Composition Forum 54, Summer 2024
http://compositionforum.com/issue/54/

Writing as a Spiritual Exercise

Paul Lynch

Abstract: The United States is undergoing unprecedented religious change, including an increasing diversity of religious tradition, rapid disaffiliation from conventional religious institutions, and a rise in syncretic and sometimes corporatized spiritualties. Given the speed and scope of these changes, all of which affect our students, rhetoric and writing studies (RWS) must undertake the study of spirituality. Insofar as RWS seeks to prepare students for democratic citizenship, it should engage in public discussion and study of the practices that appear to be replacing traditional religious observance. RWS has a special claim on spirituality studies, which have often undertaken scholarly work on writing, reading, and speaking practices. In fact, RWS has already begun to pursue this kind of scholarship, even if it does not always go by the name “spirituality.” This essay will therefore discern the ways in which RWS is engaged in this work, and it will offer reasons why we must engage it further.

“What avail is it… to win ability to read and write, if in the process the individual loses his own soul?”

— John Dewey, Experience and Education

One could argue that the reflections I present in this essay do not belong in a special issue on the subject of mindfulness. My remarks focus on spirituality, a subject that, while somewhat adjacent to mindfulness, is not synonymous with it. Despite these differences, I want to make a case for seeing writing as a spiritual exercise—that is, as the kind of practice that can cultivate habits of response associated with mindfulness. Writing has long played a central role in spiritual practice, which makes spirituality a fitting subject for scholars in rhetoric and writing studies. Yet because “spirituality” is so closely associated with religious traditions (Christianity in particular), I want to begin my case for spirituality with a thinker slant to that tradition: John Dewey.

In his 1934 A Common Faith Dewey discerns religious sensibility best fit for secular, pluralistic democracy. Instead of excluding the religious from that project, however, Dewey rescues it through redefinition. Conventional religions—freighted as they are by supernatural assumptions and historical accretions—present a stumbling block to true religious experience (4-6). In contrast to religion, the religious can be discovered within “the continued disclosing of truth through directed cooperative human behavior” (26). A common faith lies in the confidence that truth can be revealed through methodological reflection. Any experience can therefore be “religious,” which Dewey defines as “[a]ny activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of conviction of its general and enduring value” (27). The “religious” is a pursuit of what Charles Taylor has more recently called “fullness,” the sense that we may access an “activity or condition” in which “life is fuller, richer, deeper, more worthwhile, more admirable, more what it should be” (5). The authentically religious therefore designates “the unification of the self through allegiance to inclusive ideal ends, which imagination presents to us and to which the human will responds as worthy of controlling our desires and choices” (Dewey 33). Dewey’s distinction between “religion” and “the religious” seems presciently designed for our present moment, when the phrase “spiritual but not religious” has become a familiar way of describing those who remain interested in transcendent experience even as they shy away from traditional dogma. This is the background against which I wish to argue that writing studies ought to undertake the study of writing as a spiritual exercise.

The field has already opened the door to this possibility. If the “turn” metaphor had not been exhausted by overuse, one might even speak of the field taking “a spiritual turn.” In Dewey’s terms, the field has long acknowledged that writing is a practice in the discernment and cultivation of ideal ends presented by our imagination in ways that elicit certain desires and choices. For this reason, I argue that there is a warrant for the field to see spiritual exercise as part of its concern. I will make this case first by defining spirituality appropriately for a secular discipline, then by reviewing writing studies’ emerging interest in spirituality, and finally by arguing for a critical spirituality framed for a common life.

