ONE OF THE UNWRITTEN RULES IN RELIGIOUS STUDIES IS THAT professors like me are supposed to separate our work lives from our faith (and doubt) lives. So when I am invited to give a sermon, I usually just say no right away. But for some reason when a small church in Massachusetts came calling a couple of years ago, I gave myself a while to think things over.
Perhaps it was the invitation, which came by e-mail from a minister who was out hiking with his family in Colorado. Perhaps it was the church, which this minister described as 30 percent “cheerful humanists,” 50 percent “liberal Christians,” and the remainder Buddhists, Jews, and assorted “others.” But I suspect the real reason I finally said yes was that I was preparing some lectures on wandering, and this request seemed to be inviting me to wander into something new.
I began my first and only sermon by observing that wandering is a key theme in the world’s religious and literary traditions: Abraham and Moses were wanderers, as were Jesus and Paul; Ulysses wanders for years across the pages of the Greek classic The Odyssey; the Pandavas wander almost as long across the pages of the massive Hindu epic the Mahabharata; and the Mesopotamian tale of Gilgamesh concerns a seemingly invulnerable god-man who makes a friend, a friend he loves, a friend who dies, whose death brings him grief, which grief sets him wandering. The gods may sit, I said, but to be human is to live between road and home, movement and rest, exile and return.
As I stood awkwardly in the pulpit, I tried to distinguish between wandering in the West and wandering in the East. Tucked inside western understandings of wandering is a sense of mischievousness slithering toward malfeasance, I observed. To wander, says the New Oxford English Dictionary, “is to turn aside from a purpose, from a determined course of conduct or train of thought; to digress; to pass out of the control of reason or conscience; to fall into error.” It is, at Shakespeare’s hand (in Henry VIII) to “wander from the good we aim at.” It is in Lady Montague’s confession that she has “so far wandered from the discipline of the Church of England as to have been last Sunday at the opera.” Wandering, in short, is a bad thing. To wander is to wend your way into the wilderness (or the opera) far removed from the guidance of religious congregation and sacred scripture. It is to trade in productivity for play, to make common cause with fools and dreamers, to dance with the devil into the unknown. Or so goes the received wisdom.
Among Hindus and Buddhists, however, wandering is often seen not as punishment but as opportunity. How does Siddhārtha Gautama reach enlightenment? By deviating from the path of hard work and family values and wandering across the face of India. And what does the Buddha do after his Great Awakening? He wanders some more.
When I asked friends and family members for advice about my upcoming preaching debut, my daughters told me it didn’t matter what I said. Sermons are boring, they said, so all that mattered was keeping it short. A colleague who preaches regularly told me to try to tell the truth. He also told me to focus on saying one (and only one) thing, which for me in that moment was this: If by fate or by Providence you happen to find yourself in a wandering way, try not to listen to the voices in your head telling you that wandering is wrong or wasteful. Nothing is going to die, and something might actually be born, if you turn off your computer, leave your “real work” behind, and go out on a wander without any particular purpose or destination in mind.
After the worship service I spent an hour or so talking with dozens of parishioners about their various desires for liberation from the purpose-driven life. A few months later I received a copy of a chapbook produced by the congregation—a series of meditations on wandering, one for each day in Lent.
I must confess to not knowing what spirituality really means, but it seems to me that there are a few things at play. At least as the term is popularly used, “spirituality” is often quite critical of “organized religion.” It gravitates toward first-order experience rather than second-hand revelation, toward practice rather than dogma. In fact, those who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious” often disdain their deep and ancient connections to the institutions, stories, and doctrines that gave their spiritual practices birth. In this regard, spirituality looks from my perspective like a sort of wandering itself—a deviation from the straight path of “organized religion” into the scary and exciting world that lies over the hill or around the bend.
“People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote. And he was an unapologetic wanderer, who lit out for the Transcendentalist territories from his first life as a Unitarian minister. In his famous Divinity School Address at Harvard in 1838, he protested against “the famine of the churches.” “Historical Christianity…has dwelt…with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus,” he complained, and he urged the future ministers in his audience to dwell instead on something else. Nature, perhaps. Or the subtle self. Truth, Emerson said, “cannot be received at second hand.” Each of us must experience it for ourselves.
