Words expressive of spiritual experience — especially our very conceptions of psyche and spirit, God and religion — but also others to which I've devoted attention in Reckonings, such as sabbath, pilgrimage, prayer and redemption, tend to suffer in our popular culture from constrained and reductionist conceptions that fail to do justice to their richness of meaning and distort our awareness of the interconnectedness of things. In conventional usage and understanding they deny us access to the fullness of experience available to us.
The very religious traditions in which many of us were immersed in the formative years of our childhood too often set the pattern for such impoverishment, leaching into our adult lives. It's often useful to put aside conventional notions of belief and existence in order to dwell on the importance of attention. In doing so we can remind ourselves of and become more alive to what we've missed, and of that for which, knowingly or not, we yearn.
Poets whom I have invoked in Reckonings, like Stanley Kunitz, Wendell Berry, Denise Levertov and Mary Oliver, have often written of this opportunity for redemption. Here, for example, is Mary Oliver's short poem on prayer, from her book Thirst.
Praying
It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.
I have been moved over the years by the writing of John S. Dunne, a theologian at the University of Notre Dame. In his many books (perhaps most richly in The Way of All the Earth), Dunne has been engaged in what he calls "passing over and coming back": passing over into the lives, the spiritual stories and traditions, of others, and then coming back again, with new insight, into his own.
The spirit of such journeying is that of pilgrimage, and, less obviously, that of Sabbath. For it is in the natural rhythms of movement and rest, speech and silence, action and contemplation, that one finds (and gives) the greatest nourishment. Dunne writes of "the homing spirit" of his own pilgrimage: "I realized I had to find a point of rest in myself where I could rest in God, where God dwells in me, and let that be my point of origin and of return. I had to pass over to God in others and come back again to God in myself."
Note Dunne's imperative language — "I had to find" — "I had to pass over.... and come back again." To neglect such journey or pilgrimage, to abandon the nourishing companionship of Sabbath, is to invite spiritual homelessness, fearful isolation, a dark and perilous opposite of "the homing spirit."
Dunne found kinship, as have I, in J.R.R. Tolkein's incomparable trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, and drew from it from time to time in his exploration of life's essential journey of pilgrimage. He was particularly fond of a poem drawn from the trilogy:
The Road goes ever on and on,
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow if I can.
Pursuing it with eager feet
Until it joins some larger way,
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
In the following parable, Dunne contemplates a related pair of journeys, ours towards God and God's towards us. In doing so, he helps us to understand the holiness of the everyday mundane world.
Man, let us say, is climbing a mountain. At the top of the mountain, he thinks, is God. Down in the valley are the cares and concerns of human life, all the troubles of love and war. By climbing the mountain and reaching the top, man hopes to escape from all these miseries. God, on the other hand, is coming down the mountain, let us say, his desire being to plunge himself into the very things that man wishes to escape. Man's desire is to be God, God's is to be man. God and man pass one another going in opposite directions. When man reaches the top of the mountain he is going to find nothing. God is not there. Let us suppose that man does reach the top and does make this discovery. Or suppose that that he passes God on the way, or finds God's tracks leading downwards, or hears a rumor that God is descending the mountain. One way or another, man learns that climbing was a mistake and that what he seeks is to be found only by going down into the valley. He turns around, therefore, and starts going down the mountain. He sets his face towards love and war, where before he had turned his back upon them.
If our faces are set toward the valley of love and war, toward the real living that is meeting, if we stake our existence on our willingness to experience and explore, our consciousness may truly open to what we sought on the mountain — to God, or we might say to the deepest and most capacious truth, to the eternal in us as we move through the phases of our lives from childhood to youth, adulthood and age. "The eternal in us," Dunne writes,
is the person going through these phases. It is the vertical dimension of the life, as in the title scene of War and Peace where Prince Andrei lay on the battlefield looking up into the peaceful sky, perceiving peace in the midst of war. If the horizontal dimension is time and the vertical dimension is eternity, then eternal consciousness is awareness of the vertical dimension. What is more, the vertical dimension carries through the horizontal, as the person walks through life upright instead of being dragged through in ‘quiet desperation.’ Willingness and hope, accordingly, is willingness to walk through upright with hope in the face of death and darkness.
Martin Buber, in a small and lovely gem of a book entitled The Way of Man According to the Teachings of Hasidism, writes in a complementary vein of the teachings of the Baal-Shem Tov, legendary founder of the 18th century Hasidic movement in Eastern European Judaism. The Baal-Shem Tov, wrote Buber, taught that
no encounter with a being or a thing in the course of our life lacks a hidden significance. The people we live with or meet with, the animals that help us with our farm work, the soil we till, the materials we shape, the tools we use, they all contain a mysterious spiritual substance which depends on us for helping it towards its pure form, its perfection. If we neglect this spiritual substance sent across our path, if we think only in terms of momentary purposes, without developing a genuine relationship to the beings and things in whose life we ought to take part, as they in ours, then we shall ourselves be debarred from true, fulfilled existence. It is my conviction that this doctrine is essentially true.
The highest culture of the soul remains basically arid and barren unless, day by day, waters of life pour forth into the soul from those little encounters to which we give their due; the most formidable power is intrinsically powerlessness until it maintains a secret covenant with these contacts, both humble and helpful, with strange, yet near, being.