From Publishers Weekly
Readers of Zaleski's anthologies will be glad to know that, after a yearlong hiatus, his spirituality series has found a new home with Houghton Mifflin's Best American books. This sixth volume follows the expected format: some 25 essays and 10 poems that, according to the introduction, "address the eternal oppositions of good and evil, virtue and vice, creation and destruction; the sorrows and exaltations of heart, mind, and soul; the ceaseless quest for God." With approaches ranging from Seyyed Hossein Nasr's philosophical argument for the primacy of consciousness to Mark Doty's ecstatic vision of "fire [calling] its double down," the collection includes household names like Natalie Goldberg and Oliver Sacks alongside newer authors. Bus driver Robin Cody, for example, pays touching tribute to "birth-damaged or world-beaten children," and memoirist Lindsey Crittenden describes depression, death, her mother and the kind of prayer that is "pure throw of yourself into the unknown." Welcoming varied perspectives, Zaleski includes David Gelernter's summary of Judaism as well as a sprinkling of overt Buddhists and Christians, though most selections transcend religious categories. A large number, like David James Duncan's "Earth Music" and Allen Hoey's "Essay on Snow," focus on the natural world, while some, like B.K. Loren's "Word Hoard," resist classification. With few misses and many hits, the collection is a thought-provoking and often poignant read. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
As far as editor Zaleski is concerned, spiritual writing must first be good writing, "aiming always for lucidity of thought and beauty of expression," and then it must show the writer concerned with becoming "more, better, truer, clearer, more open." Those criteria are consistently met by the selections in the fourth edition of this treasurable series. The range of immediate subjects under consideration is gratifyingly broad. David Gelernter's bracing "Judaism beyond Words" argues Jewish distinctives with tremendous forcefulness. Lindsey Crittenden's account of her prayer life, early and late, gains cogent accessibility by being couched in recollections of her rather waspish mother. Bill McKibben gets us thinking about the spiritual implications of "Designer Genes," and Peter Friederici illuminates the inner and outer selves of us all via the astonishing "Fifteen Ways of Seeing the Light." Patricia Monaghan's "Physics and Grief" offers moving personal testimony and scientific reason to believe in afterlife--and lives prior, parallel, and other, as well. Other very impressive contributors include Oliver Sacks, Joseph Epstein, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
It is said that we live in a secular age, yet religion and spirituality, belief and practice, are ever more powerful forces in contemporary culture, shaping both personal lives and world events. The newest addition to the acclaimed Best American series reflects this trend, bringing us the year's finest writing about faith and spirituality from a rich array of traditions sure to enrich the lives of all readers. Included is the work of some of our finest poets -- Mark Doty, W. S. Merwin, Philip Levine -- and most original essayists. Spiritual insight comes in both expected and unexpected places: Thomas Lynch writes of his work as an undertaker, Sallie Tisdale witnesses the miracle of an elephant's birth, and Patricia Monaghan finds consolation in Heisenberg's theory during a period of intense grief. In his introduction, Jack Miles writes, "American spiritual writing at its best is, in sum, a pluriform, multifarious acknowledgment of discomfiture and an opening of exits into a wider world . . . The reader is led to this volume, I imagine, by the question: 'There must be something more. Where can I find it?' The contributors to this volume answer, in effect: 'You will find it when it finds you.'"

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction"Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?" And calling to him a child,he put him in the midst of them, and said, "Truly I say to you, unless you turnand become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom ofheaven."— Matthew 18:2–4By now the word spirituality ought not embarrass me, but like theword mommy, it still does. Mommy has its place and, especially, itstime; but we cringe a bit, don't we, when we hear an adult unselfconsciouslysay, "Mommy phoned this morning." The word is outof place, or past its time. Adults don't talk that way. Or shouldn't.Or so we think. Perhaps adults sufficiently serene in their adulthooddo not blush at mommy. But because spirituality is a word that Ifirst heard in a little world that shaped me as powerfully as a secondfamily, a world that I left behind only after a struggle, this word carriesfor me some of the same baggage as mommy. The contributionsto this year's Best Spiritual Writing are varied, authentic, engaging,and repeatedly surprising, yet for me, I confess, they summon upthe memory of a time when spirituality and adulthood seemed