If Norman Rockwell had portrayed in his Saturday Evening Post covers the pain as well as the joy and playfulness of his subjects, he would have created pictures much like the ones Walter Wangerin Jr does in "Miz Lil & the Chronicles of Grace," his collection of autobiographical tales.

Mr. Wangerin's earlier books include "Ragman and Other Cries of Faith" and "The Book of the Dun Cow," which won the American Book Award for best science fiction paperback and was one of The Book Review's best children's books of 1978.

In his new book, Mr. Wangerin tells of growing up and his years at Grace Lutheran Church as the pastor of a small inner-city congregation in Evansville, Ind. These chronicles, while not without missteps, are truly full of grace.

Stories a pastor tells on himself and his church face a high risk of being saccharine-sweet. With gritty honesty about himself and what he sees, Mr. Wangerin writes funny and moving stories about real people. He has his eves open, he's a good reporter and he has a wonderful sense of theater; he takes very ordinary occurrences -- nothing exotic here at all -- and brings out the drama, so that something as small as a playground fight creates real suspense. The reader almost seems to be part of the yelling circle of boys around the fight.

The structure of the collection is a movement back and forth between childhood and days at Grace Church. One period is as engaging as the other. And often, they sound the same notes: the boy uneasy in boarding school, the man as pastor about to officiate at his first funeral.' The book's one notable weakness shows in the first line of the preface: a tendency to be self-consciously poetic." A wandering cleric was my father," he begins. There is some overwriting, some images that seem odd: a baby "whose head was like a wheel of cheese." And the endings of some tales seem to strain for further effect when none is needed because the stories are already well told.

The subject matter has one unusual aspect. The church where Mr. Wangerin ministers has a black congregation, while he is white -- an interesting fact neither overdramatized nor hidden away in pieties like "Who notices color? Color doesn't matter." Mr. Wangerin does notice color and he makes that clear: "I still could not walk on Lincoln comfortably, where the young hung out on the hill by the pool, where men stood in knots by Doc's Liquor Store, their spirits feral their deep eyes veiled and watchful when I passed, like leopards on rocks at the zoo." He notices, and yet his stories show once again that, indeed, we are all alike. By that device alone, this book, which hardly mentions race, brings to mind the cruel ways that, out in the world, color does matter.

For anyone who is in doubt about whether ministers are ordinary mortals, Mr. Wangerin makes clear that this is the case. He talks freely of his own uncertainties about how to respond to the human dilemmas around him. "For God's sake," he asks, "how am I supposed to know these things?"

Perhaps not surprisingly, "Miz Lil & the Chronicles of Grace" has a lot to say about death -- from a very funny story of a funeral gone awry to the wounding accounts of loss. These stories are not glossed over. We get a child's frightened view of what the last stages of cancer have done to his grandfather. Yet somehow, here, death does seem to take its place in the order of things.

The last chronicle tells about a baptism, a woman pastor baptizing her own firstborn baby. In places it is florid and overwrought; line by line, it's hard to account for why the story is so moving. But it is powerful, describing the birth of the baby and then, later, the mother standing before the congregation, struggling to stop crying long enough to say the words of the baptism ritual over her own child. Whatever his stylistic excesses, Mr. Wangerin, former pastor, now writer and teacher, seems to have discovered a lot about how people are put together and what satisfies and stirs our hearts.

This collection is, in some ways, slight. It is short. It deals with daily events, not epic causes. It is episodic, without one mighty narrative drive. And yet it does justice to its people and its episodes, telling stories that are both clear-eyed and good-hearted.

He wasn't a likely choice as pastor for the tiny mostly black congregation.

He was young, inexperienced, a former talk show host who wanted to be a writer and who hadn't graduated from seminary. And he was white.

But in 1974, Grace Lutheran Church in Evansville's inner city was desperately struggling to survive.

Because they needed him so much, the church hired Walter Wangerin Jr. And the lessons he learned as pastor he has put into a book, Miz Lil and the Chronicles of Grace.

These lessons are taught in the book by characters based on real people. There is "Marie," a prostitute who stole water from a spigot outside his church, and "Miz Lil," an elderly woman who confided that widowhood filled her insides with a weight like a stone.

Stories like those of Marie and Miz Lil make up roughly half of Wangerin's new book. The other half is comprised of stories from Wangerin's strict Lutheran childhood.

Writing in cadences that resemble the King James Bible his parents read aloud each day, Wangerin spins his tales of pain and terror. Ultimately, in all the stories -- which Wangerin admits are not told exactly as they happened in order to enhance the drama -- there is redemption, and not by likely redeemers.

A crazy old woman dispenses candy and love to Wangerin, the little boy, who is afraid of passing through an alien neighborhood on the way to and from school.

An alcoholic man with a penchant for speaking out in church and disrupting the service tells Wangerin, the preacher, that "any time is a time to pray."

Wangerin, who was the oldest of seven children growing up in parsonages all over the country, said he always knew he wanted to be a writer.

Although he was serious about learning the craft in high school and college, he didn't study creative writing. He didn't believe he could make his living by writing, so he trained to be a teacher of English literature.

Later, he was a member of the faculty at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and at the University of Evansville.

