Grappling With the Role Suffering Plays in Spiritual Development

In 1998 Philip Zaleski began editing an anthology of essays that have been published each year under the broad and perhaps presumptuous title “The Best Spiritual Writing.” Such superlatives notwithstanding, these collections consistently delight in their broad and ecumenical range of voices, drawn from magazines and literary journals from predictable and unpredictable quarters. Taken together, they form a compelling inquiry into the heart of our most abiding spiritual concerns.

Zaleski’s work for 2001 is no exception, and is perhaps all the more relevant in light of the events of Sept. 11. Theologians have long struggled for an understanding of the role that suffering plays in the course of spiritual development, and Zaleski’s writers bring this struggle to center stage.

Reading Leah Koncelik Lebec’s haunting essay about the stillbirth of her first son, you understand how deeply tested her faith was, and in the course of coming to grips with the tragedy, she finds a greater understanding of God’s love than ever before. “[He] loves us,” she writes in a moment of peace, “as a mother loves her child--because we are there, because we are his, because we are ourselves: irreplaceable, forever unique, never, ever to be forgotten.”

It is hard-won solace and evidence that the search for spirituality today remains less about escaping pain than about finding meaning in it. It is a lesson drawn from Job, whose suffering demonstrated that God’s will is in everything, good and bad.

Lebec’s intimate tale similarly broadens our view of the world, as does John Landretti’s “Bear Butte Diary,” the story of a man, Jethro, who seeks to connect to the pain that his wife suffers from some unspecified violence that she has experienced. It is a search that takes Jethro on a long and arduous vision quest as he seeks a shaman in the mountains of North Dakota and endures a lengthy fast that in the end grants him the blessing of a larger perspective.

But it is a perspective that is not easily won. Landretti chronicles his experiences with various shamans, each claiming to be more authentic and learned than the others. Looking for meaning, it seems, can be as much about departing from a person or a place of faith as it is about being willing to arrive and accept a new one.

Daphne Merkin, a staff writer for the New Yorker, describes the crisis of faith she faced as the rebellious daughter of Orthodox Jewish parents. Her parents’ strict world--complicated further by the fact that she is the great-great-granddaughter of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, founder of modern Jewish Orthodoxy--sparked a deep rebellion in her.

She confesses to the conflicts she felt growing up (remembering the impiety of needing a manicure on Yom Kippur) and reflects on her small battle to seek something spiritually true between the faith of her family and her own values as a woman and writer. Clearly, the community of her religion offered her less satisfaction than the meaning of her transgressions against it.

Though Merkin finds meaning in rejecting her religious community, Howard Mumma paints the opposite picture in his “Conversation With Camus.” Recounting the time he spent with the writer in Paris in 1951, Mumma chronicles how difficult belonging can be, no matter how desired it is. Camus, we learn in this story, longed for a spiritual community that, in his mind, could be attained through baptism.

Yet he thought that because of his existential beliefs his homecoming to God must remain secret and hidden. It formed the basis of a greater search toward the end of his life: “I am almost on a pilgrimage,” Camus told Mumma, “seeking something to fill the void that I am experiencing--and no one else knows. . . . I am searching for something the world is not giving me.”

“The Best Spiritual Writing 2001” suggests that there are many paths to understanding the spiritual side of life, and many truths to be discovered in the course of that search. Maybe this is what best defines spiritual writing: the story of an individual’s struggle to explain the capriciousness of life, be it pain or joy, at a time when explanations seem most elusive.

Yet curiously, it is the focus on the individual in this anthology that raises a more perplexing question. Though each essay depicts a spiritual struggle as something to be endured alone, as a solitary struggle with God, there is a remarkable absence of these struggles as they are played out on a communal level. George Weigel’s essay on the pope’s visit to Jerusalem last year, for instance, repeatedly tries to draw the pope out of the institution he embodies, and portrays him as a pilgrim on a mission to the Holy Land.

Perhaps this will change as next year’s anthology is compiled. Maybe the collective grief and challenges we now find ourselves facing will provoke more writers to explore how we work through crises as a society of faith and, by doing so, provide a perspective that will give us a new framework for understanding spirituality in the 21st century.