antithetical.I was introduced to spirituality at the age of fourteen as a brotherin the devotional fraternity called the sodality (from the Latinsodalis, companion) that was a part of life at all Jesuit secondaryschools. Starting in freshman year, we sodalists were introduced tothe school of spirituality called Ignatian — techniques of prayerand meditation developed by Ignatius Loyola, the founder of theSociety of Jesus (the Jesuits). Back in 1956, our initiation into men-tal prayer, as the beginner's exercise in Ignatian spirituality was thencalled, began in much the same way an introduction to Pilatestraining might now — that is, in a group and under the directionof a trainer.The first step, once we had gathered in the chapel at the appointedhour, was the recitation of one of the Roman Catholicprayers that we all knew by heart. This in itself created a mild senseof fraternity, relocated us, and brought us to a kind of preliminaryfocus. The second step was a minute or two of silence. The thirdstep was the instruction "Place yourself in the presence of God,"about which more below. The fourth step was another interlude ofsilence — still brief, but a little longer than the first one. The fifthstep was the leader's presentation in a five-minute talk of a subjectsuitable for meditation. A typical subject would be Christ's prayerduring his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane: "Father, if it bepossible, let this cup pass from me, but not my will but thine bedone." The priest — the leader was always a priest on the faculty ofthe school — might evoke darkness, the chill of the night, the danger,and so forth, and direct our attention to Christ's honesty andhis courage. Then would begin the sixth step in the exercise, thecentral period of silence or mental prayer proper. Rather than askingGod for something, mental prayer was simply thinking aboutsomething in the presence of God and awaiting what might ensuewithin the mind. After the lapse of nearly fifty years, I cannot recallthe exit formula — there was one — that was spoken after perhapsfifteen minutes to signal the end of the central exercise. Comingout of mental prayer felt a bit like awakening from hypnosis. Returnedto ourselves, we recited a concluding prayer in unison andtramped out of the chapel for the rest of the school day.What transpires in the minds of fourteen-year-old boys instructedto place themselves in the presence of God? Twenty yearslater, a friend's son told us of a study allegedly proving that sixteen-year-olds experience a sex-related thought every thirty seconds. Myfriend was surprised. I was not. And to me, the chapel at St.Ignatius High School was, in memory, the place where I seemedmost aware of the intervals. Yet I testify that the command "Placeyourself in the presence of God" produced a shift of consciousnessthat the succession of tumescence and detumescence did not undermine.Did we even believe in God? At one point in John Updike's firstnovel, The Centaur, an inspired high school teacher is preaching —no other verb will quite do — the grand sweep of evolution fromthe Big Bang to the rise of human consciousness. The novelist directsour attention to a boy in a back seat whose gross sex-preoccupationseems to undercut the nobility of the lecture. But behindthe character in the novel, there broods the novelist himself.Updike is a Christian inspired in spite of himself by this godless vision.Were he an atheist, he would be inspired in spite of himself bythe Christian vision. The text of belief and unbelief seems so oftento read like a giant palindrome.Rather than by the Christian vision per se, I myself was entrancedby the esprit de corps of the Jesuit order. Over a ten-year period beginningwith my eighteenth year, the Jesuits turned me into an intellectualof sorts, but they first turned me into a fellow Jesuitthrough two full years of an intense initiation into Ignatian spirituality.This was an experience that, as I would later conclude, reversedmy normal movement from adolescence to adulthood andturned me, powerfully albeit temporarily, from an adolescent backinto a child. And though I was, to say the least, confused and embarrassedby the reversal, I return to it in memory with a kind oflonging.A month after entering the order, I was led through the SpiritualExercises of St. Ignatius — a month of silence interrupted by only afew hours of conversation every six or seven days. For the remainderof that two-year novitiate, I rose at five every morning and meditatedin silence for an hour at a desk provided with a kneeler beforewalking silently to the chapel for Mass and then from thechapel to the refectory for a silent breakfast. My life included notelevision, no radio, no newspapers or magazines, and no readingmaterial other than books on, what else, spirituality. All my needs— food, shelter, clothing, health care, recreation, and companionship— were provided for. In all those regards, I had, as never sinceearly childhood, literally nothing to worry about; and for long minutes— in the chapel, for example, after the morning's meditationhad ended but before