Because his father was a minister and Wangerin attended Lutheran school where religion was an integral part of the curriculum, Wangerin said the idea of becoming a clergyman "always lurked" in the back of his mind. After graduate school, he began studies at the seminary but didn't graduate.

Instead, he took a job as a talk show host on a St. Louis classical music radio station and produced a Saturday morning story hour for children. Wangerin was asked to be the preacher for Grace Lutheran Church while he was teaching English literature at the University of Evansville and, during the same period, teaching a Bible class in a large, middle-class, white church. He was also writing his first full-length work, a children's fantasy novel called The Book of the Dun Cow. It wasn't published until 1978, four years after he became the minister of the inner-city black church.

The congregation was proud of his literary accomplishments but it didn't let Wangerin forget his duty to the church. When his publisher pressed him to go on tour to promote Dun Cow, he discussed the matter with the church council.

"They let me go for two weeks from Monday through Wednesday, but I had to be back on the weekend."

In 1978, Dun Cow was named the Best Children's Book of the Year by The New York Times. Two years later, it won the National Book Award. Such prizes are considered extremely rare for a first-time author.

Wangerin credits some of his skill at unraveling the human soul and psyche to the guilt created in him by his strict parents. Guilt is still a "powerful motivator," he said.

"The fear of doing something wrong makes a child very sensitive to all the ways adults declare their presence," he said. "It made me very aware."

As an adult, this training through guilt "sensitized me to human gestures, the way people sit, stand, talk, walk," Wangerin said. "Artists need this careful watchfulness."

With the success of his books, which include now The Book of Sorrows, A Miniature Cathedral, Potter and Ragman and Other Cries of Faith, Wangerin has stopped preaching to write full time. He, his wife and four children have stayed on as members of the Grace congregation, however.

One suspects Wangerin did this because of what the people continue to teach him as well as the spiritual sustenance he gets from them.

As Wangerin wrote in Miz Lil:

"Miz Lillian Lander fell silent then. ... And she would not let me go. For a lifetime, for a Sunday and a season the woman remained immovable. She held my hand in a steadfast grip, and she did not let it go."

Walter Wangerin is best known for his much-loved children's books, "The Book of the Dun Cow," an allegorical fantasy (winner of the American Book Award for Best Science Fiction Paperback) and its sequel, "The Book of Sorrows."

In the preface to "Miz Lil," Wangerin describes how his mother once attacked a hillside of tangled weed, pushing an ancient mower back and forth until order and beauty were revealed.

Like his mother's struggle, Wangerin's narrative goes back and forth from childhood to adulthood, tracing his spiritual struggles. Half the stories are from his youth, half from his days as a pastor of an inner-city church called Grace Lutheran.

The first childhood story is about Wangerin's grandfather, who thrilled the boy with his Olympian skill at spitting and his secrets about the dead ("Did you know that a dead man, he don't die all at once?"). When the old man was taken by cancer, he taught his grandson what dying is, and what a friend can do for the dying. These scenes are beautifully, deeply true.

The next story introduces Miz Lil and her husband, Douglas, two quiet people at the center of the black community that includes Grace Lutheran Church. Wangerin's descriptions show considerable insight "For their sakes, do not call it a ghetto. Do not presume it a mindless, spiritless, dangerous squalor -- a wilderness of brick and broken glass, brutality, hopelessness, the dead-end center, no! They made it community because they remained in confidence and honor."

People have a place and a refuge in Miz Lil and Douglas, who remember the names and the stories of everyone in the congregation. When the new white pastor, Wangerin himself, delivers a sermon about a prostitute who has been freeloading from the church and how he put a stop to it, Miz Lil knows about the woman, and about her grandmother. At the end of the sermon, Miz Lil tells the pastor that God was not smiling. She takes Wangerin's hand and will not let it go, meaning that her pastor might need to mellow his righteousness "for a lifetime."

The effect of Wangerin's arrangement of these chapters is like the unfolding of a cloth, with a lovely harmony of pattern revealed fully at the last. His narrative is sometimes flowing, sometimes jogged with snips and interjections that highlight ideas.

Single-sentence paragraphs build anticipation. "Listen: this is how a boy can destroy himself." The prose itself is striding and bold: "Douglas Lander drove the mule that pulled the plow that broke the earth to dig the hole on which was built Grace Lutheran Church. They dug that hole twice."

Unusual words strengthen Wangerin's descriptions. Douglas Lander, again, "was a pouch of repeatable phrases." Wangerin's father had a voice that could take on a "cordwood tone of command." A beautiful woman has "lashes long as luxury."

While the chapters on adult life describe the opening of Wangerin's spirit, those on youth reveal a child buffeted by a dangerous and uncertain world, adding hard layers for protection. One of the shocks of growing up is discovering treachery in the world, even in oneself.

In "Miss Augustine," Wangerin soars out of control three times. He lets himself fly loose from a swing, then takes flight twice again as he creates two magnificently told lies, briefly enthralling his schoolmates and his beloved teacher.

Later chapters show Wangerin drifting from his faith. In "Hamilton," he hates a boy who calls him and his brother "Chrisssssssstians." "He shamed us in public and forced us in private to doubt the value of the faith that caused ... such disgrace." Finally he finds comfort in hating his religion and concludes, "I survived the sixth grade with my honor intact."

