Several years ago, in what seemed to be a flash of inspiration, I decided to teach a university course for English majors on the subject of literature and spiritual experience. The inspiration came at a juncture when I was revisiting reasons why I had decided to pursue my life path in higher education and when I was asking new questions about what I deemed most important and expansive. The answers came less from my academic employment than from my religious life. What I most value, I realized—what most fills me, moves me, and best accentuates everyone and everything I love—is my spiritual life: my relationship with God as mediated by the Holy Spirit. My religious community, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, embraces the reality of spiritual gifts, from Paul’s famous list (“love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” [Galatians 5:22-23]) to a range of other graces, some charismatic (like healings or visions) and most of a subtler variety (e.g., life direction, admonishment toward virtue or mindfulness, awareness of others’ needs, etc.). What would it mean, I wondered, to bring reflection on spiritual life into direct conversation with literature?

  The result, since repeated several times, has been the most rewarding course I have ever taught. Students and I have engaged in close readings of literary texts (non-religious as well as religious), learned from a rich body of scholarship on spiritual experience, and explored individually and collectively how literature brings greater depth to our understanding of spiritual life. Consider how literature stimulates the mind and stirs the heart, fostering greater empathy and thus increasing our capacity to feel and perceive. It opens us to new worlds and other lives, revealing startling turns of thought and exquisite—and sometimes anguished—pitches of emotion. Literature awakens the imagination and ennobles, and sometimes consoles, the soul. As such, it often acts as an inspired medium for spiritual things. In many instances, literature lends form to the meaning and diversity of our spiritual experiences, to their qualities of connectedness, purpose, and ultimate concern. It can sharpen our awareness of the great variety and depth of spiritual feelings across our diverse humanity, expanding our appreciation and understanding of spiritual things even as it casts them in a new light. For this reason, literature can also act as a springboard for our own spiritual experiences, such that learning to recognize the richness of such experiences in or through literature can make us more receptive to them across the balance of life.

  Let me say just a little more about what these experiences are and may entail. One of my favorite sources of reflection on spiritual experience within my own religious tradition comes from Parley P. Pratt, a nineteenth-century theologian and ordained apostle. In his 1855 book Key to the Science of Theology, Pratt reflects on the ways that spiritual gifts touch on every facet of life:

The gift of the Holy Ghost … quickens all the intellectual faculties, increases, enlarges, expands and purifies all the natural passions and affections; and adapts them, by the gift of wisdom, to their lawful use. It inspires, develops, cultivates and matures all the fine-toned sympathies, joys, tastes, kindred feelings, and affections of our nature. It inspires virtue, kindness, goodness, tenderness, gentleness, and charity. It develops beauty of person, form and features. It tends to health, vigor, animation, and social feeling. It invigorates all the faculties of the physical and intellectual [person]. It strengthens and gives tone to the nerves. In short, it is, as it were, marrow to the bone, joy to the heart, light to the eyes, music to the ears, and life to the whole being. ¹

Pratt’s observation is a dynamic exposition of how God’s Spirit acts within and upon us. It describes what it means to have a spiritual experience—better still, what it means to have that experience extended across time in such a way that its influence rests with us, eventually becoming part of our nature.

  When I decided to experiment with a course on literature and spiritual experience, and when I reflected on my love for such experiences, it was not that I loved spiritual life more than other things. Rather, and in the spirit of Pratt’s remarks, I love spiritual experience as what best enables all aspects of my experience to be most authentic, most themselves, even as it connects my experience to things greater than itself. To have an experience with the Spirit is to perceive the world with renewed senses. This includes discerning connections otherwise hidden from us or feeling more intensely the beauty or meaning of things to which we might otherwise be dulled. It means finding ourselves capable of greater degrees of love and fulfillment, health and hope, self-realization and self-transcendence, and so much more. Redemptive immersion in a world made new through spiritual experience: this is what I love.

