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The Best American Spiritual Writing 2004

By Philip Zaleski

Houghton Mifflin Company

Copyright © 2004 Philip Zaleski
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780618443031
Introduction

"Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?" And calling to him a child,
he put him in the midst of them, and said, "Truly I say to you, unless you turn
and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of
heaven."
— Matthew 18:2–4

By now the word spirituality ought not embarrass me, but like the
word mommy, it still does. Mommy has its place and, especially, its
time; but we cringe a bit, don"t we, when we hear an adult unselfconsciously
say, "Mommy phoned this morning." The word is out
of place, or past its time. Adults don"t talk that way. Or shouldn"t.
Or so we think. Perhaps adults suf?ciently serene in their adulthood
do not blush at mommy. But because spirituality is a word that I
?rst heard in a little world that shaped me as powerfully as a second
family, a world that I left behind only after a struggle, this word carries
for me some of the same baggage as mommy. The contributions
to this year"s Best Spiritual Writing are varied, authentic, engaging,
and repeatedly surprising, yet for me, I confess, they summon up
the memory of a time when spirituality and adulthood seemed antithetical.
I was introduced to spirituality at the age of fourteen as a brother
in the devotional fraternity called the sodality (from the Latin
sodalis, companion) that was a part of life at all Jesuit secondary
schools. Starting in freshman year, we sodalists were introduced to
the school of spirituality called Ignatian — techniques of prayer
and meditation developed by Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the
Society of Jesus (the Jesuits). Back in 1956, our initiation into men-
tal prayer, as the beginner"s exercise in Ignatian spirituality was then
called, began in much the same way an introduction to Pilates
training might now — that is, in a group and under the direction
of a trainer.

The ?rst step, once we had gathered in the chapel at the appointed
hour, was the recitation of one of the Roman Catholic
prayers that we all knew by heart. This in itself created a mild sense
of fraternity, relocated us, and brought us to a kind of preliminary
focus. The second step was a minute or two of silence. The third
step was the instruction "Place yourself in the presence of God,"
about which more below. The fourth step was another interlude of
silence — still brief, but a little longer than the ?rst one. The ?fth
step was the leader"s presentation in a ?ve-minute talk of a subject
suitable for meditation. A typical subject would be Christ"s prayer
during his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane: "Father, if it be
possible, let this cup pass from me, but not my will but thine be
done." The priest — the leader was always a priest on the faculty of
the school — might evoke darkness, the chill of the night, the danger,
and so forth, and direct our attention to Christ"s honesty and
his courage. Then would begin the sixth step in the exercise, the
central period of silence or mental prayer proper. Rather than asking
God for something, mental prayer was simply thinking about
something in the presence of God and awaiting what might ensue
within the mind. After the lapse of nearly ?fty years, I cannot recall
the exit formula — there was one — that was spoken after perhaps
?fteen minutes to signal the end of the central exercise. Coming
out of mental prayer felt a bit like awakening from hypnosis. Returned
to ourselves, we recited a concluding prayer in unison and
tramped out of the chapel for the rest of the school day.
What transpires in the minds of fourteen-year-old boys instructed
to place themselves in the presence of God? Twenty years
later, a friend"s son told us of a study allegedly proving that sixteen-year-
olds experience a sex-related thought every thirty seconds. My
friend was surprised. I was not. And to me, the chapel at St.
Ignatius High School was, in memory, the place where I seemed
most aware of the intervals. Yet I testify that the command "Place
yourself in the presence of God" produced a shift of consciousness
that the succession of tumescence and detumescence did not undermine.

Did we even believe in God? At one point in John Updike"s ?rst
novel, The Centaur, an inspired high school teacher is preaching —
no other verb will quite do — the grand sweep of evolution from
the Big Bang to the rise of human consciousness. The novelist directs
our attention to a boy in a back seat whose gross sex-preoccupation
seems to undercut the nobility of the lecture. But behind
the character in the novel, there broods the novelist himself.
Updike is a Christian inspired in spite of himself by this godless vision.
Were he an atheist, he would be inspired in spite of himself by
the Christian vision. The text of belief and unbelief seems so often
to read like a giant palindrome.