On Spirituality

Even within a Deweyan framework, the topic of spirituality may still seem out of place in a discussion of writing pedagogy. To begin, the concept of spirituality appears too vacuous to support any academic or intellectual rigor. Even scholars of spirituality acknowledge that spirituality is “often used with no clear meaning, or a wide and vague significance” (Jones, et al. xxii). Another adds, “one can sense a certain fluidity, not to say vagueness, in the use of the term” (Principe 129). “There are perhaps few words in the modern English language as vague and woolly as the notion of ‘spirituality’” (Carrette and King 30). In addition to this persistent problem of vagueness, spirituality “is personal, intimate and temperamental,” so much so that some may wonder whether it can be studied in a systematic way (Jones, et al. xxii). Part of the issue is the way in which the term has been used outside its original contexts, sometimes “applied retrospectively to the classical Greeks and Romans and other ancient peoples who certainly would not have applied the term to their own experience” (Schneiders, “Religion,” 168). This kind of casuistic stretch can be extremely productive, as in the groundbreaking work of Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault, who both write about the “spiritual exercises” of the Stoics and other pre-Christian figures.

But if we relax that stretch to study spirituality in its original context, we encounter the problem of the word’s Christian origins. Those origins are not a problem in and of themselves, but they may be a problem for any nonsectarian or secular context. “Spirituality” derives from the Christian scriptures, where Paul uses the words pneuma (spirit) and pneumatikos (spiritual), both of which come from the Greek for “breath.” Contrary to later Platonic misreadings, Paul’s use of pneuma does not mean to divide spirit from body (Gk. soma, L. corpus). Rather, it is meant to divide spirit from flesh (Gk. sarx, L. caro). A “spiritual person,” therefore, is “not someone who turns away from material reality or who undervalues the body” (Sheldrake, Spirituality 6). Rather, a spiritual person is someone who, in Dewey’s words, seeks the unification of the self through allegiance to inclusive ideal ends. Nevertheless, “spiritual” has often been used in Christian culture to divide the metaphysical from the material, the rational from the non-rational, the esoteric from the everyday. This persistent division has often reduced the spiritual to a private devotion separate from community obligation or political effect.

Later, in the fifth century, the word would appear in an anonymous letter urging the addressee to “act to advance in spirituality” (Principe 130). This is perhaps the earliest usage of spirituality that is somewhat akin to how the word is understood today—that is, as something to do with one’s own orientation to the transcendent. During the Middle Ages, meanwhile, “spirituality” referred to the clergy: the “spiritual” authorities as opposed to the “temporal.” Only in 17^th century France did the word reemerge to designate something we might now recognize as “the spiritual life” (Sheldrake, Spirituality 6). Yet as early as the 15^th century “spirituality” was being used in English in our contemporary sense—namely, as “concerned with or attentive to the spirit or soul; pious, devout, godly, religious [. . .]; characterized by sensitivity to or appreciation of emotional, philosophical, or mystical matters and lack of concern for material values or pursuits” (OED). By the latter part of the twentieth century, the word began to replace, at least in Christian theology, more traditional terms such as “ascetical theology,” and it became a key term in ecumenical and inter-religious dialogue (Sheldrake, Spirituality 7). If common ground could not be found near doctrine or dogma, it might be found in the vicinity of spiritual habits—orthopraxy as opposed to orthodoxy.

Even before this shift, non-Christian thinkers had used the term to refer to a kind of religiosity that went beyond and beneath conventional religion. Contact between European and Indian religious figures in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries revived the use of the then-moribund term. In this context, “spiritual” was used to describe Indian religion, which was cast as superior to the materialism of the West (Principe 133). Whatever the limitations of this Orientalizing distinction, this usage is reflected in the contemporary recognition of a diverse array of spiritualities beyond the Christian, including Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and of course secular spiritualities (Sheldrake, Spirituality 73-164).

This expansion of the term has cleared the ground for contemporary spiritualities that do not imply any religious foundation. Spirituality has been defined as “the quest for attaining an optimal relationship between what one truly is and everything that is; it is a quest that can be furthered by adopting appropriate spiritual practices and by participating in relevant communal rituals” (Van Ness 5); as “the experience of consciously striving to integrate one’s life in terms not of isolation and self-absorption but of self-transcendence toward the ultimate value one perceives” (Schneiders, “Theology” 266); and as “the logic, or character, or consistent quality of a person’s or a group’s pattern of living insofar as it is measured before some ultimate reality” (Haight 2). Though these all come from scholars of religion, none of these definitions characterizes spirituality in a way that demands religious commitment.

