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.
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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