  A scholar of spirituality, Wesley J. Wildman, draws a distinction that is especially helpful, dividing spiritual experiences into two categories. One denotes strange or out-of-the-ordinary experiences, like “hallucination, synesthesia, lucid dreaming, out-of-body experiences, alien abduction, [miraculous] healing, past-life, near-death … and mystical experiences.”² Wildman labels these “anomalous” experiences. His second category, “ultimacy” experiences, “are defined by subjective judgments of [great] significance. These are experiences that a person feels are of vital importance for his or her life. They bring orientation and coping power, inspire great acts of courage and devotion, underlie key life decisions, and heavily influence social affiliation."³ Where one might find an anomalous spiritual experience featured on a cable TV show dedicated to accounts of the bizarre, an ultimate spiritual experience is the kind one typically hears in a conversion narrative: somebody felt a call from God and that call spurred actions that subsequently redirected that person’s life. Where anomalous spiritual experiences are associated with strangeness, ultimate spiritual experiences inspire sanctification. Anomalous experiences are surprising and ultimate experiences usually are not; but the effects of ultimacy over time—on individuals or perhaps entire religious communities— can be immense and sometimes wondrously strange. The two operate in tandem.

  This dialectic between anomalousness and ultimacy pervades literature. As a brief illustration, consider “The Windhover” by the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, a sonnet that rehearses, and enacts, an iconically Christian spiritual experience. The poet recounts how, one morning, he catches sight of a majestic kestrel (or falcon) as it hovers high in the air. His mind is drawn to the wonders of creation: “My heart in hiding / Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!”⁴ Then, as the bird suddenly dives to the ground, the poet perceives something “a billion / Times told lovelier” (LL. 10-11), a vision of Christ in his descent to earth for the purpose of redeeming humankind. The poem thus shifts from the description of the bird to a declaration of its meaning for the poet, implying that the epiphany is nothing visible to the natural eye, even if the theology of Christ’s redemptive promise is widely shared.

  By the terms we discuss above, the spiritual experience the poet rehearses would fall into the category of ultimacy. There is nothing strange about witnessing the beauties of nature—certainly not a bird in flight, even one as beautiful as a kestrel. And the Christian vision the poem articulates reflects the poet’s long-term discipleship, not a strange experience that comes out of nowhere. And yet, while the episode and theme are of the ultimate variety, the language of the poem is decidedly anomalous. This is true both in word choice and meter. Take the opening lines:

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
 dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
 Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! [LL. 1-5]

This is not the stuff of everyday conversation or even high ecclesial speech. Rather, it is odd, arresting, alternately tongue-twisting and elegant—a symphony of sound and signification. The repetition of words (“morning morning’s”) and diverse alliterations (“m” in the first line, “d” in the second, “s” in the third, “w” in the fourth) create a lilting, musical effect accentuated by poetic meter. Note the stresses: “I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding,” and so on. Dubbed “sprung rhythm,” Hopkins wove alternating numbers of unstressed syllables into his lines to break up the repetitive cadences of poetic diction. The effect slows us down, decomposing words and phrases into orchestras of sound, composites of tone and rhythm as much as grammatical sense. Language in such a poem becomes a cathedral of contemplation, a place set apart from quotidian speech, rendered sacred and strange and utterly defamiliarized.

  Compare Hopkins’s magisterial achievement with another classic sonnet, William Wordsworth’s “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802”:

Earth has not any thing to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
The City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning: silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!⁵

The language is unmistakably poetic (“The City now doth, like a garment, wear / The beauty of the morning”; “Never did sun more beautifully steep / In his first splendour”), but it amounts more to an elevation of everyday speech (“Earth has not any thing to show more fair”; “All bright and glittering in the smokeless air”) than to the estrangement of it one finds in the Hopkins poem. This is language rendered a little less ordinary, a little more sacred; it carries the air of ultimacy. But what the poet finds ultimate, meanwhile, seems a little unusual in its degree of rapture—unusual, that is, because it is in some ways exceedingly mundane. London is a spectacle, to be sure, with its “Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples.” But the degree of splendor seems ecstatic, even excessive. Where the poet in “The Windhover” is moved by nature (the pre-visionary sight of the kestrel), the spectator in Wordsworth’s poem is almost beside himself at the achievements of civilization, which acquires the aura of nature, its monuments lying “Open unto the fields, and to the sky.” “Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep”: This is a city as seemingly nobody has seen one before, certainly not the poet, inspiring an ecstasy out of keeping even with tourist awe—a reverence not for cityscapes, but for something like urban soul: “Dear God! the very houses seem asleep…!”

