Life has been frightening and cataclysmic lately, so I needed some reading material that would reconnect me with a sense of the spiritual. I also haven’t had a lot of time to read, I’ve been writing so much. So the book I just finished was unlike my usual favorites: nonfiction books about history or colorful, literary adventure novels. I decided to pick up a book I’d had on my shelf for a long time, The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry, edited by Stephen Mitchell. Buy this book in paper or electronic format This remarkable volume serves as a history of world religion, as well as a collection of beautiful poetry. In fact, we might not even have considered many of these works “poetry” the way we normally think of it. Many of the world’s great religious classics, (and indeed most highbrow literature before a few hundred years ago) were written in verse rather than prose, as the divinity they were meant to express can only be captured, even in part, by the beauty of a poetic treatment. In order, The Enlightened Heart contains selections from: the Upanishads, the Book of Psalms, the Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad Gita,…