In fact, spirituality is often understood precisely in contrast to religion, whence the contemporary commonplace, “spiritual but not religious.” Against the exclusivist, ideological, and clerical structures of institutional religion, spirituality can seem a viable alternative for those who still feel some sense of religious motivation (Schneiders, “Religion,” 174-5). “Non-denominational personal spirituality [. . .] seems to allow one to seek God, to grow personally, and to commit oneself to the betterment of the world and society with freedom and openness to all that is good and useful, whatever its source” (Schneiders, “Religion,” 176). For many of the disaffiliated and disaffected, “spirituality” seems to offer a more generative rubric for pursuing one’s interest in the ultimate. This new use of the word “spirituality” has afforded some room to maneuver for the growing number of “Nones,” those who, when asked about religious affiliation, check the box “none.” Many of the Nones might still call themselves “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR). This suggests—as Dewey might once again predict—disaffiliation not from religious experience, but from religion.

According to a 2017 Pew study, 27% of American adults describe themselves as spiritual but not religious, an increase of 8 percentage points since 2012. “The growth of ‘spiritual but not religious’ Americans has come mainly at the expense of those who say they are religious and spiritual” (“More Americans”). Between 2012 and 2017, the number of religious-and-spiritual fell by 11 points (“More Americans”). A 2019 Pew study, meanwhile, found that 17% of Americans now characterize their religion as “nothing in particular.” That number is up from 12% ten years before; all subsets of the non-religious saw their numbers increase in 2019, while the number of Christians, including Catholics and Protestants, decreased (“In U.S.” 3). This drop cuts across demographic groups, including race, age, education, and political affiliation. In Choosing our Religion, Elizabeth Drescher confirms this finding. “We can see from the data,” she writes, “that, far from being a fringe phenomenon among the ‘unchurched’ in overeducated, latte-slinging corridors of the country, unaffiliation is part of the religious and spiritual structure of every social sector” (21).

It seems clear that the drop in formal religious affiliation has not been accompanied by a drop in spiritual interest. Contrary to the unflattering labels often assigned to the Nones—including the negation “None” itself—many who fall into that category practice “ad hoc spiritualities” (Drescher 2). In Strange Rites, Tara Isabella Burton shifts away from the negative designation and refers instead to the “Religiously Remixed,” who include the SBNRs, the “faithful Nones” (those who maintain some faith in a higher power if not in religious institutions), and the “religious hybrids” (those who belong to a specific tradition, but still mix and match from other traditions) (18-24). These groups remind us that while “None” may apply to formal religious affiliation, it does not apply to spiritual practice. Contrary to persistent negative assessments, “‘I am spiritual but not religious’ usually means that people are reflective, perhaps deep and inquiring, not indifferent to ultimate questions, and maybe even believers” (Haight 1). If anything, disaffiliation may intensify seeking.

But severing spirituality from religious tradition presents its own dangers. Religious studies scholars like Schneiders point out that, whatever their faults, religious traditions provide a context and a community by which seekers may hold themselves accountable to notions of the common good. “Privatized spirituality, like the ‘social cocooning’ in lifestyle enclaves that sociologists have identified as a major problem in contemporary American society, is at least naively narcissistic” (“Religion,” 177). As many caution, such labels should not be applied to groups, but they may be applied to certain practices. In their Selling Spirituality, Carrette and King chronicle the ways in which spirituality has been reduced to a consumer good: “in a consumer society,” they write, “[spirituality] can mean anything you want, as long as it sells” (30). The motivation for the “rebranding of religion,” they argue, has nothing to do with sincere seeking and everything to do with consumer capitalism. “From feng shui to holistic medicine, from aromatherapy candles to yoga weekend, from Christian mystics to New Age gurus, spirituality is big business” (1). Unmoored from specific religious content—along with the community responsibilities formed by religious observance—spirituality becomes another way to discipline consumers and workers for a marketplace in which the highest goods are individual desires and individual productivity. Yoga may have once made it easier to maintain postures of prayer; now it makes it easier to remain at your workstation. The danger is not that spirituality portends an unwelcome intrusion of the religious into the secular; the danger is that these practices may be assimilated to capitalism. “In a sense, the most troubling aspect of many modern spiritualities is precisely that they are not troubling enough” (Carrette and King 5). Untroubling spiritualities are those that condition their practitioners to present conditions. This danger is not inherent to spirituality itself. Every one of the definitions reviewed above articulates some sense of orientation to otherness, including “an optimal relationship between what one truly is and everything that is,” the attempt “to integrate one’s life in terms not of isolation and self-absorption but of self-transcendence,” the “group’s pattern of living […] measured before some ultimate reality” (emphases added). All of these understandings suggest some sense that authentic spirituality must draw one outside of oneself.