The last chapter of his youth is the darkest. In the fearfully oppressive setting of a boarding school, a place of such dread that Wangerin becomes physically sick when he returns there after vacation, he feels his own goodness is lost. Frightened and isolated, he succumbs to the school's expectations of cruelty and destroys a fragile boy more outcast than himself.

The adulthood chapters show him growing as a pastor, and the process is delightful to see. He learns from a half-crazy alcoholic that any time is the time to pray. Later a beautiful woman, dressed disruptively, and her son come to Wangerin's church.

Her 2-year-old breaststrokes up the church aisle. Fumbling and uncertain at first, Wangerin dares to welcome them to his church. In the end, he reaches new heights in his faith, revealing his once-tangled soul as ordered and shining as the hill his mother mowed long ago.

Most of the Germans I know have faces that look somewhat pushed into shape, but Walt Wangerin's Viking face looks as if it had been chopped out of some hard substance with a sharp object. This observation is only relevant because it provides an image with some implications for autobiography, and Walter Wangerin's new book, Miz Lil and the Chronicles of Grace, is an autobiography.

As a subspecies of history, autobiography presently engages the minds of those who like to puzzle over boundaries and edges, demarcations and definitions. These people have a favorite question which can be stated like this: To what extent is a history--that is, a created object which organizes into narrative form some details from a segment of the past--similar to a novel, another created object which organizes into narrative form details from some segment of imaginary past?

One of the implications of this question is the recognition that authors of autobiographies do, in fact, see themselves as heros or heroines, and tend often to shape narratives accordingly. The author of an autobiography, for instance, may indeed begin with an implicit statement very like the one that begins Charles Dickens' novel David Copperfield: "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show."

It is at this point that my initial metaphor becomes useful. Reading autobiography, we are presented with the developing figure of the person whose life is being displayed before us. As the teller becomes this hero, we make a number of judgments about him or her. Do we see a figure which is merely being pushed into shape, as a child manipulates the dough of a recalcitrant gingerbread boy, or do we have the sense that the character is being created with all the energy, the force, and even the potentially dangerous strokes of the chisel working against granite? The best autobiographies, even when we acknowledge that their central character is being to some extent self-created, convince us that the life itself, as well as the record of the life, has been formed with those strokes, and that in recording them, the autobiographer is being true to the nature of the experience that makes some lives really worth writing about, instead of merely interesting or entertaining. Wangerin's book, though it has faults, does convince us of this central fact. Chisel and granite are in evidence.

Mil Lil is about the action of grace upon a life. And there is of course a pun here, for the author, writing as the pastor of an inner-city congregation, describes how Grace Lutheran Church has worked on his life to produce its characteristic shape. Its people and their lives, their looks and habits and styles and words and deaths have been the chisel strokes to bring this life into its sharp reality. Sensing that any record of such a creation must tell not only about the chisel but also about the stone, Wangerin places between the accounts of the people of Grace the tales that describe his parents, grandparents, boyhood, and schooling. The alternation of these two forces gives the book its own form, for it is not a continuous narrative, but rather a series of eleven narratives, each separate yet telling parts of the same story. Like the songs in a song cycle, each has its own subject, and its own tone, its melody and key signature. Yet all have as central principle the developing life of their central figure, the one who is becoming, the one who is telling his own life in relation to these other lives. The simple terms or labels with which we usually describe these relationships do not begin to convey their complexity, and Wangerin's stories work hard at those complexities as he recounts his own developing sense of what it means to be "grandson," or "pastor."

Beginning with a preface that describes the peregrinations of the clergy family in which he grew up through the forties and fifties with his own single parish in southern Indiana, Wangerin comments on his own journey, "out of his Egypt, learning to walk" (xi). He asserts at one point that there are two journeys in his life stories, but I do not read them that way, for the journey of a life must be one journey, however multiple it looks to the one who lives it and is thus conscious in his bones of its diverse paths.

The tracing of the journey can be done in a number of ways. Typically, autobiographies have yet another sub-category, the confession. It is significant, therefore, that Wangerin has chosen to place as epigraphs for his book two quotations, the first from the Confessions of St. Augustine, the second a great poem by George Herbert. In the first, the quintessential church father asks of God what fruits can be expected from this autobiography of his, in which he confesses "to the people, also in Thy presence, what now I am against what I have been." Such a comment points to another element in the definition of autobiography, for here the author says that his words have two audiences, both of whom are witnesses to his confession. As a form, the confession itself has two dynamics, for at one level it attempts to re-create the reality of the past moment, but at the other it comments, from the perspective of the present, upon that moment of the past.

The writer thus, in the present, attempts to show us a 'true' image of the past--her past--yet also consciously shows us that past through the re-creating lens of the present. And in a c confession, the present is charged with a sense that the author speaks now as she could not have spoken in the past, since some great awakening has overtaken her in the course of the journey she is attempting faithfully to describe. Thus the text of a confession always endures the tension of these two demands: that the writer be true to the past, and that in doing so she is true also to the stance of the present time, the arrival point of the journey. Writers like Augustine, and one presumes like Wangerin, know that their witnesses. God and people, care about these demands, this truthfulness.

