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In music, the "spiritual" sings out about ultimates: grace, haven, grounds of being, doubt, pleading, rescue. It voices comfort and complaint, reaffirmation and reprimand. Under it all, though, is the assumption — no, the certainty — that a listener listens on the other end, that a Promiser offers the Promised Land.
But what does spiritual mean if one cannot believe that a listener waits at the other end of a prayer? Cannot believe that underneath the grave contusions of life an order and meaning, while difficult and sometimes opaque, nevertheless reigns?
"Spiritual" need not disappear just because no one may reside in the Celestial Home. To me, "spiritual" is a vocabulary we can use to talk about the challenges in life that other vocabularies can't adequately parse: instrumental, political, artistic, economic, and so on (though each of these, and others, has something to say about the spiritual — like food on a plate, all vocabularies eventually get mushed together).
To talk about the state of one's "soul"; to focus on ultimate meanings; to lift the body and its mind beyond the immediate and guard them against abrasion and evaporation; to seek out principles for conduct that have more tenacious roots than the instrumental and utilitarian; to craft a "long view" that also doesn't scant the vibrancy (if narrowness) of the short view; to exercise a short view of things infused with the long view; to act with purpose even when no overarching purpose is clear; to have a bias for courtesy in human dealings (oh so hard in New York City — a true Christian challenge is this city!) — these are spiritual self-dealings unencumbered by a Divinity, a pagan-like approach to life that searches for rationalizations to do well rather than ill, good rather than evil, against a backdrop of a cosmic void, crimped understandings, and the ever-present danger of bad wine.
I would, hoary atheist that I am, go so far as to include strictly religious vocabularies as well in this spiritualizing, specifically the Bible's words, not because the Bible has any authority to it (it can't be the Word or words of God if I believe there is no God to word it) but because it offers templates with which to think about the purpose and direction of life. The Fall, from a state of ignorance/innocence into the dirt of self-consciousness: is this not our animal births? Cain and Abel: not only the conflict among blood brothers but also our seeming destiny as humans to harm those whom we say we love. Jesus Christ: the ache for redemption, for a new beginning shorn of past sins — is this not the American ache for reinvention and moral avoidance? Jesus Christ again: the historical example of how a blood sacrifice is required for even the smallest advance in human dignity and freedom.
These templates, these ready-mades, like all templates, help give a narrative shape to the babble — they are a good way for us to listen to ourselves talking about ourselves (which is the only reason to have and to do art).
For instance, in John Gardner's novel October Light, the elderly dairy farmer James believes that life's gravity governs our moral lives — more specifically, since gravity is always actively pulling humans toward the center of the earth, humans must exert an opposite push to rise against gravity's clutches to keep from being decomposed into brute compost, that is, to be driven by their animal natures. This active struggle to delay the inevitable dissolve gives meaning to James' life — and it's not a bad program to follow for one's life in a debauched America where most everything is for sale (and has been sold) and the notion that anyone should sacrifice anything for a greater good is smeared and defamed.
In other words, James' life has a spiritual dimension even though he is not too sure that there is any grand lighthouse keeper showing the way for the wandering ships upon the sea. This vocabulary, this way of telling his life-story to himself, gives shape to the shifting (and shiftless) and populates the void with meaning.
Of course, using, say, the vocabulary of the Resurrection is not the same as believing that the Resurrection happened; it's only about using a palette to paint something, not an affirmation of faith in the supernaturality of the palette. Because I have no faith in the faith that declares a Divinity and thus a teleological purpose in life, all this talk about vocabularies is also talk about jury-rigging our way through our days, doing the best we can with limited information and resources in a world/universe indifferent to our fates.
This can be — is — a tiring struggle since it only ends in death and all successes are contingent and transitory (and except for a few, completely forgotten by everybody). In fact, I think those who choose to find a home in religious faith choose to avoid this struggle — I can't blame them, for whom would fardels bear, but I can't agree with them either — for me, without the thorniness of the path and the sadness of the inevitable defeat, there is no possibility for robust joy and satisfying arrival. Or, in James' words, without the upward stretch against a ravenous gravity, there is no chance to absorb the sun and be refreshed by the winds. We must take our comforts where we can find them and not expect them to be embedded in a purpose-laced universe like some kind of gold ore that we can mine.
How to end this? Not sure. Only to say that the act of writing this, of deploying words against the void, has brought a measure of (temporary) comfort. What are all human efforts, from pyramids to operas, from conquests to sewer systems, from brewing the perfect coffee to honoring the dead, but exactly this: a momentary comfort in a string of momentary comforts interspersed with the on-going rejection of gravity until it can be rejected no more? This is the fate that the spiritual, as I've tried to describe it, tries to voice, in the hope that we can — I can — live large rather than small, rise high in order to fall in the most graceful, beautiful, gentle way that I can.
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