The spirituality of the future will not be supported, or at any rate will be much less supported, by a sociologically Christian homogeneity of its situation; it will have to live much more clearly out of a solitary, immediate experience of God and his Spirit in the individual … That is why the modern spirituality of the Christian involves courage for solitary decision contrary to public opinion … It has already been pointed out that the Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not exist at all. —Karl Rahner
“Franny and Zooey,” a work published in 1961 by the holy recluse J.D. Salinger and comprised of a short story called “Franny” and a novella named “Zooey” which appeared in 1955 and 1957, respectively, is the story of a young woman’s religious crisis. Frances Glass, the youngest child of a large and eccentric New York family, has become preoccupied with “The Pilgrim Continues His Way,” sequel to another volume called “The Way of a Pilgrim.” “The Way of a Pilgrim” is the story of a peasant with a withered arm who wanders the countryside chanting the Jesus Prayer. He encounters a hermit, or starets (in the Eastern Orthodox tradition) who counsels him in the art of praying without ceasing. Franny’s obsession eventually leads to a sort of breakdown, a refusal to eat, and a return to the apartment she grew up in, where her family frets over her agitated state.
During one scene, Franny’s mother Bessie chain-smokes in a bathroom while her son, Zooey, shaves and listens with little patience to her anxieties. When Bessie suggests that a psychoanalyst should be summoned (“a very devout Catholic psychoanalyst,” she reassures him), Zooey retorts: “I’m warning you, now, God damn it. I don’t care if he’s a very devout Buddhist veterinarian. If you call in some … ignorant psychoanalyst … who’s experienced in adjusting people to the joys of television, and Life magazine every Wednesday, and European travel, and the H-bomb, and Presidential elections, and the front page of the Times, and the responsibilities of the Westport and Oyster Bay Parent-Teacher Association, and God knows what else that’s gloriously normal — you just do that, and I swear to you, in not more than a year Franny’ll either be in a nut ward or she’ll be wandering off into some goddam desert with a burning cross in her hands.”
Now, although I’ve known some people who had very good experiences in nut wards (made lifelong friends, etc.), it’s not a place I’d want to be. But what, exactly, is so wrong or undesirable about wandering into a desert with a burning cross in one’s hands?
Autumn, 2009. I am living on a city block which has an island in the middle of two opposing lanes of traffic. Every evening, at around 9PM, a man wearing a brown, ill-fitting suit and a yellow dress shirt stands in the middle of the island and shouts “Hallelujah! JOY! JOY! JOY! JOY!” repeatedly. He hands out Bible tracts, the kind that are printed in some remote Midwestern state and include statements in red letters like “Repent — NOW! And be saved.” He continues for about an hour, never seeming to be out of breath. He is a self-appointed witness to the underlying ecstasy of creation. Several times I approach him, but I understand implicitly that he is not to be spoken to. His eyes are glassy and unseeing. I am told he lives in a nearby homeless shelter. Other homeless men sit by him on the island bench, including one I befriend named “Spider.” One night Spider hands me a pamphlet called “Living Water” and as he does so he says, “God bless you. God bless us.” It is a slender volume that still sits on my shelf today, in between (I’m checking right now) “Selected Passages” by Plato and “Thoughts in Solitude” by Thomas Merton. On its cover it promises to reveal “The Radical Message of God’s Word” to anyone who dares to look within, and on the inside title page there is a stamp from a nearby Pentecostal church.
Autumn, 2019. I watch a video of a young man named Brandt Jean forgiving his brother’s killer. A female police officer, Amber Guyger, has been sentenced to ten years in prison after shooting Botham Jean in his own apartment, which she claims was a mistake. “I can speak for myself … I know if you go to God and ask Him, He will forgive you,” Jean says. “I personally want the best for you. And I wasn’t going to ever say this in front of my family or anyone, but I don’t even want you to go to jail. I want the best for you … and the best would be give your life to Christ.” For days after I hear this statement, these words ring in my ears. Give your life to Christ. Give your life to Christ. I don’t know exactly what this means, but I know that I want it.
