The Best American Spiritual Writing, 2007

The Best American Spiritual Writing, 2007, ed. Philip Zaleski

I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting from this book, but I was, well, underwhelmed. It wasn’t bad, per se. Just a bit dry in parts and not what I was looking for.

Defining ‘spiritual’ is tricky business. Who am I to judge what one person says is spiritual to them? What makes something spiritual rather than thoughtful. Does spiritual have to be related to religion? If someone is motivated by ‘the spirit’ is the activity then spiritual, even if it seems to be something else? For me, reading this book and finding essays that were fine, but not what I wanted here, I felt the formation of a definition that I didn’t know I had.

My definitions: spiritual writing is generally inward, rather than outward looking. It may focus on things happening in society, but primarily focused on how they represent or affect internal feelings rather than external systems. Spiritual is different from religious, in that it is more personal. Just because something is tangentially related to a religion doesn’t make it spiritual, and I don’t think that the culture wars are particularly spiritual, either. They are tribal, or political, but judging others and society—while a longstanding practice in religion—do not, again, have that reflective quality I look for. And that’s far too much of what I found in these pages. Explaining or judging or analyzing, but not necessarily searching.

Which isn’t too say it’s lacking entirely. There were beautiful poems interspersed between the many essays. There is a beautiful essay on free climbing, one that looks at not only where we find meaning but also explores what we owe ourselves and what we others, a key question for those of us living in community and living out religion. A short essay on laughter and what it means for humans stood out for me as well.

Elsewhere, though, I found myself feeling slightly put out by the book, as if I had been misled by the title. In Pandora, the streaming radio service that creates playlists, when listening you can rate each song, thumbs up, thumbs down, or “not for this playlist.” That was my rating for most of this book.