A Common Spiritual Hunger
To the Editor of New Oxford Review:
James K. Hanna’s “The Cloister or the World?” (Nov. 2026 issue) was a welcome and refreshing essay. His discussion of Jack Kerouac, Thomas Merton, and the spiritual restlessness of their generation particularly appealed to me, for a very personal reason. I lived through those times and experienced both worlds—the Beatnik and the monk.
What may appear to be two opposing ways of life did not appear that way to me. I saw them as expressions of the same spiritual hunger, the search for God.
My nervous breakdown in 1963 profoundly affected the way I perceived the world. In the midst of that crucifying experience, I came to see what others might regard as contradictory spiritual paths as attempts to answer the same fundamental human longing. This was not a conclusion I arrived at decades later, after studying philosophy or theology. It was something I recognized at the time.
The Beatnik sought freedom from the conventions and material preoccupations of society. The monk likewise turned away from the ordinary pursuits of the world, but sought his freedom through prayer, discipline, contemplation, and surrender to God. Their methods could hardly have been more different. Yet beneath those differences I recognized the same spiritual hunger.
Of course, recognizing a common hunger is not the same as approving every means employed to satisfy it. The search for God can lead a person through confusion, mistaken choices, and painful consequences. I knew something of that confusion myself. I did not resolve it by choosing one label over another. I lived through it.
In the years that followed, my search carried me through experiences in the counterculture and into religious communities, including monasteries and ashrams. I encountered people whose beliefs and practices differed greatly, yet whose lives were directed toward questions that had also occupied me: Who am I? Why am I here? And where is God to be found?
That is why Hanna’s essay spoke to me. His examination of Kerouac and Merton concerns more than two prominent figures of twentieth-century American religious and literary history. It concerns a spiritual hunger that can exist in people whose outward lives seem utterly incompatible.
I have spent much of my life trying to understand and describe that search. Now, more than sixty years after my experience in 1963, I have completed a forthcoming memoir, Path Perilous: My Search for God and the Miraculous, recounting my own penniless ten-year pilgrimage through those turbulent years and beyond.
What I especially appreciated about Hanna’s essay was his ability to discuss serious spiritual questions in clear, accessible language. He made the people and their struggles understandable without burying them beneath academic terminology.
The cloister and the world may represent very different ways of living. But I learned long ago that the longing for God does not necessarily begin in a monastery, a church, or even in a life that appears particularly religious. Sometimes it begins in confusion, among people who scarcely understand what they are searching for.
I was one of them.
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