daily Mass began — nothing to think about,either. And I began to like it that way. Against the predictions ofsome, I began to like having nothing on my mind.Besides practicing Ignatian meditation every morning, a noviceattended more general lectures on Christian spirituality. Onelearned about the history of monasticism and about the variousschools of spirituality. One read classics in the related literature.One learned of the via purgativa, the via contemplativa, and, for thesainted few, the via unitiva. As beginners, we were on the viapurgativa. Purgative asceticism — fasting, mild (and closely controlled)self-flagellation, and the use of the "discipline," a kind ofbarbed bracelet worn for an hour or two around the thigh —would help us get started.Did it take? It is easy to answer that it did not. By divers paths,most of those who started out with me to become Jesuits are nowex-Jesuits. But, yes, something did take, though not in the way Ionce thought it did. Novitiate life, often silent and solemn, was notalways so; and this matters more in retrospect than it did at thetime. A Jesuit of the generation before mine entitled his memoir ofJesuit training I'll Die Laughing. I have never, before or since,laughed with such abandon as I did during those two years. Norhave I ever lived so physical a life, a life of sports played to such joyousexhaustion. Never before or since have I lived a life in which somany hours were spent exuberantly out-of-doors or in which Iseemed to feel the passing of the seasons in every pore of my skin.As for sex, though I know now that others have other tales to tell,my experience during those first two years consisted entirely innoctural emissions: never a dalliance with another boy, never anact of masturbation. We were given three rules to follow: tactus(Latin for "touch"), the rule forbidding us to touch one another(tagging in tag football or collisions in basketball or handball wereexceptions to the rule); "particular friendship," a rule that, in effect,meant that we were to strive to treat all the brethren withequal affection; and "custody of the eyes" — that is, no "meaningful"gazing. These three rules, which at my novitiate seemed to bestrictly observed, preserved chastity pretty effectively. But in effectthey made us act as if we had yet to enter puberty; and in sayingthis, I return to the troubling question with which I began. Mustone become a child to enter the kingdom of heaven?At Harvard in the turmoil of the late 1960s, still a Jesuit but now aHarvard graduate student as well, I awoke one morning to anoddly frightening thought: I could not recall when I had last had awet dream. Why should this matter? I asked myself. After all, I hadtaken a vow of celibacy. The answer that came — not instantaneouslybut quickly enough — was that I had not authentically renouncedsex but only, somehow, indefinitely postponed it. Whenvowing celibacy, I had unconsciously made (to use a phrase fromJesuit casuistry) a mental reservation. But I had pronounced myvows all of eight years earlier. Time was fleeting! Though I was onlytwenty-seven, the physical change I had noticed was enough tosend a simple but chilling message: I would not be forever young.And from that morning on, something began to unravel.Ignatius Loyola built his spiritual exercises around the transformationthat he had brought about in himself while recoveringfrom a crippling war injury. But at the time of this transformation,the charismatic Basque had behind him years of life as a courtierand as a soldier. He had fathered a child. A novice in the spirituallife, he was anything but a sexual novice. But could the regimenthat turned this sexually experienced if not, in fact, somewhatdebauched courtier into a monk be imposed on virginal Irish-American boys to the same transformative effect? What was thereto transform?In the 1960s, younger American Jesuits had already begun to objectthat traditional Jesuit training infantilized them. But for thesexual sharpening of that point and its linkage to Ignatius himself,I am indebted not to them but to a Jewish classmate at Harvard.Jeremy (as I will call him) was one of surprisingly few Jews whobrought no rabbinical training and no Jewish religious commitmentwith them into Harvard's Hebrew Bible program. His path tothe Tanakh had led not from any yeshiva but rather from an undergraduatelove affair with Israeli Hebrew as a rapidly evolving literarylanguage. Jeremy read the dense Hebrew prose of S. Y. Agnonfor pleasure and, to universal amazement, without a dictionary. Hisprickly manner with the religious Jews in our classes presaged a battlethat he would join only later, but it is always easier to see another'shumpback. When it came to Catholicism, Jeremy had anunforced, intuitive, sympathetic, and in the end quite correct understandingof what was eating at his Jesuit classmates.Jeremy was a good friend, and I remember him fondly. All thesame, I blushed hot when he made his historical/sociological observation.He was gentle, he was wry, but I was mortified anyway.One way to state the human condition, I submit, is to assert