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ОглавлениеThe Spiritual Essayist
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers.
—James Baldwin
The spiritual essay anchors the biggest part of the briefest moment, an economy of insight, if you will, that the long-winded autobiography and memoir do not share. This economy allows writers to impress upon us that they have grasped the spirit’s light even though it has already flashed by. In addition, its brevity engenders flexibility: the essay can turn on a dime, go against itself, and come back or keep roaming. The essayists I discuss—D. H. Lawrence, Langston Hughes, Bruce Lawrie—succeed in their abstract/sensual marriage by remaining lyrically intimate as much as numinously alert, dwelling loosely but fixedly on the form’s brevity, compaction, and intensity. These writers must try and angle the profound into the passing of the profound—no easy task.
Among the finest spiritual essays in English is Lawrence’s “The Spinner and the Monks.”1 In 1912, the writer and Frieda von Richthofen, having fallen lust-mad for each other, spent the winter/spring seasons on Lake Garda in Gargnano, Italy. High above Gargnano and its tangled streets sits the church of San Tommaso. The small chapel, which Lawrence espies from the lakefront, seems to float in the sky, pondering, like the author, the snow-capped peaks of the Tyrol. Climbing cobblestone streets up through the village, passing walled houses atop steep stairways, he discovers San Tommaso’s terrace, “suspended . . . like the lowest step of heaven” (21), a place with an earthen sacredness in between (or joining) sky and Earth. He enters the sanctuary and inhales “a thick, fierce darkness of the senses” (22). His soul shrinks, he says, and he hurries outside.
There, in the courtyard, he finds an old woman spinning. More strangeness. “She made me feel as if I were not in existence” (22). Still, there’s something in her he desires, something in her he fears. It’s unclear. Speaking with her in his poor Italian, he shapes their encounter by painting concrete detail like Renaissance portraiture. “Her eyes were clear as the sky, blue, empyrean, transcendent. They were clear, but they had no looking in them. Her face was a sun-worn stone” (23). Lawrence, the vagabond Englishman who can “read” a people’s soul (Italians are “Children of the Shadow”), compares the woman to “the visible heavens, unthinking.” She is “without consciousness of self,” a state that nettles Lawrence, a man whose senses are easily aggrandized. This peasant is “not aware that there was anything in the universe except her universe” (24).
In his description, Lawrence moves the old woman from a servile condition to an archetype—a glowing personification of the unconscious. An otherness. Like the stars. He places the woman, metaphorically, into the firmament, where his being, momentarily, is absorbed into the “macrocosm,” the universe that she represents. But, he declares, “the macrocosm is not me.” He is the microcosm. So, he concludes, “there is something which is unknown to me and which nevertheless exists.” The woman’s bearing lets Lawrence address the void-like divide between him and the nonhuman. He’s stunned: “There is that which is not me,” he writes, over and again, as if this were a newly discovered substance like a spaceship or an artificial heart (24).
He walks on, going higher, picking primroses, lamenting the waning sun. He stops to gaze down into a garden, full of “bony vines and olive trees” (28). There two monks are walking and talking, in late afternoon light, unseen by him. Here is yet another rapprochement between Lawrence and the mystical, the “not me,” a scene in which “it was as if I were attending with my dark soul to [the monks’] inaudible undertone” (29). They are walking “backwards and forwards,” a phrase he repeats several times; they are busy striving, in tandem, pacing and turning back to pace and turn again. This “backwards and forwards” between life and death, now and then, soul and matter, is like a fulcrum. “Neither the blood nor the spirit spoke in them,” Lawrence writes, “only the law, the abstraction of the average” (30). The monks embody a kind of neutrality: being in the world yet also passing through it, which Lawrence broods upon as his, as our lot, while the old woman is existence itself, its psychic wholeness, observable but unembraceable, which Lawrence yearns to possess. Still, he dreads this come-and-gone sensation. Why? Such flight defuses his nature, which pushes him to capture and hold, for a time, the capricious realm he pursues. Indeed, his prose, too, walks “backwards and forwards,” contemplating existence and evanescence, carrying water, chopping wood, before and after this hilltop moment. It is as discoverable as it is unknown.
