Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

A Letter to an Aspiring Writer

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I am writing this for an anthology to appear in October. And here is my first version, which I have decided not to use. I include it here for those who might be interested.

A Letter to an Aspiring Writer
Hi Anita,
So when you were twenty-one, you decided to become a writer.
If you could have looked forward through the mists of time, and seen how relatively little you have written twenty-nine years later, would you still have set your face to become a writer?
* * *
Oh, yes! There was nothing else that really interested you, you see.
You read that Rajiv Gandhi, later Prime Minister of India, said, “I had rather create history than study it.” And you felt like that about literature.
* * *
 Ah, but Anita, how many wrong turnings. I wish I, having discovered my first grey hair, could have counselled you. Many did —and their advice slowed you down—for advice is a double-edged sword.
Not everyone who has failed wishes you to succeed. The successful are not necessarily cheerleaders. There is a fine line between a mentor and a tormentor. Advice can be offered from malice and envy. Remember Iago.
Accept no advice without praying through it. For the most important, the vital, voice you need to learn to hear is your heavenly Father’s.
                                             * * *
Theories abound in quasi-magical fields like writing or creativity or prayer. You must find, by trial and error, the right ones for you.
You learn writing by studying the masters, but, if you have the ear for it, the gift for it, you ultimately learn to write by writing. Reading and practice, that’s all it takes, though good teachers save you time by the embarrassment of their criticism, and the encouragement of their praise!
Did you overdo the education and classes in the days of abounding energy, when you should have been writing?  A BA and then an MA from Somerville College, Oxford; an MA in English and creative writing from Ohio State; Ph.D classes in Creative Writing at SUNY-Binghamton; more graduate classes at the university of Minnesota. Working with famous writers, one on one as with Carol Bly, or at the Loft Literary Centre in Minneapolis, or at writers’ conferences and colonies.                                                                                                          * * *
What was that silly thing you heard? About connections being the third wing of the writers’ life: reading, writing, and connections. That stressed you out, for you were living in small, boring Williamsburg, Virginia. And so you wasted time going to conferences–Bread Loaf, Squaw Valley, Wesleyan, Chenango Valley, Mount Holyoke, hoping to learn yes, but also to meet other writers.  And for magic.
Ah you had a mental script for the writer’s life, which involved a fairy tale–discovery by fairy godmothers: an editor and an agent. And a happily ever after,
But Anita, good writing leaps off the page. It makes its own connections, its own magic.  Write the rabbit for the magicians to flourish.
Christianity is a fairy tale filled with surprises, reversals, redemption, and happiness ever after. And so I believe you will see a fairy tale in your writing, because a good God who loves you and called you to write is ultimately writing the script, not you. And that fairy tale will include an essential element of fairy tales—surprise!
                                                  * * *
You attended writers’ groups for praise and camaraderie, when you should have been holed up writing. Your writing conditions weren’t bad, but seeking validation and the stimulation of creative people you applied for fellowships to writers’ colonies–Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Centre for Creative Arts.
Colony life is magic, is paradise–lunch brought to your door at VCCA; organic deliciousness eaten with artists at Vermont, and you read and wrote all day, but oh, how you missed your husband and young ones.
And you learnt that, though long uncommitted hours obviously increase the odds of getting work done, art that flows from a life grounded in home, garden, family and friends is more sustainable in the long run.
·      * * *
Seeking validation, you entered essay, creative non-fiction and memoir competitions for cash but more–the glory. And you won some, including a magical $20,000 National Endowment for the Arts award, $6000 from the Minnesota State Arts Board, travel grants and essay prizes.
But all those successful applications for prizes, grants, awards and fellowships to writers’ colonies and conferences meant that the showcase chapters got polished to perfection before the rest of the manuscript was written.
