Introduction

ESSAYS

Steven Chase, San Antonio

The meaning of a word can sometimes be illuminated such that its seeming opposite begins to control the page. This is the case with Douglas E. Christie's essay, "Reading Ruusbroec in Argentina: Darkness, Loss and the Common Life" in the sense of light until the brilliance is glaring, explosively incendiary, a holocaust in Argentina. The Ruusbroec epigram does the same with "dark silence" and "the lost." Together, Christie and Ruusbroec evoke "brilliance" and "dark silence"––and will not look away from the Argentinian "disappeared."

In our second essay, "The Spiritual Force of Unleashed Love: Echoes of Saint John of the Cross in Frederico García Lorca's Sonnets of the Dark Love," Daniel Muñoz explores the interplay between sexuality, spirituality, and poetry in the work of the sixteenth-century poet, Saint John of the Cross and the early twentieth-century poet, Frederico García Lorca. In both poets, as Muñoz shows, desire and "unleashed love" are expressed through erotic imagery and sexual intimacy as fitting expressions of spiritual longing. An implication of Muñoz's work is that creativity itself, can be an expression of sexuality and spirituality.

It is a synchronicity that Christie works with the image of "dark silence," while Muñoz works with that of "dark love"—a synchronicity but not a coincidence. At one point in his essay Muñoz cites another poet to the effect that poetry is the union of two words that no one has thought of before; newly joined, the words take on a quality of mystery. Hence, we are left with the mysteries of "dark silence," "dark love," and later in Muñoz, of the "wounded, dark stag."

Spiritus also publishes, in this issue, sonnets by Frederico García Lorca newly translated by Daniel Muñoz.

PERSPECTIVES

Steven Chase

Perspectives in this issue provide new insight and depth into what we know as spiritual practice. In her opening perspective, Amy Greer begins with a beautiful and inspiring work, "Wrestling the Goldbergs: Piano Variations as a Spiritual Practice." Greer has a well-rounded group of practices, yet she admits to "being unhappy"; her practices have become stale, a deadly repetition, dull, void, interfering with important relationships rather than opening them in any creative way. Greer does such a professional job of explaining the Goldberg Variations that there is no need to say more here than that the Variations are by Bach and that Glenn Gould, the odd and brilliant (to say the least) reintroduced them in the middle of the 20th century.

Greer explains something of the complexity of the Variations while simultaneously conjuring the notes and the piano, the fingers and the pages, the solid structures and forms of a spiritual practice. Her prose verges on the edges of spiritual practice as ineffable mystical experience, while "guiding us through the musical labyrinth that Bach created."

If Bach guides us through a "musical labyrinth," Rod Jellema, in "Spiritual Poetry: Mirage or Matter?" guides us through a series of poetic labyrinths that are not mirages, they matter. Jellema first approaches poetry as a philosopher (though throughout he writes as/like a poet practiced in the poet's earthen, spiritual art). As a philosopher he distinguishes between two types of "spiritual poetry," one steeped in monism where the spirit or soul is the ultimate and only reality, while matter is illusionary or evil; and a second, dualism, which "comes from 'out there' [the soul or spirit] and is caught and reflected in the world it inhabits." Jellema's is a true dualism. Through the many delightful poetic examples he offers in his essay, we see how "out there"–say, the sun or ephemeral butterfly wings–is truly wedded to "down here"–say, mud or galoshes or rain on a silver-gray lake. Jellema guides us through poetic labyrinths that somehow seem both familiar and appropriately strange.

Miriam Díaz-Gilbert finds a correspondence between the early Christian ascetic body and the modern-day ultrarunner's body. For those not familiar with what an unltrarunner is, the marathon, with which most of us are familiar...