Then a “meeting-point” arrives, and Lawrence takes “possession of the unknown” with a salty question: “Where in mankind is the ecstasy of light and dark together, the supreme transcendence of the afterglow, day hovering in the embrace of the coming night like two angels embracing in the heavens . . . ?” (31). Where is it? It is there, right in front of him, he realizes. But it is also equally unrealized, its elusiveness its reality. Where is also where Lawrence sees what “is not me,” that is, the apprehending consciousness with which he accepts, satisfied, his ultimate absence.
Thus, the final paragraph.
Where is the supreme ecstasy in mankind, which makes day a delight and night a delight, purpose an ecstasy and a concourse in ecstasy, and single abandon of the single body and soul also an ecstasy under the moon? Where is the transcendent knowledge in our hearts, uniting sun and darkness, day and night, spirit and senses? Why do we not know that the two in consummation are one; that each is only part; partial and alone for ever; but that the two in consummation are perfect, beyond the range of loneliness or solitude? (31)
The spinner and the monks in their Italianate bowers trigger in Lawrence one of life’s knottiest queries: Why can’t we see that the supposed opposition of body and soul is nothing of the kind, that they are not severed but whole? We can’t see this because, as Lawrence shows us, we are the agents of that severing—the me and the not me. In his climb, he passes a clothmaker and robed walkers, and he is empowered by them to categorize and name and psychologize and represent and even praise their otherness. He lingers on them long enough so he will, eventually, see their difference or, better, his inability to merge with them. Beautifully, he essays: feels the season, observes its flowers, dawdles with its companions. And yet, ultimately, his ending is full of passionate irony. I mark his words: Why do we not know? Indeed, nothing stops him or us from coming and going, “backwards and forwards,” our bobbins spinning us into yarn and wool. In short, this is the spiritualized tension Lawrence is famous for, a man who lingers with the “bony vines and olive trees,” who conjures the ashen “not knowing,” who rises with the “cloudy knowing.” All that to-and-fro—a delight for this reader—to be reminded of Lawrence’s what is not me.
As with nearly all of Lawrence, there’s a lesson to heed: if you wish to lay bare the spiritual questions, disinterred from their religious answers, let the writing indulge the body and its felt abstractions, and the spirit will speak.
* * *
A SECOND spiritual contender is Langston Hughes’s widely beloved tale “Salvation,” from his autobiography, The Big Sea (1940).2 Hughes tells us that “going on thirteen,” he, young Langston, was saved from sin—saved, “but not really” (18). At a children’s session in the church, where he and other kids would “see and hear and feel Jesus in your soul” (19), Langston waits while the minister asks the “little lambs” to come forward. A few hesitate, but most go to the altar. And there, by their voluntary presence, they are saved. Except Hughes and another boy, Westley. Neither budges; Langston is not feeling it. But it’s hot, and the hymns keep insinuating, and the preacher keeps intoning, and the flock keeps expecting, until Westley finally capitulates: “God damn! I’m tired o’ sitting here. Let’s get up and be saved,” he says to Langston, and so Westley goes to the front of the church. And he is saved. Now, from every corner, the hanky-waving faithful and Langston’s family besiege him, the last straggler, to get up. They pray for him “in a mighty wail of moans and voices.” And, though he feels he wants to receive the Lord, nothing happens. He waits again. But still he can’t see Jesus. Seeing Westley, happily swinging his legs up front, Langston muses, “God had not struck Westley dead for taking his name in vain or for lying in the temple” (20).
So. At last Langston gets up and saunters to the front of the church. And he is saved. Voilà! Lord and congregation propitiated. The dominoes have fallen.
That night, however, after the hurrahs of the family have settled and Langston is alone in bed, he cries. His aunt hears him and comes into his room. His tears, she says, are the Holy Ghost reminding him that he has seen Jesus. The everlasting has arrived in his life for good. But no, Langston thinks, his tears are his shame for lying: “I couldn’t bear to tell her,” he writes, “that I had lied, that I had deceived everybody in the church, that I hadn’t seen Jesus, and that now I didn’t believe there was a Jesus any more, since he didn’t come to help me” (21).