Oh, privilege the first draft. Keep it moving. “First get it down, then get it right,” is sage advice, but sadly you need to get each paragraph—even those you’re later going to jettison—somewhat right before writing the next one. It’s not the most efficient way of writing. But it’s yours!!
And, please learn to outline before you write. It will save you hours in the long run!
                                         * * *
How badly you wanted validation, glory, and general impressiveness to slip into conversation to explain what you spent your time doing.  You yearned to publish a big successful book to prove how special, interesting and gifted you were. Justification by writing!
But how much better to just relax and be yourself, and be appreciated and accepted for who you are, not what you do.  And prolonged failure taught you this.
If you seek validation through fame and success, you will need more and more of it. Instead, as Rilke says,  “Draw close to those things that will not ever leave you.” Learn to find happiness in simple things: ingardening, nature, travel, family, friends, reading, writing and God.
                                                      * * *
Things changed when you learned to soak in the love of the Father, and his love strengthened and healed you, and gave you the validation you needed.
Things changed when you began to love writing for itself, when you were willing to self-publish to get the work out there, when the possibility of self-publishing made failure lose its terror. Your work wouldsee the light.
Perhaps the desperate longing to succeed had to die for you to discover the deep play of writing. To learn you had to write
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.
Whát I do is me: for that I came, Hopkins imagines everything crying. And writing was you, the way you discovered what you thought and felt. Writing was natural and instinctive as breathing.
                                                      * * *
Blogging was the best thing that happened in your writing life.
When your writing stalled, and you despaired of finishing your big book, and despaired of finding a publisher; or readers if you self-published, you heard God suggest blogging on April 10th, 2010.
After trying to write unassailably well for so long, the discipline of daily blogging taught you to write swiftly and to make peace with imperfection. You gained more readers, and made more connections in two years of blogging than in two decades of publishing in magazines, journals and newspapers.
And your first twenty-eight months as a blogger have been full of stimulation, creative breakthrough, increasing confidence, affirmation, connections and new friendships.
                                                      * * *
Henry James famously said, “If one desires to do the best one can with one’s pen, there is one word you must inscribe upon your banner, and that word is Loneliness”.’
And so you passed up church, school and neighbourhood social events. And when loneliness hit—and you remembered the healing power of social support–you went to everything, and then regretted the stiff forced smile, the pretence of interest, the uncomfortable bored encounter when you could have been home, reading and writing.
It took experimentation to learn the right amount of friendship and social life for you. Two intense lunches or coffees with friends per week are ideal. For deep conversation sparks your creativity. Less than that, and you begin to get a bit bored and restless with just family and writing. More than that is distracting, and you enjoy social life less.
Once you have more friends than you can keep up with, as you now have, pass up group events for one-on-one conversations!
                                                   * * *
“Be patient with the seasons,” everyone tell young mums–but no ambitious young mum wants to hear that. You could not accept this necessary slowing down when your children were little, and so worked, and worse, worried yourself into exhaustion.
You refused to wait for time to become spacious again—as it now has. You limped on with your writing while Rome burned. Wrote on amid marital discord and domestic mess. Ah, but one is far less productive under such conditions—and what a psychological price it exerts!!
Far better to put first things first. Now that you are at peace with God and man, words flow easily, like honey.
                                                      * * *
Though you were a Christian for twenty-three of your writing years, how long it took for the Christian and the writer to be one and the same!
To learn to lean on your heavenly Father, and to let his creative power flow through you. To learn to do things through Christ who strengthens you. To entrust your writing to God. The great laws of the spiritual life operate in writing: Do not be afraid. Trust in the Father.  Trust also in Jesus.


