Spiritual Writing: My GA Talk

[This is the text of my 15-minute segment in the Spiritual Writing workshop organized at the UU General Assembly by UU World magazine. I was on a panel with Meg Barnhouse, the other columnist on the UU World website. Meg, who has written five books and has made musical CDs, is much better known than I am, so we packed the 200-chair room to the point that the organizers had to keep reminding people not to sit in the doorway.]

Before I get started, there's something I should tell you. About 20 years ago, the female characters in the comic strip Eyebeam described a chronic condition that I immediately realized I suffer from. It's called Male Answer Syndrome. The main symptom is a compulsion to answer any question you're asked, whether you know what you're talking about or not.

The worst case I ever saw was my college roommate. When people asked Mike for directions, he always gave them – even if he had never heard of the place where they were going. To this day whenever I'm lost, I remember Mike and I never ask for directions.

I thought I should tell you this, because a few months ago Kenneth Sutton asked me: "What makes writing spiritual?"

So here I am.

What makes writing spiritual?

I once led a discussion at my church on the question "What is spiritual?" It didn't work out very well. The second person to talk – probably another Male Answer Syndrome sufferer – looked spiritual up in the dictionary and answered the question for us. Where can a discussion go from there? Who were we to pit our authority against the OED?

I don't want to repeat that mistake today, but if you're going to talk about spiritual writing, you do need at least some working notion of spiritual, so I'll tell you mine. To me, spiritual isn't a type of subject matter, it's a frame of mind. This really comes through in Zen, where they might teach you to practice archery or calligraphy. Are those things spiritual? Well, no. But you can do them – like you can do almost anything – in a spiritual frame of mind.

What frame would that be? The best way I can think to describe the spiritual frame of mind is that it's an engaged humility. You're totally absorbed in whatever you're doing, but not in a dominating, controlling way. When you do something in the spiritual frame of mind, you can get so far away from the sense of your own place in the spotlight that you feel privileged just to be present – even though you are the person doing the thing that you're present at.

So: spiritual writing. Well, almost any writing can be spiritual to the writer. It's like archery or calligraphy. You could be writing the most formulaic murder mystery. But if you hit that point where the story takes on a life of its own and the characters start saying what they say rather than what you tell them to say – that's a spiritual experience. That's engaged humility. You forget that you're writing the story – it's just happening and you feel privileged to be there.

But notice: It's the process that's spiritual, not the product. The reader just sees a murder mystery.

So I think I'd rather reserve the term spiritual writing for pieces that are intended to be spiritual for the reader. A good piece of spiritual writing should invite the reader into a state of engaged humility.

The night sky may not be a piece of writing, but it has that effect. On one of those cold, clear nights in the desert, the sky goes beyond just being engaging. It's arresting. You can't stop looking at it. And it's also humbling, because there's too much of it. You can't look at all of it. You're just a finite being in a Universe that might as well be infinite.

But again, spirituality is in the process, not the product. It's not that the night sky itself is spiritual. Rather than being engaged and humbled, you could look at the night sky and experience a sense of pride in your ability to identify all the constellations. Instead of being humbled by the whole, you could cut it into pieces and master each one by knowing its name. There's nothing wrong with that, but I wouldn't call it spiritual.

And that, I think, is a lesson for writers. If the Creator of the Sky can't force a spiritual response from people, neither can you. You can invite readers to dance, but you can't sweep them off their feet.

Now, spiritual writing as I've just described it is very different from religious writing, where you write about religion or about religious concepts like God or karma or the UU Principles. Sometimes the two overlap, because some religious concepts are so big that they're like the night sky. You're engaged by the concept, but you're humbled at the same time. Even as you grasp a piece of it, you realize that there's so much that you're not grasping, so much that's just on the edge of your comprehension, and probably even more that is outside your field of vision completely. That's when religion becomes spiritual.

But some religion and some religious writing is downright anti-spiritual. Because it's not about humility at all; it's about mastery. You can cut God up into constellations and name them: God is omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent. God is a character in our book, and the book has rules that He has to follow. And so we can hold God to His commitments, because we're the ones in control.

Another anti-spiritual kind of religion promotes humility, but it's the humility of a slave rather than a saint. Instead of engaging you, it beats you down: Don't look up at the night sky. It's too big for you. You wouldn't get it. You'd just be confused. I, the author, have been specially chosen and specially trained to look at the sky, and I'll tell you what you need to know. Listen to what I say. And the first thing I say is: "Don't look up."