It is never possible to judge with real precision how close a writer comes to that truthfulness, particularly if one lacks some other controlling record against which one can place the personal account, but I would guess that one criterion is simple: how well does the writer convince us that she is capable of understanding the significance of the events of her life? And here I have one small reservation about this book (which may be based on an idiosyncrasy) because I tend to trust the record partly in relation to the age of the writer. Can a young person

write an account of a life, getting the shape of it right, tracing the journey so that its central motion can be correctly observed, when so much of it lies yet ahead? Probably the answer to this nagging question of mine, which came up several times as I read the book, is yes, and no doubt many good examples can be given to show that the journey can best be described by the person who has just completed it. Though here I think there must be a modification of the definition of the work, for we are dealing with a record of a stage of the journey, and not the whole of it. So this book, and others by young authors, ought perhaps best be viewed as a Confession, Part I.

The second epigraph is the poem "Easter Wings," an examination of which will bring us immediately to the specific content of Wangerin's "confessions." In the poem, Herbert (also a clergyman) prays that the shape of his life, which has suffered a diminution because of his own sinfulness, may, through a connection with God's suffering, ultimately experience an expansion

into the true fullness of God's very being. (Anyone who knows the poem will, I hope, excuse this over-facile generalization of its magnificent meaningfulness.) The poet recognizes his own qualities; he is "most poore," and "most thinne." But in "affliction" and in "fall" the poet expects to experience an advance, or a furthering of "the flight in me." I assume this to refer, in Wangerin's case, to his perception about his own poor thinness, and the affliction and fall which

have worked to move him toward fullness. Now anyone who knows clergy knows that though they may be prone to "thinness and poorness" language, they frequently exhibit a fat richness in their attitudes, at least toward their clerical position. And a clergyman who is also a powerful preacher, and who is frequently told that he is a powerful preacher, has an even greater than usual temptation to a fatness about his own being. It is extremely difficult for a writer to describe his own excellences, and then to describe how he loams the failures and fatuities of those excellences, but this is the task Wangerin has taken on, and it is a task he executes creditably. Much of this author's excellence is to be assumed by the reader; Wangerin is an author whose books have won prizes, a speaker and teacher who can hold any variety of audience spellbound, a preacher of unparalleled eloquence and passion. He takes trouble to describe here the ways in which those excellences have been formed, but also the ways--the devastating ways--in which they have been found wanting.

His conversations at the church door with Miz Lil provide for him a kind of touchstone in this awareness. Sometimes she says, "Well, you taught us today," and sometimes she says, "Pastor, you preached today." When pressed for a further explanation by the young pastor eager for yet more approval from an already admiring congregation, Miz Lil expatiates, though she does not thereby explain:

"When you teach," she said, instructing me, "I learn something for the day.... But when you preach--" She lowered her voice and probed me the deeper with her eyes-- "God is here. And sometimes he's smiling," she said, "and sometimes he is frowning surely." (37)

Now the young pastor is pleased to interpret this as the desired compliment; his preaching has brought God into the place. But her words are not, he gradually learns, the compliment he takes them for. It takes another occasion, and perhaps many occasions, before the young pastor hears what Miz Lil is saying. Later, after a sermon whose story he gives us, she says to him, "you preached today, God was in this place." But she herself was not smiling, and she tells him then that his strong preaching, the preaching that had brought God into the little church, brought with that presence a condemnation of his own words. For though they had been spoken with fire, with certainty, and with the righteous sword of the Lord in hand, they had not been spoken with pity.

How can the word of the Lord be preached with fire, with certainty, with righteousness, and with pity, with humility, and with faithful love? This is the lesson which the people of Grace teach the pastor of Grace. In one of the most painfully revelatory stories, "Horstman," we are told

what monstrous obstacles those people have to overcome in their teaching. "Horstman" is the story I have always suspected, but never heard, a scathing account of the vicious hatefulness of the prep school atmosphere, the "system" as it is still called in the circles of those who were trained there for the clergy from the age of fourteen onward. No doubt, as readers have heard in many versions from the English boys' school narratives in the early biographies of dozens of great Englishmen, this atmosphere has its good side, for bonds of comradeship and even love have been formed in its nurture. But other qualities have been formed there too. Facing the inevitable fear, insecurity, failure, loneliness, and isolation experienced by all young people, generations of good men learned to deal with these feelings by bravado, denial, self-righteousness, alienation, and pride. To learn that such strategies were frequently encouraged by the adults in these schools is shocking, but not surprising.

In telling "Horstman," Wangerin does not neglect to blame himself for capitulating to these evils. Rather, he acknowledges the distance the people of Grace had to go in demonstrating to him the overwhelming mercy and pity of God. Following "Horst man" with the account of Pastor Cherie's baptism of her own daughter, "Baby Hannah," he makes the connection utterly clear. To learn the mercy of God, to learn to hear the voice of God, one must unlearn the lessons in which we are caught, even by the best-intentioned of our teachers. We must be "born again," perhaps, as he describes the sense of being born from the very body of the mothering God, knowing in that birth God's pain and tears and love for us.