Praying in African

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And here’s my funniest moment from River Camp, the Pentecostal Family Camp I’m hanging out at.

  Irene, praying in baby language!

Irene was lying on the floor, trying “soaking prayer” with the adults for the first time ever. A lady came and prayed with her, she said. “First she prayed in English, and then she prayed in African,” said, Irene, 13.

“In African? Was she black?” I asked. “No, blonde,” she said.

I laughed. She was probably speaking in tongues.

We attended a Charismatic church (St. Aldate’s, Oxford) for 6 years, but since Irene went to children’s church, I guess she’s never heard glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, a gift I received when i was 17.

Which, incidentally, can sound beautiful, and exotic. I fancy it sounds like Persian!!

Rolling with the Pentecostals. And Listening to Heidi Baker

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 Englishness and Pentecostalism: Can you think of more antithetical things?So watching the English version of Pentecostalism or Charismatic-ness always amuses me. It’s like the watching the English morph into Americans–or Nigerians.I am spending six days at the Pentecostal River Camp in Gloucestershire.

* * *

I came to RiverCamp with some Brennan Manning and John Eldredge books to listen to on my iPod as I walked by the river.

Well, it turns out that the River in River Camp is metaphorical. Duh!

It, in fact, describes my favourite river in the world, the river which flows from the sanctuary in Ezekiel 47 1-12.

Googling my own blog, I see I’ve written about it repeatedly. It is the river of creativity, of refreshing, renewal, and forgiveness—the only river in which you want to live. Where this water flows, the salty turns sweet. Trees on the banks of this river bear fruit every month. The fruit is good for food and the leaves for healing.

* * *

Heidi Baker spoke. Heidi is 53, but has the figure, energy, zip and personality of a bouncy teenager. She tells stories with absolute child-like delight, and jumps up and down with excitement as she tells them!!

Her life is her sermon. She apparently knows Christ as few do, and operated in a different dimension altogether in which miracles are normal.  Then she goes on stage and tells stories of the myriad miracles she has experienced in the course of her daily life in which she steps out on a limb daily, and it is more powerful than any theological sermon.

I have heard her thrice before, twice in Oxford, and once at New Wine in Somerset, but always gain new things from her (often repeated) stories. Well, she puts it this way—you may have been pregnant before, but when it comes time to push, you feel something!!

* * *

Heidi was severely dyslexic until the age of 16; her teachers mocked her inability to spell. After prayer for healing, she was healed completely of dyslexia and went on to get a Bachelor’s, Masters and even a Ph.D (in Systematic Theology, for heaven’s sake!) from Kings’ College, London.

I LOVE that story. The molecules in the brain can be healed just as much as the molecules in the body, the dyslexic receiving a Ph.D, just as later, her husband, Rolland Baker, who had advanced dementia, was miraculously healed.

I was myself was completely healed from a long, long burn-out ( the result of a toxic cocktail of overwork, stress and depression) which severely affected my reading speed, and my ability to concentrate for long hours after humbling myself by requesting prayer in a healing service at church in April 2010. The week I started blogging!! I wrote a sardonic post about the grammar of the healer—and later humbly realized, heck, grammar wasn’t essential to heal!

Without that complete healing, which restored my ability to read, write and concentrate for long hours, after a severe burn-out and intermittent depression which had lasted for many, many years, I not would have been able to blog or write successfully!!

Remember how Naaman was told to wash in the River Jordan (2 Kings 5).  Sometimes, healing or the spiritual gift you seek comes because you humble yourself and take the time to go and ask for it. (And often, the healing will come from someone who you may well feel supercilious about.)

* * *

One reason I find Heidi Baker inspiring is that  she makes following Christ sound joyful and easy. Listen, hang in there, press in, pray constantly, obey.

Heidi snorkels in the ocean outside her home in Mozambique. She goes knee-deep, then waist-deep, puts her face in, kicks her legs , lets go, and looks into an amazing new world.

Stepping into the Kingdom is like snorkelling, she said. Leave shore, go deep, deeper still, and look at your world, a new world, with the eyes of faith.

* * *

Here’s another story she told. When Heidi was 18, a Christian preacher came to her college, and said that God gave him a city. She sat in front, smiling, nodding, and thinking, “What a jerk!! Gave him a city!! As if God would give him a city.”

And she said she saw a vision of angel, pointing at the man, saying, “He’s telling the truth. Listen to him.”

