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.
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