The Best American Spiritual Writing 2004 (The Best American Series) - Hardcover

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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 sufficiently serene in their adulthood do not blush at mommy. But because spirituality is a word that I first 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 first 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 first one. The fifth step was the leader’s presentation in a five-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 fifty years, I cannot recall the exit formula there was one that was spoken after perhaps fifteen 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 first 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 vission.
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 likke a giant palindrome.

Rather thannnn 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 first 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 five 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-flagellation, 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 first 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, indefinitely 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 fleeting! 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 mortified 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 specifically 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 unfinished journey to an unknown destination.

Adulthood is a meaning that sexual experience can bear at most only briefly 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...