| Throughout Christian history, hagiographical works were written as instruments for the adulation and emulation of spiritual exemplars, or saints. At their most effective, these literary pieces had transformative value for their readers. Modern methods of scholarship led understandably to a more critical stance toward these hagiographic materials, casting doubt on their historical accuracy and spiritual value. However, Edith Wyschogrod in her 1990 work, Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy, cautions against letting the pendulum swing too far in the direction of historicizing a saint's life while neglecting the divine-human transformation that may have occurred there.;Kees Waaijman in his 2002 work Spirituality: Forms, Foundations, Methods provides a scientific framework which takes seriously the dialogic nature of spiritual experience. Spiritual biography utilizes what Waaijman calls form-descriptive research tools from the fields of history, the social sciences, literary criticism and theology and employs them in mystagogic research to study the transformative divine-human relational process in an individual life. This study introduces and exemplifies the genre of spiritual biography as an update to pre-scientific hagiography that nonetheless treats individual lives as revelatory texts.;Arleen McCarty Hynes (1916-2006) is an apt subject for a spiritual biography. Her life's work as a wife, mother, lay Catholic leader, political activist, bibliotherapist and Benedictine sister was rooted in an underlying belief in the transformative power of the texts of Scripture, poetry and story. Arleen and her husband, Emerson Hynes, were Benedictine oblates of St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, where Emerson taught ethics and they raised their ten children according to The Rule of St. Benedict. They moved to Washington to work with Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota. After the early death of her husband, Arleen Hynes helped launch the field of bibliotherapy as a librarian at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC, and then returned to Minnesota to become a Benedictine sister. Her letters, journals, interviews and published pieces suggest the revelatory role of text in her personal and professional life, especially during times of change. Her life narrative serves here as a case study of the genre of spiritual biography as revelatory text. |