And she collapsed saying, “Then give me a nation.” Do you hear her ambition? Nothing to be ashamed of in ambition for things of the Spirit.

She asked for the poorest, most desperate nation on earth, which was Mozambique.

She is building a university there, and has seen some of the 10,000abandoned children she has adopted and educated become professors, journalists, architects, doctors, nurses and preachers.

I recently chatted to a missionary to Africa who told me that Mozambique is one of the continent’s great success stories. Surely Heidi has played a part in this!

Anyway, lesson: Just because we’ve never heard of being given a city by God doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Just because we have never seen an angel (I haven’t, though I experienced angelic protection and deliverance numerous times) doesn’t mean no one does.

* * *

When we lived in Manchester where Roy as a Distinguished Visiting Professor in Maths at the University, we went to another healing meeting, for the aforementioned burn-out. The speaker, an American, kept pointing to corners of the room, saying, “There’s a large female angel there, over you in pink.” “And, you, sir,” pointing to a mild, inoffensive Englishmen, “God is doing something in you. I see angels around you.” The man turned around startled; so did I. Didn’t see any angels. I didn’t, at least.

“He believes in angels,” I whispered to the tune of the Abba song, “I have a Dream,” to my daughter, Zoe,  then 10, each time he saw another angel. “Ssssh, mum,” Zoe whispered. Apparently, she had been brought up to believe one should behave oneself in church!!

I later realised how stupid I was being. Just because I had never seen an angel does not mean that the speaker did not see one. Or the controversial Todd Bentley who says he sees an angel called Emma scattering gold dust. Yes, really. (He really says so,

One Sure Cure for All Social Media Angst

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One Cure for All Social Media Angst

 

The Friend

Who will always follow you on Twitter,

Accept your Facebook Friend Request,

And kindly like your Facebook fan page too.

Who will read your blog with close attention,

Subscribe to your RSS Feed,

And if you ask, will even

Quietly comment on your posts.

He’ll put you on his Blog Roll,

The Great Roll which ultimately counts,

And ask nothing in return,

But that you follow back.

Writing and Prayer ( Originally Published in the Christian Century, 2000)