On the other hand, writing that opens up new vistas of consciousness can be spiritual, even if it has nothing to do with religion. Three hundred years ago reading Newton could be a spiritual experience. The idea that the same law made your fork fall off the table and kept the Moon in its orbit – it was so big. Everything you'd ever thought seemed small by comparison.

Now finally we get to UU spiritual writing. To me that means spiritual writing that has some UU religious content, and not just a UU author. It doesn't have to be a dissertation on the seven principles, but it should be informed by a UU sensibility. Meg Barnhouse's essays, I think, are good examples of what I mean: It's not like the words Unitarian Universalism appear on every page, but it's no surprise when you discover that the author is a UU. My writing, I think, comes in the other door: It's obvious when I'm writing about UUism, but I only occasionally get spiritual with it.

Some of the challenges of spiritual writing are the same for UUs as for anybody else, and some are unique. Like any other kind of religious writing, UU writing can be anti-spiritual. Sometimes we go so far in our efforts to demystify religion that we destroy any sense of awe and wonder. The Universe becomes something to master, and humility goes out the window. Or we can beat people down by telling them that their subjective engagement with life is just idiosyncratic and not worth paying attention to.

One special challenge is a UU audience's distrust of authority. There are no spiritual experts in UUism, so you can't just say, "Listen to me." To a certain extent you have to be like the early sea-faring merchants when they dealt with skittish tribes. They wouldn't barge into the village and try to make a sale in sign language. Instead they'd lay some of their merchandise out on the beach and back away from it. In time the natives would come and inspect it and leave some of their own products in its place.

So you don't go to a UU audience and say, "You should think this." Instead you say, "This is how I look at things. These are my experiences that lead me to think this way." Then you back away. Slowly, your readers come out of the jungle.

The place where my religious writing gets most spiritual is when I present a vision of how things could be. But I always have to be careful to put it forward as my vision, not the UU vision. If readers want to make it their own vision, they can pick it up off the beach.

On those rare occasions when I do say something directly, maybe because I don't have time to do anything else, I try to make it non-threatening by wrapping an amusing metaphor around it – like seafaring merchants and skittish tribes.

A second special challenge – I wish I had an amusing metaphor to buffer this one – is UUism's impoverished religious language. This really hits me whenever I read evangelical stuff. I get language envy, because they can very quickly and simply communicate things that would give me fits. Several years ago I saw a piece on 60 Minutes about a Christian couple who adopted and raised kids that nobody else wanted. They had like 26 of them. And when the reporter asked why, the wife said very plainly (as if these things happen every day) that this was the work God had called them to do. That was all she needed to say. Evangelicals all over the country knew exactly what she meant.

If that woman were a UU, she could explain for half an hour and still leave questions. She absolutely could not say that this was the work God had called her to do. "God? God Who?" UUs don't have a religious terminology that everyone understands.

We also don't have a canon of stories and characters that we can take for granted. If I were talking to an evangelical audience about friendship, I could just say "David and Jonathan". I wouldn't have to tell the story. They'd know it well enough to figure out for themselves how it applied to my talk. But what UU stories does everyone know? That lack of common reference impoverishes our ability to communicate. (Actually, for the Star Trek fans out there I can make this point in three words: Darmok at Tanagra.)

As a UU writer, you get around the poverty of our language by grounding your points in the nitty-gritty of everyday life, and making metaphors out of experiences so common that almost everyone can identify with them. (And also, occasionally, by using pop culture.) Religious words, if you use them all, need to come late, after the everyday metaphors fix their meanings. Just now, for example, I talked about the night sky before I ever mentioned God.

Meg's pieces make good examples of this UU style. She almost always engages us by starting in some totally mundane place like a laundromat or a diner or a county fair. And she's in a role we all recognize: she's a mother or a daughter or somebody trying to do a hard job. The religious content arises slowly, and the humility in these pieces comes from realizing that even the most ordinary situation has depth. Even the most mundane setting opens outward to the infinite. If I were really aware, what might I see in this room? It's a humbling thought.

I wanted to close by reading a poem that captures this same kind of dualism between ordinary experience and themes so vast that they become spiritual. It's "First Lesson" by Philip Booth. I don't know whether Booth was ever a UU or not. I know the poem because Laurel Hallman used it in her Berry Street Lecture, which is in the volume A Language of Reverence. As Hallman notes, the poem has not one word of religious language in it. Superficially, Booth is just talking about teaching his daughter to float. But the deeper themes are there also. Listen:

[I then read the whole poem, which would not be fair use to publish online -- Hallman didn't publish it online either. But I did find it here. How the Poemhunter site deals with copyright issues I have no idea.]

Portland, Ho!