The record of a journey is not the journey. We cannot experience the revelation of grace that Wangerin has experienced, however skillfully he describes it. But it is good to walk with him in imagination, tracing his steps. We are allowed to hear the confession of what he now is against what he has been, and in those words perhaps we are encouraged to perceive our own biographies, not as shapeless tangles of unrelated events, but as journeys toward our own hearing of the voice of God.

From Huckleberry Finn to Jay Gatsby, the rootless heroes of American literature have desperately attempted to find a place for themselves. They push on, constantly lighting out for a territory which moves progressively westward. In the process these ingenuous characters realize that finding a place is as impossible as discovering a clear identity.

The prize-winning American novelist, Walter Wangerin, Jr., knows these heroes well. So it is that his latest book, Miz Lil and the Chronicles of Grace, begins with the lines, "A wandering cleric was my father. Wherever he went, I went there too, as rootless as he was in this world." What follows is a skillful braiding of stories from Wangerin's childhood with stories from his first pastorate, Grace Lutheran Church, an inner-city congregation in Evansville, Indiana. The book is not only about being an outsider and living life on the fringe, but also about one inexperienced pastor's discovery of his true identity--in worship, in his past, and among people who become living emblems for him.

Wangerin is a master storyteller, but that identity is not without its ambiguities. In third grade he discovers the thrill of mesmerizing his class with a tragic tale of the demise of his own sister. He is, however, "telling a story"--and he is eventually caught in the web of his narrative. This doesn't stop him, and soon he drifts from storyteller to preacher to poet as he describes to his friends how he swung so high that he not only flew, but he saw God.

"The air makes a shelf in heaven," I said. "You slide that shelf like a slicky-slide," I said. "Airplanes find it and fly and they never flap their wings," I said. "And God said, 'I'll show you that shelf.' God showed me that shelf, and I turned on my belly, and I flew. I soared. I sliced the wind with my arms stretched out, and I looped the loop, and I was the earth--"

Most of the adults in his young life--especially his adored and horrified teacher, Miss Augustine--do not understand that fiction and poetry often tell lies to tell the truth. He, of course, struggles less with this paradox than they do--or maybe even less than the reader of this book will. Wangerin begins with a cautionary paragraph that says on the one hand that the stories told in the book are true, but that some of the characters might be fictional. Is it autobiography or is it fiction? That is the impossible question that so many authors are asked, and one admires Wangerin's unflinchingly contradictory answer to it. All stories are one's own story, he seems to say. All literature--past, present and future--is his literature, and here, as in his fantasies The Book of the Dun Cow and The Book of Sorrows, he weaves echoes of passages from Emily Dickinson, Dylan Thomas and George Herbert into his own prose.

What he is saying is that his continuing narrative is bound up in his past--and that the individual talent can never be separated from tradition. Officiating at his first funeral service ties him to his early memories of the death of his grandfather and to the story of Miz Lil's gut-wrenching loneliness after the death of her beloved Douglas. The story of his own success at learning cruelty at Concordia Milwaukee prep school is tied inexorably to the story of the baptism of a baby he watched being born in blood and pain.

Finally, Wangerin insists that his place is in an uncomfortable spot--at the foot of the cross. Only there can he find an identity--in sacrament--and discover his people, in the priesthood of all believers. Inseparable from the experience of finding his place is telling the story of others telling the story to him. The layers of his narrative unfold--and what emerges is not only cleverly crafted, but true.

Over the years Walter Wangerin, Jr.'s writing has attracted considerable attention but little formal or scholarly criticism. As a former college teacher of English (and as a professional critic), Wangerin at times has taken this critical silence as a cause for concern. According to Wangerin one reason for this neglect is that his publishers direct his books to "Christian markets?and though some of my books contained the purpose that fit best there, many of my books desire the serious attentions of secular and religious critics alike?desire criticism unqualified by classifications that are simply inapplicable." He wants critics who attend to his work "for professional reasons," as opposed to "ideological reasons." In short, he dislikes being pigeonholed as a "Christian writer" as though such a label obviated the need for critical evaluation. "Let critics as critics criticize?not as agnostics (or whatever) ignore . . . . I?m seeking a criticism of craft" (Wangerin, 26 November 1988).

Henry James distinguished between the artistes donn?e? the fundamental idea, the inspiration and rhetorical purpose?and the execution of such ideas or purposes: "We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donn?e: our criticism," said James, "is applied only to what he makes of it." James appears to endorse exclusively criticism concerned with literary means (form, style, technique) as opposed to ends (idea, meaning, purpose). However, as this look at Wangerin's craft will show, in successful works questions of means and ends tend to converge.

 Miz Lil and the Chronicles of Grace (1988), completed after many other books written during what he refers to as his "apprenticeship," is well-suited to criticism that concentrates on the care and quality of its workmanship. All eleven of the numbered chapters plus the final "Reprise" can be read apart from the rest as short stories in their own right. However, since Wangerin has said, "The craft of the book (made casual and concealed?as easy as conversation) will yield to a watchful, patient eye," I have assumed that it is very important to read each of these stories as parts of a larger whole, pieces that work together as elements in an overall "figure in the carpet" (Wangerin, October 1988).

