Five Nonfiction Books to Help Satisfy Your Spiritual Longings
Are you looking for ways to better connect spiritually with others and the greater universe? Are you losing sight of the deeper value in your regular religious rituals or normal engagement with your faith community? Perhaps you are just needing to sharpen your saw and renew your sense of wonder and awe. Maybe you are looking to rediscover transcendence.
The sky is the limit for ways you can reinvigorate your spiritual life. You might start a new spiritual practice or exercise or take up a new hobby that promises spiritual benefits. Service and charity are often true paths to spiritual growth, as is building deeper relationships with others. Sure, you could do something exotic like make a pilgrimage to a rare site of spiritual, historical, or cultural significance or unbounded natural beauty. Simple actions might also help to satisfy your spiritual longings — such as perusing just a few of the countless volumes that have been composed relating to the spiritual life(aside from reading sacred texts themselves). Here are five such nonfiction books that may help you find greater spiritual fulfillment in your journey. And like any great work, these cited gems can always be returned to for further riches to be mined.
The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness by Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong entered a convent in 1962 at the age of 17. Hoping to find spiritual fulfillment and deeper connection to the Divine, she entered a life secluded from the outside world. Tragically, her convent life also became a confinement from her own authentic spiritual path and faith. She left the convent several years later, facing shame and disgrace from her failed spiritual journey. Then, further spiritual desolation followed her as she experienced a depressing journey full of professional failures, personal angst, and phantom health problems haunting every corner of her life.
The Spiral Staircase is Armstrong’s courageous, honest, and unwavering account of her spiritual journey to find healing, renewed faith, and deeper fulfillment after her ordeals in youth plus numerous obstacles faced in her professional and personal life. In our age of ever-advancing technology and existential dreariness, this book is a beacon of hope and authentic spirituality for anyone who may have experienced a dark night of the soul for far too long. It was Armstrong’s quest to write a comprehensive survey of the history of monotheistic faiths that became the catalyst for her spiritual renewal. Such a humbling quest(and the memoir is written with profound honesty and humility), opened her to the transcendent.
“I discovered that I felt at home and alive in the silence, which compelled me to enter my interior world and around there. Without the distraction of constant conversation, the words on the page began to speak directly to my inner self. They were no long expressing ideas that were simply interesting intellectually, but were talking directly to my own yearning and perplexity.”
Eventually, she was able to rediscover faith, hope, and connection to the Divine at the heart of things.
The Worlds’ Religions by Huston Smith
“What is it with all of these world religions?” so many easily ask. Also, there is this common position in our uncertain age of ever-advancing technology to just hold up one’s arms in confusion about anything related to religion. Meanwhile, humanity still recognizes the unmatched wisdom of the perennial religious traditions, and countless still long for some sort of “spiritual something.” This is where Huston’s classic, enchanting, and inviting introduction to the world’s major religions can offer some much needed spiritual footing.
First written by the late internationally renowned expert of religions in the late 1950s, this book offers generous consideration and broad survey of the major religious traditions that have grounded human cultures for millennia. The chorus of adherents from any explored faith(as well as thousands of other traditions not explored) can never be fully understood by any scholar. But Smith is humble, profoundly open-hearted, and thorough in his survey as he cites his methodology from the start: “all we can try to do is listen carefully and with full attention to each voice in turn as it addresses the Divine.” Such an approach seems profoundly needed for our age, as demographics projections have predicted that the majority of humanity will still claim adherence to one major religion or another in the next century. Readers certainly will not find resolution for most of their deeper spiritual longings, but might at least find a starting point to better appreciate and approach the questions. And Huston’s unyielding ability to fully listen to the major religions will surely bring spiritual enrichment to any reader whatever their point of view.
The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell
So we hear so much on television, online, and in books about the wonders found by science and technology. Many have attended a lecture or watched documentaries about a certain religious tradition or philosophical point of view. But what about one of the oldest and primordal of domains of thought, inquiry, and spiritual method that still moves the world — mythology? The Power of Myth, a six part series from Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers, offers both a comprehensive overview as well as deep immersion into the oceans of mythology like no other. In the book version of the video interviews, readers can constantly revisit many excerpts to mine numerous insights from the late master of comparative mythology Joseph Campbell.
