The Best American Spiritual Writing (2007)

Reliably, Philip Zaleski has chosen a fine spectrum of essays for THE BEST AMERICAN SPIRITUAL WRITING 2007. Read it from cover to cover to enjoy the full gamut of opinion and subject matter, or consult the table of contents and skip to favorite authors or topics first. Here are a few of my favorite highlights: Dick Allen's poem "And All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner of Thing Shall Be Well" begins the selections with knock-your-socks-off impact. In "Love Divine," Dara Mayers recounts her adventures in the Indian ashram of Amma, the hugging guru, using a writer's voice reminiscent of Elizabeth Gilbert's in her bestseller, EAT, PRAY, LOVE. Garry Wills reminds us "What Jesus Did" was far more radical than anything the modern What Would Jesus Do? throng would actually advise putting into practice. The obscure (to most people, anyway) composer Messiaen, who supposedly put heart-opening notes to paper sitting on a World War II concentration camp toilet, gets his due in Ann McCutchan's "Reaching for the End of Time." Frederica Mathewes-Green, in "Loving the Storm Drenched," likens the culture war to uncontrollable weather, proposing that Christians focus on helping those downed and wounded by contemporary culture rather than futilely fighting the inevitable culture front. And Huston Smith spells out "The Universal Grammar of Religion" in fourteen principles that build on one another: the fourteenth begins, "What we know is ringed about with darkness" and continues, "It is a numinous darkness that lures, for we know that God sees it as light." This collection contributes a host of perspectives to our human quest to see beyond our darkness into the light of the Great Mystery, even though, as Smith intones, "We are born in mystery, and we die in mystery." As Harvey Cox writes in his introduction, "I invite the reader to peruse the following pages not just as fine writing, which much of it surely is, but also as a series of examples of spiritual discipline." You are invited to dive into these disciplines and look for light.