Nevertheless, there remains the ultimate question of how such practices might fit the disciplinary work of rhetoric and writing studies. I would offer three answers to that question. First, insofar as rhetoric and writing studies aspires to prepare its students for democratic citizenship (or to fire their desires for a democracy yet to come) spirituality is well within our scholarly and pedagogical project. The “return” of religion, the rise of privatized and corporatized spirituality, the dissolution of community, the emergence of the SBNR—all of these will shape how our students will relate those others and to the world. Second, because spirituality has become an issue of public interest, it “needs public discussion” (Haight 1). Those who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious “draw upon a range of theistic and extra-theistic language that makes it impossible to draw hard lines between the affiliated and the unaffiliated” (Drescher 22). Public discussion, the collision of different discourses, and daily disciplines of writing and speaking—all of these fall well within the disciplinary range of rhetoric and writing studies. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, spirituality is our concern because we are claiming it as such. A number of recent works in rhetoric and writing studies point in this direction, even if they don’t mention the word spirituality. These works attempt to address the same range of human experience addressed by spirituality, as Peter Van Ness writes:

Facing outward, human existence is spiritual insofar as one engages reality as a maximally inclusive whole and makes the cosmos an intentional object of thought and feeling. Facing inward, life is apprehended as a project of people’s most enduring and vital selves and is structured by experiences of sudden self-transformation and subsequent gradual development. (5)

The spiritual is here identified with the aspiration to relate to the world as a whole. We might now speak of a flattened ontology in which the human is reincorporated into relations with the nonhuman. The spiritual also cuts across inner and outer, self and other, subjectivity and objectivity. Likewise, we might speak of ambience, vitality, rhetoricity—all of which suggest relations that precede rather than follow whatever we take our developing selves to be. Ultimately, my claim is this understanding of the spiritual articulates the emerging disciplinary interest that I observe in the next section.

Implicit Spiritualities

The spiritual interests of rhetoric and writing studies are nothing new, as Geoffrey Sirc reminds us in English Composition as a Happening. Sirc describes the “happenings classroom” of William Lutz’s 1971 “Making Freshman English a Happening.” Lutz’s pedagogy features what contemporary religious studies scholars would almost certainly describe as a form of remixed religious practice: a classroom of closed drapes, dimmed lights, flickering candles, wafting incense, and a musical combination of Gregorian chant and Jefferson Airplane (along with some of the early ’60s usual suspects: Steppenwolf, Simon and Garfunkel, the Doors). Sirc laments the loss of this writing classroom, which has been displaced by more conventional aspirations that Sirc cannot help but describe in religious terms:

We erect temples to language, in which we are the priests among initiates (of varying degrees of enthusiasm), where we relive the rites of text-production for the nth time, despite the sad truth that the gods have fled so long ago that no one is even sure that they were ever there in the first place (in Composition, the gods are called, variously, power, authentic voice, discourse, critical consciousness, versatility, style, disciplinarity, purpose, etc.). (2)

Having betrayed our mission for a “conservative professionalism” Sirc urges a revitalized composition in which “faith and naiveté replace knowingness and expertise” (32). This distinction between naiveté and knowingness can be mapped precisely onto the spiritual-but-not-religious topos: composition’s temples and priesthood would seem to stand on the side of the same institutionalism that, as Dewey might argue, distorts religious experience into “religion.”