that forour species meaningless sex is impossible. However mere we wouldlike mere sex to be, some sort of meaning always crowds in on it.Sex can represent strength, youth, beauty, health, love, safety, consolation,wealth, power, transcendence, oblivion, escape — a listthat any reader of this sentence can lengthen. For me, at that timein my life, it represented adulthood. I could not begin to be anadult, I thought, until I ceased to be a virgin. It was sexual experiencethat separated the men from the boys, and I was still, in apainfully unbecoming sense of the phrase, just one of the boys.As this transitus got under way, the Society of Jesus and everythingI had learned about spirituality in my specifically Jesuit trainingcame to seem part of an embarrassingly prolonged boyhood. Itmattered not a little that in the 1960s the word spirituality, ubiquitousin Roman Catholic piety, was still rare in Protestant, Jewish,and secular discourse. The difference of dialect mattered becauseat just this time, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council and ofthe election of John F. Kennedy, American Catholics as a populationwere emerging self-consciously and awkwardly from theirsocioreligious ghetto and looking to take their natural place in thelarger American society. To use the word spirituality was, for me, toring the leper's bell: Catholic! Catholic! Worse, it was to hint at anappalling defect of masculinity: spirituality as the chaste seminarian'ssubstitute for physicality. I felt like Hester Prynne wearing a Vfor Virgin instead of an A for Adulteress.When I wrote my Jesuit superior in Chicago (though studying atHarvard, I belonged to the Chicago "province" of the order), hewrote back asking if I had discussed with my spiritual director a requestfor dismissal from the Society. (A Jesuit who wanted to departon good terms did not just quit or walk out; he requested dismissal.)The man's question was perfectly honorable and reasonablewithin the assumptions of the order, and I recognized it assuch. Yet spiritual director prompted the same sort of wince that spiritualityprompted. What would people think — the people I wantedto meet, the people I wanted to think me one of them — if theyknew I had something called a spiritual director? At some emotionallevel, it was as if a young man, planning to go abroad, were tonotify his father tersely of his intentions and hear back solicitously,"But have you talked this over with Mommy?"Yet consultation with a spiritual director was a step that I felt conscience-bound to take. If this was to be a divorce, and that seemedpretty likely, I wanted it to be an amicable divorce. Giving spiritualdirection a chance constituted good faith in the secular sense ofthe phrase. To my good fortune, I found my way to a brilliant andrather worldly Jesuit philosopher, then a scholar in residence at aposh psychiatric clinic in the Berkshires. An afternoon with him, asthe snow deepened outside, effectively became my exit interviewfrom the order. In memory, the soundtrack for the long drive backto Boston is James Taylor's "Sweet Baby James," a song mysteriouslyabout adulthood and rock-a-bye infancy, not to speak of theBerkshires, Boston, snowy December, and an unfinished journey toan unknown destination.Adulthood is a meaning that sexual experience can bear at mostonly briefly and once. As a transition to adulthood, losing one's virginityis rather like disembarking from a ship. Once one is ashore,even if one is the last to disembark, one is ashore for good. Thething is done. But in my case, as it happens, other meanings followedon apace.Not long after leaving the order and the church as well, I beganto read a good deal about Buddhist meditation. I attended a numberof lectures and began to meditate regularly. I found appealing,even consoling, the doctrine of anatta, according to which the selfis an illusion, a transitory event "co-dependently originated" frommultiple starting points. I found plausible the claim that the illusionof self is preserved only in normal consciousness, whereinarises normal desire, the origin of all pain, and that liberation isaccomplished by "the slaying of the mind," vividly pictured as ahyperactive monkey hopping from branch to branch. Unlike Jesuitmeditation, Buddhist meditation is not an attempt to thinkseriously and at length about something such as Jesus' agony inGethsemane but rather an attempt to kill the monkey — to haltordinary thinking altogether and subside into a protracted precognitionalor extra-cognitional state. The Buddhist-inspired exercisesthat I undertook at this time produced an effect that seemeddifferent from but experientially just as real as the more familiar Jesuiteffect of placing myself in the presence of God. But what Ifound most arresting was the fact that the brief periods (only someminutes in duration) during which I seemed to achieve what wasreferred to as mindfulness resembled nothing so much as the senseof mental emptiness that I had by then experienced during peakmoments in sexual intercourse.It was only years later that I learned of vajrayana Buddhism