On Writing and Faith

This is the fifth beginning I have written for this talk, and, I hope, the last.
I write all the time and every day, for both work and pleasure,
but writing this speech has been different:

trying to talk about some of the deepest and most important things I believe,
on subjects where it’s all too easy to devolve into cliché,
with as much honesty and truth as I can
And trying to stay under ten minutes.

So it has scared me a bit, I must say,
and there have been many digressions and changes in direction—

the part relevant to Exodus? No longer included.
Never mind those first four failed beginnings.

But the direction I’m taking now grew out of those beginnings:

With their stops and starts, the exploration and retreat, the search for what I want to say, and the struggle for the best way to say it.

The attempt to be in the moment, the flow; the need for improvement from without and within; the hope of making a beautiful thing that might speak to others; and the desire, always, to connect.
And if you get the sense I’m not just talking about writing here, you are correct.
Because as I was flailing around to find something meaningful and interesting to say about this John text, which is, after all, all about words,
I realized how much my struggle to write resembled my struggle with faith as well:

the same doubts,
the same fears,
the same hopes of getting beyond myself to something true and real.

So I am going to talk here about a number of the ways that the work of faith and the work of writing resemble each other
And if the talk turns out to be a sixth failed beginning—

Well, I thank you for putting up with it.

This actually isn’t such a random comparison to draw,
Because language and faith are intimately connected in the Christian church:

We don’t dance to feel the spirit, and we rarely meditate to make it come

Instead we live in words:

studying the Bible,
singing the lyrics,
and praying—in silence or out loud, but in language.

Of course we hope with all these things to get beyond words;
but language remains our primary method of approaching God,
and often the only way we communicate our experience.
Then there is this text in John, which is one of my very favorite passages in the Bible.
The Greek word for “Word” is Logos, which can also mean “thought, speech, meaning, reason, principle, standard,” or “logic.”
Heraclitus established the term in Western philosophy as meaning the fundamental order of the cosmos.
So John’s use of “Logos” for God is calling him the deep structure of the universe:

an Organizing Principle that makes and orders the world.

Words, reason, principle, light—indeed, all the metaphors John uses here promise us illumination, straightforwardness, understanding and right action,
if we can only connect with it, even for a moment, and then spread its light on earth.

And that is the first way writing is like faith, or vice versa: They are both about connection.
Even when I’m writing just for myself, to work out an emotion or think through a problem,
I’m trying to draw a line between what I feel and what the facts are,

how to get from point A in my life to point B.

More often I’m writing to connect with other people: to make an argument or explain my point, to let my reader hear what I’m feeling.
That doesn’t mean things will go my way, or be any clearer or any easier

But I will have done my best to tell my truth to the world
Which sometimes is all I can offer.

With God the connection often isn’t so straightforward.
My faith sometimes feels like I’m tuning a radio, trying to find the right station, to hit upon the magic combination of words and feelings that will let me be connected with him

And then to stay tuned in, through the static of my daily life—
And that’s if, I have to say, I take the time to do it at all.

But those times it has been right and the connection goes through
I’ve felt a peace and rightness and comfort I hardly ever feel otherwise:
Feeling in harmony not just with him but with everyone

As if I know my part in the Logos and move within it.

And then once the connection is made, both writing and faith require you to go deeper,

to give your time, your love, and your very best effort
in service of the truth you’ve glimpsed or want to find

I edit books for a publisher in the city,
and the thing that separates the real writers from the dilettantes
is their willingness to work, to dig down till they reach the depths of their characters and their stories,
to cut and write and rearrange till their words are clear as day and pure as night—
all in service of the deep structure of the story and the truth they have to tell.
As Christians, we make a similar commitment

Not just to the Logos, to be part of its order, to shine God’s light on earth;
But to love, which upends the established order, and is his light on earth.

We’re charged not to settle for the status quo

But to work toward the world that we would have it be.

It is very tiring, and an uphill slog, and easy to lose sight of the destination.
But once you know the truth is out there—it’s the only thing that matters.

But just as writing and faith are similar quests for truth and connection
They also have similar dangers and distractions.
And the first of these great dangers is distraction itself.
This is my great bugaboo personally: I pray for my sister,

and while praying I remember I forgot to call her,
which I was supposed to do while washing my dishes,
and shoot, I need to mop the floor too . . .
and suddenly I am no longer thinking about God.

Or when I’m writing, I need to verify the phrasing of a quotation I want to use,

so I Google it and that leads me to a web page about poetry,
And that reminds me of an e-mail I need to send to a friend,
and two hours later . . .

There is a great deal of noise in the world—not necessarily actively oppressive, not even out to get you really, just there,
and if you pay attention to it for even a moment, you lose the connection, the flow,
The sense of being out of the world, because you’ve been pulled back by something in it.
The good news here is, neither God nor your writing care that you went away

As long as you come back.
That’s the most important thing: You must always come back.
And then they’ll be waiting.