Rather than by the Christian vision per se, I myself was entranced
by the esprit de corps of the Jesuit order. Over a ten-year period beginning
with my eighteenth year, the Jesuits turned me into an intellectual
of sorts, but they ?rst turned me into a fellow Jesuit
through two full years of an intense initiation into Ignatian spirituality.
This was an experience that, as I would later conclude, reversed
my normal movement from adolescence to adulthood and
turned me, powerfully albeit temporarily, from an adolescent back
into a child. And though I was, to say the least, confused and embarrassed
by the reversal, I return to it in memory with a kind of
longing.

A month after entering the order, I was led through the Spiritual
Exercises of St. Ignatius — a month of silence interrupted by only a
few hours of conversation every six or seven days. For the remainder
of that two-year novitiate, I rose at ?ve every morning and meditated
in silence for an hour at a desk provided with a kneeler before
walking silently to the chapel for Mass and then from the
chapel to the refectory for a silent breakfast. My life included no
television, no radio, no newspapers or magazines, and no reading
material other than books on, what else, spirituality. All my needs
— food, shelter, clothing, health care, recreation, and companionship
— were provided for. In all those regards, I had, as never since
early childhood, literally nothing to worry about; and for long minutes
— in the chapel, for example, after the morning"s meditation
had ended but before daily Mass began — nothing to think about,
either. And I began to like it that way. Against the predictions of
some, I began to like having nothing on my mind.

Besides practicing Ignatian meditation every morning, a novice
attended more general lectures on Christian spirituality. One
learned about the history of monasticism and about the various
schools of spirituality. One read classics in the related literature.
One learned of the via purgativa, the via contemplativa, and, for the
sainted few, the via unitiva. As beginners, we were on the via
purgativa. Purgative asceticism — fasting, mild (and closely controlled)
self-?agellation, and the use of the "discipline," a kind of
barbed bracelet worn for an hour or two around the thigh —
would help us get started.

Did it take? It is easy to answer that it did not. By divers paths,
most of those who started out with me to become Jesuits are now
ex-Jesuits. But, yes, something did take, though not in the way I
once thought it did. Novitiate life, often silent and solemn, was not
always so; and this matters more in retrospect than it did at the
time. A Jesuit of the generation before mine entitled his memoir of
Jesuit training I"ll Die Laughing. I have never, before or since,
laughed with such abandon as I did during those two years. Nor
have I ever lived so physical a life, a life of sports played to such joyous
exhaustion. Never before or since have I lived a life in which so
many hours were spent exuberantly out-of-doors or in which I
seemed to feel the passing of the seasons in every pore of my skin.
As for sex, though I know now that others have other tales to tell,
my experience during those ?rst two years consisted entirely in
noctural emissions: never a dalliance with another boy, never an
act of masturbation. We were given three rules to follow: tactus
(Latin for "touch"), the rule forbidding us to touch one another
(tagging in tag football or collisions in basketball or handball were
exceptions to the rule); "particular friendship," a rule that, in effect,
meant that we were to strive to treat all the brethren with
equal affection; and "custody of the eyes" — that is, no "meaningful"
gazing. These three rules, which at my novitiate seemed to be
strictly observed, preserved chastity pretty effectively. But in effect
they made us act as if we had yet to enter puberty; and in saying
this, I return to the troubling question with which I began. Must
one become a child to enter the kingdom of heaven?

At Harvard in the turmoil of the late 1960s, still a Jesuit but now a
Harvard graduate student as well, I awoke one morning to an
oddly frightening thought: I could not recall when I had last had a
wet dream. Why should this matter? I asked myself. After all, I had
taken a vow of celibacy. The answer that came — not instantaneously
but quickly enough — was that I had not authentically renounced
sex but only, somehow, inde?nitely postponed it. When
vowing celibacy, I had unconsciously made (to use a phrase from
Jesuit casuistry) a mental reservation. But I had pronounced my
vows all of eight years earlier. Time was ?eeting! Though I was only
twenty-seven, the physical change I had noticed was enough to
send a simple but chilling message: I would not be forever young.
And from that morning on, something began to unravel.
Ignatius Loyola built his spiritual exercises around the transformation
that he had brought about in himself while recovering
from a crippling war injury. But at the time of this transformation,
the charismatic Basque had behind him years of life as a courtier
and as a soldier. He had fathered a child. A novice in the spiritual
life, he was anything but a sexual novice. But could the regimen
that turned this sexually experienced if not, in fact, somewhat
debauched courtier into a monk be imposed on virginal Irish-
American boys to the same transformative effect? What was there
to transform?

