Were the science essaying of Raymo’s books better known! For example, Honey from Stone: A Naturalist’s Search for God (1987) plumbs the physicist’s year spent communing with nature on a peninsula, geologically and ornithologically alive, in western Ireland: “If I am to encounter God, it must be as the ground for ‘things seen.’ If I am to encounter mystery, it must be within the interstices of ‘things known’” (112).
12. Oxford Guide to Ideas and Issues in the Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 296–97.
The 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.
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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