That these are autobiographical stories is made clear in the Preface, where Wangerin sketches out the plan of the book. All of the stories deal with spiritual journeys; half deal with the "journey of the spirit of a child. Into Egypt, one might say." They tell how this child, baptized into the faith by Walter Wangerin, Sr., found the forms of his progenitors' religion insufficient: while yet an adolescent "secretly, unknowingly, I had decamped the faith," Wangerin confesses in the Preface. The other half of the stories "observe that other journey?of the spirit of a young man bound to a particular, a spirit bound to Grace." Grace here has a double meaning, referring at once to the gift of God and to the name of the Lutheran church he served in Evansville, Indiana where he learned to walk "out of his Egypt." "These two series of stories," Wangerin tells us, "are presented alternatively, first the adult, then the child, the adult again, and back and forth as once my mother went back and forth to level the tangled weed until her hill was beautiful" (Miz Lil xv).

Miz Lil and the Chronicles Of Grace is a series of stories in the tradition of James Joyce's Dubliners (1916) or Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919), since one of the recurrent motifs that carries through many of the tales in each book concerns the paideia of a central character. Paideia is the Greek word for education in the broadest sense, including psycho-social, moral, and spiritual growth--processes that never really end in one's life (compare the German Bildung). The tales reveal the interior life, especially the interior life of the central character or protagonist. There are many instances of climactic moments in these stories which Joyce called "epiphanies," but many of the epiphanies in Wangerin's book are religious or spiritual in a theological and not merely metaphorical sense.

A story often begins with the disruption of a state of order, the ensuing conflict fills the middle, and the restoration of order brings a satisfying closure. For Wangerin, sin is the cause for the conflict and resulting disequilibrium, and grace and its power allow the restoration of order and the sense of satisfying closure. Telling autobiographical stories, Wangerin says, potentially indicates a victory over sin, since by the time the episode is over and the story can take shape, the author has been forgiven: "But the story begins with a declaration of sin, of failure, of shame, perhaps" ("Preacher" 11). Furthermore, by telling stories based on our own experiences, we show how God continues to act in the world and our stories become part of the ongoing Heilsgeschichte, the narrative of what God had done and continues to do among us, God's epiphanies" ("Preacher" 11). The epigram from St. Augustine's Confessions which Wangerin placed at the front of his book seems to announce the same idea: "And those who are goodthey delight to hear of the past evils of such as are now freed from them, not because they are evils, but because they have been and are not."

But why do the stories alternate back-and-forth between childhood and adulthood? Why didn't Wangerin arrange them chronologically? Why don't they follow a V-shaped narrative pattern in which the child, secure in the faith of his father and mother, wanders away, decamps the faith, and so journeys toward some Slough of Despond, and then from this bottom point makes his ascent?

Considerations of craft may have led Wangerin to reject such a pattern as being too simple and insufficient to allow the scope necessary to achieve the most powerful effects. Instead of a single narrative thread, moving sinuously forward, up and down, he offers a weaving. The thread of the child is the warp and that of the adult is the woof, and they go over and under each other, sometimes seeming to blend together, sometimes in clear juxtaposition. Picking at the fabric, we can see that warp and woof have their own integrity, but together they make a whole cloth. Wangerin may have rejected the simple linear, especially the V pattern, not only for formal reasons but also because he felt it belies his experience of human growth and is inadequate for the representation of the life of faith. Although the theme of all these stories could be distilled to the lines from John Newton's famous hymn, "I once was lost, but now I'm found,/ Was blind, but now I see," (he uses several lines from "Amazing Grace" in the penultimate story, "Baby Hannah"), the structure of this collection avoids oversimplifying the process of becoming lost and being found.

In The Orphean Passages (1986), Wangerin makes it abundantly clear that faith is not a noun, a something that we simply and all-at-once find or all-at-once lose. Faith is a verb, he insists, and like the passage of Orpheus, there are many crossings of the path in faithing. The life of faith is not so much like a continuous thread, in which we move from height to height and age to age, and leave forever the earlier stages; it is more like a weaving?we revisit and relive the sins and conflicts and memories of our youth. Troubles and conflicts are never exactly the same the second or third time they are encountered, but neither are they entirely new and different. Thus we find the young pastor in Miz Lil and the Chronicles Of Grace encountering dangers and temptations and doubts that recapitulate experiences encountered in youth; the alternating time levels juxtapose these similar events so that they effect a kind of literary counterpoint.

The fundamental pattern woven into this book, as I have previously suggested, is the paideia theme, the basic pattern of physical, emotional, and spiritual growth that is followed in almost any autobiography. But Wangerin's literary design instructs that the growth towards maturity and into a relationship with God not linear and undeviatingly progressive, but recursive and complex. There are several embodiments of this general theme, and the first one I have called "Alles in Ordnung." using the phrase of pastor/protagonist of "Robert" as he inwardly comments on his Teutonic urge to order (Miz Lil 84). The "Alles in Ordnung" theme encompasses the cultural conflict between the narrator and his German-Lutheran upbringing and the black cultural world of Grace Church and its neighborhood. There is also a strong theme having to do with sex, gender, gender relationships and the gender associations with God. Another important theme is the power of story, and closely associated with this is the power of words, a theme which draws attention quite naturally to the matter of style.