  Ultimacy and anomalousness—the effects of wonder—play off each other in these two sonnets. For Hopkins, anomalous language underscores the ultimacy of the vision, whereas, for Wordsworth, the ultimacy of the language heightens the wondrous spectacle of urban accomplishment. In each case, anomalousness and ultimacy combine to create a forceful spiritual impression. Hence, where Wildman rightly distinguishes between modes of spiritual experience, Hopkins and Wordsworth reveal how literature overlays such modes, enriching and even, potentially, recreating the intensities they describe. Take, for example, the present-tense language of each poem. For Hopkins, such language recreates the drama of the bird’s dive to earth and the sudden apparition of the poetic vision: “Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here / Buckle!” (LL. 9-10) or collapse. The breathiness of the consecutive commas gives way to an enjambed line, literal “inspiration,” or breathing, leading to exclamatory exhalation, a virtual “I see!” For Wordsworth, likewise, the scene is the ecstatic present, the poet’s vision momentarily becoming our own: “all that mighty heart is lying still!” It all seems so unusual and yet so resonantly real; word becomes feeling and thought grows into experience. This is dynamic experience, fully (per Pratt and Wildman) spiritual experience, what the scholar of Christian spirituality Mary Frohlich describes as the “human spirit fully in act.”⁶

  Reading literature in this way has deepened its resonances for me. More than that, it has enriched my spiritual life. My students express much the same thing: “This has been my favorite class and the most meaningful to my life.” “This class has helped me in innumerable ways outside of just academia.” “I have become more grateful for God’s tender mercies.” Such comments inspire me to special reflection as an educator. We read all the time about how the humanities are in crisis—how decreasing enrollments endanger not only humanities programs at some colleges and universities but also threaten the viability of humanities disciplines for entire fields. Bringing literature into conversation with spiritual experience reminds me of why this need not be the case—or, if it continues to be, how I best can meet its challenge. For literature is perhaps our most sophisticated instrument for reflecting on what we find meaningful (and joyful, and grievous, and frightening, and sobering, and so on) and why, and spirituality represents meaning in its fullest form. Together, literature and spiritual experience capture our panoramic experience as both fallen creatures and image bearers of God, as beings at once culturally situated and self-transcendent, and as products of mortal circumstance who, nevertheless, are not left “comfortless” (John 14:18). No mere theological abstraction, spiritual experience is the vital manifestation of a Christian poetics, the present-tense realization of Christ’s promise of an abundant life (see John 10:10). Literature, sharpening our attention, can help us feel the rhythms and fulfillment of this promise more vividly.

Adapted from Life to the Whole Being: The Spiritual Memoir of a Literature Professor (Provo: Neal A. Maxwell Institute, 2022).

¹ Parley P. Pratt, Key to the Science of Theology, 10th ed. (1857; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1973), 101.
² Wesley J. Wildman, Religious and Spiritual Experiences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 82.
³ Ibid., 84.
⁴ “The Windhover,” Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Major Works, ed. Catherine Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 132, LL. 7-8. Subsequent references will be cited in the text.
⁵ Wordsworth, “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802,” Wordsworth, The Poems, 2 vols., ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Penguin, 1977), 1:574-75.
⁶ Mary Frohlich, “Spiritual Discipline, Discipline of Spirituality: Revisiting Questions of Definition and Method,” Spiritus 1.1 (2001): 65-78 (71).