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A few words Jesus wrote
            Writing and Prayer.  We read about them, write about them, talk about them, agonize about them, resolve to do them, wish we’d done them, more than we actually do them.  In this they resemble other pursuits that people overestimate the intensity, frequency, and duration of–reading, and sex.
            Both writing and prayer are archaic, anachronistic, against the grain of modern life, solitary and often heartbreaking, embarked on without the certainty of fruit.   Both demand an expenditure, an apparent waste of time, that’s like a waste of self.  Bill Gates in Time magazine: “In terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient.  There’s a lot more I could be doing on Sunday morning.”  Of course, of course.  Making art is not the most efficient use of time either when it comes to tangible economic rewards.  It’s working in the darkness with no guarantees of success, publication, or “fame, money, and the love of beautiful people.”  Now or ever.  It’s working with blind faith, stubborn hope, dumb love.
            The tiny stunted wings of the flightless cormorant of the Galapagos are useless for flying.  Yet with hazy, ancestral memories of flight, it spends much of its time standing on rocks near the shore spreading its vestigial wings out to dry in the sun, just as flying cormorants do.  Flapping wings with a sense of futility, a foreboding of failure.  That’s how we feel on the brink of something difficult, but exhilarating like writing or prayer.  But if the wind suddenly lifted the bird and it sailed through the skies, effortlessly, beautifully–well, that’s like flight into the realm where the right words in the right order surprise like a free gift; ideas cascade, inevitable as a cataract; and each sentence sings; or in prayer when “so great a sweetness flows in the breast that we must laugh and we must sing, we are blest by everything, everything we look upon is blest.”
            In both prayer and writing, these blessed states are partly a free gift, and partly earned: we travail to forge the metal which lightning may strike.  Both take a quiet life, hard work, and sacrifice.  Henry James captures the pain: “If one would do the best he can with his pen, there is one word he must inscribe on his banner, and that word is solitude.”  Though there have, of course, been gregarious writers–I think of Trollope who treasured the social success, the club life, and the friends his writing brought him–and though friendships bring insight, knowledge, self-knowledge, and growth, my own experience echoes T.S. Eliot in “Ash Wednesday,” “Where shall the word be found, where will the word/ Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.”  Conversations echo in my head, a dissonance drowning out my own thoughts.  Too much extroversion robs me of the inner quiet necessary to view my life sanely, leave alone to revise it.  In fact, my writing and my thinking are inversely proportional to my social life.
            “Be still and know that I am God,” echoes an Old Testament imperative.  In the Book of Kings, the Lord appeared to the prophet Elijah, not  in “the great and powerful wind that tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks,” not in the earthquake, not in the fire, but in “a gentle whisper.”  A whisper, easily drowned in the tumult of an overambitious schedule.  The Quaker writer, Richard Foster, extols the otium sanctum, “holy leisure,” of the Church Fathers.  “If we expect to succeed in the contemplative arts, we must pursue “holy leisure” with a determination that is ruthless to our date books,” he says.
            Holy Leisure.  It is indeed the best soil for writing or prayer: a considered, underscheduled and  life with fallow hours, and pruned activities, commitments, friends.  It’s important especially for women, trained to be “nice,” to perfect the difficult art of saying No, resisting the blandishments to busyness, “giving back to the community,” taking your turn, doing your fair share.  Not to do as much as–possibly–you can, but to live with “the broad margin to life,” Thoreau praises, thus making space for the new idea, the transforming insight.  When I look at Vermeer’s paintings, the girl pausing in the midst of quiet work to gaze out of the window and muse, I think: That is how I want to live my life, softly, meditatively, reverently.  Coming to the quietness has a cost, of course, the cost of the loneliness that wrenches you when the quietness you have courted seems more than you can bear.  Precious, costly, and priceless, that holy loneliness, carved out and set apart from the dead wood of lunches, dinner parties, and talk, talk, talk.
            We enter the realm of paradoxes.  Though we need solitude to pray, prayer returns to the engagement of love.  The refrain of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” long embroidered into samplers declares, “He prayeth well who loveth well/ Both man and bird and beast./  He prayeth best who loveth best/ All things both great and small.”  John, Jesus’ beloved friend, gives us two yardsticks to gauge our spirituality–growing love for God, growing love for the people in our lives.  Real prayer does not so much change God’s mind as it changes us, slowly, almost imperceptibly.  And in the quietness of prayer, we learn the arts of kindness.  Thomas Merton in New Seeds of Contemplation: “It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers.  The more solitary I am, the more affection I have for them.  It is pure affection and filled with reverence for the solitude of others.  Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say.”
