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Returning: A Spiritual Journey

Dan Wakefield

3.46 · Rating details · 37 ratings · 7 reviews

Dan Wakefield was a successful writer of novels, nonfiction, and screenplays when he awoke to a private life that was disintegrating in alcohol, depression, and isolation. He fled Hollywood for Boston where he reclaimed a faith he had thought he was too sophisticated to embrace. In this moving memoir, Wakefield returns to his religious roots and his early life: his Indiana ...more

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Paperback, 272 pages

Published April 30th 1997 by Beacon Press (first published 1988)

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Mar 23, 2018 Kyle rated it really liked it

A lovely, thoughtful spiritual memoir--essentially a look through the author's life and noticing the ways God was there, guiding him in moments he didn't realize.

I'm reading as part of my project to read 1988 books throughout 2018 (@1988is2018 on Twitter), so I'd like to have a clever comment here about how this fits with the times or something. But if anything, it *doesn't* seem to fit with the emergence of the Moral Majority and other Christian movements I associate with the 80s; instead, ...more

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Oct 12, 2019 Richard Propes rated it liked it

I wish I had more to say about "Returning: A Spiritual Journey" than I do, but it's more a book I respected and appreciated than I actually enjoyed and immersed myself in. As a fairly new member of a local Unitarian-Universalist congregation, I have found myself exploring the world of UU writing and, not surprisingly, Wakefield popped up. Being that I'm also from Indy, I took the chance to read this book that vividly recounts Wakefield's return to church later in life after many years of ...more

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May 23, 2018 Tom Santopietro rated it it was amazing

A fascinating meditation on the meaning of faith that grew out of Wakefield's New York Times Magazine article "Returning to Church." Wakefield's first two sentences grab hold instantly: "One balmy spring morning in Hollywood, a month or so before my forty-eighth birthday, I woke up screaming. I got out of bed, went into the next room, sat down on a couch, and screamed again." A painfully honest chronicle of Wakefield's spiritual journey as well as his secular life, "Returning" explores ...more

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Sep 17, 2013 Daniel Petersen rated it liked it

This was one of my very favourite reads until the last third where Wakefield’s Unitarian view took centre stage and watered the work down a bit. That portion was not only philosophically disagreeable to me, but also rather boring in that wishy-washy do-gooding liberal vicar sort of way. This religious pluralism seemed contradictory to Wakefield’s earlier narration of personally experiencing what he claimed was the actual presence of the New Testament Christ in the world today.

Still, the writing This was one of my very favourite reads until the last third where Wakefield’s Unitarian view took centre stage and watered the work down a bit. That portion was not only philosophically disagreeable to me, but also rather boring in that wishy-washy do-gooding liberal vicar sort of way. This religious pluralism seemed contradictory to Wakefield’s earlier narration of personally experiencing what he claimed was the actual presence of the New Testament Christ in the world today.

Still, the writing of the first two-thirds was delightfully crisp, a model of quality prose, and the storytelling was enthralling. I was very moved by the vulnerable and poignant account of his early, adolescent, young professional, and middle life. A friend of Kurt Vonnegut (they both came from my hometown of Indianapolis), Wakefield is a genuine literary intellectual, so the well-crafted narrative is peppered with great quotes from various authors and also anecdotes of luminaries he met in his sojourns in New York City and Boston.

It was very refreshing to hear such an intelligent person be candid about his conscious, intentional, strategic avoidance of the reality of God. Wakefield’s long-practiced atheism perfectly modelled Sartre’s claim: ‘I collared the Holy Ghost in the cellar and threw him out; atheism is a cruel and long-range affair: I think I’ve carried it through’ (Words, 1963). Wakefield frankly acknowledges that he substituted Freud for God and that substitution only enhanced his plummet into darkness. His uncomplicated acceptance of genuinely numinous and supernatural phenomena throughout each of these stages was also a welcome surprise. It was intriguing, however, that these forces and experiences were exclusively benevolent. Even though he unflinchingly recounts some of the darkest personal existential trauma I’ve ever read, he never even hints at any forces of darkness beyond one’s own psyche and social and intellectual trends. He is very open to the existence and influence of actual angels, but strangely quiet as regards any demons but the metaphorical kind we all have.

The most exciting and helpful parts for me were his reminiscences of childhood and family, good and bad, and his encounters with the God he at first welcomed but then ended up trying so hard to suppress and avoid (none other than the Christ of Scripture as Wakefield recounts it). He sees with hindsight a world full of providential grace and guidance. These elements and his critiques of popular trends, both Freudian and Fundamentalist Christian, were the strengths to me. Indeed, Wakefield’s acerbic and insightful repudiation of the Jesus of 1950s respectable America (the attractive, friendly, positive-thinking, upwardly mobile businessman in a grey flannel suit – still with us today in ever fresh upgrades and permutations) makes his acceptance of the equally suspicious Unitarian New England Jesus, who’s just everybody’s tolerant pal (except those damn oil-loving, war-mongering conservatives, of course,) a bit baffling. I guess a more notorious Indiana celebrity captured our tendency here with his album title: Use Your Illusion. We all do it. My own idolatrous Barnacle-Jesus is no doubt encrusted with misleading cultural accretions too. I hope that those of us who claim the Nazarene can work toward undeceiving ourselves and pursuing truth together.

Having read Wakefield’s first novel, Going All the Way (1970), and now this ‘spiritual autobiography’, I definitely want to check out more of both his fiction and non-fiction. I think he will continue to be a worthwhile conversation partner in the strange pilgrimage of faith.
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Sep 14, 2013 Mary rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Anyone who likes non-fiction

Recommended to Mary by: Library Book Sale

Shelves: read-but-unowned, 1970-1989, 85-89, bought-at-a-library-book-sale, non-fiction, paperback

Dan Wakefield was a successful writer of novels, non-fiction, and screenplays when he awoke to a private life that was disintegrating around him due to alcohol, depression, and isolation. On a balmy spring morning in Hollywood, a month or so before his forty-eighth birthday, Dan Wakefield woke up literally screaming. His private life had been crumbling for years and alcohol barely numbed the pain.

Those horrifying morning screams drove him back to Boston, his former home, where he changed his ...more

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