A few days later I speak to a family member on the phone. “I want to give my life to Christ,” I say. “What does that mean?” She fires back. “That doesn’t mean anything. You still have to pay rent.”
Spring, 2023. I am at a monastery. A monk shows me a vast library of 40,000 volumes. We speak of the sermons of John Donne, the visionary poetry of William Blake, the writings of George Washington, various forms of feminism, his love of D.H. Lawrence and Nietzsche, Bernie Sanders, and the wretched consequences of the economic consensus of the past forty years. I tell him of my interest in the mystics. “If you say you’re interested in the mystics today,” I complain, “people look at you like you’re a nutcase.” “Oh, no,” he says placidly. “It’s the mystics that are going to get us out of this mess.”
He seems to glide rather than walk as he moves among the stacks, the black point of his hood pointing toward the ground. “It makes people feel alive to have an enemy, someone to hate — but that’s not really The Way.” I listen. “This stoking of division, this ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ — young people are going to totally reject that.” His prophecy implies that a coming transformation will be led or at least informed by people in touch with other realms. The words echo what I have known intuitively for a long time: if I can stay away from the news long enough and let the mental wrestling in my mind dissipate, it seems to me that Left and Right are nothing but an illusion of the brain.
I don’t believe in Left and Right. I believe in God and the re-enfranchisement of the middle and working class.
The night before I arrive at the monastery, I dream that I am wearing two red garments that burst into flame. Several weeks later I dream that I have left my old life behind and long to go back to it. But now I am standing in a field of lambs, small white creatures in the grass, and this is the reason I cannot go back.
In the months that follow I feel closer to God than I have ever been. I notice that sometimes on my way to church I start to run. When I leave, I feel depressed, thinking, now what am I going to do with the rest of my day when all I want is to be In There? A profound and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence enters me. It is hard to focus on everyday tasks. I sometimes have to stop in front of my window, tears streaming down my face because I feel such ecstasy. What is happening to me? I think. What is happening to me?
Fear that my zeal could someday explode and escape control has permeated my life. The word comes from the Greek “zelos,” meaning “heat” or “burning emotion.” It’s worth noting that the word “passion,” a synonym of “zeal” as well as “ardor” and “fervor,” comes from the Latin “passus” or “pati” which means to “suffer” or “submit.” Passion, a word we associate with love and romance, has it roots in pain, as one observes when expressions of sexual pleasure resemble a kind of exquisite torment.
At the monastery I have worn dresses with long sleeves. I have been enveloped in silence, in peace. Returning to the world is jarring, a kind of sickness. I pass a girl on the street, cellulite jiggling out of her cutoff jeans as she shouts on the phone. She is talking about another woman. “No,” she guffaws, her flip flops slapping against the street. “She just wanted to sleep with him!” I am lost and don’t belong here. God, it is all so empty, so gut-wrenchingly empty.
I try to attend church again at my normal place. But nothing feels the same. As I leave, I have the distinct feeling that God is calling me out of the world. The depression floods back into my heart. I go home and collapse on the bed, deep into sleep. When I awake midway through the afternoon, I open my eyes to a strange apparition on the ceiling. Light has reflected from a portable carbon monoxide detector I keep on top of my air conditioner. It is in the shape of a fish. I stare again in disbelief, then take a picture. Could this be happening?
In May I attend afternoon Mass. The young priest, a gifted speaker who seems to have a ring of red around his eyes, as though he has been enveloped in some kind of private suffering, speaks about being called. He explains that God doesn’t call the capable. He calls the flawed and the deficient, so He can be glorified. “If God’s calling you, it’s not because you’re strong,” he says. “It’s because you’re weak.” I nod because I know.
For as long as I can remember, I have been looking for a Way Out. Sometimes it took the form of an interest in suicide. A fascination with it, a fear of it, and a compulsion to talk others out of it. Other times it took the form of an investigation into alternative lifestyles. Sustainable farming, intentional community. Witchcraft. I was once part of a women’s circle where we howled at the moon. Womyn who run with the wolves. I have felt haunted. It was strange to believe that God could be calling me because of my darkness, because of my wayward sexuality, because of the worst of my life.