Once again this year I'm going to be doing a sort-of-blog for the UU General Assembly. It's a blog in the sense of being a regularly updated chronicle of what I see and do, but it's sort-of because there's no mechanism for leaving comments. (Not my fault; the GA web site just isn't set up that way.)

I'll post a link when I know one, and feel free to attach comments to this post.

This week I've been doing my homework. I'm covering the Ware Lecture by Rashid Khalidi, so I read his book about Palestine "The Iron Cage". Liked it. He gives the impression of being thoughtful and not knee-jerk partisan. I am not an Israel/Palestine expert though, so I can't judge how accurate his overall interpretations of the facts are. I expect an interesting talk.

I'm having more trouble with my other homework. I'm covering David Korten's talk, so I'm reading his recent book "The Great Turning: from Empire to Earth Community". I want to like the book, but it's pushing so many of my buttons.

When an author is trying to state a case or make a point, one of my tests is whether s/he seems to understand why some people disagree. I'm impressed if you can state the opposing case in a reasonable way, and I'm not impressed if you think that everyone on the other side is either stupid or evil. So far, in the first 100 pages, the main reason I've seen for people choosing Empire is that they are not as spiritually advanced or psychologically mature as the people who choose Earth Community. That doesn't give me a good feeling.

He also pushed my gender button. 67% of "Spiritual Creatives" -- the highest caste in Korten's system -- are female. Now think about the reaction an author would get if he defined a ladder of spiritual advancement and discovered that 2/3 of the highest caste were male. Immediately issues of structural bias would come up. But Korten just swallows this number in one gulp, without raising a single question about it.

On the GA web site I'm going to maintain journalistic objectivity; it's my job. But it may not be easy.

My Moment in the Public Eye

Good things (and bad things, I suppose) happen in bunches. The same day that my first column appears on the UU World web site is also the day I get my first article published in a political quarterly: Public Eye.

The article is called Defense Against the Dark Arts, and it's about the working class evangelicals. What's going to happen to them? Are they going to rediscover their progressive self-interest? Or is 2006 an aberration, after which the Reagan coalition will reform?

The title, you probably noticed, comes from Harry Potter's favorite subject. Here's the metaphor-establishing paragraph:

At Hogwarts, the Reagan spell would be taught in Transfiguration class: Lower-wage workers who coincidentally belong to conservative churches are transmuted into moral crusaders who coincidentally have bad jobs. The progressive working class becomes the religious Right, and the band plays "Onward Christian Soldiers" instead of "Joe Hill" or even "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?" And liberals - compassionate, decent people that we think we are - are transmuted in their eyes into soul-destroying monsters.

If you've been reading my stuff for a while, you'll probably notice that most of the themes and references of Who's Afraid of Freedom and Tolerance? are back, but repackaged into a more political context and given a new framing metaphor. And hopefully reaching a new audience.

I Are an Columist

Today begins something I've been looking forward to for a while: I've become a regular columnist on the UU World web site.

If "regular" makes you think of Paul Krugman writing twice a week for the New York Times, I'm overstating things. My column will appear six times a year. One way of looking at it is that Meg Barnhouse (author of the book "Rock of Ages at the Taj Mahal" and the new "Did I Say That Out Loud?") and I are sharing a monthly column.

My first column is a more philosophical look at something I've been posting scattered impressions of since April: the New Humanism conference at Harvard. The column is called Does Humanism Need to be New? I'm pleased with it. I think I got a lot of content into a small space, and I'm happy with the phrases and the running series of sci-fi metaphors.

I have an ulterior motive for not posting the text here: I want a lot of people to go to the UU World web site and read my column there, so that it gets a good hit count. UU World doesn't have any commenting feature, though, so come back here to say what you think.

New Humanism Conference III: Me and Salman

The thing-I-will-never-forget about the New Humanism Conference is that I got to ask Salman Rushdie a question.

The first night of the conference (Friday) was devoted to giving Rusdie some kind of lifetime achievement award in "cultural humanism". So there was a long process of introducing introducers who introduce somebody who introduces Rushdie. I'm sure you know how those things go. Steven Pinker was one of the introducers, and Rebecca Goldstein made some interesting points, so it could have been worse.

Then Rushdie did a reading from "Shalimar the Clown". I liked it a lot. At this point I have to make a shameful confession: I've never read a Rushdie novel. I bought "Satanic Verses" back when the Ayatollah was threatening to have Rushdie killed, but I never got around to reading it. Buying it was more of a political statement than a literary ambition. (I know you're wondering: Whatever happened to the fatwa? It was never officially rescinded, but Rushdie wanders around pretty freely these days. I get the impression that certain circles in Teheran will celebrate when Rushdie dies, but bringing that day closer doesn't seem to be high on anybody's to-do list.)

