The best books about the conflict between personal spirituality and religion

Though I did enjoy the earlier Wolf Hall I found Bring Up the Bodies more readable and compelling.

Hilary Mantel paints intimate word pictures of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, and especially Thomas Cromwell, struggling to make his way through the minefield of political intrigue at Henry’s court. Though it is against almost every principle he holds dear, Cromwell charts a course which one step at a time ultimately brings Anne Boleyn down.

Finding himself in an almost impossible situation, he agonizes over every decision, looking at it from many sides: legal, political, ethical, spiritual, and religious. Meanwhile not far in the background we see the Church’s Pope Clement trying desperately, like Oz’s man behind the curtain, to control events.

Mantel’s genius was her ability to transform dry history into compelling, character-driven stories.

It’s hard for me to imagine myself in Sister of the Cross’ place, overcome with spiritual experiences so intense they are almost unbearable.

Like Saint Teresa of Avila’s ecstasies or experiences under the influence of psychedelic drugs, ordinary language cannot describe her journeys outside the normative experience of her spiritual sisters. They are, to herself and her community, barely believable.

In the end she faces an unbearable choice: to allow herself to collapse into that other, wonderful world, or be “cured.”

In my golden years I’ve come, perhaps wrongly, to trust myself and the decisions I make. Still I sometimes agonize over decisions which like a great clapper sound the bell at the core of my ethical self.

Nearly as handwringing are choices I’m forced into through something new I’ve learned about myself, my friends, or the world around me. Something new that shakes the ground of my understanding so violently I have to stop what I’m doing and hold on.

This is what happens in The Sparrow, as at last we – as someday we surely will – communicate with other life from outside the earth. Salzman cleverly puts much of the action into the hands of the Jesuits. Imagine how they must feel when the Bible, their tradition, and almost everything they believe go out the door…

Stonehenge, the Pyramids, and even Neolithic burials tell those of us living in the 21st century that a large and undeniable part of being human is taken up with asking the question:

What lies behind our visible, ordinary lives? If we could lift the veil, what would we find behind it? It is a question that follows me around like a hungry kitten, demanding attention, even though I have “better” things to do.

I found myself wrapped in the personality of Lagerkvist’s Mendicant Jew, struggling with choices he has made, as he sets out on a long, difficult pilgrimage to quell his own spiritual hunger. The answers the Sibyl gives him are equally amazing as they are confounding.

I grew up in a time (1950’s) and place (rural northern Wisconsin) when there was only one television channel—available only in good weather—no internet, and a library not much bigger than an Amtrak roomette.

It was a childhood full of wonder, but with very short horizons. I can’t say I actually read every book in our town’s library, but I came close. Books were my magic carpet to times and places and, more importantly, frames of reference well outside the box I lived in.

How was it that among its several hundred volumes was The Autobiography of a Yogi, by Paramahansa Yogananda? I did not discover Bruno Schulz, a Polish author murdered by the Nazis in 1943, until many years later. But having traveled far and experienced much, I was just as shocked when I walked through the door into Schulz’s world in a small Polish town, as though I was once again a pre-teen, naive but curious.

Once again I was seeing everything as though for the first time, reflected in a house of mirrors. There are not many books I can say that about.