Spiritual Sunday
Today I will be delivering the following talk to our church’s Adult Forum. The theme of this year’s program is “Practicing Our Faith in a World of Need.” Not surprisingly, I claim that reading literature is a form of spiritual exploration.
In this year when the Adult Forum is examining ways to “practice[e] our faith in a world of need,” I am suggesting one spiritual practice that may not come immediately to mind: reading great literature. To explain, I begin with a story.
Back when I was a young professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, I didn’t see the point of going to church. Julia and our children were attending the Episcopal church adjacent to the college, but as I told the rector at one point, I didn’t need religion because I had literature.
Needless to say, I no longer believe this to be the case. Later in the talk I’ll explain why I see both as essential, but for the moment I note that I wasn’t altogether wrong. There’s a lot of overlap between religion and literature, with both operating as rich symbol systems that strive to express that which is beyond expression.
Both religion and literature address life’s fundamental questions, and both rely on narrative and figurative language in their search for answers. Matthew Arnold, the great Victorian poet and critic, observes that “poetry…requires, no less than religion, a true delicacy of spiritual perception.” Alluding to Christ’s vision of manifesting the kingdom of God here on earth, Arnold wrote that in literature and art, as in religion, “the human spirit has manifested its approaches to totality.” Literature and the arts, Arnold said, envision a “full, harmonious perfection,” and in their envisioning, they stimulate and help forward “the world’s general perfection.”
I didn’t use exactly this language as a young literature professor, but I sensed Arnold’s point. I knew that, when one is immersed in the power and beauty of a great poem, play or novel, one leaves behind the material realm and touches the stars. At the time, literature engaged and inspired me and attending church did not.
When one argues for an overlap between religion and literature, however, one encounters problems. The other day Sewanee’s English Department chair Jennifer Michael said that poets with strong religious agendas are seldom great poets because their allegiance is elsewhere than to their poetic vision. I think this is definitely true if religion is seen in its traditional sense. Those poets who attempt to be orthodox or to conform to official church doctrine can put blinkers on their poetic exploration. Many who have refused those blinkers, meanwhile, have encountered trouble with church authorities.
Geoffrey Chaucer, for instance, felt the need to recant Canterbury Tales and other works towards the end of his life, either because the church objected or because he himself was fearful about getting into heaven. Moliere’s Tartuffe, a brilliant satire of religious hypocrites, cut too close to the bone for church authorities in 17th century France, who banned it.
My favorite novel, Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, which as one point contains a 50-page spiritual reflection by Father Zosima that is so powerful I wish it would go on for another 50 pages, nevertheless incurred the wrath of state censors because of its graphic depictions of child abuse. Dostoevsky pleaded that the passages be retained because he knew that, if we are to fully explore sin and redemption, we must see the full darkness. The spiritual brother Alyosha, if he is to hold his own against his brilliant, rational brother Ivan, must be prepared to look at what humans are capable of. Ivan won’t let him get away with cheap grace.
And then there’s Paradise Lost. What are we to make of a work in which generations of readers—certainly my college students—fall in love with Satan? Satan is so charismatic—far more so than God and Jesus, who pale in comparison—that William Blake famously opined that Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it. But with all respect to Blake, who has his own profound meditations on the relationship between religion and secular society, Milton had to create Satan as he did. The demands of his drama required him to show sin in all of its attractiveness.
By the end of the epic, Satan has been exposed as a shallow narcissist who can’t move beyond his inflated self-image, and the real heroes of the epic turn out to be the less glamorous but more substantive figures of Adam and Eve. Their willingness to look within themselves, to make sacrifices, and to repent are far more inspiring than Satan’s theatrics. I can report as a teacher, however, that it’s harder to sell my students on them. A spiritual journey is required, and it is through such journeys that our spiritual life is deepened.
The Milton example helps us see that poetry and institutional religion have different agendas, at least initially. If we think of literature as “virtual life,” then we are plunged into all the challenges and heartaches of life when we pick up a book. A great work takes us into ambiguous terrain that allows no easy answers. And while I think we should grapple with this terrain no less in our worship services, the two operate very differently.
For an example, I turn to one of my favorite poets, someone who writes about religion yet still manages to be great. Yet I wonder if the poetry of George Herbert would have been embraced wholeheartedly by the church if it has been published during his life. That’s because his doubts about God are taken up in poem after poem. Take “The Flower,” for instance, which begins on a confident note of devotion, encounters doubt, finds reassurance, experiences doubt again, and finally concludes with a declaration of faith. Herbert refuses to settle for anything that is not entirely true, even when it comes to his feelings about God.
Or imagine church authorities responding to the opening of “The Collar,” where Herbert feels his clerical collar has become a slave collar, a burdensome yoke carrying such high expectations that it threatens to defeat him:
I struck the board and cried, “No more;
I will abroad!
What? Shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free, free as the road,
Loose as the wind, as large as store.
Shall I still be in suit?
Have I no harvest but a thorn
To let me blood, and not restore
What I have lost with cordial fruit?
The poem goes on in this vein, with the poet becoming more and more angry with God and the responsibilities that go with faith. The message is accentuated through a quadruple pun going on with the title: clerical collar, slave collar, choler (anger), and caller. But it ends with a shift in tone that overwhelms me whenever I read it:
But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild
At every word,
Me thought I heard one calling, Child!
