The Best Spiritual Writing by Philip Zaleski

The Best Spiritual Writing Reviews

• 
  Kristina

  This was my first sampling of this annual collection. I was instantly intrigued and impressed by the variety of contributions. The selections varied from essays to poetry (there’s even one letter), and, while many were academic, all of the collected works were accessibly readable but never shallow. My only criticism would be that this year’s editor (Poet Billy Collins) chose to include works from only a few sources. While the periodicals cited are wonderful and relevant, there are SO MANY other spiritual resources available to peruse. That’s me being nit-picky though; the collection was outstanding.
  
  The “best of the best:”
  
  “Words are Not Enough” by Alice Lok Cahana
  “Turning Points” by Paul J. Griffiths
  “What Art Can and Can’t Do” by Philip Yancey
• 
  Jennifer

  Finally got thru this after a year. I would read a bit, put it down, then pick it back up. Some stories were very moving and interesting. Others were just plain boring.
• 
  Cheryl

  No matter how you define spirituality, this collection of spiritual writing stimulates your mind and broadens the definition in many of the essays. There was one disturbing one, (“Christianity Face to Face with Islam” Robert WIlken”)I will talk about at the end of my review, which caused the poor rating, but there was beauty in here that I can’t ignore. As the Desiderata says, “Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the DULL AND IGNORANT; they too have their story.” I think essays like that one is why I stopped reading this series, but many of the other essays are beautiful and I am glad I didn’t miss them.
  
  There is nothing more beautiful than to be able to read stories and essays and remember all the ways that we love god, or God, or Allah, or whichever name you choose. Every day I sit next to a man who fled Iraq for the opportunity to live somewhere this exists, and we talk about religion in a ways he never was able to before, and I know we are so incredibly lucky. Billy Collins opens with a poem of Emily Dickenson I had never read:
  
  Some keep the Sabbath going to church:
  I keep it staying at home,
  With a bobolink for a chorister,
  And an orchard for a dome.
  
  God preaches, - a noted clergyman,-
  And the sermon is never long;
  So instead of getting to heaven at last,
  I’m going all along!
  
  I would change ‘staying at home’ to going to the mountains or beach, but 150 or so years later, I know exactly what she means. Collins is talking about his loss of faith in the Christian traditions over time, and surveys how poetry has expressed and promoted and denied religion and/or spirituality. He mentions that there is a theory from Gary Snyder that meditation arose from hunter-gatherer times before arrows and hunters felt the space of the waiting and also the revelation possible. Just another way to define what it means to be spiritual. The Collins poem included is “Grave” which is another one where he goes to his parents’ graves and asks them a mundane question, like their opinion of his new eyeglasses. As with Collins magic, it ends with a light and deft enlightening image that makes you catch your breath:
  
  …(my father) would say nothing,
  And I could not find a silence
  Among the one hundred Chinese silences
  That would fit the one he created
  Even though I was the one
  Who had just made up the business
  Of the one hundred Chinese silences-
  The Silence of the Night Boat.
  And the Silence of the Lotus,
  Cousin to the Silence of the Temple Bell
  Only deeper and softer…
  
  Included in the collection is a laugh out loud essay about Passover programs: hotel special getaways that cater to the Jewish community for Passover and elevate the buffet to the art form (Jesse Kellerman’s Let My People Go to the Buffet.) Poetry and mathematics are linked elegantly in Joel Cohen’s A Mindful Beauty; and a Muslim cleric’s lovely comparison of Islam and Christianity, linking all the ways they are similar calls for acceptance and peace. A Holocaust story affected me body and soul, viscerally and simply teaches it what it means to live. And Barry Lopez as usual stunned me with An Intimate Geography, about many of the far flung places he has travelled and how his favorite is his home in Oregon.
  
  Coleman Barks, “Starting out from Ted Hughes’ Letters”:
  
  In the front yard lives the oldest thing around, a white oak
  That I used to say is my love for the world,
  That I now would just call love as it is.
  Belonging to nobody, no metaphor, the very.
  
  Rick Bass, “The Return”:
  “Time and time again I am astounded by the regularity and repetition of form in this valley and elsewhere in wild nature: basic patterns, sculpted by time and the land, appearing everywhere I look. The twisted branches in the forest that look so much like the forked antlers of the deer and elk. The way the glacier-polished hillside boulders look like the muscular, rounded bodies of the animals- deer, bear- that pass among these boulders like loving ghosts. The way the swirling deer hair is the exact shape and size of the larch and pine needles the deer hair lies upon one it is torn loose and comes to rest on the forest floor. As if everything up here is leaning in the same direction, shaped by the same hands, or the same mind; not always agreeing or in harmony, but attentive always to the same rules of logic and in the playing-out, again and again, of the infinite variations of specificity arising from that one shaping system of logic an incredible sense of community develops…
  
  Felt at night when you stand beneath the stars and see the shapes and designs of bears and hunters in the sky; felt deep in the cathedral of an old forest, when you stare up at the tops of the swaying giants; felt when you take off your boots and socks and wade across the river, sensing each polished, mossy stone with your bare feet. Felt when you stand at the edge of the marsh and listen to the choral uproar of the frogs, and surrender to their shouting, and allow yourself, too, like those pine needles and that deer hair, like those branches and those antlers, to be remade, refashioned into the shape and the pattern and the rhythm of the land. Surrounded, and then embraced, by a logic so much more powerful and overarching than anything that a man or woman could create or even imagine that all you can do is marvel and laugh at it, and feel compelled to give, in one form or another, thanks and celebration for it, without even really knowing why…”
  
