Spirituality and the Writer. Thomas Larson

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.

      One reason: it is possible that where models of religious security once dominated the tell, today uncertainty calls the shots. A change not in form but in content.

      Maybe what matters is that each author takes a swing at the inexplicable. Maybe what matters is that with each at bat we, as readers, glimpse where the inexplicable lies in each author, that death is the end, that there is no answer to evil, that nothing will ever be resolved, that it is as good to know where you’re going as it is good to have no idea where you’re going. Maybe what matters is simple—that we don’t institutionalize the urge to write spiritually as anything other than making the most of that urge.

      NOTES

      1. D. H. Lawrence, “The Spinner and the Monks,” chap. 2 in Twilight in Italy (1916), in D. H. Lawrence and Italy (New York: Penguin Books, 1972). Essay runners-up from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries include “Spiritual Laws” and “The Oversoul,” by Ralph Waldo Emerson; “The Wind at Djemila” and “Death in the Soul,” by Albert Camus; “The Inner Galaxy” and “The Hidden Teacher,” by Loren Eiseley; “Fire Watch, July 4, 1952” and “Day of a Stranger,” by Thomas Merton; “The Surgeon as Priest” and “The Exact Location of the Soul,” by Richard Selzer; “Let It Go” and “god,” by Brian Doyle; “Winter Garden” and “On Intla: Snow That Has Drifted Indoors,” by Kathryn Winograd; “Fire Season” and “The Return,” by Rick Bass; “God in the Doorway” and “Singing with the Fundamentalists,” by Annie Dillard.

      2. Langston Hughes, “Salvation,” in The Big Sea (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993).