andthe cosmology behind ego-obliterating tantric sex. The Los AngelesCounty Museum of Art is home to the Heeramoneck collectionof Tibetan art, including a stunning array of esoteric mandalasportraying ecstatic divine copulation in a way that is intended toerase not just the distinction between gods and men but also thatbetween self and world and, ultimately, between order and chaos.Had I happened into such an experience of ego-erasure at thetime when I surrendered within the same brief period my virginityand the Jesuit cosmos that had engulfed me from puberty on? Iwondered: perhaps so. But by the time the idea occurred to me, Ihad turned the page in a dozen ways. I can only say that during myearlier "Buddhist period," though I was willing to take it on faiththat true enlightenment is only arduously achieved, I could notdeny a certain sense of déja vu when taking instruction. If, to quotea well-known Buddhist saying, the Buddha at the moment of enlightenmentwas like a deer in the deer park, if that state of mind— a state of animal rather than human consciousness — is the goalof Buddhist meditation, then Buddhism may be respectfully anduninvidiously characterized as an attempt to exit the normal adultspiritual condition. But this seemed an exit that I had by then experienced,however fleetingly, in two quite different settings.Or so I thought.We give human children little stuffed animals toplay with because, in a way, children are little animals. Their consciousnesshas not yet matured to the adult human state. Their littleminds are not yet jumping from branch to branch with adult humanagility. Buddhism has always seemed to me an attempt notmerely to return to a childlike state of consciousness — call it thestuffed-animal state — but boldly to progress or descend past thatstate to something even more devoid of human ideation. I honorthat effort, and yet I would add that descending only as far as thestuffed-animal state takes some doing; and this is the experiencethat I seem to recall in the luminosity of my first Jesuit years.I begin with the observation that though we were not mistaken asJesuits in our late twenties to object that our training had juve-nilized us, juvenilization has more than one meaning. Yes, we hadbeen excused from adult responsibility in a way that left us super-ficially and temporarily ill equipped to assume such responsibilitylater. But that same deprivation — joined during a period oftwo full years with strict sexual abstinence and with a deprivationfrom all else that might have given our incipiently adult mindswhereon to think — ushered us back through the gates of pubertyinto a kind of induced second latency. And that second latency,however artificial, remains in memory a distinct, vivid, and deeplyattractive spiritual state. We were not like deer in the deer park,no, but we were, after all, in surprisingly close approximation tothe spiritual condition of prepubescent children. Everyone sawthis about us. Everyone, even elderly retired Jesuits who had beenthrough the experience themselves years earlier, shook their headsand laughed when they saw it in us. But there it was. Think of it, ifyou will, as standing on your head. Headstanding may be crazy, butit is certainly possible, and its effect upon the brain, whether youcall the effect beneficial or not, is unlike that of any other exerciseyou can perform. At the time, I liked it rather well.All this was, you will understand, a long time ago. I now have adaughter at Berkeley. Next year, my wife and I will celebrate the silveranniversary of our wedding. But when I am asked to addressmyself to "spiritual writing," much of this tangled process crowds itsway back in. There was a time not too long ago when I would havetried to talk about it without using the word spirituality. But by aroundabout path, I have come to a point where I can speak some ofthe old words without the old fear of being somehow tainted, disqualified from competing in the larger world, or, worse, draggedall the way back in.The memory of spiritual intensity in childhood has been for onewriter after another the touchstone for all spiritual experience worthyof the name. Jesus was far from the only one. I spoke above ofsports played to joyous exhaustion and of the seasons of the yearfelt in every pore of the skin. Whom does that bring to your mind?It brings the poet Dylan Thomas to mine. Who has spoken better ofthat state of heightened but joyfully unreckoning sensitivity? "Inthe sun born over and over," he wrote, "I ran my heedless ways."The novitiate stood on a bluff overlooking a river. Leaving thepark-like grounds, we would hike through woods cut by cold creeksto a farmhouse the novitiate owned, situated on a remote hilltop.Remembering these hikes and the larky feeling of boys on a holiday,I think of Wordsworth in a dozen passages like:The sounding cataractHaunted me like a passion; the tall rock,The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,Their colors and their forms, were then to meAn appetite; a feeling and a love,That had no need of a remoter charm,By thoughts supplied, nor any