The theme of Alles in Ordnung, adumbrated in the Preface via Wangerin's many remarks about his upbringing in what he names twice as "the forms of my father's religion" (xiv), seems basic to the first story, titled, "Derelict." The narrator is presented not as a child but as an adult. He is relatively new to the pastorate of Grace Church and is in charge of his first interment. The black funeral director, asks the pastor as they ride to the cemetery, "Petals or dirt?" (1). Anxious because he doesn't understand the question, the pastor becomes even more anxious and irritated that he doesn't know the correct answer. He feels his authority is in jeopardy; he ought to know?alles ought to be in Ordnung: "What do the Lutherans do?" he asks himself. ?What do the blacks do when they mourn? What do I do when the cultures collide?" (3). He wonders what his Pastor's Companion says, as there must be a correct answer, but he doesn't want to be seen consulting the rule book. He "wings it," and says that Lutherans prefer that dirt, not flower petals, be sprinkled on the casket at interment.

Later he is further unnerved by the unrestrained mourning of the bereaved at the grave side?not Teutonic behavior at all; and the funeral director serenely sprinkles "marigold petals on the coffin lid. Not dirt" (7). The pastor is furious, and when he leaves the funeral home, he speeds off in his own little truck and nearly sideswipes a derelict leaning into the gutter, presuming him to be a drunk. Part of what contributes to his epiphany in this tale is that the man is not drunk, but is "vomiting blood into the gutter" (9). Yet he is still prejudging this community by rigid rules imported from another world, a point underlined when the funeral director reappears and offers him the Pastor's Companion he had forgotten. The emblem of burial in this community is evidently petals, sweet and pliable compassion, not the stark farewell of dirt. He is a child again in his prideful tantrum and his rule book cannot help him.

The Alles in Ordnung theme is carried forward in the next tale, "The Spittin' Image," which deals primarily with early childhood memories of his German-American Grandpa Storck, but which ends with a coda at the time of his pastorate. The protagonist of the beginning is only six or so and the tone of most of the piece is lyrical, a lyricism of the sort found in Dylan Thomas's poem, "Fern Hill," from which Wangerin borrows lines on at least three occasions. The youth is blissfully happy in the walled kingdom of the huge St. Louis cemetery that Grandpa Storck lives within and cares for; together they roam the green hills, the boy heedless that this Edenic verdure is a place of the dead. He watches with amazement as his Grandpa?a great, vigorous Moses of a man who speaks to the boy in German?spits audaciously, triumphantly. Grandpa Storck initiates the boy into mysteries: a secret place to pee outdoors, and the fact that "a dead man, he don't die all at once . . . Parts of the body, Junge. . . . live on" (15) .

The narrator's deeper epiphany has to do with the awakening to the reality of death that was always surrounding the pair in their interludes together in the cemetery. He says farewell to a Grandpa made cadaverous before death by cancer, a word his mother "spat like bile" (19); he has had to learn there is no cure for death, that "time holds us green and dying," even when we are little children and unaware. He learns about leave-taking from Grandfather Storck. Twenty-seven years later, he learns more about death and leave taking from a black woman parishioner who had lost her husband: "Lutheran she was. German she was not. Musetta was black. Her love had no hard edges" (24). But while the theme of cultural conflict, "petals and dirt," or Southern black pliability over against Teutonic rigidity, is clearly stated here, this coda shows there are bridges between the cultures and between youth and adulthood as well. The husband had also died of a "wasting cancer," and the wife says to the pastor, "Arthur Junior . . . is the spee-it 'n image of his daddy" (24). What the narrator hears her saying is an echo of what his mother said of him, but he has misheard. The word "spirit" in her dialect sounded at first like "spittin"'; still the years between the two times collapse as spiritual time rushes in, and the continuity of love in spirit is revealed to him. The epiphanic meaning of being called "the spittin' image" of his Grandpa is realized. Parts of a man do not die, and what lives on in the narrator is not just the genetic inheritance. What continues is spit/spee'it/spirit. The bonds of love, acted in the flesh but living beyond it now, help unite him to this new world at Grace Church.

The first two stories, "Derelict" and "The Spittin' Image," demonstrate how Wangerin often centers his stories on key images or image clusters: petals and dirt in the first, and in the second the act of spitting and the word spat and its pronunciations and transforming association with spirit. A reviewer for the New York Times said that a notable weakness of the book was "a tendency to be self- consciously poetic." She mentions Wangerin's frequent use of inverted word order and says that "some images seem odd" (Payne 9). Another reviewer has spoken of the "lushness" of his prose (Bouman 36), and indeed the narrator in the story titled "Robert" says that in the pulpit, "when I'm straining, . . . sometimes I overcompensate with a forced, dramatic vigor" (Miz Lil 86). This admission of a stylistic flaw concerns oral discourse, but no matter: poetry is essentially an oral art form, and Wangerin is a poet and a preacher as well as a writer, and his written style has a strong oral tendency, as is shown by the importance of the sound of the words spittin' and spirit. Elsewhere in these stories Wangerin uses foreign words and phrases?tag lines in Hebrew, German, and of course many words and passages in black dialect. He spells reverend with a terminal "t" in many places when he is writing down the way certain parishioners addressed him. As to the frequent inversions "A wandering cleric was my father" (Miz Lil x), for example this is another rhetorical or poetic tactic which calls attention to itself because in this age of print the normative reading of text is presumed to be silent rather than oral.

