God Help the
Spiritual Writer
By
Philip
Zaleski
(Author of The
Best Spiritual Writing, and Gifts
of the Spirit)
(reprinted
with permission from the author)
Question:
What do you think of "spiritual writing"?
Answer:
(1) My admiration is boundless. Where would we be without the Song
of Songs, Augustine's Confessions, the mystical ballads of
the Islamic poet Rumi or The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by
the haiku master Basho?
(2) 1 love Shirley, MacLaine's books. Do they count?
(3) It depends on what you mean by spiritual writing.
Devotional tracts? Religious autobiographies? Self-help guides?
New Age blather? Please define.
(4) The phrase "spiritual writing" doesn't
make sense. Writing is a visceral activity, as are all the arts. Who
ever heard of "spiritual sculpture"?
(5) I'd rather read the tax tables, thank you.
As this survey attests, spiritual writing is a
pixilated genre, manna to some, dementia to others. What I mean by
spiritual writing is 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. It is, in other
words, an omnibus term, embracing Attic Greek dialogues and
post-modern fantasy, dazzling metaphysical tracts and dreary
self-help manuals, dream workbooks, Zen cookbooks, intimate chats
with God or angels or earth spirits, neo-Hindu,
pseudo-shaman and paratantric tracts and even one or two solid
works of biblical scholarship. Spiritual writing may be confessional,
prescriptive, satirical or polemical. But it always engages that elusive
realm of human existence lying just beyond the reach of the test tube,
the opinion poll or the psychiatrist's couch, where we encounter the
great mysteries of good and evil, suffering and death, God and
salvation.
Nowadays, the genre basks in the sun. Who was
surprised to learn that what President Clinton read on his summer
vacation was The Marriage of Sense and Soul, by the New Age
philosopher Ken Wilber; that Diana, Princess of Wales, came to dote on
the writings of Mother Teresa; that in Hollywood Kabbalistic texts are
all the rage? Sales of spiritual writing easily outstrip those of other
recent non-fiction success stories, like nature or travel writing. Many
of America's gifted stylists--John Updike, Annie Dillard, Andre Dubus--are
tilling the field; in some ways, spiritual writing seems to be entering
its glory years.
But not everyone succumbs to the spell. The
intelligentsia remain notably resistant. Nothing dampens a conversation
so fast at a faculty cocktail party as the admission that one writes or
edits "spiritual" books. The scientist wanders off to check
his hamsters, the hostess departs to freshen her drink and soon one is
left with one or two wide-eyed interlocutors--the innocent young or
white-haired veterans of the New Age workshop circuit--eager for
illumination.
The reason for the stampede is certainly
understandable. For every example of good spiritual literature published
last year, 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.
Hiw did we come to such a pass? How did we move from
Isaiah to The Celestine Prophecy? From Donne's Devotions
to A Course in Miracles? From the Meditations of Marcus
Aurelius to Money Meditations for Women? Some of the reasons are
familiar: the dumbing-down of culture, the pressures of the
marketplace (one wonders what publishing niche Aquinas or Milton would
land in nowadays). More provocative, however, are causes peculiar to the
genre. The most important, perhaps, is glut.
Montaigne observed that "there are few men who
dare publish to the world the prayers they make to almighty God."
Our ideas about reticence, modesty and shame have done an
about-face since the 16th century; as the torrent of spiritual
autobiography today indicates, it's de rigueur to expose one's
inner life, preferably between hard covers. Feeding this exhibitionism
is the odd circumstance that spiritual writing allows amateurs to claim
professional status. A few years ago, when I worked as executive editor
on a quarterly journal of comparative religion, I spent an inordinate
amount of time fending off strangers who would wander into my office
unannounced bearing hefty manuscripts with titles like Answer to
Buddha or The Last Tablet: The Secrets of the Bible
Unlocked." It's difficult to imagine a tyro publishing a book
on medical procedures or economic-theory, yet something comparable
occurs with uncomfortable frequency in the world of spiritual
publishing. Here one finds the bright-eyed divinity school student who
"journals" her way into print. Here one finds the overzealous
academic who creates a sensation by arguing that Mary Magdalene was
really Jesus' wife. And here one finds the famous novelist or critic who
churns out one quirky religious tract after another.
A second reason for the woes of spiritual writing is
the hostile secular tone of the dominant culture until the mid-1960's;
not many good writers wanted to work in a genre with a siege mentality.
As Western culture regains Its religious roots, change has come, but
it's not entirely change for the better. Now religion is in a state of
ferment, with eclectic spiritual movements, revitalized orthodoxies and
shrinking mainline denominations battling for adherents. The result is a
Wild West atmosphere, marked by reckless scholarship, flamboyant
theorizing and a penchant for goofy New Age formulations and
watered-down or sexed-up presentations of traditional faith.
The third--and to my mind most fascinating reason for
the current crisis is that spiritual writing is, by its very nature,
trapped in a paradox. My desktop dictionary defines
"spiritual" as "not tangible or material"--that is
to say, beyond sense impressions and perhaps ineffable. Here's what one
of our greatest spiritual writers has to say on the subject:
This is thy hour 0 Soul, thy free
flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased,
the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent,
gazing,
pondering the themes thou lovest best,
Night, sleep, death and the stars.
Walt Whitman got it right in A Clear Midnight: the
soul thrives best when away from words. But words are all writers have.
This isn't a new problem, of course; over the centuries, a vast
metaphorical and philosophical lexicon has been developed to describe
the indescribable, with the soaring language of the King James Bible and
the via negativa of medieval scholastics leading the way. Alas,
today all but the best spiritual writers ignore these riches, settling
instead for vague abstractions or for reducing spirituality to
psychotherapy. Too often, the eternal search for God becomes, in Joseph
Campbell's narcissistic reworking, "Follow your bliss."
What can be done to in sure the integrity of
spiritual writing? To begin, it should be produced--and
sampled—more sparingly. Readers might bear in mind the advice of the
12th-century Confucian sage Chu Hsi, that we would do well to
limit ourselves to half a page of attentive reading per day. Such a pro
gram would soon ease the glut and raise readerly acumen to boot. The
main burden, however, falls on writers. Scholars need to write for a
wider public, instead of abandoning popularization to clueless amateurs;
the literati need to cultivate humility, grounding themselves in the
traditions about which they write; all of us should heed Nietzsche's
admonition that "to improve one's style means to improve one's
thoughts and nothing else; he who does not admit this immediately will
never be, convinced of it." Above all, we should remember that,
contra Campbell, great spiritual writing springs from struggling against
oneself and against one's times. Consider
the origins of modern English spiritual prose: a man trapped in dire
poverty, hounded by adversaries, languishing in prison, sits down one day
in his cramped cell and writes the glorious first sentence of The
Pilgrim's Progress" "As I walked through the
wilderness-of this world, I lighted on a certain place, where
was a den; and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and as I slept I
dreamed a dream."
John Bunyan's dream awakened a new genre, whose
possibilities have yet to be fully explored.