How simply wrought yet religiously portentous this confession is. Several things are true. The initiation passed, the emotional purge exacted, Langston is saved in the eyes of the church members; he is saved by his conscience, the opposite of what his family treasures him for receiving; and he is saved by the querulous surprise of his self-disclosure. He knows that what they believe and what he believes—which each would swear to—are the same as they are different. Salvation and faked salvation—river and bank, sun and moon. Doesn’t this happen often whenever we are tapped by the rank-and-file to bow our heads in prayer for the dearly departed or to stand for the seventh-inning rendition of “God Bless America”? How many of us, caps in hand, embarrassed faces, dodgy hearts, relish little of what we’re supposed to and, instead, feel that the land-that-I-love or the deity-on-high fervor is a public face we’re preternaturally unable to feign. The degree to which we hide an absent belief is also the degree to which we hope such an absence might be acknowledged.
The story begins with church members meandering through the sleepy hymn “The Ninety and Nine.” Despite the tune’s avowal that the lone stray sheep (young Langston), brought back to the fold, is the most blessed of the flock, another counter-certainty raises its head: there is, for young Langston, no God except the God who isn’t there, a strangely satisfying hollow that awakens the writer’s conscience. Reverse salvation—that which is presumed to ground his life, the weight of the Old Rugged Cross, he discovers he has no desire to lug. But that’s not the point. The point is, how does he, how do we live with ourselves if we protect others from knowing what we genuinely feel?
It is not odd that the writer admits his strength as a failure: that’s part of the confessional tradition. But it is odd to have learned a kind of doublespeak that shielded those good gospel women who raised and loved him from his disbelief, women to whom he could only disclose, while young, his apostate identity except in the guise of telling the truth—showing he was saved when he wasn’t and wouldn’t be.
* * *
HUGHES’S SPIRITUAL pivot comes from an artist whose sensibility our culture has deftly fitted him with. To live loyally, to be indoctrinated into a religious community, is the lot of the child whose “participation” is typically no more than an accident of birth. In charismatic or Baptist-style congregations (compare James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain) reside the public means to—and a performance of—salvation. You are how you conform to your church; you are not how the church conforms to you. But despite this tilt, Hughes upholds his individuality, if stealthily and deceptively, within the community, which is the lot of the adult observer, the later-assessing writer.
For Hughes, such hiding in plain sight, enduring ambiguity, is best suited to the internal personal drama of the tale. There, the reader is prodded to interpret motives and decisions without the author’s interference, though sometimes such authorial guidance does appear. There, the writer avoids—should avoid—the overt preaching or teaching rhetoric of religious tracts and devotional formulae.
In a word, Hughes’s spirituality is his character. The conflicting motives are remarkable. Consider, first, that Jesus got Langston to go to the front of the church; consider, second, that Langston went up there of his own free will because, Jesus having failed to nudge him and the church demanding he conform, he strolled up on his own. The first posits a truth that wisely directs our behavior from the outside, though it’s also thought of as an inner push or conscience; the second posits that the source is enigmatic at best because it can be contrived or, in certain people, managed because painful consequences come to those who mess with the sanctimony others, chiefly members of one’s family, hold dear. That Hughes conveys the subtlety of both with such a simple narrative is, as I say, uncanny.
What’s more, he conveys an even stronger ambiguity, which I call flawed reliability. No story is wholly good or bad, so the deconstructionists have taught us, and no author can be wholly credible. All confession is, in part, unreliable. In fiction and nonfiction,3 modern writers build characters with stark fallibility if they wish readers to trust their creations as sharing our culture’s doubt and delusion. A character—think Humbert Humbert, testifying at his trial, in Lolita—has to engage with his reliability as his story. With “Salvation,” the fallibility of young Langston’s conviction is everywhere present in the story. The piece discloses the constant skirmish he has with church rules. His family and Westley, in particular, do not see what we do: that going up front is a success and a failure.
And there’s something even bigger. Trust. The reader’s trust. I trust Hughes because he seems to say that an individual’s salvation cannot be known by other people and, in like manner, requires some of that unknowingness from the author. In other words, it’s easy to fake salvation for a crowd of born-agains, but it’s even easier to fake it for oneself. I trust those who show me how fallible the teller of the tale might be. How can anyone know—leaving aside gospel women and preachers and the public spectacle of testifying—whether one is saved? How does coming to the front of the church during the high drama of an evangelical threshing salvationally guarantee that when you die the pearly gates will open? You will be saved in the moment as, apparently, all the little lambs that day were “saved,” even the tricksters, Westley and Langston. But the question-inviting and begging of such theater is the legacy.
