Best Spiritual Writing: 1998.

HarperSan Francisco, $15, 352 pp.

Michael O. Garvey

It's a safe bet that Thomas Merton will never be proclaimed a Doctor of the Church, but for many of her children, and certainly for me, he will always be at least one of our very best chiropractors. Monsignor William Shannon's solicitous introduction to the splendid fiftieth anniversary edition of Merton's autobiography carries some anxious admonitions about how the occasionally triumphalistic tone of the prose and the somewhat less than fully ecumenical outlook might perplex us sophisticated children of Vatican II. True, true, and Huckleberry Finn has racial slurs, and Mississippi Fred McDowell's lyrics are sexist, and Macbeth is violent. What Merton called "dry, outlandish technical compounds that the scholastic philosophers were so prone to use" do occasionally creep into this narrative, and from time to time he seems to be as tolerant of silly ultramontane rectitude as he will later be of silly theological extravagance. So what? This is a great adventure story, a book that comes roaring at you and beating its chest. Much like its author, it will always slightly offend, it will always resist sprucing up, and it will never be made entirely respectable. The Seven Storey Mountain is a treasure of the church.

Merton's barnacled and unwieldy classic is familiar to most Commonweal readers, and the particulars of his tumultuous journey from a faded medieval southern France through a moribund prewar England to an edgy prewar New York and finally to the high ground of Gethsemani need not be recounted here. It is an ancient story, the only Christian story, really, about the relentlessness of the Father of Jesus and the inescapability of his love: A young man is mesmerized by his own power and intoxicated by pure possibility, and he attempts to possess himself and his universe. Living solely for the satisfaction of his own appetites, he gradually becomes their slave, and he encounters disaster after disaster, and tries anesthetic after anesthetic. He despairs of himself, finally, and then God rescues him. Anyone who spends any time around Jesus knows, and on some level lives the same story, but Merton transformed the tale of the prodigal son into a literary thriller - jazzed up, powerfully narrated, and as impossible to put down now as it must have been a half century ago.

However much Merton may have grown as a monk and a man in the years between the publication of The Seven Storey Mountain and his death in Bangkok, I don't think he grew much as a writer at all. Which is to say that this, the book that launched his paradoxical career as a celebrity of self-abandonment, is every bit as absorbing a read as Seeds of Contemplation, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, or the Asian Journals. The whole bagful of contradictions is on display right from the beginning. Everything that will delight and exasperate Merton readers for the rest of the century is here: the searing self-scrutiny, the occasionally apodictic tone, the wisecracking, the vaulting lyricism, the piercing remembrance, the self-deprecation, and the showing off. He thinks nothing of hopping on top of his narrative for some absolutely corny exclamation like "France, I am glad I was born in your land!" or ""Oakham! Oakham!" (addressing that awful English boarding school in which he underwent too much of his adolescence) or "New York, you are mine! I love you!" But only a very brave writer, only a writer's writer, can write so badly, and precisely such excess and audacity give rise to some wonderful passages, too, like this one about one of many illusory fresh starts before his conversion:

October is a fine and dangerous season in America. It is dry and cool and the land is wild with red and gold and crimson, and all the lassitudes of August have seeped out of your blood, and you are full of ambition. It is a wonderful time to begin anything at all. You go to college and every course in the catalogue looks wonderful. The names of the subjects seem to lay open the way to a new world. Your arms are full of new, clean notebooks, waiting to be filled. You pass through the doors of the library and the smell of thousands of well-kept books makes your head swim with a clean and subtle pleasure. You have a new hat, a new sweater, perhaps, or a whole new suit. Even the nickels and the quarters in your pocket feel new, and the buildings shine in the glorious sun.

I will always love Merton for remembering those notebooks, that sweater, those nickels and quarters. Annie Dillard, another writer's writer, insists that to write well is to "spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now." That impetuosity guarantees a sort of gallantry to Merton's prose, transforming its flaws into something like wounds received in honorable combat.

Nevertheless, if the appeal of The Seven Storey Mountain were merely literary, it would be more a curiosity than a classic. It is, first and foremost, an absolutely sincere account of a man overwhelmed by grace, and its freshness after fifty years might say more about Our Lord than about Merton. There are, after all, contributors to Philip Zaleski's collection whose prose is every bit as good as, and, in some cases, better than Merton's. Come to think of it, nothing by Annie Dillard is among these pieces of the best spiritual writing of 1998. She must have been idle last year.

It's said that the theologian who first distinguished between mortal and venial sin is probably in hell. I sometimes hope that infernal space has also been reserved for the scholar who first isolated and sought to define "spirituality." That's probably too harsh, but "spirituality," like "spiritual writing" is, at best, moderately useful as a category. In Zaleski's anthology, for example, great spiritual writing is "prose or poetry that addresses, in a matter both profound and beautiful, the workings of the spirit." This reminds me of a wonderful bumper sticker I saw the other day which read, "I like cool stuff."

Now there's certainly nothing wrong with cool stuff, and Zaleski's collection has plenty of it. But mountain climbing with Thomas Merton can make a reader impatient with even the most picturesque hills. Remembering a miserable time shortly after his conversion, Merton quotes God's admonition to the Israelites, "For the Land which thou goest to possess is not like the land of Egypt," and observes that he had "made the terrible mistake of entering the Christian life as if it were merely the natural life invested with a kind of supernatural mode by grace." He gradually - and fearfully - learned that God was terribly more than some mere guarantor of meaning.

Some of the very gifted writers Zaleski presents seem to approach "the workings of the spirit" with a similar naivete, and produce something more like belles lettres than "spiritual writing." A gaseous essay by Thomas Moore, for instance, launches a sort of relativistic balloon flight from Botticelli's Primavera, through some cloudy ruminations on the cleavage between the natural and spiritual worlds, and pretty memories of an Irish coast and reflections on the monks who lived there long ago before landing the reader ever so softly on a suggestion that we ought to appreciate nature. Another, by Joseph Epstein, leads an edifyingly erudite pirouette before concluding that it's gosh darn hard to know just what the "the good life" means.

But there are some fine pieces here, too. In "God's Love on a Darkling Plain," Barry Lopez brings together a stark depiction of a tundra landscape with a painful meditation on Original Sin. Rabbi Marc Gellman's splendid sermon, "What Are You Looking For?" is the first truly unsentimental consideration of angels to appear for a long time. And a week-long retreat could be based on "Love in the Morning," Andre Dubus's deceptively quotidian description of weekday Mass.

What the best of these writers have in common with Merton is an awareness of their paradoxical plight. Their work as writers requires boldness in the face of a blank page, but they are hunting God, and hunters are God's quarry. No wonder they're all a little nutty. God bless them.

Michael O. Garvey is the author of Finding Fault (Thomas More Press).