Of course, it’s easy to start wondering whether it’s worth coming back—
Whether what you have to say or what you believe is really true.
And this is the second danger to both writing and faith: doubt.
It is endemic to both, the shadow in both, the dark that opposes the light of the Word.
In faith, we doubt God’s existence, to start with;

then his working on earth, if he does;
then his interest in us individually, if he has any:
We hear only the vast silence of the universe.

In writing, we doubt our having new anything to say, for a beginning,

then our ability to say it in the way that’s right;
then anyone else’s interest in hearing it . . .
We see only the blank page.

And these are just the primary doubts;
it’s once you start measuring yourself against other people that the fun really begins.
Doubt paralyzes us by turning us inward:
Rather than looking at the beauty and truth of the world
and all we can accomplish in it,
we stare only at what’s inside our own heads,

which get more and more warped the longer we stay inside them.

The best way out of doubt is to step back from it: to breathe deep, and see the world again
And then . . . I wrestle with doubt a lot, and in the end, for me, the only good way out of the questions is to live as if the answers were “Yes”:

Yes, God exists and works on earth and loves us
Yes, I have something new to say and people will want to hear it
Yes, I can make good things happen in the world

Because if I answer “No,” in writing or in faith, it’s all over;

I’ll never say or try anything; and
I’ll never know what could have been—and neither will the world.

Of course, there’s also the opposite danger with both writing and faith: and that’s too much certainty, too much sense that you’ve got it all down.
So you fall in love with your own genius, or righteousness, and lose sight of the larger picture—God, the point of your story, the attempt to connect.
Several books published recently have posited that all of the world’s troubles come down to religion.
But I believe all of the world’s troubles come down to literary interpretation, for as we know, even people who share a religion, or a denomination, or a church, can have completely different understandings of a religious text.

In the Islamic world, the forces of moderation and tolerance war with—or are killed by—those who read the Koran and hear only jihad.
The Episcopalian church, and our own, have been riven by disagreements approaching schisms on how to read texts regarding gays and lesbians.

Indeed, if our fellow Methodist George W. Bush interpreted the Bible the way we do at PSUMC,

not only would we NOT be in Iraq, we’d have universal health care, same-sex marriage, and an end to the genocide in Darfur.

And as the president’s missteps in Iraq have shown,
The next step after deciding your interpretation is the only valid one

Is that you stop listening to others;

And it’s easy after that to stop loving them, against what Christ intended.
Righteousness must be balanced with reason and humility when religious people act in the world,
And the same is true for writers.
We need to keep an awareness that words inside our heads may not make perfect sense to those outside it,

And to be willing to listen to criticism and then revise till our meaning shines clear.

Otherwise, we’re betraying the truth we hope to convey.

And indeed, what all three of these dangers to writing and faith demonstrate
is a focus on ourselves and our own needs and desires to the exclusion of that which we claim to be serving.
They’re all forms of egotism, really, saying “Me! Me! Me!” more than anything else.
This is especially true of the last danger I’d like to discuss here:
Perfectionism, my other great personal bugaboo.
Perfection paralyzes, just like doubt
But rather than endless mental loopings of the same questions that go nowhere
Perfectionism is the idea that you have to go everywhere, cover everything

And you are the only one who can do it.

A correction there: Actually, I am the only one who can do it.
I can see the light, I know it’s there,

and I’ll kill myself to try to reach it—or feel like killing myself when I don’t.

I had to declare the fifth beginning to this talk was the final one

Because otherwise I’d still be writing that paragraph.

And all this time, really, I do know
God does not care about perfection—in writing or in faith.
He knows we makes mistakes; in fact, all of Christianity begins from the idea that he loves us so much his son died for them.
And he loves us for who we are, those weaknesses included.
All my errors and imperfections; all my failures to say things rightly; all the bad words and jealousy, the many, many typos in my behavior
God loves me despite these, and for trying to overcome them.

Elie Wiesel said once that God made man because he loves stories
And as a book person, I find this idea makes that vast love of God comprehensible:
God as not just the co-writer but the reader of my life,
watching me and nudging me along,
with the same affection and engagement I have for my favorite characters
Elizabeth Bennet, Harry Potter . . .
If they didn’t make mistakes—if I didn’t make mistakes—there would be no story.
So I hope God is finding my life amusing.
And I’m comforted by the thought of having a happy ending
And that God’s directing me in getting there.

For this is the final and most important way that writing and faith are alike.
It is not that it is all about the journey,

because at least with writing, we’re trying to get a very specific result from the journey, and not just the journey itself.

But it is that we must love the journey,

we must love our doubts and mistakes and missteps;

our false starts and our deleted lines;

we must come to see it all as a whole,
and as our contribution to the whole,

our creations going towards God’s.

Art, faith, and love are the making of meaning
In a world growing ever noisier and more cynical.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
May we all find the ways to speak our words, and the courage to live them, every day.