Anyone can conjure the “evidence” of things unseen—ghosts and spirits and highways to heaven. But when writers develop their narrator’s psychology, they present competing evidence as well. While things are unseen, they are also seen for their unseenness, if you will, for their unreliability. Indeed, Hughes defers to the complicated knowingness of the child. Just as the church community tricks children into public testament—heed the call and let the Lord in—the child, in his honesty, divulges where the rabbit is hidden. Saying that makes him a reliable witness to the deception.
(Deconstruction is not easy.)
The child, Langston, is saved by the truth that he wasn’t saved. He lies to himself and then refuses to tell the lie to his family until many years later, nearing forty, when he finally opens and owns up in The Big Sea. There, the family, if they’ve read the story, may have learned that faith is not merely a matter of raw belief. It is a matter of tenacious conscience. We like to think that publicly witnessed religious conviction is by nature preferable to privately witnessed disbelief. Don’t be misled, Hughes argues. If the faith is in anything, it is in the child’s instinctual ability to handle paradox and, with it so handled, be at peace with it.
* * *
BOTH LAWRENCE and Hughes maximize the literary impact of their evanescent moments. Publishing one hundred years and sixty years ago, the two essayists capture a spiritual sensibility, which, once we examine it, bears the hallmark of today’s authors, the individual opposing, if not thwarting, the institutional. By the time we get to the contemporary essay, a resurgent form, we have a growing number of personal collections and scholarly volumes, perhaps the most well-known of the last two decades, the Penguin Books series The Best Spiritual Writing (1998–2013), edited by Philip Zaleski.
Each year, Zaleski assigns an editor to introduce his or her selections. In an early article about the series, he writes that the twenty or so pieces in each compilation consist of “poetry or prose that deals with the bedrock of human existence—why we are here, where we are going, and how we can comport ourselves with dignity along the way.” He goes on: spiritual literature engages that “elusive realm . . . where we encounter the great mysteries of good and evil, suffering and death, God and salvation.”4
The range of each collection, at times, bewilders and disappoints: most collections carry scholarly articles (exegeses on the Koran; an archeological sojourn through Jerusalem) and (one too many) poems that mention Christ or the Father or spirituality, in text or title, and taste overcooked in their own obscurity. It’s tough to find veins of gold in Zaleski’s mine. This is so, in part, because the lion’s share of religious writing is didactic—telling over showing, begetting over persuasion, credal imperative over inner motivation.5 To his credit, Zaleski agrees: “For every example of good spiritual literature published last year [1998], there were a baker’s dozen that embarrassed with promises of instant enlightenment, or explanations of how meditation can make you rich, or revelations of what Jesus really, really said.”
In his introduction to The Best Spiritual Writing, 2011, the poet Billy Collins recounts his adolescent’s religion and its institutional intractability. He details his stint with the Catholics and rails against two of their infuriating maxims: “To be born with original sin seemed flatly unfair; and the claim of the Church to hold the only means of its erasure—baptism—struck me as monopolistic” (xv). During college, Collins drifted into unbelief, via “utterly seductive” writers like Wordsworth and Dickinson, Beckett and Jack Kerouac (the Beats’ name comes from beatific: desolation angels and seraphic outcasts). He was also lured into theological debate, in which several Ferrari-sharp minds try to prove, logically, God’s existence.
Exploring his existential dilemmas via poetry, Collins says, in his introduction, that the numinous arrives only in “veil-dropping moments of insight” (xxi). “For the majority of its followers, religion is less of an experience than it is a set of beliefs, a moral code, and a picture of the hereafter. But spiritual experience . . . is indeed an experience, usually marked by a sense of sudden entry into another dimension. This spiritual life is one of surprising glimpses, which often resist verbal description, as distinct from a sustained set of theological beliefs and doctrines, which can be explained to anyone, as any proselytizer knows” (xxiii).
