Passion & obedience.

The Best American Spiritual Writing 2004

Edited by Philip Zaleski Introduction by Jack Miles

Houghton Mifflin, $14, 304 pp.

I think of myself as religious but not spiritual. Partial to the sensuous, communal, and cerebral forms of ritual and text, I've always considered "spirituality" too ethereal and invertebrate a way of being. So I was heartened to learn from Jack Miles's introduction to this fine and sometimes magnificent collection that, for him too, spirituality has "some of the same baggage as mommy." (Moving from his Jesuit schooling through Buddhist experiment to Episcopal communion, Miles's brief spiritual memoir is itself among the notables.) But it's baggage that he and the contributors clearly want to unpack, not discard.

Arranged alphabetically by author, and assorted nimbly by genre, subject, and mood, this collection has, thankfully, no discernible "message," "lesson," or "point of view," and the very best pieces resist the clumsy and distrustful impulse to Spell It Out. Indeed, if what editor Philip Zaleski asserts in his brief but elegant foreword is true, such restraint is a literary and a moral virtue. Great spiritual writing marks a felicitous intersection of aesthetics and ethics, a victory over the cardinal sins of "mediocrity in one's work" and "mediocrity in one's self." That makes a reviewer's task trickier--how then does one criticize a spiritual work without berating the author?--but it fuses art and soul in a way that Augustine and Oscar Wilde would find convincing.

What mediocrity there is in this volume is for the most part aesthetic or intellectual. Seyyed Nasr rightly but abstrusely laments science's inability to fit consciousness into nature. (He does take a nice shot at Teilhard de Chardin, a charlatan who can't be ridiculed too often, I think.) Robert Coles's sketch about his fifth-grade teacher is tiresomely didactic. In the stalest of the lot, novelist David James Duncan brays against the depredations of reason and science. (Nature, Duncan "holds," is a "divine manuscript." Now there's a fresh metaphor.) There's the occasional but notable fall from grace, as when, in an otherwise keen meditation on "The Green-Eyed Monster," Joseph Epstein lapses into neocon cant when attributing anti-Americanism to "envy, much of it rancorous."

Zaleski himself commits an editorial sin against ecumenical etiquette. Judaism and Christianity are duly represented, Hinduism and especially Zen Buddhism receive honorable mention, but Islam gets no space whatsoever. When even secularity gets a spot (Patricia Monaghan's essay on the aftermath of her husband's death is an intelligent and moving reflection on the nature and probability of miracles), I don't think it mere political correctness to object that Islam's absence is a serious oversight.

If there's mediocrity of self in this collection, it's in computer scientist David Gelertner's petulant essay on Judaism. (Though there's no mediocrity of wit: modern attempts to reject God but retain morality are, Gelertner writes, like thinking that "you can close your bank account and keep writing checks.") In case you didn't know, "the Jewish nation is the senior nation of the Western world, by rights its spiritual leader"--a bellow of hubris worthy of Commentary, the bastion of Zionism gone rancid. Gelertner is as facile as he is grandiose, rehashing sophomore caricatures of medieval peasants professing Christianity "uncritically and without thinking." And how Christianity can be a "Jewish invention" and yet "fundamentally different in character," it would take the most subtle and tendentious logician to clarify. (At least Marcionism had the virtue of clarity.) Oh for the days of Martin Buber and Abraham Heschel. Still, these mediocrities fade next to the best pieces. The poetry is especially well chosen, ranging in tone and scope from the quotidian to the majestic. A moth flies into a man's ear at the start of Robert Cording's bizarre verse, and on "one ordinary evening of unnoticed pleasures" an insensible suburbanite becomes "suddenly a pilgrim / On the shore of an unexpected world." Allen Hoey's "Essay on Snow" dotes on its subject in an aptly meandering and crystalline way, almost convincing me that the best way to go through life is to "drift like a snowflake in the world." In a short and powerful elegy to her son, killed in war, Sarah Ruden looks coldly and faithfully on a world now deprived of his presence. "What can be finished that You do?" And while Scott Cairns is only half right that the "Holy City bides within the heart"--surely there are precincts outside as well--he concludes with Augustinian grandeur that our privilege and desire is to "greet his City's boundless sweep, and see."

Several writers look to the natural world, and the best avoid the temptation to romanticize. Without a trace of sentimentality, Rick Bass opens the volume with a wonderfully observed meditation on the epiphanies afforded by the Texas landscape. Unless we inhabit or remember such places of grace, "our spirits become as barren as a wash or gully." Yet if Bass finds a quasi-sacramental sustenance in nature, Sallie Tisdale sees despair and oblivion in the impending extinction of elephants. Seen in much of mythology as strong and graceful pillars of the earth--"God's most amazing dream"--the disappearance of these lumbering angels will make "the world, bereft ... sink of its own weight, out of sight."

For me, the most absorbing pieces link spiritual reflection and cultural criticism. In an alarming essay on designer genetics, Bill McKibben urges us to avert, while and if we can, a coming "biological arms race" fueled by vanity and power lust. McKibben sketches the latest strategy in class reproduction and conflict: the accumulation of genetic capital. Devoted to life, liberty, and the pursuit of exchange value, the new bourgeoisie, determined to get the Best for Our Children, have turned parenting into "product development." Plato's Guardians meet Huxley's Alphas. ("You want to give your child the edge no matter what," one parent says with neo-Malthusian affection.) "No dictator anywhere," McKibben writes, "has ever tried to rule his subjects with as much attention to detail as the average modern parent." Don't tell me, after reading this piece, that we don't need another youth rebellion.

If McKibben highlights pride and avarice, R. R. Reno contends that the most corrosive vice of our age is sloth, spiritual apathy, what the monks called "the noonday devil" of acedia. In the most subtle and incisive piece in the collection, Reno argues that "the great innovation of modern culture was the promise of progress without spiritual discipline." Spoonfed on irony, put off by passion, and terrified by pain and suffering, we elevate an ideal of "critical distance" and instrumental reason that lames and even deadens our capacities for commitment, discipline, and necessary, intelligent discrimination. "We want to be free ... to be ourselves," regardless of how boring and narcissistic a spectacle that usually turns out to be. Only a "frenzied fervor," sparked and sustained by prayer and sacrament, can overcome the vice of mediocrity. While I actually wish more people these days displayed some critical intelligence--of which, I might note, Reno's own essay is a masterly example--his piece reminds us that the sharpest and most effective criticism always derives from some prior passion and obedience.

Eugene McCarraher's essay on Augustine and imperialism is included in Anxious about Empire (Brazos).