Afterwards there was a question period. I'm always conflicted in situations like this. Part of me wants to interact with the famous person any way I can, and another part of me is ashamed of that juvenile impulse and sits on it. So if I recognized God having the grand slam breakfast in the next booth at Denny's, I'd probably leave him alone. I don't want to waste his time with something stupid like: "The Universe was just such a cool idea. I really, really like it." I'd try to watch him without being obvious, and then later I'd think: "I can't believe it was like, God, right there. And I didn't say anything."

So I'm not saying anything, and all these people are trying to ask refined literary questions, some more successfully than others. Rushdie is answering them very graciously. One woman is an English teacher whose class read "Midnight's Children". They argued over what the ending meant, and she wants to know what Rushdie thinks it means. And he says exactly the right thing: "It's not my job to say what it means. That's your job."

I'm watching the line of questioners dwindle, when I realize that I actually do want to know something that nobody else is asking. So after some internal debate I stop sitting on my juvenile self and get in line. I continue to be the end of the line, and when the MC offers Rushdie the chance to declare victory and go home, Salman notices that there are only four questioners left and decides to let us ask our questions. I'm last.

I ask: "Looking back at 'The Satanic Verses' and the fatwa and the way it dominated your life for so many years, my question is: Would you do it again?"

And Rushdie very wryly says, "Well, I'd rather not." And then he makes a very interesting comment, which I won't put in quotes because I don't remember it word-for-word. He said that it makes him happy now that finally people can read "Satanic Verses" as a novel. For years, he said, no one commented on it as a novel. You could talk about it in a political context or a religious context, but not in a literary context. He said it was very frustrating as a writer to put so much of your time into writing a piece of fiction and have it talked about every way but as a piece of fiction.

Then the evening was over and I went home. For a while I thought that although Rushdie's answer had been interesting, he had sort of dodged the question. I had meant to ask: Knowing what he knows now, knowing what the effect on his life would be, would he have written and published "Satanic Verses" at all? And he didn't answer that.

At least not directly. As I thought about his answer and about the general tone of his other answers, I realized something: This crowd had gathered to honor him as a Humanist hero, and he wasn't going to come out and tell them in so many words "Being a hero wasn't worth it." That wouldn't have been gracious at all. Instead he told me that he was glad that the book had stopped being a symbol and gone back to being a novel. Which, I think, sort of means the same thing. But he made it my job to come to that interpretation, not his job.

And I guess that means that the book on my shelf has stopped being a political statement and started being a novel that I haven't read. Maybe I will.

New Humanism Conference II: Da Yute

Easily the most fun session at the New Humanism Conference was the "Next Generation of Humanism" panel. Whoever assembled the panel must have had a blast doing it. In addition to leaders of more-or-less traditional student organizations -- Amanda Shapiro of the Harvard Secular Society, Peter Blake representing Harvard Graduate Humanist Community, August Brunsman of the Secular Student Alliance -- the panel included three new-media types: Rebecca Watson, editor of the online magazine and blog Skepchick and regular contributor to the podcast The Skeptics Guide to the Universe; Bryan Pesta, who hosts the atheist and agnostics page on MySpace; and Hermant Mehta, author of the book I Sold My Soul on eBay.

Mehta's backstory is the most entertaining: He grew up Jain but has been an atheist since he was a teen-ager. The stunt that eventually became his book was that he offered the following auction on eBay: the winner could send this lost young atheist to the church of his or her choice. He expected to get about $10, but the bidding ended with a $504 bid by evangelist Jim Henderson. Mehta proceeded to visit a number of churches chosen by Henderson and blog about them for Henderson's web site Off the Map. (If this all sounds too good not to be planned in advance, you too may be a skeptic.) The book chronicles Mehta's adventures visiting a variety of Christian churches, including Ted Haggard's church in Colorado and the Willow Creek megachurch in Illinois.

Skepchick is another great story. The online magazine last published an issue in May, 2006, so it may be defunct. But the blog, forum, and podcast are active. Under slogans like "Smart is Sexy" and "Critical Thinking for the Masses", the Skepchick community discusses all sorts of topics from a youthful, skeptical, female viewpoint. (Anything from "Who are the 11 hottest movie scientists?" to "Can or should religion and science cooperate?") Probably the most outrageous thing they do is sell a "sensual but not lewd" calendar of skepchicks, which sadly was not available in the merchanting area. (Order yours here. Submit your photo for the next one here. See the 2007 calendar turned into a music video here.) This is not your grandmother's Humanism. It's not even the Humanism of your spinster great-aunt that nobody talks about.

