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BY MICHAEL JOSEPH GROSS | "The Best Spiritual Writing 1998" makes you want to take a shower. The essays and poems in this first volume of an annual series (modeled after Houghton Mifflin's "The Best American Short Stories") describe ways of living that make you long for greater cleanliness and simplicity of life. They are also the products of a somewhat grubby business -- the booming niche market of spiritual publishing. Encountering "The Best Spiritual Writing," readers face a familiar dilemma. Believers, like the contributors to this anthology, are, by and large, inspiring, radiant people -- they live big, lovingly, truthfully, openly. Yet their collective presence (in churches, synagogues, yoga classes and anthologies) often conveys a stifling orthodoxy, which can impart a big-time case of the creeps.

The reigning orthodoxy of "The Best Spiritual Writing" is the business of professional spiritual writing. The book is a hit parade of spiritual bestsellers (Thomas Moore, Kathleen Norris) who pray for pay. Even the three contributors whose biographical notes indicate involvement in conventional ministries also contain long lists of publishing credits that make clear where their first vocational loyalties lie. There's nothing nefarious about believers wanting to see their work in print. For those of us who believe that religion is a central aspect of human existence, it's encouraging that some of the best new American books consider spirituality to be an integral force in personal, political and cultural struggles -- in novels such as Robert Stone's "Damascus Gate" and Allegra Goodman's "Kaaterskill Falls," poetry such as Adam Zagajewski's "Mysticism for Beginners" and Edward Hirsch's "On Love," and nonfiction such as Bruce Bawer's "Stealing Jesus," Stephen Dubner's "Turbulent Souls" and Marilynne Robinson's "The Death of Adam."

Yet the bestselling products of the religious publishing boom are books like "Conversations With God," "Tuesdays With Morrie" and now, "The Best Spiritual Writing," most of whose contributors write as if spiritual life were an essentially self-centered enterprise, with only tangential connections to communal religion. "The Best Spiritual Writing" contains no straight sermons, academic essays or plain prayers; nothing that comes directly from the life of a community of worship, seminary or yeshiva. Also, there's not one piece of third-person reportage. Martin Luther King Jr., George Herbert, Howard Thurman and Wallace Stevens, had they been eligible for inclusion this year, would probably not have made the cut. The book's editor, Philip Zaleski, seems to have a sweet tooth for memoirs that have been mashed through the grinders of the magazine biz, where inspiration can't be published without a prewritten proposal. So, heartfelt as much of the writing may be, it also reflects the commodified notion of spiritual relevancy in a world whose appetite for autobiography has made "I" the dominant character of American spiritual life.

Most of the memoirs in "The Best Spiritual Writing" find God in cozy, universal formulations: "It is the journey not the destination that matters" (Joseph Epstein); "Lush nature invites us to look upward to find our spirituality" (Thomas Moore). There are a couple of religion-and-pop-culture pieces as well, including a soft-hearted paean to Princess Diana by Leonie Caldecott: "I feel that she is reaching out especially to one very grief-stricken, courageous man, who like her has spent his life searching for love, for the deeper meaning of life (are not the two, after all, one and the same?). That person is her husband, Prince Charles." And there's a kitschy essay by Marc Gellman on "the literary and cultural angel explosion" ("I want you to write a letter to your angels"). Even the volume's least egoistic selection, an explication of the Sabbath by Cynthia Ozick, is so lovely as to be practically useless. "The Sabbath inspires us all to become the best that we can be," Ozick avers, without considering the ethical barriers that contemporary life throws up between us created beings and "the Sabbath's focus on spiritual and moral elevation."

Yet the swamp of sap sometimes stirs with wisdom: Andre Dubus' vision of Eucharist infusing the world; Anne Lamott's humble suggestion that "right behind the cliché is the original message;" Rick Moody's two-sentence indictment of postmodern linguists' dismissal of God: "God is a theoretical repository for the idea of meaning, nothing more, a repository who reflects meaning back onto a scarily empty system of signs. You can't pray to that."

If "The Best Spiritual Writing" falls short of its title, that's to be expected. We live in a fallen world -- writers have to make a living, and readers should be thankful that publishers, whether from motives false or true, are making some bucks off goodness, truth and beauty. Besides, seekers who truly want a Word that speaks to them probably know they can't buy it in paperback. A bedtime book like "The Best Spiritual Writing" can offer vague and worthy inspiration, like the stars and sun and moon. For most people, however, the really transforming words appear in the harsher light of everyday life. The best spiritual writing comes from writers who are writers incidentally, whose words are rooted somewhere other than their word processors.
SALON | Dec. 8, 1998

Michael Joseph Gross is a freelance writer in Boston.