If these insights “resist” the verbal, as Collins argues, why write about it at all? Why not just sing anthems or recite the Lord’s Prayer as legions do? First, such practices by artists or by mass assent do not exclude each other: transcendentalists like Thoreau stayed away from church, while Emerson adored the pastor’s perch. Second, the surprising glimpse resists the verbal; it neither stops nor forbids inquiry. Writing to occupy the Holy Spirit found zealotry in the four gospel authors, in Paul, in Augustine, in the medieval visionaries Hildegard von Bingen and Richard Rolle—all sought God’s grace by taking up their pens. Third, Collins’s worry, that spiritual intuition and poetic verity are antagonistic, reaffirms the necessity of metaphor, which pushes one “to turn toward other terms” when translating the ineffable. Such descriptive fury ignites John Donne’s Holy Sonnets. God is a lustful tart, whom one poem’s narrator accuses: “You ravish me.” In kind, God makes the narrator think his hunger to be loved should be validated by pain: “Batter my heart,” “bend / Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.” The believer is prey, his faith the fate of a prisoner. Locked up, he “wisheth himselfe delivered from prison.” But hauled from his cell by the hangman, he “wisheth that still he might be imprisoned” and escape the terror of execution and God’s judgment. The associations writers uncover and fertilize are limitless.
* * *
DELVING MORE deeply into the Zaleski volumes, I locate at least one desert bloom: “Who Am I, Lord, That You Should Know My Name?” by Bruce Lawrie.6 This three-page piece, published in Portland in 2009, is among the most indelibly spiritual essays ever penned. It is directed to the author’s “severely mentally retarded” son Matty and involves Lawrie and a God who, in the writer’s imagination, afflicts the most innocent and promises them heaven as their reward. Every night when Lawrie puts the boy to bed he sings him praise songs (the title is a line from one), cherishes their touch, and hopes the act soothes the boy’s condition.
I start singing the next song in our nightly rotation as I brush his hand against my whiskers, first his palm and then the back of his hand. He explores my face with his fingertips and then he covers my mouth gently. I sing into his palm, imagining the reverberations vibrating down into his little soul. How does he experience me? What am I in his world? I don’t know. I may never know. (114)
The essay’s final paragraph (of ten) is a wish for Matty’s coming life in heaven. Lawrie whispers to the boy that his ordeal will end: “Soon, Matty. Soon.” Before this dark wish, Lawrie describes the heaven where Matty has “a healthy body and a lovely wife,” a son of his own, where father and son drink a beer and the author invites Matty’s son, Lawrie’s grandson, to “fall asleep in my lap, a sweaty load of spent boy pinning me to my chair on the deck.” But none of this wipes out Matty’s punishing operations, “the straps tying his hands to the hospital bed rails so he wouldn’t pull the needles out,” a boy clueless “why the people around him had suddenly begun torturing him” (115). (We never learn his specific “retardation” or his treatment.)
A brief list of sour apples torments Lawrie. He remembers “all the other things [Matty’s] been robbed of. Meeting a girl. Playing catch. . . . Making love.” Matty’s heaven is the reverse of this one—where he will get what most of us here already have: romantic love, losing that love, and finding it again. The result is that he, the father, keeps the hope of better times alive when the boy’s pain will end. As will Lawrie’s pain, too. When Matty dies, he’ll awaken healed; his father will be there, too, and, Lawrie writes, “God will carve out a little slice of eternity for us; our own private do-over.” “Soon, Matty. Soon” (114–15).
Lawrie keeps reporting on and imagining Matty in these contrasting states—in the boy’s richly intimate but agonizing actual life and in the dream home his father insists the boy will one day occupy. His earthly life “comes at him as if blasted from a water cannon,” thick with an “indecipherable roar” and “white noise.” The specifics grind to dust our sense of a child’s due. Matty is “unable to walk on his own,” is “legally blind in one eye,” has endured “operations,” “IVs,” “needles,” and “countless blood draws,” among other pains—according to Lawrie, all these weigh, slab-heavy, on “his little soul.” Yet Matty is loved and he “loves”—prizes his routine, “craves” its “repetition,” and routinely toddles “off to sleep.” Just before that moment, Matty “lets out a sigh that tells me [Lawrie] everything’s right in his world” (113).
“He finds the cool sheet safe, slings a skinny leg over the bed, and hauls himself up on top, moving rapidly before the bed can escape. He lies on his back rocking back and forth in bed, body rigid, a crease-eyed smile lighting his face, letting out an ecstatic aaahh” (114).