Sirc’s invocation of Lutz’s classroom reminds us that spiritual practice is not entirely foreign to writing studies. One might also cite collections such as The Spiritual Side of Writing (1997) or Negotiating Religious Faith in the Composition Classroom (2005), which quite explicitly call the field’s attention toward spiritual questions. But in this section, I wish to turn our attention to more recent scholarship in rhetoric and writing studies. This work points toward the possibility of seeing spiritual exercise as an appropriate and even central part of our discipline. Space considerations limit my reading of this scholarship to the suggestive, yet the suggestion is nonetheless unmistakable.

The closest thing to an explicit argument for seeing writing as a spiritual exercise comes from Robert Yagelski’s Writing as a Way of Being (2011), which urges the field to “shift our theorhetorical gaze from the written text to the self writing—from the writer’s writing to the writer writing” (107). In other words, Yagelski argues that we should focus our scholarly and pedagogical attention less on the written “product” and more on the “act” of writing itself (144). “Whatever happens to a text after it is written,” writes Yagelski, “does not affect what is happening to (or in) the writer as he or she is writing that text” (7). If we shift our attention in this way, we will be better able to attend to the idea that writing is “a way of being,” a way of relating to the world rather than an instrument for reporting on relations that are happening in some other way. In this way, we might overcome the “Cartesian ontology” that separates knower from known. Within that ontology, writing becomes an instrument for separating self from world (so that self may control world). This separation, argues Yagelski, is the central cause of a myriad of social problems, first and foremost the “crisis of sustainability” (see Chapter 1). When human beings are alienated by their knowledge practices, it becomes easier to treat the world and other people as mere resources. Moving past this debilitating binary requires that we see writing from the perspective of “non-duality,” which rejects the Cartesian separation of knower and known. Yagelski acknowledges the challenges of reorienting our thinking. Notions like non-duality are “often dismissed in scholarly discussions in Western culture as spiritual rather than rigorously academic” (75, emphasis added). Once again, we encounter the problem of the word “spirituality,” whose reputation for vagueness always precedes itself.

Yagelski echoes arguments put forward by Pierre Hadot in his landmark Philosophy as a Way of Life (2002/2005), which argues that ancient philosophy was not interested in conceptual frameworks or rational systems so much as an entire way of living. “The philosophical act,” writes Hadot, “is not situated merely on the cognitive level, but on that of the self and of being. […] It is a conversion which turns our entire life upside down, changing the life of the person who goes through it” (83). A key method for effecting such a change, notes Hadot, is writing. Hadot finds his example par excellence in the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, which are the notebooks the emperor kept as a means of cultivating Stoicism. The Mediations, in other words, are not a treatise or even a manual, but rather a record of one person’s attempt to practice a way of living. As Hadot notes, they were not meant to be read. They are rather a record of a practice. Expressing a sentiment that could have been expressed by Sirc, Hadot writes, “[w]ritten pages are already dead” (Inner 51). He adds, “[w]hat counts is the reformulation: the act of writing or talking to oneself, right now, in the very moment when one needs to write” (Inner 51, emphasis added). For the Stoic, writing is first and foremost a spiritual exercise, a phrase that, as Hadot acknowledges, “is a bit disconcerting for the contemporary reader” (Philosophy 81). But a spiritual exercise sees the act of writing—rather than the content—as paramount.