In the 1960s, younger American Jesuits had already begun to object
that traditional Jesuit training infantilized them. But for the
sexual sharpening of that point and its linkage to Ignatius himself,
I am indebted not to them but to a Jewish classmate at Harvard.
Jeremy (as I will call him) was one of surprisingly few Jews who
brought no rabbinical training and no Jewish religious commitment
with them into Harvard"s Hebrew Bible program. His path to
the Tanakh had led not from any yeshiva but rather from an undergraduate
love affair with Israeli Hebrew as a rapidly evolving literary
language. Jeremy read the dense Hebrew prose of S. Y. Agnon
for pleasure and, to universal amazement, without a dictionary. His
prickly manner with the religious Jews in our classes presaged a battle
that he would join only later, but it is always easier to see another"s
humpback. When it came to Catholicism, Jeremy had an
unforced, intuitive, sympathetic, and in the end quite correct understanding
of what was eating at his Jesuit classmates.

Jeremy was a good friend, and I remember him fondly. All the
same, I blushed hot when he made his historical/sociological observation.
He was gentle, he was wry, but I was morti?ed anyway.

One way to state the human condition, I submit, is to assert that for
our species meaningless sex is impossible. However mere we would
like mere sex to be, some sort of meaning always crowds in on it.
Sex can represent strength, youth, beauty, health, love, safety, consolation,
wealth, power, transcendence, oblivion, escape — a list
that any reader of this sentence can lengthen. For me, at that time
in my life, it represented adulthood. I could not begin to be an
adult, I thought, until I ceased to be a virgin. It was sexual experience
that separated the men from the boys, and I was still, in a
painfully unbecoming sense of the phrase, just one of the boys.
As this transitus got under way, the Society of Jesus and everything
I had learned about spirituality in my speci?cally Jesuit training
came to seem part of an embarrassingly prolonged boyhood. It
mattered not a little that in the 1960s the word spirituality, ubiquitous
in Roman Catholic piety, was still rare in Protestant, Jewish,
and secular discourse. The difference of dialect mattered because
at just this time, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council and of
the election of John F. Kennedy, American Catholics as a population
were emerging self-consciously and awkwardly from their
socioreligious ghetto and looking to take their natural place in the
larger American society. To use the word spirituality was, for me, to
ring the leper"s bell: Catholic! Catholic! Worse, it was to hint at an
appalling defect of masculinity: spirituality as the chaste seminarian"s
substitute for physicality. I felt like Hester Prynne wearing a V
for Virgin instead of an A for Adulteress.

When I wrote my Jesuit superior in Chicago (though studying at
Harvard, I belonged to the Chicago "province" of the order), he
wrote back asking if I had discussed with my spiritual director a request
for dismissal from the Society. (A Jesuit who wanted to depart
on good terms did not just quit or walk out; he requested dismissal.)
The man"s question was perfectly honorable and reasonable
within the assumptions of the order, and I recognized it as
such. Yet spiritual director prompted the same sort of wince that spirituality
prompted. What would people think — the people I wanted
to meet, the people I wanted to think me one of them — if they
knew I had something called a spiritual director? At some emotional
level, it was as if a young man, planning to go abroad, were to
notify his father tersely of his intentions and hear back solicitously,
"But have you talked this over with Mommy?"

Yet consultation with a spiritual director was a step that I felt conscience-
bound to take. If this was to be a divorce, and that seemed
pretty likely, I wanted it to be an amicable divorce. Giving spiritual
direction a chance constituted good faith in the secular sense of
the phrase. To my good fortune, I found my way to a brilliant and
rather worldly Jesuit philosopher, then a scholar in residence at a
posh psychiatric clinic in the Berkshires. An afternoon with him, as
the snow deepened outside, effectively became my exit interview
from the order. In memory, the soundtrack for the long drive back
to Boston is James Taylor"s "Sweet Baby James," a song mysteriously
about adulthood and rock-a-bye infancy, not to speak of the
Berkshires, Boston, snowy December, and an un?nished journey to
an unknown destination.