interestUnborrowed from the eye.Many from all backgrounds cherish some such memory fromchildhood. But granting that the intensity of childhood experienceis a recognizable state, even a familiar one, one must still ask: Is italso a state to which the adult can return after the natural momentfor it has come and gone? Is it possible to create a spiritual disciplineto turn the man, even the sexually ardent young man, backinto a boy? That is the question — the question of whether an intensebut transitory personal experience can ever be replicatedand then built into an ongoing adult life.Never completely, I would answer, but perhaps partially. As Jesuitnovices, it seems to me that we tried our best. And we had a warrantfor our attempt in the Gospel passage that I have placed as an epigraphto this essay. Many of those who are revered as spiritual leadersradiate a youthfulness that age cannot touch, a maturity beyondmere adulthood. As Jeremy suggested, it may be a mistake to attemptthis step beyond adulthood before reaching adulthood inthe simpler sense. Hinduism with its rich and rooted acknowledgmentof the stages of life may be wiser here than Catholic Christianity.But if one does try to be, so to speak, young before one's time,well, you may count on it: something will happen. Racing aheadthat way is, perhaps, a bit like reading a great classic before you areold enough to appreciate it. I read King Lear for the first time whenI was fifteen. It means incomparably more to me now than it didthen, but it meant something to me even then. This is what I meantwhen I said above that "something took" in the Jesuit novitiate.The fact that I grew accustomed to hearing "formed" Jesuits,caught up in the swirl of their later lives as teachers, administrators,lab supervisors, drama coaches, and what have you, speak of thenovitiate as a lost world suggests to me that the spiritual effect ofwhich I speak was a secondary, largely unconscious effect. Primarilyand consciously, we were learning and practicing the rationalizedIgnatian spirituality of mental prayer. Perhaps at the peakmoments of that spirituality, such as the nature meditation thatcomes at the conclusion of the Spiritual Exercises, the two didseem briefly to work in tandem. But more often, they did not; andthe more powerful experience was the one less attended to, theone that lingers as an indelible memory, however transitory it mayhave been as a spiritual condition.As I said above, it was the esprit de corps of the Society of Jesus thatmade me, at the age of seventeen, want to enlist. How powerfully,as adolescents leave their families behind, they yearn to belong tosomething else! And how painful it can be not to make the team,not to be admitted to the fraternity, not to be chosen for the cast.At such a moment, a boy or girl feels not so much rejected as orphaned.The hoped-for replacement family has turned one out.Adults, too, often have a desire to belong to something larger thanthemselves, but theirs is a tamed and domesticated version of theawful adolescent craving. The developed adult appetite (capacitymight be a better word) for group identity doesn't eat at theachieved adult but feeds him. The earlier, more rampant appetite— for those who are lucky enough to make the team or the fraternityor the cast — can easily go beyond nurture to intoxication. Itcertainly did for me.Years after leaving the Jesuits, I learned with a faint jolt of recognitionthat the motto of the French Foreign Legion is Legio patriamea: "The legion is my fatherland." The legion and not, as onemight expect, France. This brought a shock of recognition becausemy own earlier motto could so easily have been Societas ecclesia mea:"The Society is my church." "The Society" is what Jesuits call the orderamong themselves. That it is "of Jesus" goes without saying. Butas with young legionnaires, so with young Jesuits: in the end, firstthings must come first. If you have your doubts about France, youdon't belong in the Legion, however exciting you may have foundit. And if you have your doubts about the Church of Rome, youdon't belong in the Society of Jesus, either.Ten years after leaving the Jesuits, I ratified a process already wellunder way by marrying in the Episcopal Church. I had concludedby then both that I could not avail myself of the spiritual resourcesof Buddhism as well as I could those of Christianity and, more basically,that agnostic disaffiliation, the default option for my generation,was an intellectually unwarranted impoverishment of life.Spiritual life in the Episcopal Church has been, for me, like lifelived in a ramshackle but still surprisingly functional old manse. Asan Episcopalian, I am accommodated as the adult I must ever be,yet given repeated, fleeting but pungent occasions to be, withoutshame, a spiritual child again.I know that the Episcopal Church is not for everyone, but thenwhat is? This seems a flippant question, but I mean to ask it seriouslywith reference to this anthology of spiritual writing. Of itscontributors, one may know, guess, or suspect that several, at least,are committed to developed traditions