Jeffrey calls “the protagonist’s experience . . . from original sin and alienation through exile, wandering, and providential intervention to a discovery and reading of the Bible, which then interprets life retrospectively, bringing about repentance, conversion, and rescue.”12
Defoe’s classic is, Jeffrey notes further, “the progenitor of the modern novel,” realistic fiction, a lie or exaggeration that tells the truth. In the uphill struggle of much spiritual narrative, whose authors create physical and moral trials they must pass, a form eventually crystallizes.
This form—which we now call the spiritual memoir—features a compelling narrative, often to an exotically new place, where a man or woman who lives by his or her wits and under the veiled grace or outright absence of God is challenged, transformed, and, on occasion, redeemed. Such works blend the “I” of the writer and his creation, the “I” of the narrator. Such works posit alternatives to, or argue with, the precepts of the author’s religion, if he or she has or has lost one. Such works unscroll a death-defying plot, perspire with detail, foreshadow harrowing events, and, when necessary, load and lengthen and hold onto their mountaintop moments of spiritual liberation with awe.
But before all that complication, there’s a middle way, which need not shepherd one’s higher love down the sticky sidewalk of one’s quotidian survival, which need not tally three hundred pages and years of intemperate searching. It’s a compromise between basin and range, between lyric and discursive—the spiritual essay.
NOTES
1. Thomas Merton: Spiritual Master; The Essential Writings, ed. Lawrence Cunningham (New York: Paulist Press, 1992), 15.
2. Some readers will recognize my paraphrase of what may be the most precise of all quotations about the writer’s craft: “A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.” William Stafford, Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer’s Vocation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1978), 17.
3. Eric A. Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).
4. Erasmus (ca. 1466–1536) translated this sentence differently: “In the beginning was the Speech.” The idea is that God spoke the Word long before his followers discovered writing, and then wrote his Word down. Speech lacks the carved-into-stone solidity that Text has. It is inescapable that so-called holy texts (aka speech acts) of Christianity and Judaism happen before writing, and yet the writing lays the groundwork for the religion’s truth claims. For my purposes, this means our interpretation of religious/spiritual writing is based more on the rhetoric of literature and less on the rhetoric of speech.
5. I am not including such post-Augustine philosopher-theologians as Peter Abelard, Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart, Søren Kierkegaard, and others, in part because the vast majority of Christian authors, including these, are theological writers. Very few chew the grit of personal narrative; they don’t sink into the personal as witness, having so few models, Augustine notwithstanding. At the same time, I acknowledge the importance of sacred-like textual and artistic monuments such as those to the “American faith.” These we might call, expanding the community, secular scripture: the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights; films like It’s a Wonderful Life and Taxi Driver; paintings like Nighthawks and Freedom from Want; and books like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, True Grit, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, of which Harriet Beecher Stowe remarked, “I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did His dictation.”
6. St. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, trans. Mirabai Starr (New York: Riverhead Books, 2002). You’ll need some backbone to read the secondhand accounts of his brutal Inquisition-blessed confinement. He was often starved and regularly lashed by the Spanish Catholic authorities. Starr labels him “Spain’s favorite poet and most confusing theologian” (xvii).
7. I suspect this is as good a spot as any to distinguish soul and spirit, words that seem interchangeable but which are not. In Webster’s New Dictionary of Synonyms (Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 1984), soul “usually suggests a relation to or a connection with a body or with a physical or material entity to which it gives life or power.” Thus the familiar verse in Matthew: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind” (22:37). Or Mark 8:36: “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul.” Soul is like a taproot of our species, as in “it often takes a war to lay bare the soul of a people.” We hunt high and low for our soulmates. We recognize from 1776 Thomas Paine’s “times that try men’s souls.” African Americans rally around soul music and soul power, The Souls of Black Folk and Soul on Ice. Countless other examples are available.
In my first few pages, I described spirit as a temperamental force. Webster’s Synonyms notes further that spirit “suggests an opposition or even an antithesis to what is physical, corporeal, or material and often a repugnance to the latter.” The poor may be “blessed in spirit” despite their poverty. Native Americans honor the Great Spirit, which connotes a kind of moral magnetism found in the Earth and from which civilized peoples stray. Even as the body wears out, the spirit survives. The spirit models itself, again from Webster’s, as “signs of excellent physical, or sometimes, mental, health as ardor, animation, energy, and enthusiasm.”
Angels and devils have no souls; it’s their spirits that do the haunting. I like this ambiguity: Spirit requires a body or a soul through which its immateriality, paradoxically, is experienced. When we “obey the spirit rather than the letter of a law,” we move beyond a prescribed action. We measure intent, apply moral leniency, and decide cases individually. Spirit is slippery and inchoate when it’s roaming, single-minded and leading the way when it’s lit.
Soul feels permanent, spirit evasive; one clothed, the other unclad. The soul is immortal. F. Scott Fitzgerald writes to try and discover the “American soul.” Joyce forges the “uncreated conscience of his race” in the “smithy of his soul.”
Spirit comes close to immortality as well. But it is often more functional, giving us vitalism, our sanguine natures, exalted emotions, and an alchemical ability to reconstitute the self or any other object it chooses to inhabit.
8. The Cloud of Unknowing, trans. Carmen Acevedo Butcher (Boston: Shambhala Books, 2009), a manuscript from the late fourteenth century by an unknown author, states that God “can be loved but not thought. By love God can be embraced and held, but not by thinking” (21). A mystic from earlier in the same century, Richard Rolle, asks what is God: “I say that thou shalt never find an answer to this question. I have not known; angels know not; archangels have not heard. Wherefore how wouldest thou know what is unknown and also unteachable?” The Fire of Love, trans. Richard Misyn, in Richard Rolle Collection (London: Aeterna Press, 2015), 56.
Scribes and scholars, however, then and now, declare that via writing and speech God is knowable because he has communicated his being partly in words, which are further sanctified by their inerrancy. Thus, there shouldn’t be much doubt that what he says he is in language, he is. Or do we just disregard this in favor of his “working in mysterious ways”? This literate and literary aspect of God’s being is, for me, central to the necessity of religious and spiritual discourse. To discuss, debate, believe, and disbelieve such being. To argue that language can’t render it is a copout.
9. T. Corbishley and J. E. Biechler, “Mysticism,” in The New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (Farmington, MI: Gale Group, 2003), 10:113.
10.