The interviews do not hold back from Moyers and Campbell touching on many of the biggest philosophical, spiritual, and existential questions. What place do the perennial mythological and spiritual traditions have in our modern world? What does it mean to be a hero? How ought we to find authentic meaning and purpose in life? For the last question, one of Joseph Campbell’s most notable quotes should serve as enough appeal for readers to immerse themselves in the text:
“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins
The chagrin and blunt debunking of religious belief and genuine embrace of the transcendent has left so many feeling confused and even hopeless for far too long. How about a work so poetic, enchanting, and even spiritually moving that you would think it came from a spiritual sage or even religious leader but really has come from one of our age’s grandest debunkers of traditional religion — Richard Dawkins? Whatever your philosophical and spiritual point of view, anyone can peruse Dawkin’s unexpectedly poetic and perhaps even mystical text Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite For Wonder.
Just consider quotes from the book that resemble those scientists with a mystical bent like Einstein or Spinoza.
“The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite.”
“There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence. For those of us not gifted in poetry, it is at least worth while from time to time making an effort to shake off the anaesthetic. What is the best way of countering the sluggish habitutation brought about by our gradual crawl from babyhood? We can’t actually fly to another planet. But we can recapture that sense of having just tumbled out to life on a new world by looking at our own world in unfamiliar ways.”
Some of those who are torn apart by efforts to debunk by Dawkins and others may find this work a breath of fresh air, even if they come from a contrasting point of view. One such position that many may disagree with is the insistence that science will eventually elucidate most questions about the physical universe and existence. But Dawkins’ marvelous work is actually testament to the premise that there are multiple ways of knowing and that countless ultimate mysteries will always remain. One of those grandest of mysteries is the boundless wonder that we human beings are here at all, able to make sense at least in some small part the infinitely grand Cosmos for which we are but a speck. This work of Dawkins is sure to shine among the likes of other visionaries who have offered a poetic and spiritual vision of the universe as discovered by modern science like Carl Sagan and Albert Einstein.
Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis
C.S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy is part autobiography, part spiritual memoir, and part atlas of some common deeper currents flowing through every human soul. If you are looking for inspiration and hope after quite a few dark days or tragic life events, this masterpiece will certainly not disappoint. Just consider one of the beginning passages:
“With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.”
A profound and wondrous thing about Lewis’s autobiographical account is that it turns into an exploration of many larger mental, emotional, and spiritual constants inherent in the human condition. For instance, what exactly is authentic joy in every sense of the term?
I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again… I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and Pleasure often is.
And how ought we find sustaining joy and peace in the midst of life’s suffering and hardship? What might the spiritual traditions(obviously for C.S. Lewis it was Christianity but for others it may be a different path) offer for lasting calm from the storm as well as connection to the ultimate? Lewis’s work is certainly one that will continue to inspire for ages to come.
Even though the 2020 coronavirus pandemic has mostly come to a close, this is an age of existential and spiritual disarray. The whole of civilization is facing increased pressure from the risks associated with ever-advancing technology and automation, as well as inching closer and closer to the edge with environmental catastrophes including species loss and climate change. Even the political and social unrests we see in every part of the world are influenced in great part by the existential and spiritual dread many nations’ citizens feel in a profoundly uncertain age.
But opportunities for spiritual renewal and growth present themselves to each of us every day. Whether we seek to get back out to Nature, offer our deeper selves in charity and service to others, or simply take some time to practice meditation or deep breathing. Reading itself is a spiritual practice, opening our minds, hearts, and deepest selves to new worlds and perspectives. The list presented here are five spiritual books certain to help one find spiritual renewal and greater growth. And these are just five works out of millions and billions, but a few gems from the bottomless chest of spiritual riches humans have mined and molded from throughout the ages.
