Spiritual Exercises in Three Humanistic Contexts

Abstract

Spiritual Exercises in Three Humanistic Contexts Matthew Wickman Spirituality is famously transformative, a quality that is at once promising and threatening. In December 2014, my department asked me to teach a capstone seminar for English majors the following year. One may build this course, designed to help graduating seniors synthesize aspects of their education, around any topic. I had taught it several times, though not for many years. I considered teaching it around a large project I was completing on literature and mathematics but I had covered that material several times in other classes, and was dissatisfied with the thought of reprising it here. I had commenced another project reading high philosophy by way of detective fiction, but I had also taught that in other courses and felt uninspired by the prospect of doing so again. I then considered current trends in literary studies such as modes of reading, processes of mediation, and matters of scale (temporal and spatial) and mused over a course built around one of these topics. They also left me flat. Then I paused and asked myself a different question: What if I designed a course around a subject I find inherently meaningful, irrespective of discipline, project, or trend? A response leapt to mind, bearing a vibrancy that felt familiar if also a little strange, even uncanny: spirituality. Spirituality is indeed an uncanny subject, even or especially relative to itself. If one takes it generically to denote a connection to some force outside oneself, or else to what is most essential to oneself, then spirituality becomes a dynamic concept, no sooner defined in a particular context than already outmoded, already pointing to something perpetually lingering beyond or more deeply within. For Karl Barth this self-undoing quality inflects Christian spirituality with particular poignancy: "spiritual life… begins at the very point where spiritual skill ends," where ingrained routine, or what John G. Flett, adopting sociological language, calls habitus, opens onto a transformative call, beckoning one from or pointing one toward some other place.1 To be a Christian in Barth's sense is to be perpetually drawn away from what is most familiar, becoming a stranger to oneself in order to come closer to God. It was precisely such dynamism that compelled me, some three decades ago, to take up serious study of the humanities. The impetus was not an impactful college course, but rather the cumulative effects of the two-year mission [End Page 324] I served for my church in France and Switzerland. While I was fairly quick to pick up a foreign language, the foreignness of worldviews came to seem increasingly strange over the duration of my time there. Beguiled, but fascinated, by the existential impact of deep cultural differences, I began turning to secular texts—to literature and philosophy—as a kind of implicit spiritual record, an index of peoples' divine imaginary. Higher education would be, for me, a spiritual quest, or so I thought. And now, some three decades later, thoroughly enculturated in the habitudes of my profession and discipline and, as a result, less naïve if also less idealistic, the situation seemed reversed: responding to a routine request from my department to teach a seminar, and recognizing how steeped I had become in the discourses that suffuse the humanities, I felt moved to consider spirituality as a way to synthesize the ethos of my fields. And that threatened, in its way, to propel me outside the humanities altogether. (Seriously, spirituality? A course on, say, spirituality and literature? There is virtually no precedent for such a thing, as spirituality bears little presence in literary studies, certainly not at its forefront. How would I devise such a course and then explain it to students, colleagues, peers, and even to myself? And what if, in teaching it, I felt moved to begin writing on it? For whom would I write, and what could I possibly say of any value?) These questions were admittedly naïve, but I sensed myself on the track of something important. A few additional years have passed and, as it turns out, I have published a handful of articles and chapters on the relationship between literature and spirituality, with...