or disciplines that, for theiradherents or practitioners, have historically been answers ratherthan questions, intended for the many rather than for the few. Butin the main, what the contributors choose to write of here is, as Imight put it, the vestibule rather than the sanctuary. One detects apluralistically chastened awareness that comparable experiences,as they come to be preserved and implemented, may lead to incomparable,incompatible rationalizations. These, too, can beshared, but never quickly, never easily, and often at some risk of offense.The most powerful statement collectively made by this anthologyis thus less an assertion of some such tradition or discipline than itis a negation of the mentioned default position in American spirituallife. Again and again in these pages, we find an American manor woman experientially interrupted in and then dislocated fromthe stultifying routine of normal American materialism. Taken together,the collection thus bespeaks a poignant readiness to takeleave of the consumer society whose cosmology may be Big Bangawesomebut whose ideology rarely gets much past "When the goinggets tough, the tough go shopping." Just after World War II,Americans believed that science had won the war and saved theworld from tyranny and that the material plenty bestowed by science("Better Living Through Chemistry" was an advertising sloganof the day) was an innocent blessing, especially for folks whohad known such tough times so recently. That belief is the spiritualhome, the default Weltanschauung, for most Americans over forty.But in the first decade of the twenty-first century, science seems increasinglythe unwitting destroyer of the world, while the innocenceof American plenty has morphed into obese glut for the fewand dire want for the many. It may be time, then, to leave the defaultposition, to leave home.American spiritual writing at its best is, in sum, a pluriform, multifariousacknowledgment of discomfiture and an opening of exitsinto a wider world. These acknowledgments and openings, some ofwhich involve a doubling back to childhood, are not the consummationof spirituality, but in their candor and unguarded opennessthey are the beginning. The reader is led to this volume, I imagine,by the question: There must be something more. Where can I find it? Thecontributors to this volume answer, in effect: You will find it when itfinds you. Refuse to deny what you know but consent to how littlethat will always be, and, when the moment comes, the sky will openand the liberating intrusion will descend upon you.--Jack MilesCopyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin. Introduction copyright © 2004 by Jack Miles. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, the very best pieces are selected by an editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field, making the Best American series the most respected -- and most popular -- of its kind. The latest addition to the esteemed series is a collection of the best spiritual writing of the year, introduced by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jack Miles and including both prose and poetry. Series editor Philip Zaleski has chosen the volume's pieces with an eye to spirituality's many guises, from its impact on personal relationships and the environment to politics, creativity, and literature. Christian, Muslim, Jewish, secular, and pan-Hindu perspectives are all represented in these pieces, which have been selected from both mainstream and more specialized periodicals.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Readers of Zaleski's anthologies will be glad to know that, after a yearlong hiatus, his spirituality series has found a new home with Houghton Mifflin's Best American books. This sixth volume follows the expected format: some 25 essays and 10 poems that, according to the introduction, "address the eternal oppositions of good and evil, virtue and vice, creation and destruction; the sorrows and exaltations of heart, mind, and soul; the ceaseless quest for God." With approaches ranging from Seyyed Hossein Nasr's philosophical argument for the primacy of consciousness to Mark Doty's ecstatic vision of "fire [calling] its double down," the collection includes household names like Natalie Goldberg and Oliver Sacks alongside newer authors. Bus driver Robin Cody, for example, pays touching tribute to "birth-damaged or world-beaten children," and memoirist Lindsey Crittenden describes depression, death, her mother and the kind of prayer that is "pure throw of yourself into the unknown." Welcoming varied perspectives, Zaleski includes David Gelernter's summary of Judaism as well as a sprinkling of overt Buddhists and Christians, though most selections transcend religious categories. A large number, like David James Duncan's "Earth Music" and Allen Hoey's "Essay on Snow," focus on the natural world, while some, like B.K. Loren's "Word Hoard," resist classification. With few misses and many hits, the collection is a thought-provoking and often poignant read. (Oct. 14) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal