The Best American Spiritual Writing 2005 - Hardcover

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9780618586424: The Best American Spiritual Writing 2005

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0618586423 ISBN 13: 9780618586424

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005

A selection of the finest spiritual writing of the year offers a wide variety of essays and articles on faith, spirituality, and their influence on politics, creativity, literature, and many other fields, reflecting Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, and other diverse perspectives in works by W. S. Merwin, Barbara Kingsolver, Mary Gordon, Charles Johnson, Patricia Hampl, and others. Simultaneous.

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Introduction

One benign, summer morning I departed a small tent camp, pitched on the back of a valley glacier, and headed with a few friends for an embayment a couple of miles away in the La Gorce Mountains, in the interior of Antarctica. We were curious about the place, an unnamed natural amphitheater we’d examined through binoculars some weeks earlier. A curving wall rose sharply from the valley floor on three sides, towering over a dark expanse of frost- shattered porphyry and other igneous and sedimentary rock that had fallen, over dozens of millennia, from the walls and serrated ridge above, or been pushed up from the glacial ice below this rock barren.
It was a clear day of unusually still air. By now, at the end of a forty-five-day field season, the six of us were so accustomed to the steady cold I can’t recall a specific temperature. It must have been around 0�F. The few people who have actually traveled in the interior of Antarctica have all done so recently and their journeys have been carefully recorded by the U.S. Geological Survey; so it’s possible to say, with a high degree of certainty, that no one had ever been where we were headed. The La Gorce Range, with its many unnamed peaks, shoulders its way through the continent’s permanent ice cover about 225 miles north of the South Pole. The vast, dead- slow river of ice, flowing off the polar plateau, around this range, and toward the edge of the continent, buries the lower seven thousand feet of these mountains. The upper several thousand feet are bare, wind-blasted rock and steep snowpack.
Eying our destination from camp and scrutinizing the topographic map, we guessed that the only problems we might face in our traverse would be a crevasse field, which we could skirt, and the steep pitch of an ice wall where Klein Glacier, on which we were camped, curved around the base of Kessens Peak, the valley’s southeast portal. Like a river streaming around a boulder, an ice sheet moving around the corner of a mountain range leaves a cavity on the downstream side of any obstruction. It was this side slope of the passing glacier that we would have to descend to reach the mouth, about four miles across, of this deep amphitheater.
The pitch of the ice wall raised a few eyebrows but was not perilous to navigate. We descended, crossed the ice apron to the foot of the valley, and parked our snow machines at the threshold of the felsenmere, the dozen or so square miles of rock blown clear of snow by perennially strong winds (which happened not to be blowing on this day).
My tent mate, John Schutt, the expedition leader, had the same unannounced idea I did. The two of us hiked in a few hundred yards over the angular boulders and rocks, looking for a relatively flat patch in the rubble that had been soaking up solar radiation for weeks. Using a couple of sun-warmed boulders as backrests, we settled in to peruse what many would characterize as a scene of desolation.
To the northwest of us, on the right, was 10,823-foot Mount Paine, the other portal to the valley. From there a sharp ridge, an arete, swung toward us and curved around behind us to terminate on our left, at Kessens Peak, 8,645 feet. Directly before us, about a mile distant, the ice wall of Klein Glacier rose up some hundreds of feet, a rigid tsunami of translucent grays and brilliant whites cutting across a pale blue sky, a great expanse lighter than azure, darker than pearly blue, and without a cloud.
The silence around us was so deep it induced an aura of anticipation. The present, the time in which John and I were gazing west, grew taut, like a manufactured object tightened. And then it broke, in the manner of mercury dispersing. Each of us felt he was being given what he had deliberately sought here an unbounded moment when immaculate light filled an immense space, a moment devoid of history, empty of language, without meaning.

I have experienced this emotion before, the sense of a sudden immersion in the profound mystery of life, a mystery that seems to originate in arrangements of time and space that precede the advent of biology. It is a sensation known to many people, often characterized as an awareness of unity with the divine, or as a release from the routine coordinates of life, as a greatly expanded sense of the present, or as a religious experience without the symbols of religion.
In reflecting on previous occasions when I have sensed this collapse of measured time, and been aware of a pervasive, almost tangible hush in a specific geographic place once in the self-contained desert ranges of western Namibia, another time in the far reach of a spinifex grassland bordering a dry riverbed in Australia’s Northern Terrritory, once at the Cliffs of Moher in western Ireland I realized that certain elements were common to them all. I was always with a feeeeew friends; the physical place opened toward a generous horizon; the weather was clement; the atmosphere was silent; and light played a strong role, intensifying the clarity of the air. This has led me to believe, contrary to popular western folklore, that these apparently private experiences are actually social, that they have more in keeping with everyday life than with a grail quest. Further, since these experiences always release in me a floodtide of hope, I’ve come to associate the vistas sharply lit land opening toward a horizon, a vast silence under benign skies with that emotion.
That particular day in the La Gorce Mountains with my friend John, though, I saw something in addition, something I’d never noticed before, possibly because no human mark of any sort showed here, or because this landscape wasn’t catalogued anywhere among the events we call history, or possibly because of the sheer immensity in which we were so comparatively infinitesimal in a nightless summer I experienced space and time as one. I saw the flow of the glacier before me, the shifting of my chilly fingers in my mitts, and the disintegration, rock by rock, of the cirque wall behind me as the same event.
Months later, when the memory of the sensation did not recede, I began to wonder at the nature of the glue that might hold time and space together. To put it another way, what allowed a sense of space, a feeling for the volume of geography around myself, and a sense of time, a sensitivity to the different lengths of interval by which we notice change, to penetrate each other?
It could be reverence, I thought.
* In a lyrical, beautifully human book called Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue, the classicist and philosopher Paul Woodruff describes the cardinal virtues courage, reverence, wisdom, justice as those that are recognized, admired, and upheld by all peoples, regardless of their other cultural beliefs. They go beyond religion, and no particular human tradition can claim that these virtues originated with them.
Reverence, writes Woodruff, begins in a deep understanding of human limitations.” He describes it as a capacity for certain feelings, most obviously awe and respect, which prompt us to behave well.” He stresses, further, that the ability to feel these emotions must be practiced if an attitude of reverence is to become part of one’s character. A reverent attitude toward the world, he writes, is what we recognize in ourselves when we feel awe at the immensity of the reality that does not conform to human wishes,” and when respect for the ineluctable mystery of the world wells up in us. Finally, he points out that through all of human history, different peoples have celebrated and reinforced the virtue of reverence, individually and communally, in ceremony.
It occurred to me, after reading Woodruff’s book, that the emotional elevation I felt that day in the La Gorce Mountains, and which I had experienced in other locales a mix of awe and respect in the face of certain physical surroundings, a sense that in that moment the physical (outer) and emotional (inner) worlds were part of the same bolt of cloth, and that I was embedded in this setting, not a mere observer grew out of a capacity for such feelings that I had intentionally practiced (although I’d always understood this as a consciously willed effort to be vulnerable to the world, in order to be intimate with it). I had anticipated that sitting in that rock- strewn amphitheater, emotionally susceptible to it, might give rise, in other words, to the sensationWoodruff calls joyful reverence.” I could not assume, though, that cultivating such a capacity would make the sensation inevitable.
Perhaps the most amazing aspect of any revitalizing experience like this is that no matter what we’ve done, such doors regularly swing open before us. A gift. You cannot expect, after months or even years of emotional barrenness and anxiety, to be elevated out of the ordinary merely because your desire is keen and constant. The elevation can’t be earned. It’s true, as Woodruff writes, that the capacity for such feelings must be cultivated the gift always has to be acted upon if these feelings are to go deep and sustain us; but the opportunity to enhance a sense of reverence or of justice, for that matter is sometimes upon us, overwhelmingly, when we least expect it.
To feel, suddenly and intensely, reverent toward the world can seem like a reprieve. It releases a person, at least for a few moments, I think, from the modern burden most of us feel over our complicity in the world’s waywardness: injustice, religious contempt, ethical cowardice, rampant intellectualizing the conditions against which the cardinal virtues are arrayed. As such, the unanticipated moment of elevation feels like an absolution.
It seems to me that this experience with the numinous, of release into a world that stands outside human comprehension, is what lies at the heart of spiritual writing.” The intent in the genre is to locate, make apparent, and celebrate the wellsprings of the cardinal virtues justice, courage, wisdom, reverence. The term itself, of course, is problematic. For many, the notion of spiritual values is too closely identified with specific religious dogma. And experiences with the numinous are too easily associated by some with deism or theism. Or pantheism. Gods and religion, however, need play no role in the experience, cultivation, and exercise of virtue (which is why philosophers stipulate that the cardinal virtues are recognized by everyone, regardless of their doctrines).
Writing about the recognition and pursuit of virtuous life is one dimension, as I have come to see it, of a very old ceremonial history, one that celebrates mankind’s affinity for, its longing after, a frame of mind sensitive to issues of reverence, wisdom, justice, and courage. Somehow, in experiencing these feelings, we experience the profundity of our own existence. It is a specific kind of human awareness that leads to just forms of governance, to good politics, to equity at all levels of a social order.
What caused me to sense a seamlessness of space and time with John that day in the La Gorce Mountains, I believe, was that the intensity of reverence I felt could not be distinguished in those moments from what I imagined the conditions for justice to be. There were no lines of separation.

I opened this essay with a description of events in a place nearly impossible for most people to travel to, implying, perhaps, that encounters like this which lead to a renewed awareness of the profundity of human existence are most often wilderness experiences. I don’t mean to convey this. I recall emerging once from the paleolithic cave at Altamira on a cool, fall day in northern Spain. Suddenly I saw spread below me, as if for the first time, the bucolic landscape that runs inland from the Bay of Biscay, near the village of Santillana del Mar. I felt immense tenderness toward it. Twostory farmhouses, compact and tidy, stood randomly on several square miles of land, the fields divided by low stone walls and windbreaks of tall Lombardy poplars. Grain had been harvested; sheep were penned; late-summer vegetables grew in straight rows in large kitchen gardens; a Guernsey cow straddled the sill of a barn door; a man was towing a manure spreader with a small red tractor. Having just stepped from the cave, having stared in wonder for the past hour at a Cro-Magnon record of life, the interpretations of that life still glistening on the damp walls, as if they had been created only that morning, I lost completely the sense of a time between these painters and the man on the tractor. I was so overcome by the elimination of this familiar distance, I had to lean into a retaining wall on the bluff above the valley to keep from reeling on the path.
That night I sat in a hotel room in Santander and wrote to a friend in rural Kentucky, a well-read man with a great capacity for reverence, about what I had seen. It seemed crucial to share the sensation while it was still fresh with someone who would understand my observations about how ruthlessly insistent the modern metronome of time can be about Progress.
One June morning, looking up a side street in Montmartre, I was transfixed by how the reflection of early light gleaming on wet paver stones and the sound of rainwater burbling around a scrap of wood in the gutter included a woman emerging from a bakery with a large clutch of bread loaves in the fold of her apron. Another time, I felt myself living outside the moment” as I gazed at Old Havana from the Malec�n, the city’s Gulfward edge, at the crumbling pastel fa�ades of rowhouses, and heard long runs of birdsong over lulls in the traffic. And I would want to include in these out of place and time” experiences, which reawakened a sense of reverence for humanity, the moments of eerie luminosity and the collapse of language and analysis I felt the first time I saw a Vermeer, Girl Interrupted at Her Music, at the Frick Collection in New York. I remember having the same sensation when I turned a corner in the Vatican Museums a couple of years later, a seventeen-year- old boy, and came upon Agesander, Athenodorus, and Polydorus of Rhodes’ Laoco�n. Most recently, I felt infused with a sense of regard for all life after I entered a Quaker meetinghouse in Houston, Texas, where a ceiling designed by the space-and-light artist James Turrell opens to accentuate the skyspace above the building. I watched for an hour hues shifting in a cloudless sky, while the sun set and three or four times blackbirds crossed over.
The essential ingredient in these experiences is humanity, not wilderness. If I were better at inducing a state of vulnerability in myself in cities, I believe I would experience there the same intensity of life-purpose I did in the La Gorce Mountains.

It is a commonplace observation that, like other cultures, we too yearn after justice, that we want civic life to hinge on mutual respect, and that we hope to cultivate in ourselves a capacity for virtue. What we truly wish for, I think, is not the impossible ideal of a life of just relations, of consistently wise decisions, courageous action against the afflictions that dog us, and respect for what lies beyond our ken, but simply the conditions that make such things possible. We seek out books, art, performances, and political groups that make the life we believe is possible plausible.
Spiritual writing, and some of what is called nature writing, are literary attempts, it seems to me, to explore and to keep alive the plausibility of virtuous life. Modernity, with its caustic contempt for virtue, its investment in the importance of individual life over social life, and its choice of cynicism and detachment as a safe way to approach the unknown, insists, of course, that real literature lies somewhere else. The attempt to write about spiritual matters, this a...

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