It’s a heartbreaking essay, the narrator twisting between realms real and dreamlike. Does Matty feel his father’s cherishing him, and yet also sense his dad’s craving for him to be a “normal” boy? Does Matty grasp the gap between the human drama and the supernatural fantasy? The human drama is universally felt; the fantasy conjures up a Christian cosmos. Heaven is where all beings are, if not copacetic, then fixed. Heaven, where wishing the boy healthy is granted, where there’s a new Matty, the saved or the corrected or the replaced Matty: the deity makes everything right, including movie dates, a first kiss, a first night of passion, arriving unblemished after life. But not during.
In the not during simmers the hurt. The more another boy is wished for, the more the boy in the bed is unchanged and the more the father despairs. Worse, Lawrie has to balance the affection he has for his boy against the future “version” of Matty he obsesses over. That version of the self which suggests we have no say in the random nature of our punishments, a tune also sung by Job: “For he breaketh me with a tempest, and multiplieth my wounds without cause” (9:17).
That Lawrie has called upon God to give Matty the brain he should have had because—you guessed it—God dealt him the bad hand, the endless surgeries no child should endure, is irrational, if not absurd. Doesn’t Matty’s condition suggest, at least, in Lawrie’s mind, that God will fully heal Matty only when Matty is removed from his dad’s care? Why doesn’t Lawrie abdicate his conviction once he discovers the petitioned one is the abuser? Or is he? Perhaps Lawrie should, but he doesn’t. Giving up on heaven is not in the author’s nature, nor in his boy’s interest. Besides, what father abandons hope while his child suffers?
None does.
* * *
READING LAWRIE ping-pong between what is and what will be, that is, the will be that should have been, arouses feelings in me of the darkest hue. Just consider the essay’s chafing facts—the boy’s torture, the father’s piety; the boy’s physical burden, the father’s sorrow; the boy’s velvety prison, the father’s holding its bars in place. More disturbing is the chamber opera of false hope. How it must upset Lawrie to stifle the fact that Matty’s time on earth has been robbed while he, the father, sings him their bedtime song! To have it boil down to Lawrie wishing the boy dies soon, sooner than the father wants, and loving the boy’s pleasures still seems utterly hopeless.
What I find frightening in this almost mockingly Christian Christian essay is that merely acknowledging the boy’s suffering exacts the death wish. That Lawrie allows it. That he doesn’t apologize for it. That he makes fervent his hastening it: “Soon, Matty. Soon.” A loving execution.
Such is spiritual? Yes. It arrives, first, in the glimpse, the surprise of Lawrie’s executioner’s ardor. It is apparently an option, and so off-putting that Lawrie can only state it and turn away. The hope that Lawrie might grant his son’s death when God will not I think of as malevolent. But it is also supernal, not unlike petitionary prayer. This death-dream invites a truth about what God won’t decide but will defer to us. That truth would have remained submerged had Lawrie not pushed the essay to press the desire of heaven against the ludicrousness of fate. Lawrie presses anyway. The idea is made more profound because it is succinct. The conciseness scares everyone and forces the whole responsibility for the boy’s mortality onto Lawrie’s shoulders. What’s flummoxing is that Lawrie wants what he can’t have and can do nothing about what he feels he’s steering himself to do—hasten the end of Matty’s life so Matty might have his heaven.
Pico Iyer writes, in his introduction to The Best Spiritual Writing, 2010, “Spirituality . . . arises out of the disjunction between us and the transcendent as much as out of the occasional union; it lies, as in any love affair, in the attempt to draw closer to a reality that we sense inside ourselves (though sometimes, in our uncertainty, we call it only ‘possibility’), and in our longing to live in the truth that is self-evident whenever we’re where we ought to be” (xiv).
I want to underline “disjunction”—and the longing that occurs because of it. That longing crosses desire with transcendence, what we know is there, what we can’t have, yet we want nonetheless. Spirituality is a chasm between a beckoning, absent reality and where we are stuck, yearning for that reality. Sometimes a bridge materializes and a union ensues. But, considering human complaints about fate’s unfairness, most of the time we are left wishing a union were so.
I note that Lawrie is not angry with God’s power in heaven or on earth. In fact, heaven often manifests its palliative spirit during the nighttime ritual joy of father and son at bed. It’s only the persistent reminder of “all the other things he’s been robbed of” that nettles Lawrie into a quiet rage—a rage, I should note, made more palpable because Lawrie has chosen to evoke that rage. Caveat emptor indeed.