Adulthood is a meaning that sexual experience can bear at most
only brie?y and once. As a transition to adulthood, losing one"s virginity
is rather like disembarking from a ship. Once one is ashore,
even if one is the last to disembark, one is ashore for good. The
thing is done. But in my case, as it happens, other meanings followed
on apace.

Not long after leaving the order and the church as well, I began
to read a good deal about Buddhist meditation. I attended a number
of lectures and began to meditate regularly. I found appealing,
even consoling, the doctrine of anatta, according to which the self
is an illusion, a transitory event "co-dependently originated" from
multiple starting points. I found plausible the claim that the illusion
of self is preserved only in normal consciousness, wherein
arises normal desire, the origin of all pain, and that liberation is
accomplished by "the slaying of the mind," vividly pictured as a
hyperactive monkey hopping from branch to branch. Unlike Jesuit
meditation, Buddhist meditation is not an attempt to think
seriously and at length about something such as Jesus" agony in
Gethsemane but rather an attempt to kill the monkey — to halt
ordinary thinking altogether and subside into a protracted precognitional
or extra-cognitional state. The Buddhist-inspired exercises
that I undertook at this time produced an effect that seemed
different from but experientially just as real as the more familiar Jesuit
effect of placing myself in the presence of God. But what I
found most arresting was the fact that the brief periods (only some
minutes in duration) during which I seemed to achieve what was
referred to as mindfulness resembled nothing so much as the sense
of mental emptiness that I had by then experienced during peak
moments in sexual intercourse.

It was only years later that I learned of vajrayana Buddhism and
the cosmology behind ego-obliterating tantric sex. The Los Angeles
County Museum of Art is home to the Heeramoneck collection
of Tibetan art, including a stunning array of esoteric mandalas
portraying ecstatic divine copulation in a way that is intended to
erase not just the distinction between gods and men but also that
between self and world and, ultimately, between order and chaos.
Had I happened into such an experience of ego-erasure at the
time when I surrendered within the same brief period my virginity
and the Jesuit cosmos that had engulfed me from puberty on? I
wondered: perhaps so. But by the time the idea occurred to me, I
had turned the page in a dozen ways. I can only say that during my
earlier "Buddhist period," though I was willing to take it on faith
that true enlightenment is only arduously achieved, I could not
deny a certain sense of déja vu when taking instruction. If, to quote
a well-known Buddhist saying, the Buddha at the moment of enlightenment
was like a deer in the deer park, if that state of mind
— a state of animal rather than human consciousness — is the goal
of Buddhist meditation, then Buddhism may be respectfully and
uninvidiously characterized as an attempt to exit the normal adult
spiritual condition. But this seemed an exit that I had by then experienced,
however ?eetingly, in two quite different settings.

Or so I thought.We give human children little stuffed animals to
play with because, in a way, children are little animals. Their consciousness
has not yet matured to the adult human state. Their little
minds are not yet jumping from branch to branch with adult human
agility. Buddhism has always seemed to me an attempt not
merely to return to a childlike state of consciousness — call it the
stuffed-animal state — but boldly to progress or descend past that
state to something even more devoid of human ideation. I honor
that effort, and yet I would add that descending only as far as the
stuffed-animal state takes some doing; and this is the experience
that I seem to recall in the luminosity of my ?rst Jesuit years.

I begin with the observation that though we were not mistaken as
Jesuits in our late twenties to object that our training had juve-
nilized us, juvenilization has more than one meaning. Yes, we had
been excused from adult responsibility in a way that left us super-
?cially and temporarily ill equipped to assume such responsibility
later. But that same deprivation — joined during a period of
two full years with strict sexual abstinence and with a deprivation
from all else that might have given our incipiently adult minds
whereon to think — ushered us back through the gates of puberty
into a kind of induced second latency. And that second latency,
however arti?cial, remains in memory a distinct, vivid, and deeply
attractive spiritual state. We were not like deer in the deer park,
no, but we were, after all, in surprisingly close approximation to
the spiritual condition of prepubescent children. Everyone saw
this about us. Everyone, even elderly retired Jesuits who had been
through the experience themselves years earlier, shook their heads
and laughed when they saw it in us. But there it was. Think of it, if
you will, as standing on your head. Headstanding may be crazy, but
it is certainly possible, and its effect upon the brain, whether you
call the effect bene?cial or not, is unlike that of any other exercise
you can perform. At the time, I liked it rather well.

