as institutional and external forms and “spirituality” as personal prayer and meditation. I know that these are phenomena that can occur separately, but each seems to me now to be barren and easily corrupted without the other. I spoke to Jane about wandering alone in the woods in childhood, filled with awe and wonder but not knowing where to go with that experience or how to connect it to visits to museums of art, poetry read aloud at the breakfast table, or the occasions when I had been taken to church.
    One of the things that my mother believed was that if children have shared the experiences of worship with a group of believing, engaged adults, they will have the capacity to empathize and participate later in life, so she wanted me beside her rather than in a Sunday school class, where I might memorize easily forgotten bits of doctrine with no connection to experience.
    “So your mother didn’t believe in indoctrinating children? That’s no surprise,” Jane said.
    “No,” I said. “But, you know, I’ve realized that there were quiet ways in which she made sure that I wasn’t—how should I say?—culturally deprived, illiterate about religion. I think that makes a lot of sense. It makes sense that children should participate in the events and processes that adults feel are significant. I believe in taking children to the polls to see adults vote, and to funerals. That’s actually one of the things that concerns me about some of the spiritual communities that have sprung up in this country, that some of them don’t have a model for how children are brought in. It’s like the relationship between Islam and Sufism. Islam is the religion of a full community, and Sufism is for a minority of self-selected adults who want to follow a particular spiritual path within Islam. The gateway is through the wider tradition that you meet as a child, that you may leave behind but you never fully reject. When I look at spiritual communities in this