  “In a way that I haven’t yet figured out how to fully articulate, I believe that children who get to see bald eagles, coyotes, deer, moose, grouse, and other similar sights each morning will have a certain kind of matrix or fabric or foundation of childhood, the nature and quality of which will be increasing rare and valuable as time goes on, and which will be cherished into adulthood, as well as becoming- and this is a leap of faith by me- a source of strength and knowledge to them somehow. That the daily witnessing of the natural wonders is a kind of education of logic and assurance that cannot be duplicated by any other means, or in other place: unique and significant, and, by God, still somehow relevant, even now, in the twenty-first century.
  
  For as long as possible, I want my girls to keep believing that beauty, though not quite commonplace and never to pass unobserved or unappreciated, is nonetheless easily witnessed on any day, in any given moment, around any forthcoming bend. And that the wild world has a lovely order and pattern and logic, even in the shouting, disorderly chaos of breaking-apart May and reassembling May. That if there can be a logic an order even in May, then there can be in all seasons and all things.”
  
  Alice Lok Cahana, “Words Are Not Enough”:
  
  When I was in Auschwitz, I kept asking, why am I here, what did I do wrong? What did my grandfather do wrong? And a young American man, he put me in the right knowledge. You didn’t do anything wrong, he said, the world did something wrong, terribly wrong. This young man, he went to Budapest in the beginning of it all, and he saved Jews, he gave out passports of Sweden, and because the Hungarians didn’t know how to read Swedish, this was how my father was saved. And thousands of others too, with these pieces of paper. I am here to tell you that one man can make a difference, and that man can be you, any of you…”
  
  “I made a painting that has holes in it. Why is there holes? Because God says to us, I cannot do all. I can create you, but I cannot do it all. You have to help Me fix the holes and put everything together. This is the learning from the Holocaust. That each of us is here to fix the holes.”
  
  “I don’t know how much you know about the Holocaust. What is your interest in it? What do you want to do with your life, where do you want to go? What is hurting in you? What are your holes to fix? What is now important in my life, and in your life also, is that after the Holocaust, we are shaking hands with each other, that we are nobody lesser than the other. That we understand the real meaning of what God created us for. You have the task. You have the task to better this world. There are holes in people also but those we create and can fix with love. God wants us whole.”
  
  There were too seemingly oppositional essays about Islam and the West, one, “We and You- Let us Meet in God’s Love,” that was taking The Muslim faith and the Christian one, side by side, and detailing all the ways they are similar, in order to bridge the divide. The second, “Christianity Face to Face with Islam,” was not unifying, it was divisive and I didn’t appreciate it. He wrote, “If Christianity continues to decline in Europe and becomes a minority religion, its history will appear fragmentary and episodic and its claim to universality further diminished by the shifting patterns of geography. In my wanton and admittedly darker ruminations, I sometimes wonder what Christianity needs is not so much a new Benedict as a new Charlemagne.���
  
  I am torn about throwing the baby out with the bathwater based on that essay alone, it is absolutely horrifying. Charlemagne “forcibly Christianized” the Holy Roman Empire, and Mr. Robert Wilken should be ashamed of implying he would like to happen again. “Wanton and dark” should be changed to “unchristian,” “un-American,” “non-spiritual,” “weak,” and “inhumane,” to start with, and that is being nice. And the series editor should be fired.
  
  
  
• 
  Amanda

  I'm giving this three stars because, although I did enjoy many of the essays, some of the others were just a big "miss" and I'm ashamed to admit I skipped them.
  
  Unusually for me, since I'm not a big poetry reader, I enjoyed many of the poems in this volume, especially by Billy Collins. Alice Lok Cahana's contribution of vignettes about her time in concentration camps was riveting, and I was fascinated by the parallels she drew from her experiences to her own worldview and spiritual beliefs. I also loved two contributions that delved into the Eastern religions of Buddhism, one focusing on a man's journey through various incarnations of religion in his life, and the other on a Zen Buddhist retreat in LA.
  
  Not so fun? An essay linking applied mathematics and poetry - as previously mentioned, I'm not a huge poetry fan, and I suck at math. It just did nothing for me.
• 
  M.E.

  This year's collection is well worth your while. I always love this collection because it reminds me that even though it sometimes seems like religious discourse in modern society has been watered down to the point of uselessness, there are still a whole host of people that think seriously and deeply about our relationship to God. Highlights include Christian Wiman's "My Bright Abyss," Jesse Kellerman's "Let My People Go to the Buffet," and Bruce Lawrie's, "Who Am I, Lord, That You Should Know My Name?" As is always the case with these collections, some will fall flat for certain readers, but there is enough quality and engaging writing to warrant buying the book and taking the time to read it.
• 
  Kayla

  There were a couple of jewels in this collection....one on Scordatura (abnormal tuning of a stringed instrument in order to obtain unusual chords) and one written by a father who whose two daughters became nuns. However, I was disappointed in the collection overall, as there were more misses than usual.
• 
  Jessica

  Threw this book across the room in a rage shortly after bringing it home. Almost zero essays by women, and the men who've made it in are pompous windbags.