Emerson largely restricted his wanders to the library and the lyceum circuit, but his friend Henry David Thoreau tramped out to Walden Pond, around Cape Cod, down the Merrimack River, and up Mount Katahdin in Maine. He also went much further than Emerson in cultivating a spiritual practice. Whereas Emerson read and reveled in Hindu and Buddhist literature, Thoreau worked to integrate into his life Asian spiritual disciplines. “To some extent, and at rare intervals,” he wrote to a friend in 1849, “even I am a yogi.”
In this way, Thoreau and Emerson invited today’s “spiritual but not religious” folk to find their own paths. But the Transcendentalists were not the first Americans to try to cut through the icy rites and “corpse-cold” dogmas of their inherited religions to a deeper spiritual reality flowing underneath. The Puritans of the New England colonies, now widely disdained as prudes and hypocrites, were also spiritual practitioners par excellence. Ministers and parishioners alike sought to be shaken (and stirred) by the passion of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit. In fact, in order to become a member of your local Congregationalist church in colonial New England, you needed to present an autobiographical “relation” of your spiritual journey that was moving enough to convince other church members you were likely of God’s “elect.”
All this is to say that “spirituality,” at least in its commonplace meaning as a rebellion against “organized religion,” is so suspiciously American that if it hadn’t existed before 1776, Americans would have had to invent it. Perhaps, in a way, they did, taking earlier forms of spiritual experience and injecting into them the attitudes and assumptions of American culture. Individualism? Check. Self-reliance? Check. Tolerance? Check. In this way, the Puritans begat the Transcendentalists who begat the Theosophists who begat the Beats who begat the counterculture who begat all of us (or at least those of us who read books like this).
Still, I have to say that the dichotomy between good “spirituality” and bad “religion” bequeathed to us by this venerable lineage of preachers and poets and ne’er-do-wells has never made much sense to me. Spirituality—whatever that word might mean—is not the opposite of religion but one of its many manifestations. After all, the great religions created and sustained most of the spiritual practices cultivated today by the “spiritual but not religious.” Saint Teresa of Ávila, Saint John of the Cross, and other Catholics mystics were nurtured on the Catholic sacraments, and their works were read and remembered by priests and nuns. Without Islam, we would not have Rumi’s poetry. Without Judaism, we would not have the Kabbalah. There would probably be mystics without the great religions, but we would not have heard of many of them.
This, by the way, is how Religious Studies professors write about the things we write about. We pride ourselves on dispassionate detachment—a historical observation here, some sociological analysis there. But we are humans too, and, like it or not, whatever spirit inhabits spirituality inhabits us as well.
My own writing on wandering came together when my life seemed to be falling apart. Previously, I had written a dissertation about American Buddhism and taught courses on American Hinduism. But I had kept my bodhisattvas and devas at a safe distance. As midlife overtook me, however, they started coming my way.
After a friend invited me to a gathering of a meditative dance community, I declined on the theory that I wasn’t a good dancer. “Are you a good walker?” she asked. A few hours later I was hooked. Through that community, I made friends with the only real mystic I have ever known. And I eventually started attending (fitfully, alas) a Quaker meeting where, blessedly, no one ever talks. On a recent winter visit to my local meetinghouse, the only observable liturgy was the episodic work of an elderly man in denim overalls and sensible work gloves rising every fifteen minutes or so to stoke a wood fire. Here the gospel came and went in the rush of cold air over crackling oak. And at least to me it seemed to be saying, “First, do no harm.”
The Best Spiritual Writing 2013 approaches spirituality the way many “spiritual but not religious” people approach the world’s religions. No path is prescribed; inclusivity is the order of the day. There is poetry and there is prose. Authors are steeped in Catholicism or Protestantism, Judaism or Buddhism, and none of the above. There are autobiographical pieces that hit on that spirituality sweet spot of individual experience. But others read more like exercises in comparative religion or long-form journalism. And there are essays too, in Montaigne’s sense of attempts, trial balloons, what-ifs—word wanders into the unknown.