Hadot sees writing as a practice, a term that Casey Boyle has insisted is fundamental to a posthuman understanding of persuasion. Boyle defines rhetoric as “a practice that exercises serial encounters within ecologies to inform bodies” (27; emphasis added). Understood in this way, a practice is not oriented toward “self-preservation or self-improvement” (33), terms that suggest that our experiences might somehow become our natural possession, unproblematically available for future deployment. For these reasons, Boyle is troubled by the way in which the field understands ideas like reflection or metacognition, both of which seem to reinscribe the same “separation between thought and action, a knower and known” (37) that also troubles Yagelski. Boyle articulates his hesitations about this separation in posthuman and ecological terms, both of which situate the writer within networks and systems rather than at some outside Archimedean point. From this enmeshed place, the study of rhetoric is not about the idealization of concepts or the amassing of competencies, but rather “the more pragmatic task of self-transformation through humble experimentation (Bradotti, qtd. in Boyle 42). For Boyle, this means that capacity, rather than agency, is the appropriate term for understanding what practice actually cultivates: “when we practice,” he writes, “we exercise our tendencies—our relations and affinities—to generate greater capacities to affect and to be affected” (53). Boyle’s notion of practice suggests that the “results,” if we can call them that, possess us as equally as we possess them. Again, we might consider Aurelius’ Mediations, in which the practice of writing is meant to effect greater capacities to practice the Stoic virtues (wisdom, temperance, justice, courage).

The point here is not whether those should be our virtues (though we could do worse). The point is that writing as a spiritual exercise is a practice of self-persuasion. New situations will always demand new exercise; practice is ongoing. “Practice is the repetitive production of difference even if that difference looks, to our conscious awareness, the same” (Boyle 53). The effects of practice may not immediately present themselves to our awareness, nor do they come from our awareness. Dewey speaks of a similar idea in A Common Faith, where he designates the deepest harmonization of the self toward ideal ends by the (admittedly antiseptic) term “adjustment.” Adjustment “cannot be apprehended in knowledge or realized in reflection” (19). It is something beyond the voluntary. “An ‘adjustment’ possesses the will rather than is its express product. Religionists have been right in thinking of it as an influx from sources beyond conscious deliberation and purpose” (19, emphases added). Whether or not one joins Dewey in dismissing the supernatural, the point is that adjustment, which could be understood as Dewey’s terms for our deepest capacities, involves something beyond our control or consciousness.

The sense of source beyond conscious deliberation and purpose is also observed by Daniel Gross in his Being Moved: Rhetoric as the Art of Listening. Furthering Krista Ratcliffe’s groundbreaking work on rhetorical listening, Gross likewise urges rhetoricians and writing teachers to reconsider listening as a key modality of rhetorical exchange. The central difference between the two projects, however, is the extent to which Gross emphasizes listening’s passivity against what he sees as our disciplinary bias toward the active. As with Yagelski and Boyle, Gross’s argument is too complex for any neat summary. What particularly concerns my argument is Gross’s “disciplinary prehistory,” which questions Michel Foucault’s genealogy of the human sciences and its conventional characterization of rhetoric as flattery and indifference to truth. Against Foucault’s epistemological framing, Gross sees the human sciences as “meta-practical. They are interventionist disciplines that reflect practice in more or less explicit fashion” (62). Rhetoric is one such discipline, along with ethics, politics, psychagogy, and poetics. These are what Gross calls “ought” disciplines rather than “is” disciplines, disciplines that play a role in the way human beings form their lives (90). Key to this understanding is the notion of movere (L. to move), particularly in the rhetorical sense articulated by Cicero and then Augustine. Rhetoric moves, and therefore rhetoric must account for the experience of being moved. In movere, Gross recognizes a phenomenon that cannot be fit into Foucault’s biopolitical framework (62), in no small part because movere is historically articulated through sacred rhetorics. These make room for sources of persuasion that other genealogies of modernity might dismiss as “fanciful,” particularly the notion that rhetoric is “an art of moving souls” (58). In other words, if we wish to detect listening’s paradoxically passive power to move, we should listen to sacred rhetorics.

