American souls

Restless Souls: The Making of an American Spirituality. By Leigh Eric Schmidt. HarperCollins, 352 pp., $26.95.

Deepening the American Dream: Reflections on the Inner Life and Spirit of Democracy. Edited by Mark Nepo. Jossey-Bass, 288 pp., $24.95.

TO THE POINT of feeling at least a little bit curmudgeonly, I find it increasingly difficult to disguise my unease with the word spiritual. I'll take it as a kind word when someone's trying to avoid the confusion or offense that might follow from describing someone as religious, and I'll happily affirm the spiritual as that which is irreducible, transcending our every attempt at compartmentalization. But I'm still unsure about what to do with talk of spiritual truths, principles and components, or with the question "How are you doing spiritually?" How's your unincarnate self lately? Is your astral projection holding up well?

Leigh Eric Schmidt, professor of religion at Princeton University, who offers a history of "American spirituality" in Restless Souls, well understands how goofy spirituality can get as a catchall marketing term with little or no content or conviction. He is also aware of that other best-selling term, studied closely by pollsters and well monopolized, in his view, by the religious right: moral values. For the prize of Most Tragically Unexamined Term in American Popular Discourse, I'm torn between moral values and spirituality, and Schmidt seems similarly conflicted.

Schmidt hopes to familiarize readers with the little-known history of America's "spiritual left." Apart from the dangers of anachronistically grouping eclectic voices into a culture of "seeker spirituality," this kind of compilation can be a tricky business. Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman are never far from the discussion, and I was pleased to hear tell of John Chapman (later immortalized as Johnny Appleseed), whose affection for all creatures extended to a hornet that stung him repeatedly, and of the story behind such best sellers as Ralph Waldo Trine's In Tune with the Infinite ("Dear everybody, I love you"), which had no rival saleswise till the appearance of Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking. But I couldn't stop thinking of Garrison Keillor's joke warning of the consequences of making a Unitarian angry: You risk the horror of discovering a large question mark burning on your front lawn. I confess that my favorite character in the book might be an anonymous student who crank-called Thomas R. Kelly (author of A Testament of Devotion) professing to be "the Inner Light."

The likes of Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr. and Thomas Merton are proffered as patron saints of "religious liberals." I found myself wondering about the narrowness of this particular spirituality (as well as of this liberalism) and about whether these figures would be pleased with how they've been categorized.

And what is it that keeps Hawthorne and Melville out of this assemblage? Did Orestes Brownson fall off the map when he went Roman? Wasn't John Brown of the spiritual left, or were his confessions too specific? For all its talk of the needless divisions and quibbles over different beliefs, the Green Acre colony had difficulty maintaining the ties that bind once Sarah Farmer returned from Ottoman Syria thoroughly converted to the Baha'i faith.

As Schmidt notes, there's a tension within the "eclecticism" of the self-avowedly open-minded tradition he seeks to trace. But when he observes that this tradition always seeks something "beyond belief," I'm puzzled as to what other than belief anyone can deal with this side of the eschaton. Our creeds, as I understand them, are all we have. It's only upon the occasion of open disagreement over what we believe thus far that a conversation (or a friendship) might develop.

One such conversation comes our way with Deepening the American Dream, which features essays by Jacob Needleman, Elaine Pagels, Parker Palmer and others. Editor Mark Nepo cites President Carter's 1979 statement about "moral malaise" as a prophetic word that has yet to be heeded on the popular level. Nepo offers these essays as a collection of wisdom from varied traditions for days that tempt us to hopelessness and despair. In a way reminiscent of the Iroquois custom of dream-walking, Nepo seeks to harness individual views on wisdom for a communal purpose. Throughout the book such resilient listening and gathering (hopeful, respectful collecting) is viewed as a deeply redemptive (and, at our best, deeply American) sensibility.

Carolyn T. Brown, who works at the Library of Congress, has an especially compelling testimony. As a black woman who grew up in the 1950s among a predominantly Jewish intellectual elite (with a number of unacknowledged cultural taboos), she has served on occasion as "a walking metaphor" for other people's needs and expectations. By her account, "marginality is an equal-opportunity employer."