We arrive at a dystopic vision of the supreme being, a negation modern Christian theologians call absurd. That the Maker who made me warts and all wants me fixed only in death. There’s no greater conundrum for the undeserved torture of a child. But resolving that wrong, that fate, is not Lawrie’s point. The point is to inhabit the trap of longing, which is unresolvable neither by the author nor, this terse tally tells us, by God. Lawrie can only enact the irresolution in prose.
Lawrie digs into this abyss beautifully, sensitively. He exposes his own naïveté about God, examining a childlike hope of heaven whose benevolence is forever delayed. But that who-knows-when—and soon—also justifies such hope, particularly for the father of a disabled son. How compelling to stay with his words, be soaked to the bone on his in-between-ness, which, though wide and deep and wet and frightening, may be the only bardo in which the spiritual lingers, if and when it lingers at all.
* * *
WHAT STRIKES me about the Zaleski series—why, I wonder, did it end in 2013 after fifteen years?—is that the volumes isolate, if not magnify, problems with distinguishing religious treatises from spiritual writing and, within the latter, identifying the lyric and the discursive modes, in essay and memoir, respectively, that urge an author to use one mode over another.
That magnification, which the series celebrated, is a good thing; I’m sorry it ended. However, even though I admire Zaleski’s desire to categorize the “best spiritual writing,” a superlative doesn’t mean we know what “spiritual writing” is. Perhaps that’s why the series didn’t continue—the anthologies did not sell well, “the spiritual essay” need not have a separate venue from the essay, or the literariness of the “form” is hopelessly unstable, its wildly different takes on belief and unbelief (or the hazy combination of the two) rendered best inoperative.
Let me probe this another way.
You, the writer, decide to wash the bodies of the dead in New Delhi so you can quit a decade of beer-guzzling and pot-smoking. Or you, the writer, retreat for a summer with real Navajos to real Navajo sweat lodges so you can rediscover your Native American heritage that’s been buried for years as a branch manager at Wells Fargo.
How are these essays or stories, short or long, spiritual?
You can hear the goal of each—the desire to move away from a condition where your soul is imprisoned. Or, better, to move toward activities that you suspect are soulful. Which, because of the spiritual connotation, may release that soul. But you probably also hear the danger. It’s in assuming searching leads to finding. You can’t escape the booze or the bank unless you leave and seek something new. You have to make the break. But what has happened before when you set that goal? Nine times out of ten, failure. This is the trap of trying to sentence yourself to be “more spiritual,” assigning yourself outcomes like salvation, redemption, and grace.
I know of no other way around this for the writer than through it. Lawrence’s search for the sensual oneness of being, Hughes’s search for a way to integrate his disbelief with his church community, and Lawrie’s search for a heaven-like, near-time destiny for his son’s malady—all come up short as resolution. Where they don’t come up short is discovering that writing is far more helpful for the peripatetic soul than we know.
One reason: it is possible that where models of religious security once dominated the tell, today uncertainty calls the shots. A change not in form but in content.
Maybe what matters is that each author takes a swing at the inexplicable. Maybe what matters is that with each at bat we, as readers, glimpse where the inexplicable lies in each author, that death is the end, that there is no answer to evil, that nothing will ever be resolved, that it is as good to know where you’re going as it is good to have no idea where you’re going. Maybe what matters is simple—that we don’t institutionalize the urge to write spiritually as anything other than making the most of that urge.
NOTES
1. D. H. Lawrence, “The Spinner and the Monks,” chap. 2 in Twilight in Italy (1916), in D. H. Lawrence and Italy (New York: Penguin Books, 1972). Essay runners-up from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries include “Spiritual Laws” and “The Oversoul,” by Ralph Waldo Emerson; “The Wind at Djemila” and “Death in the Soul,” by Albert Camus; “The Inner Galaxy” and “The Hidden Teacher,” by Loren Eiseley; “Fire Watch, July 4, 1952” and “Day of a Stranger,” by Thomas Merton; “The Surgeon as Priest” and “The Exact Location of the Soul,” by Richard Selzer; “Let It Go” and “god,” by Brian Doyle; “Winter Garden” and “On Intla: Snow That Has Drifted Indoors,” by Kathryn Winograd; “Fire Season” and “The Return,” by Rick Bass; “God in the Doorway” and “Singing with the Fundamentalists,” by Annie Dillard.
2. Langston Hughes, “Salvation,” in The Big Sea (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993).