This admittedly brief presentation indicates themes developed throughout this article: rhetoric as a practice, as a formation of life, as an openness to being moved by sources beyond the rational—including those related to the spiritual. For a final example of the emergence of these kinds of themes, I turn to Marilyn Cooper’s The Animal Who Writes, which advances an “enchantment ontology.” Though Cooper does not write in spiritual or religious terms, “enchantment” immediately suggests the idea of disenchantment, the idea, first articulated by Max Weber in the early twentieth century, that Enlightenment rationality had sapped the world of mystery, vitality, and wonder. Drawing on posthumanism, new materialism, and process theology, Cooper seeks to endow some sense of enchantment to the thinking of rhetoric and writing studies. “Instead of a world made up of bounded individual entities, enchantment ontology envisions individuals as entangled in intra-active phenomena from which they co-emerge contingently in an ongoing process of becoming” (9). Writing, therefore, would not seek to know the world as an entity separate from ourselves. Rather, writing is the practice through which we recognize and cultivate our relations to the world around us, rather than the instrument through which we name, categorize, and control the world around us. It is a habit that cultivates “an active comportment to the world” (39). It is a habit that must be cultivated frequently, even daily. Cooper quotes William James: “Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day” (126, emphasis in original). This advice echoes another such exhortation quoted by Hadot: “Take flight each day! At least for a moment, however brief, as long as it is intense. Every day a ‘spiritual exercise,’ […]. Become eternal by surpassing yourself” (Friedman, qtd. in Hadot, Philosophy 70). For both Hadot and Cooper, writing is a central means by which one might surpass oneself. As Cooper describes it, writing is not the means of “looking for ideas to fill up a thesis, but [of] mixing my feelings and thoughts with those of disparate others, human and nonhuman” (7). To put the matter in Gross’s terms, writing is the way we open ourselves to being moved by those others.

Again, such brief précis cannot hope to do justice to the full complexity and richness of these arguments. Even so, these rapid reviews suggest a plausible case for including writing as a spiritual exercise within our disciplinary concerns, both a subject of research and as a practice of pedagogy.

Desiring Spirituality

The idea of teaching writing as a spiritual exercise might be met with a variety of counterarguments, the first of which is the simplest: we already have enough to do. To add “spirituality” to our already unmanageable list of pedagogical tasks would seem foolhardy. Not only do we lack the time, we also lack the qualifications. We are there for their academic needs. If our students have spiritual needs, it might be quite reasonably argued, they can turn to the Chabad, Hillel, Humanist, Intervarsity, Muslim American, and Newman Centers on campus. Worse than succumbing to mission creep would be to become creeping missionaries, sneaking through the back door practices properly barred from university classrooms.

To these objections, we can add equally legitimate concerns about the way in which contemporary spirituality is so often reduced to private practices of “self care.” Witness, for example, the way in which Stoicism has become the world’s most popular philosophy, recast in the terms against which Carrette and King warn. Consider current titles: The Little Book of Stoicism: Timeless Wisdom to Gain Resilience, Confidence, and Calmness, or The Beginner’s Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity, or The Stoic way of Life: The Ultimate Guide of Stoicism to Make your Everyday Modern Life Calm, Confident & Positive. Absent from these titles are the four cardinal Stoic virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance, which are tougher sells in airport bookstores. Our culture seems to be most interested in philosophies and practices that can manage our stress rather than critiquing its causes. They direct our attention toward improving our inner lives rather than the outer world.

This division between inner and outer is a persistent feature of pop spiritualities. Consider Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, which includes the following as rule #6: “set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.” Though this standard would see to render critique all but impossible, it is fitting for Peterson’s reductive Darwinian worldview. For Peterson, the world of human beings is not much different than the world of lobsters: a never-ending struggle for social dominance. “There is an unspeakably primordial calculator, deep within you, at the very foundation of your brain, far below your thoughts and feelings. It monitors exactly where you are positioned in society—on a scale of one to ten” (15). Peterson’s counsel for ascending the scale? “Stand up straight, your shoulders back” (1). With a ramrod spine, the argument goes, you won’t look like someone who could be dominated. Peterson’s own primordial calculator, meanwhile, sits somewhat closer to the front of his mind: he has created his own “Self Authoring“ curriculum—reasonably priced at around $30—which includes a set of four self-improvement programs, complete with several writing exercises. In other words, if writing studies does not take up such self-authoring practices as subjects of our own curricula, others will.