All this was, you will understand, a long time ago. I now have a
daughter at Berkeley. Next year, my wife and I will celebrate the silver
anniversary of our wedding. But when I am asked to address
myself to "spiritual writing," much of this tangled process crowds its
way back in. There was a time not too long ago when I would have
tried to talk about it without using the word spirituality. But by a
roundabout path, I have come to a point where I can speak some of
the old words without the old fear of being somehow tainted, disquali
?ed from competing in the larger world, or, worse, dragged
all the way back in.

The memory of spiritual intensity in childhood has been for one
writer after another the touchstone for all spiritual experience worthy
of the name. Jesus was far from the only one. I spoke above of
sports played to joyous exhaustion and of the seasons of the year
felt in every pore of the skin. Whom does that bring to your mind?
It brings the poet Dylan Thomas to mine. Who has spoken better of
that state of heightened but joyfully unreckoning sensitivity? "In
the sun born over and over," he wrote, "I ran my heedless ways."
The novitiate stood on a bluff overlooking a river. Leaving the
park-like grounds, we would hike through woods cut by cold creeks
to a farmhouse the novitiate owned, situated on a remote hilltop.

Remembering these hikes and the larky feeling of boys on a holiday,
I think of Wordsworth in a dozen passages like:

The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colors and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thoughts supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.

Many from all backgrounds cherish some such memory from
childhood. But granting that the intensity of childhood experience
is a recognizable state, even a familiar one, one must still ask: Is it
also a state to which the adult can return after the natural moment
for it has come and gone? Is it possible to create a spiritual discipline
to turn the man, even the sexually ardent young man, back
into a boy? That is the question — the question of whether an intense
but transitory personal experience can ever be replicated
and then built into an ongoing adult life.

Never completely, I would answer, but perhaps partially. As Jesuit
novices, it seems to me that we tried our best. And we had a warrant
for our attempt in the Gospel passage that I have placed as an epigraph
to this essay. Many of those who are revered as spiritual leaders
radiate a youthfulness that age cannot touch, a maturity beyond
mere adulthood. As Jeremy suggested, it may be a mistake to attempt
this step beyond adulthood before reaching adulthood in
the simpler sense. Hinduism with its rich and rooted acknowledgment
of the stages of life may be wiser here than Catholic Christianity.
But if one does try to be, so to speak, young before one"s time,
well, you may count on it: something will happen. Racing ahead
that way is, perhaps, a bit like reading a great classic before you are
old enough to appreciate it. I read King Lear for the ?rst time when
I was ?fteen. It means incomparably more to me now than it did
then, but it meant something to me even then. This is what I meant
when I said above that "something took" in the Jesuit novitiate.

The fact that I grew accustomed to hearing "formed" Jesuits,
caught up in the swirl of their later lives as teachers, administrators,
lab supervisors, drama coaches, and what have you, speak of the
novitiate as a lost world suggests to me that the spiritual effect of
which I speak was a secondary, largely unconscious effect. Primarily
and consciously, we were learning and practicing the rationalized
Ignatian spirituality of mental prayer. Perhaps at the peak
moments of that spirituality, such as the nature meditation that
comes at the conclusion of the Spiritual Exercises, the two did
seem brie?y to work in tandem. But more often, they did not; and
the more powerful experience was the one less attended to, the
one that lingers as an indelible memory, however transitory it may
have been as a spiritual condition.

As I said above, it was the esprit de corps of the Society of Jesus that
made me, at the age of seventeen, want to enlist. How powerfully,
as adolescents leave their families behind, they yearn to belong to
something else! And how painful it can be not to make the team,
not to be admitted to the fraternity, not to be chosen for the cast.
At such a moment, a boy or girl feels not so much rejected as orphaned.
The hoped-for replacement family has turned one out.