The panel part of the discussion was noteworthy more for its attitude than for any outstanding idea or quote. This is a generation of Humanists who are not going peacefully into the closet. They don't shy away from terms like atheist. And they've also gotten past the in-your-face adolescent-rebellion God-sucks kind of atheism. And they don't look like the classic pocket-protector-wearing nerds. They are who they are and they seem comfortable with it.

The most interesting audience question/comment came from Fred Edwords of the American Humanist Association. He was being blown away by the numbers the new-media people threw around. Pesta's MySpace group has 31,604 members (I just checked) and Watson claimed her podcasts could get up to 16,000 downloads. Edwords pointed out that the MySpace group was technically the largest Humanist organization in the country. He urged the 20-somethings to come to meetings of the longer-standing humanist groups and explain how they were reaching so many people. It was like watching a middle-aged businessman boggle at the net worth of the Google founders.

Things I Learned at the New Humanism Conference, Part I

I went to the New Humanism Conference at Harvard two weeks ago, and I've had writers' block about it ever since. I think I've finally figured out why: I've been trying to write something that captures everything I learned, pulling it all together and capping it with a bright red bow.

Not going to happen. Too much. Too big.

The conference was full of stars: novelist Salman Rushdie, biologist E. O. Wilson, singer Dar Williams, Senate candidate Ned Lamont, and some other very important people who I hope are not insulted to be left off that list. Some of the talks launched me into idea-fugues of my own, leaving me unable to say exactly which ideas were theirs and which are mine.

This morning I figured out that I can break the logjam by starting small. One of the talks that got the least buzz at the conference was by Tu Weiming, a professor of Chinese history and philosophy at Harvard. Busting myths about Humanism was a general theme of the conference, and Weiming was part of a panel busting this myth: Humanism is a purely Western phenomenon that we are either exporting to or imposing on the rest of the world. Weiming tackled the subject of Confucian humanism.

My notes are a complete injustice to Weiming's talk. I fugued, but along the way I came to understand something about the East/West divide that I had never grasped before: the difference between Eastern and Western ways of thinking about self. In the West the self is a thing; it has an inside, an outside and a boundary. Sometimes when we're explaining things, we'll draw a little blob to represent ourselves. Other people have their own blobs, and each one has its own unique essence. When I learn and change, something is happening inside the blob that represents me. You could pick that blob up and put it somewhere else without changing its essence.

But when Weiming talked about the Confucian self, it sounded different. "The self is never an isolated individual but a center of relationship." I puzzled over that and similar statements for a while, until a new framing metaphor popped into my head: Weiming was viewing the self not as a blob, but as a point. A point doesn't have the space to contain an inner essence; all it has is a location. It exists on a map. And a person grows in wisdom by getting a ever richer picture of the map, not by developing the interior of the self.

To a Westerner that metaphor sounds, well, empty. If I'm a point, somebody could plunk me down somewhere else and I'd be just like the points that are in that location. If I moved to Detroit and became a lawyer, I'd be just another Detroit lawyer. We think that way because our maps are impoverished compared to the map of a Confucian sage. The sage understands the uniqueness of each location on his multi-dimensional map. I'd be not just another Detroit lawyer, but one who had these parents and went to that school and read those books and was influenced by such-and-such ideas. That would all be represented by my location, my point of view.

Two individuals, in this metaphor, are separated by a distance rather than a wall. The distance is ultimately uncrossable. I can move closer to your point of view, but you have spent your entire life getting where you are. I will never arrive at your location, nor you at mine. In the Confucian model, this -- not some interior essence -- is our individuality.

The Confucian humanist "seeks harmony without conformity by dialog. Dialog is not a way of persuasion; its purpose is to find out what we do not know." Conformity would be an artificial attempt to mask the distance between us, to hide the fact that we are in different locations and view things differently. And yet, despite our distance, we can harmonize our actions to achieve common purposes.

As I experimented with this model -- thinking of myself as a point rather than a blob -- a lot of Eastern (not just Confucian) thought made more sense to me. All the Buddhist talk about "the emptiness of the self" -- a Westerner hears that and pictures a blob with a vacuum inside. But points are empty because they have no interior into which you can put stuff. There is no vacuum, only a recognition that the space you imagined inside yourself is a misconception. Westerners hear about "destroying the Ego" and imagine that it involves achieving some universal point-of-view. If I read this metaphor right, the exact opposite happens: You understand that all you are is a point of view. The Ego is the illusory wall you have built around all the things to which you are attached.

I'm pretty sure Weiming said the stuff in quotes. As for the rest of it, I don't know. It happened somewhere in the space between us.