Between the Dark and the Daylight by Joan Chittister, Image, 173 pages, $20
As a believer that there is much wisdom to be mined at the margins, those in-between spaces in life where all is not either this way or that, I was drawn first by the title — especially the subtitle, “Embracing the Contradictions of Life.” And then, upon spying the author’s name, the wise and courageous Sister Joan Chittister, one of the great women’s voices in the American religious landscape, I knew this was a book that held promise.
It delivered. Or, rather Chittister, author of a profound litany of spiritual masterworks across the arc of the last three decades, delivered. She dove right in: “The truth is,” she writes in the opening pages, “we spend our lives in the centrifuge of paradox.”
And it is that messy terrain — the liminal, betwixt and between — that Chittister unflinchingly explores. “There is a part of the soul that stirs at night, in the dark and soundless times of the day, when our defenses are down and daylight distractions no longer serve to protect us from ourselves,” she writes. It’s from this deep murkiness that the most essential questions emerge, the questions “that will not let us rest.”
Chittister has earned her place as one of the illuminators of our age. Stricken with polio as a young Benedictine nun, she’s a survivor in the deepest sense. Because she has spent her years absorbing a library of wisdom, she weaves into her writing an eclectic catalog of soul-stirring citations, none from the usual roster of thinkers.
Chapter by chapter — “The Fragility of Achievement,” “The Creativity of Confusion,” “The Emptiness of Accumulation” among them — she explores the many paradoxes of this age of “chaos and crisis.” By the book’s end, you just might believe, along with Chittister, that beneath a veneer of contradiction lie the most fundamental truths about what it means to be human.
From the New World by Jorie Graham, Ecco, 365 pages, $29.99
When searching for a book for the soul, you’d be wise to amble out of the aisle marked “Religion/Spirituality” and duck into the shelves where poetry is tucked. It’s in the acute attention paid by poets that the ineffable is netted.
And, certainly, Jorie Graham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet known for her bold lyrical action and formal inventiveness, has been paying attention to the soul for a very long time. “From the New World: Poems 1976-2014” is a sequence of poems from Graham’s 11 earlier books. More than simply a retrospective of her evolution as a poet, this collection is described as “part spiritual autobiography, part survival manual.” Her centering spiritual practice, then, is wakefulness, as is the practice of so many fine poets.
From “Overlord” (2006), in a poem titled “Praying (Attempt of May 9 ’03),” she begins: “I don’t know where to start. I don’t think my face / in my hands is right. Please don’t let us destroy / Your world. No the world. I know I know nothing.”
Again and again throughout the nearly 400 pages spanning four decades, Graham — who teaches at Harvard University — circles back to the sacred, to the cries of the soul, and the unsettling questions that cannot be answered. In Graham’s hand, the poem, so often, is prayer.
The Sacred Year by Michael Yankoski, Thomas Nelson, 354 pages, $15.99
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If pressed to define what makes a book a truly soulful one, I’d be inclined to say that I’m not looking for a tome with all the answers, but rather for one that asks the most probing questions. Michael Yankoski’s “The Sacred Year” is just that — and an adventure guide, to boot.
Why, in the span of nearly 400 pages, we follow along as Yankoski — the best-selling author of “Under the Overpass,” a memoir of living as a homeless person in six American cities — contemplates an apple for an hour before tasting, climbs a narrow mountain path in a driving rainstorm to seek a week’s shelter in a cave, digs 405 shovelfuls of dirt out of the earth and then musters the courage to slither into the self-pitted grave, where he lies, supine, staring up at the sky, embracing his mortality.
It’s all in a year’s determined attempt to shake himself out of the somnolent jaded carapace of who he once was. Cycling through 18 discrete practices — from attentiveness to solitude, silence to Sabbath, and straight on to wilderness — Yankoski finds that “spiritual practices (are) a way of unfurling the sail of the soul so that the Wind-Spirit-Breath of God might fill us and propel us wherever it wills.”
And because he’s good-humored and fills his prose with the accumulated wisdom of a host of quotable sages, the peripatetic Yankoski makes for a very fine read. I can’t wait to deep-dive into his next soulful obsession.
Barbara Mahany is the author of “Slowing Time: Seeing the Sacred Outside Your Kitchen Door.” Twitter: @BarbaraMahany