Spirituality and the Writer
Spirituality and the Writer
A Personal Inquiry
THOMAS LARSON
SWALLOW PRESS / OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS
ATHENS
Swallow Press
An imprint of Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701
© 2019 by Thomas Larson
All rights reserved
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Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8040-1212-6
Electronic ISBN: 978-0-8040-4104-1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.
To my son Blake and to the memory of my partner’s son Scott.
Contents
Religious Author, Spiritual Writer
Spirituality and the Memoirist
Writing Spiritually: A Rough Guide
Acknowledgments
First, I offer thanks to the editors of four online publications where the following essays, their material reworked for this book, first appeared in 2017: Los Angeles Review of Books, “Leo Tolstoy and the Origins of Spiritual Memoir”; Berfrois UK, “Thomas Merton and the Language of Spirituality”; Pacifica Literary Review, “The Reliably Spiritual Author”; and Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, “What I Am Not Yet, I Am.”
Next, I salute those who joined me for an AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) panel “Writing the Spiritual Memoir” in Los Angeles in 2016: Kathryn Winograd, Janice Gary, Shann Ray, and Beverly Donofrio. I also acknowledge my coparticipants on the panel “The Faithful and the Faithless” at the NonfictioNOW conference in Phoenix in 2018: Jessie van Eerden, Jenna McGuiggan, Sarah Beth Childers, and D. Gilson. I appreciate those friends and colleagues who listened to my evolving ideas, especially about the spiritual memoir, and thereby helped me clarify my often-unruly thoughts: Richard Buch, John Christianson, Linda Haas, Rosanna Hardin Hall, Steve Harvey, Richard Keith, Jane Lipman, Joe Mackall, Joan Mangan, Donald Morrill, Suzanna Neal, Jo Scott-Coe, Michael Steinberg, Sandi Wisenberg, and several MFA students at Ashland University who struggled valiantly with their own enigmas while trying to write about religious and spiritual experience.
Last, my deep regard for the crew at Ohio University Press / Swallow Press: director Gillian Berchowitz for wanting the book and wisely suggesting the final chapter; managing editor Nancy Basmajian for taking on more editorial worries about my prose than she deserved; and John Morris for his good-humored and unerring copy editing.
Religious Author, Spiritual Writer
The very best in art is too spiritual to be given directly to the senses; it must be born in the beholder’s imagination, though it must be begotten by the work of art.
—Arthur Schopenhauer
Most of us in the West know what a religion is. We know it by its myths and artifacts, its history and beliefs, its God and its texts. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, we know that old white man, Jehovah, bushy gray beard and furious scowl. We know John the Baptist, his sandals in the river, and Francis, the people’s pope, his slippers in the Vatican. We’ve stood before the Celtic cross and inside the cathedral of Rheims. We’ve seen still and moving images of mitered bishops, snake-handling evangelicals, boy preachers as young as two. We’ve imagined a monk praying in a Benedictine cell, a nun chanting Compline in a convent chapel. We’ve beheld Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece and Titian’s Madonna and Child. We’ve heard Protestant hymns and civil rights anthems, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio and Leonard Bernstein’s Mass. In Barcelona, there’s the Sagrada Familia. In Rome, St. Peter’s Square. At Holy Ghost in Harlem, the Pentecostals roll the holy up and down the aisles, while in Mexico City, pilgrims stream by the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The blood of the nailed Christ drips on our upturned heads. Whether it’s real or metaphoric doesn’t matter; we raise his suffering above all as our Lord and Savior.
Most of us know the Judeo-Christian texts—dictated documents and composed convictions whose pronouncements, parables, and punishments are decreed by God and dispensed by humankind: the Talmudic Law, the Ten Commandments, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And, though not all of us subscribe, most of us recognize religion’s brightest beam: to flock a congregation of like-minded souls who share moral convictions, ceremonies of birth, baptism, marriage, and death, as well as obeisance to a supreme being.
As much as we know that a religion is its palpable presence in the world, we cannot claim the same of faith’s capricious partner, spirituality. We know that realm—if we do at all—by its immateriality, its expressions inscrutable, transient, and inborn.
Spirit suggests a life force, a will, which Arthur Schopenhauer calls the “striving of matter,” the “eternal becoming and endless flux” of life. We don’t know for certain, but at one time spirit may have brought dead matter to life, stardust to chemistry. Spirit invites paradox almost from the get-go. Its absence from our grasp is its presence. It’s the unseen in the “evidence of things unseen.” It’s a ghost in the machine. Invisible but charged. Embryonic. Popping in unannounced. Gone in a heartbeat. The spirit-voice of the wind. The spirits in a gin and tonic. The spirt of an imp or a goblin, conjured or cast out. The spirit of our Revolution. The spirit of the 1960s. The spirit of Black Lives Matter. Spirit manifests in singers like Billie Holiday, in towns like Santa Fe, in buildings Frank Gehry designs, in the pinstripes worn by the New York Yankees. Spirit guides the Eucharist, the Day of the Dead, the Quaker meetinghouse, the cradle and the coffin maker. Even without the New Age woo-woo of Deepak Chopra, most of us know that spiritual feelings are real. Our spirits bend from elated to depressed, from songful to sorrowful. Merciless, we break the horse’s spirit; bereft, we sing a Negro spiritual. We laud the men who gave “the last full measure of devotion” at Gettysburg and honor the spirit of those dead men who live on, somehow, if only by reciting Lincoln’s matchless address.
It seems impossible to separate religion and spirituality. One reason is that the spiritual, which predates organized faith, has been appropriated, if not colonized, by the fixed doctrines, the pious rites, and the tribal sects that further a creed’s cause. Religious pioneers branded the appropriation the holy spirit, a divination for members who acquire the creed, by conversion or birth. Untold examples come to mind: the haloes encircling the heads of saints in medieval paintings, the crutch-throwing and money-soliciting circuses of televangelists, the prayers of parents who petition God to save their opiated babies and selves.
In