Wangerin, however, as it is made clear in the story "Horstman," his account of Concordia prep school in Milwaukee, is steeped in the classical tradition. As a former graduate student of English language and literature, he deeply interested in Old and Middle English and the time of Caxton and the development of print. Perhaps even more to the point, throughout the Biblical texts, the written word is a sign for the spoken word and many of those texts existed in oral form before they were written down. In an interview, Wangerin once spoke of the connections he draws between story, Scripture, and orality: "In Scripture the story is the thing. Much of the Bible began as oral tradition which on the page is potential, but which literally comes to life in the telling" ("Preacher" 10). In the same interview he tells how one Easter Sunday, when none of the church school teachers showed up in Grace Church, he told "the entire story of the Passion and death of Jesus as a single piece." He was "astounded at the effect"; his audience was caught up in the tale: "For them, Jesus died .... The experience taught me something about communicating the faith that I never forgot" ("Preacher" 10) .

Another version of this experience is in The Orphean Passages when Pastor Orpheus tells the story of the passion to his black congregation on Good Friday, and at the end is fully persuaded that Jesus was dead. In Miz Lil and the Chronicles of Grace, the same incident is not repeated, but the pastor learns to preach without a text and without relying on the forms of the printed liturgy; he comes to see that the rules in The Pastor's Companion create barriers between himself and his congregation (see especially "Robert" and "Baglady"). He realizes, in other words, that some of the tension between the Teutonic Lutheranism and this black church arises from the psychic gulf between a people and social system based on print and a people and social system that is residually oral. (The phrase "residual orality" is used here in distinction from both "literacy" and "primary orality," which is defined as "the orality of cultures untouched by literacy" [Ong 6].)

In the penultimate story in Miz Lil and the Chronicles of Grace the pastor achieves a special union with the congregation and with God. The occasion of his vision or epiphany is a worship service in a picnic shelter?a service celebrated away from the stained glass image of a white, Teutonic Jesus and without benefit of The Lutheran Book of Worship or any other written order of service or printed hymn: "We turned Shaker austerity into jambalaya?we black, demonstrative, broad, declamatory people! We sat and sang without piano, without our hymnals, by memory and by faith alone. Grace had gathered" (177).

Another notable difference about this worship service as described in "Baby Hannah" is that it includes the rite of baptism under the worship leader Pastor Cheri. Those two words uttered together in the halls of Concordia, the all- male preparatory school for Lutheran pastors, the setting of "Horstman," would have been unthinkable. There the worst epithet that could be hurled at another future pastor was "girl." The only female mentioned on campus is the school nurse and the one meeting between a girl and a boy is a clandestine encounter in park bushes, which would lead to the expulsion of the boy in question and the anathematization of the boy who reported him, as did Horstman.

Over the course of the book, the protagonist's spiritual awareness grows and deepens as his conception of God passes from a stern, Old Testament, masculine Lawgiver, to a perception of a feminine, birthing God. In the early story from his childhood, "The Spittin' Image," Grandpa Storck is compared to Moses. But at the back of the book in "Baby Hannah," the old, black woman, Miz Lil, is described as having" a back like the rod of Moses" (178). And in his epiphanic vision during the baptism of Hannah, Pastor Cheri's infant daughter, the pastor/protagonist sees God as a woman giving birth?and it is he himself who is being born?or we should say, who is being born again: "I saw Cheri as if there was nothing between us, neither time nor space nor flesh nor worlds, and I recognized in that same moment a most celestial thing: That I was the baby Hannah. That Cheri was the figure of my God, and God was weeping." (183) The warp of childhood crosses the woof of adulthood and the strands blend: the adult is an infant and for this new child of God, God is a mother, a kneeling, pliant woman, groaning in childbirth.

By placing his tale about the all-male pastor-prep school back-to-back against the story of Pastor Cheri and the baptism of her daughter, Wangerin reveals the movement of the whole church on the issues of race and of gender roles, as well as a personal vision of his relationship to God and the Christian faith. In his second baptism, the vicarious one of infant Hannah, the pastor comes to peace with a faith that is distinctively his own, not merely the faith of his father and mother, and not exclusively the white Lutheran faith of book and tradition, but of the bookless faith of black Grace Church where a woman is co-pastor.

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Works Cited

• Bouman, Stephan Paul. Rev. of Miz Lil and the Chronicles of Grace. Lutheran Partners May/June 1989: 36- 37.
•  James, Henry. "The Art of Fiction" (1888).
• Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Methuen, 1982.
• Payne, Peggy. Rev. of Miz Lil and the Chronicles of Grace. New York Times Book Review 8 January 1989, sec. 7: 9-10.
• Wangerin, Walter, Jr. Letter to the author. October 1988?
• ---. Letter to the author. 26 November 1988.
• ---. Miz Lil and the Chronicles of Grace. San Francisco: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1988.
• ---. The Orphean Passages: The Drama of Faith (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986), 7-8.
• ---. "The Preacher as Storyteller," Lutheran Partners (May/June 1985), 11.