Adults, too, often have a desire to belong to something larger than
themselves, but theirs is a tamed and domesticated version of the
awful adolescent craving. The developed adult appetite (capacity
might be a better word) for group identity doesn"t eat at the
achieved adult but feeds him. The earlier, more rampant appetite
— for those who are lucky enough to make the team or the fraternity
or the cast — can easily go beyond nurture to intoxication. It
certainly did for me.

Years after leaving the Jesuits, I learned with a faint jolt of recognition
that the motto of the French Foreign Legion is Legio patria
mea: "The legion is my fatherland." The legion and not, as one
might expect, France. This brought a shock of recognition because
my own earlier motto could so easily have been Societas ecclesia mea:
"The Society is my church." "The Society" is what Jesuits call the order
among themselves. That it is "of Jesus" goes without saying. But
as with young legionnaires, so with young Jesuits: in the end, ?rst
things must come ?rst. If you have your doubts about France, you
don"t belong in the Legion, however exciting you may have found
it. And if you have your doubts about the Church of Rome, you
don"t belong in the Society of Jesus, either.

Ten years after leaving the Jesuits, I rati?ed a process already well
under way by marrying in the Episcopal Church. I had concluded
by then both that I could not avail myself of the spiritual resources
of Buddhism as well as I could those of Christianity and, more basically,
that agnostic disaf?liation, the default option for my generation,
was an intellectually unwarranted impoverishment of life.

Spiritual life in the Episcopal Church has been, for me, like life
lived in a ramshackle but still surprisingly functional old manse. As
an Episcopalian, I am accommodated as the adult I must ever be,
yet given repeated, ?eeting but pungent occasions to be, without
shame, a spiritual child again.

I know that the Episcopal Church is not for everyone, but then
what is? This seems a ?ippant question, but I mean to ask it seriously
with reference to this anthology of spiritual writing. Of its
contributors, one may know, guess, or suspect that several, at least,
are committed to developed traditions or disciplines that, for their
adherents or practitioners, have historically been answers rather
than questions, intended for the many rather than for the few. But
in the main, what the contributors choose to write of here is, as I
might put it, the vestibule rather than the sanctuary. One detects a
pluralistically chastened awareness that comparable experiences,
as they come to be preserved and implemented, may lead to incomparable,
incompatible rationalizations. These, too, can be
shared, but never quickly, never easily, and often at some risk of offense.
The most powerful statement collectively made by this anthology
is thus less an assertion of some such tradition or discipline than it
is a negation of the mentioned default position in American spiritual
life. Again and again in these pages, we ?nd an American man
or woman experientially interrupted in and then dislocated from
the stultifying routine of normal American materialism. Taken together,
the collection thus bespeaks a poignant readiness to take
leave of the consumer society whose cosmology may be Big Bangawesome
but whose ideology rarely gets much past "When the going
gets tough, the tough go shopping." Just after World War II,
Americans believed that science had won the war and saved the
world from tyranny and that the material plenty bestowed by science
("Better Living Through Chemistry" was an advertising slogan
of the day) was an innocent blessing, especially for folks who
had known such tough times so recently. That belief is the spiritual
home, the default Weltanschauung, for most Americans over forty.
But in the ?rst decade of the twenty-?rst century, science seems increasingly
the unwitting destroyer of the world, while the innocence
of American plenty has morphed into obese glut for the few
and dire want for the many. It may be time, then, to leave the default
position, to leave home.

American spiritual writing at its best is, in sum, a pluriform, multifarious
acknowledgment of discom?ture and an opening of exits
into a wider world. These acknowledgments and openings, some of
which involve a doubling back to childhood, are not the consummation
of spirituality, but in their candor and unguarded openness
they are the beginning. The reader is led to this volume, I imagine,
by the question: There must be something more. Where can I ?nd it? The
contributors to this volume answer, in effect: You will ?nd it when it
?nds you. Refuse to deny what you know but consent to how little
that will always be, and, when the moment comes, the sky will open
and the liberating intrusion will descend upon you.

--Jack Miles

Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin. Introduction copyright © 2004 by
Jack Miles. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin
Company.



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