Summer, 2023. “You’re doing it wrong,” an older female friend of the family says when I tell her of my torment and confusion. “Being a Christian isn’t about this kind of struggle. It’s just about being a good person.” She is frustrated with my questions and doesn’t want to listen. Her reasoning echoes the same old cliches that many have repeated: You have to come down off the mountaintop sometime. You can serve God and still be in the world. But if being a Christian is just about Being a Good Person™, if one can serve God and still be in the world, why does God keep calling people out of the world? Why did God start calling hermits into the desert in the third and fourth centuries, to forsake their societies and devote themselves to ceaseless prayer? If being a Christian is just about BeInG a GoOd PeRsOn and not about any kind of more tortured, ecstatic or rapturous communion with the Holy Spirit, why did monks like Merton write things like this?
Christian contemplation is precipitated by crisis within crisis and anguish within anguish. It is born of spiritual conflict. It is a victory that suddenly appears in the hour of defeat. It is the providential solution of problems that seem to have no solution. It is the reconciliation of enemies that seem to be irreconcilable.
Why did he speak about hearing God say this?
All the things around you will be armed against you, to deny you, to hurt you, to give you pain, and therefore to reduce you to solitude … Everything that touches you shall burn you, and you will draw your hand away in pain, until you have withdrawn yourself from all things … You will have gifts, and they will break you with their burden. You will have pleasures of prayer, and they will sicken you and you will fly from them.
Why, also, would contemporary monk Michael Casey write this?
Taking the spiritual life seriously means that it is not compartmentalized. It is a total obsession.
I ask a religious sister if being Christian is simply about Being a Good Person. She bursts out laughing. “The spiritual life is about spiritual warfare,” she says.
Sometime this year, I increase my small acts of mercy. My favorite is to hunt for worms after a rainstorm, those cursed souls who have washed onto the sidewalk, and now risk being stomped on by an errant foot or dried in the sun when it returns. I find them, hold them squirming in my hands, and bring them to the nearest park. There I look for the lushest, dampest soil, and place them gently in the Earth again. It gives me great joy to see them burrow into the ground where they belong.
My ancestors were pokeweed Christians and Free Methodists who shouted in church and performed faith healings. I remember my family speaking of camp meetings and the Pilgrim Holiness Church. If you’ve never heard of “pokeweed gospel,” it’s how some referred to the “backwoods Christians” of the “Holy Roller cults” — adherents of a charismatic faith who would “not take any sort of medicine.”
If a young man or woman lacks the charism of celibacy for the Kingdom, he [or she] is not called to religious life.
The person who wants a “radical Christianity” but does not really want celibacy should seek radical marriage and enter that state of life. But then he will have to find a radical partner. No easy task.
To give up the interpersonal relationship of marriage primarily for work, even for excellent work, is unnatural. It relegates the person to the level of means. A machine is a pure means. A person is not. —Thomas Dubay, S.M.
At night on my bed I long for the monastery. Its scent of soap and rosemary, the potatoes being roasted in the kitchen and the ugly buzzer sound summoning us to prayer. Many times in the darkness, thinking of the things that have gone wrong, I have felt so close to Christ in my affliction that I longed for the affliction to never end. I could feel Him there with me, almost pressed against my skin, the nails that were in Him also pressed into me, in a way that bound me to my life and would bring me through. It is this intimacy I want more than any other. And wouldn’t another person get in the way of that?
I want to enter willingly into my passion, into something I know will consume me, the imprudent choice. I see online that monks and nuns have crosses above their beds in their cells, and I order one from a man who makes them by hand and sells them on Ebay. Now my home is complete. “Enjoy your cross,” he writes to confirm the order.
Enjoy your cross. It seems like an odd thing to say. Usually one hears take up your cross and follow me (Matthew 16:24), or about the pain of the cross. But the cross is joy. It is the greatest joy of my life.