And I replied, My Lord.
In other words, rather than being put off when we thrash around in our doubt and misery, God calls out to us as if to an upset child. Herbert’s choler melts when he hears the still small voice of the caller.
So far I have been focusing on works that explicitly deal with religious themes, but I want to shift now to some that don’t, at least to the same extent. For many years now, my blog Better Living through Beowulf has shared a Mary Oliver poem each Easter Sunday. Most people think of Oliver as a nature rather than a religious poet—for years I did—so it came as a surprise to me when our rector, in one of his sermons, mentioned that she was Episcopalian. After I noted my surprise, he humorously noted that this is fairly typical of Episcopalians—we can be pretty good at hiding our faith. In any event, take a look at “Egrets,” which many would see only as a poem about a walk in the woods:
Egrets
Where the path closed
down and over,
through the scumbled leaves,
fallen branches,
through the knotted catbrier,
I kept going. Finally
I could not
save my arms
from thorns; soon the mosquitoes
smelled me, hot
and wounded, and came
wheeling and whining.
And that’s how I came to the edge of the pond:
black and empty
except for a spindle
of bleached reeds at the far shore
which, as I looked,
wrinkled suddenly
into three egrets— a shower
of white fire!
Even half-asleep they had
such faith in the world that had made them—
tilting through the water,
unruffled, sure,
by the laws of their faith not logic,
they opened their wings
softly and stepped
over every dark thing.
If we see this as an Easter poem, Oliver is walking the road to Calvary. Torn with thorns, she faces a black and empty tomb, only to suddenly experience “a shower of white fire.” At this moment, doubt is dispelled as, unruffled and sure,
by the laws
of their faith not logic,
they opened their wings
softly and stepped
over every dark thing.
Do you see in these lines the Easter promise? Oliver’s faith is influencing how she sees the world around her.
Or to take another example, in Flannery O’Connor’s disturbing short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” an extremely disagreeable grandmother finds grace only in the final seconds of her life. Up to this point, she has been a self-absorbed narcissist whose selfishness manages to get her family lost and in a car wreck. Then the family encounters “the Misfit,” a killer who has escaped from prison, and the grandmother sees him murder her son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren.
The Misfit has been sharing with her his religious doubts. If Jesus could in fact transcend death, he says, everyone should drop whatever they are doing and follow him, whereas if he couldn’t, then life is meaningless and it makes no ultimate difference whether one kills people or not. In her panic, the grandmother has a Peter betrayal moment—“Maybe he didn’t raise the dead,” she mumbles—but seeing his misery at this possibility, for the first time in her life she steps out beyond her self-absorption:
His voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother’s head cleared for an instant. She saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” She reached out and touched him on the shoulder.
This action of genuine compassion, reminiscent of Jesus’s forgiveness from the cross, so unnerves the Misfit that he instantly shoots her. Then we get from him one of the most bizarre but spiritually weighted observations to be found anywhere. First, the shooting:
The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them.
Hiram and Bobby Lee returned from the woods and stood over the ditch, looking down at the grandmother who half sat and half lay in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a child’s and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky.
And then the line that resonates:
“She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
Gruesome though the conclusion is, we see a moment of grace offsetting a selfish, petty life.
When I teach literature, whether it’s overtly religious, covertly religious, or lacking in any religious allusions at all, I don’t proselytize. St. Mary’s, despite its name, is a state school, but I wouldn’t proselytize at Sewanee either. Our students don’t need to have religion forced upon them.
That’s because they hunger, not for ready-made rituals, but for substantial conversations about spirituality and the meaning of life. I don’t know how many have told me, over the years, that they are “spiritual, not religious,” and I take that self-characterization seriously. They have all their lives to find a faith tradition that speaks to them, but at the moment they need immersion in the big questions. Literature can provide them with the immersion they crave.
I’ll conclude with one last example to make my point. My favorite Shakespeare play is King Lear, a nihilistic tragedy in which God is not mentioned once. To be sure, the recently blinded Gloucester mentions “the gods,” but that’s just to point out the senselessness of suffering:
As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods.
They kill us for their sport.
Yet I find Lear to be one of the most spiritually uplifting works that I know. Earlier in the play, of course, good daughter Cordelia has refused to play her father’s love game, even though he disinherits her as a result. He wants to dictate the conditions of love—love on his terms, in other words—and she refuses to desecrate something so sacred.
By the end of the play, however, he has discovered what love truly is. As they are being taken away to prison and to their deaths, Lear tells his daughter,
Come, let’s away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news…
Which would you rather have, I ask my students—a lifetime of self-absorption or 24 hours of ecstatic connection? King Lear, like our Christian faith, restores perspective.
I mentioned at the start of my talk that I no longer prefer literature to religion but embrace both. Literature, for all its beauty and complexity, is not only spiritual. We look at the language, the themes, the historical context, the gender dynamics, and countless other things. When I’m in church, by contrast, I focus on one thing. Literature is so much like life that we can get lost in it the way we get lost in life, whereas worship concentrates the mind.
Yet having said that, I add that, in my life, literature and religion are never apart: my Christianity deepens my understanding of literature, and my understanding of literature deepens my faith. Those students who haven’t embraced a specific faith practice get at least a glimpse of transcendence, and this glimpse can become an integral part of how they see themselves and the world.