Each spring at Boston University, I teach a “what-if” course called Death and Immortality. For more than a decade, I have had the pleasure of discussing with my students the greatest story ever told (the epic of Gilgamesh) and of reading with them from Plato’s Phaedo, the Katha Upanishad, and the Book of Common Prayer. We try to figure out what Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day has to teach us about reincarnation, and what we are supposed to take away from the last words of the Buddha (“All conditioned things are impermanent. Work out your own liberation with diligence”).
The assumption of the course is that there is an intimate connection between how people understand the self (body only? soul only? some combination of the two?), dispose of the dead (cremation? burial? cryonics?), and imagine the afterlife (heaven? hell? moksha?). The course’s conceit is that death is the question. As sociologist of religion Peter Berger has argued, the central challenge of every religion is to make sense of our mortality, so the religions that do that best do best in the long run. However, according to the feminist philosopher of religion Grace Jantzen, birth is an equally compelling question. Death is in many respects a man’s game, she argues. For women, “generativity” (her word) is the question: How does something that did not exist a moment ago all of a sudden impress its existence upon us? Hindus have traditionally thrown a third question to the mix: What sustains things in the bardo between life and death we refer to as human existence? In this tradition, Shiva (the destroyer) explains death; Brahma (the creator) explains generativity; and Vishnu (the sustainer) explains how our lives (and the cosmos) keep spinning around and around.
Spirituality, it seems to me, responds to all three of these mysteries—how do things come into being, remain, and cease to be?—not so much in words as in experiences. We feel most alive, and most ourselves, when we are creating the things that matter to us. And when these things are dying we feel as if we are doing the same. But we also sense what the Sufis call the Really Real when we are in the midst of the things (or the beings) that sustain us.
I have already hinted that silence sustains me. But so do words: a new book; an essay that tries; a provocative sentence; a surprising turn of phrase; a word that emerges out of silence, hovers above it, and then floats away. Each of these mysterious things has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Each breathes of Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva. Each offers up a life (and death) of its own.
The essence of wandering is moving without destination into the unknown, and opening yourself in the process to surprises. Though in rare cases wanderers do not return home, in most cases they do. So while there is no itinerary to wandering, there is a rhythm: escape, adventure, and return; out and around and back again. To wander is to find joy in small things, and to wrestle with big questions. It is to make choices rather than to follow rules. Should I take the shortcut or the long way around? Should I run or walk or sit or dance? You can wander alone, with a companion, or in a group. You can go by foot, train, car, or boat. And into deserts and woods, up mountains, over oceans. Wandering can happen on city streets. If you are limber enough, you can even wander up a tree. But you can also wander while reading, or writing, as long as you keep some eros in it, since close to the heart of wandering is letting go of means and ends, lingering in anticipation rather than racing toward the consummation of this or that.
In the pages that follow, authors flirt with angels and wander into sacred spaces. They look for love and speak of forgiveness. They interpret scripture, architecture, film. They remember to pray (and play). They confess their failures. They speak of evil and aging and zombies and art. Taking a cue from the Zen tradition—“chop wood, carry water”—these writers find the holy in the ugly, the extraordinary in the day-to-day, the rabbi in the custodian, the Great Goddess in the enteropathogenic bacteria of the Ganges. But none of this is particularly surprising. Neither is it surprising to encounter in these pages what may now be the dogma of spirituality: What is experienced cannot be said, and what is said cannot be experienced.
There are surprises in store, however. One blessed writer confesses a lack of interest in spirituality. Others invite us to wander out from our religious and spiritual routines, and then to bring our adventures back home.
It is commonplace to describe writing as a discipline, and even a yoga of sorts. But these writers at their best turn our reading into a spiritual practice—an antidote to our purpose-driven culture, a circuitous route out of dichotomies such as effective and ineffective, productive and unproductive, good and bad, sacred and profane. To wander through this book is to wander with them into the cycles of life, death, and whatever (if anything) may lie beyond.
STEPHEN PROTHERO