Peterson’s popularity is further evidence that Roger Haight is right: “Spirituality needs public discussion” (1). Public discussion is certainly within our disciplinary purview. In fact, we might go so far as to call such a project “public spirituality.” Initially, I thought about calling it a “critical spirituality,” but I hesitate to do so because the word “critical” risks reintroducing naive notions of critique, as though we might be able to fashion some kind of spiritual exercise that can make our students intellectually invulnerable to the temptations of consumerist self-care. A more productive vulnerability is what an appropriate spirituality should actually cultivate. Even in his attempts to set aside the supernatural, Dewey’s notion of the religious insists upon relations to what is outside the self. He writes, “it is pertinent to note that unification of the self through the ceaseless flux of what it does, suffers, and achieves, cannot be attained in terms of itself. The self is always directed toward something beyond itself and so its own unification depends on the idea of integration of the shifting scenes of the world into that imaginative totality we call the Universe” (19). Even without the supernatural, Dewey’s notion of the religious is always oriented to something larger than ourselves, even if that “something” is as yet ideal and not actual. To be “unified” in this sense is not to be a “fulfilled” or “discrete agent who finally possesses self-knowledge. Rather, it is to be someone with eyes on a wider horizon of shared possibility. “The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves,” writes Dewey. “They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link” (87). The question before us is how we might link writing more strongly to those communal doings and sufferings.

To put this another way, my recommendation is not that we help students cultivate their “inner lives” to the exclusion of their “outer lives.” The writing studies scholars I’ve mentioned here—Boyle, Cooper, Gross, Yagelski—all start from the basic assumption that “inner” and “outer” are holdovers from Cartesian dualism. Insofar as the phrase “critical spirituality” might reassert that same dualism, it is perhaps best avoided. Dewey’s notion of doings and sufferings recognizes that “the spiritual,” whatever else it may be, is always a group activity rather than a private adventure of self-exploration. Yes, there is a danger of solipsism in any spiritual pursuit. But solipsism is also a danger in traditional academic writing practices that emphasize the individual, the original, the proprietary.

In lieu of a “critical spirituality,” then, we might imagine a “desiring spirituality,” an idea I borrow from Sheldrake, who argues that spirituality is essentially the practice and cultivation of desire. Initially, this association between the spiritual and desire may seem odd; we may be more accustomed to associating the spiritual with some notion of being freed from desires. Because desire is associated with embodiment, nonrationality, vulnerability—and because desire has its dangers, including excess, exploitation, and abuse—we may not be accustomed to linking desire to the transcendent or the truthful. Yet desire is also a fundamental part of human experience, one that pushes us outside of ourselves. Desire, writes Sheldrake, is associated with “being open to the world beyond our private selves and therefore with vulnerability, encounters with ‘the other,’ and the challenge to change” (Sheldrake, Befriending xii). To acknowledge desire is to acknowledge that we are neither self-contained nor self-sufficient. A “desiring spirituality” would thus designate writing practices that acknowledge, examine, and cultivate the desires that reach beyond self-containment or self-sufficiency.

Again, resonance with this idea already circulates in writing studies. We might consider the work of Jonathan Alexander, who asks questions that writing instructors are not accustomed to asking. “What do we desire of writing? What might writing desire?” (9). The answers to these questions, Alexander argues, push us beyond the familiar ways writing is perceived: “desire need not just be purpose, or particular intention; desire might be, more generally, the move outward—the self, the subject, the actor and agent, reaching out to sense how oneself is always already in the world” (14). Desire, in other words, is not something to be “handled” so that we may get down to the serious work of handling our interactions with the world. Rather, desire occasions our interactions with the world in the first place. Desire is not to be kept at bay so that we may compose ourselves; desire is how we compose ourselves. To practice writing as a spiritual exercise is to practice the composition of desire.

Works Cited

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