hollow that awakens the writer’s conscience. Reverse salvation—that which is presumed to ground his life, the weight of the Old Rugged Cross, he discovers he has no desire to lug. But that’s not the point. The point is, how does he, how do we live with ourselves if we protect others from knowing what we genuinely feel?
It is not odd that the writer admits his strength as a failure: that’s part of the confessional tradition. But it is odd to have learned a kind of doublespeak that shielded those good gospel women who raised and loved him from his disbelief, women to whom he could only disclose, while young, his apostate identity except in the guise of telling the truth—showing he was saved when he wasn’t and wouldn’t be.
* * *
HUGHES’S SPIRITUAL pivot comes from an artist whose sensibility our culture has deftly fitted him with. To live loyally, to be indoctrinated into a religious community, is the lot of the child whose “participation” is typically no more than an accident of birth. In charismatic or Baptist-style congregations (compare James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain) reside the public means to—and a performance of—salvation. You are how you conform to your church; you are not how the church conforms to you. But despite this tilt, Hughes upholds his individuality, if stealthily and deceptively, within the community, which is the lot of the adult observer, the later-assessing writer.
For Hughes, such hiding in plain sight, enduring ambiguity, is best suited to the internal personal drama of the tale. There, the reader is prodded to interpret motives and decisions without the author’s interference, though sometimes such authorial guidance does appear. There, the writer avoids—should avoid—the overt preaching or teaching rhetoric of religious tracts and devotional formulae.
In a word, Hughes’s spirituality is his character. The conflicting motives are remarkable. Consider, first, that Jesus got Langston to go to the front of the church; consider, second, that Langston went up there of his own free will because, Jesus having failed to nudge him and the church demanding he conform, he strolled up on his own. The first posits a truth that wisely directs our behavior from the outside, though it’s also thought of as an inner push or conscience; the second posits that the source is enigmatic at best because it can be contrived or, in certain people, managed because painful consequences come to those who mess with the sanctimony others, chiefly members of one’s family, hold dear. That Hughes conveys the subtlety of both with such a simple narrative is, as I say, uncanny.
What’s more, he conveys an even stronger ambiguity, which I call flawed reliability. No story is wholly good or bad, so the deconstructionists have taught us, and no author can be wholly credible. All confession is, in part, unreliable. In fiction and nonfiction,3 modern writers build characters with stark fallibility if they wish readers to trust their creations as sharing our culture’s doubt and delusion. A character—think Humbert Humbert, testifying at his trial, in Lolita—has to engage with his reliability as his story. With “Salvation,” the fallibility of young Langston’s conviction is everywhere present in the story. The piece discloses the constant skirmish he has with church rules. His family and Westley, in particular, do not see what we do: that going up front is a success and a failure.
And there’s something even bigger. Trust. The reader’s trust. I trust Hughes because he seems to say that an individual’s salvation cannot be known by other people and, in like manner, requires some of that unknowingness from the author. In other words, it’s easy to fake salvation for a crowd of born-agains, but it’s even easier to fake it for oneself. I trust those who show me how fallible the teller of the tale might be. How can anyone know—leaving aside gospel women and preachers and the public spectacle of testifying—whether one is saved? How does coming to the front of the church during the high drama of an evangelical threshing salvationally guarantee that when you die the pearly gates will open? You will be saved in the moment as, apparently, all the little lambs that day were “saved,” even the tricksters, Westley and Langston. But the question-inviting and begging of such theater is the legacy.
Anyone can conjure the “evidence” of things unseen—ghosts and spirits and highways to heaven. But when writers develop their narrator’s psychology, they present competing evidence as well. While things are unseen, they are also seen for their unseenness, if you will, for their unreliability. Indeed, Hughes defers to the complicated knowingness of the child. Just as the church community tricks children into public testament—heed the call and let the Lord in—the child, in his honesty, divulges where the rabbit is hidden. Saying that makes him a reliable witness to the deception.
(Deconstruction is not easy.)
The child, Langston, is saved by the truth that he wasn’t saved. He lies to himself and then refuses to tell the lie to his family until many years later, nearing forty, when he finally opens and owns up in The Big Sea. There, the family, if they’ve read the story, may have learned that faith is not merely a matter of raw belief. It is a matter of tenacious conscience. We like to think that publicly witnessed religious conviction is by nature preferable to privately witnessed disbelief. Don’t be misled, Hughes argues. If the faith is in anything, it is in the child’s instinctual ability to handle paradox and, with it so handled, be at peace with it.
* * *
BOTH LAWRENCE and Hughes maximize the literary impact of their evanescent 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