            And though there have been splendid lyric poets like Emily Dickinson who were essentially recluses, drawing inspiration from the certain slant of light on winter afternoons, much of the inexhaustible art like Hamlet, Lear, Madame Bovary, Middlemarch, or Wuthering Heights that shares its wisdom and beauty with you afresh on each encounter, springs from the empathy from which Flaubert declares, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.”  That’s interesting considering a writer’s actual work, faced with the blank page, is quiet to the point of sensory deprivation.  Just as a foreigner sees the quirks and oddities of a country more clearly than the native, the person who deliberately seeks solitude gains clear-sightedness.  I like that line of Yeats, “And eyes by solitary thought made aquiline.”
            Whether one seeks to be an artist or a contemplative, discipline, mundane word, must channel the streams of sweetness that surprise, whether “inspiration,” or the rapturous insights of contemplation.  We’ve heard the metaphor: inspiration, like lightning, strikes where it wills, whom it wills.  But if anything lasting, anything lovely, is to remain after its sudden blazing descent, there is no substitute for the long hours of learning a craft.  This apprenticeship teaches us to tame a torrent of ideas in sinuous, sinewy sentences, in the essay’s narrow room.  (And, as with any craft, and this is one of life’s unfairnesses, there are the naturals who absorb the tricks of the trade rapidly, as if by osmosis, and others, of whom I am one, who learn them slowly, arduously).
            In fact, inspiration is a way of seeing, a loving perception of the mystery, the magic, the tiny miracles in daily life that we can train ourselves to acquire.  It takes slowing down.  Consider the subjects that the house-bound Emily Dickinson made poetry of–the fly, the bird, the worm, the snake.  Traveling through the hours lightly, looking, thinking, helps our eyes cultivate the retina of wonder, the ability to “see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.”
           Writing a literary book feels like tunneling through the Himalayas with a spade.  You work in the darkness with no surety that you’ll ever succeed, just wild hope.  You just do it, and do it, and do it, and you probably do it best when you do it without hope of reward–for its own sake.  In “Writing in the Cold,” his brilliant essay on the writing life, the editor Ted Solotaroff suggests that “the turning point in many people’s writing lives was when the intrinsic interest of what they were doing began to take over, and generate a sense of necessity.”  The intrinsic interest rather than ambition, or restlessness for reward: money, praise, “the buzz.”
            There’s always the intermittent temptation to abandon being a writer, or being a Christian.   I have, at moments of crushing discouragement, contemplated giving up writing altogether.  But then I know I cannot.  There will always be empty hours.  I cannot imagine living without a passion to fill them, and nothing for me is more interesting.  And so I continue like Macbeth after the first murder that necessitated sequential crimes: “I am steeped in blood so far, that returning were as tedious as going o’er.”  So I work dumbly, doggedly, like a ox plodding in circles, treading grain.  To modify Eliot’s stricture in “The Four Quartets,”  I work and “wait without hope/ For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; work and wait without love/ For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith/ But the faith and the hope and the love are all in the waiting./  For us there is only the trying.  The rest is not our business,” Eliot concludes.
            Writing early drafts feels like groping in the darkness–like reaching for God who is somewhere in the shadows, loving and good, powerful and wise.  And amid the griefs of life–a precious friendship dissolves amid gossip and misunderstandings, the book manuscript I’ve worked on for five years is not viable, when I feel pierced by “the arrow that flies by night,” inexplicable malice, envy, betrayal, the human depravity scripture details–I grope for him, trying to see the meaning, the final draft, when all around me is a mess of manuscript, haphazard, crossed-out, added-to.  And I try to revise myself and my life beyond the first draft, believing that with the help of the sovereign wise artificer, this manuscript of aspirations will eventually become the  finished, completed, perfect book.
            While practicing both arts, you yearn for acceleration.  You get fed up of this trying and failing; you want to write well; you want to master your craft.  You want to savor the joy, and the peace that passeth understanding that lured you onwards.  But spiritual growth is slow and gradual.  The good man in the Psalms is compared to “a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in due season.”  Evolving as an artist is a similarly organic process.  The natural can master her craft more rapidly by a ferocity of hours and will, diligence and discipline, but wisdom comes in its own time.  That’s why it’s hard to think of a writer who has been a child prodigy, a Mozart.
            Yet, though nothing but time can turn a sapling into the largest of trees, so that the birds of the air come and perch on its branches, there are organic fertilizers for one’s tender spiritual or artistic life, that will help it grow stronger, lovelier, and, yes, faster. Reading widely and deeply, the old masters as well as new ones; writing carefully and continually for writing is an art one learns by doing; seeking out smart criticism to show you your blind spots; creating time and space to work quietly–these help a writer develop.  A fierce yearning–“God-hunger”–launches spiritual growth.  “You shall seek me, and you shall find me when you seek me with all your heart:” Jeremiah’s words were engraved on a plaque in our dormitory when I was a novice with Mother Teresa at Calcutta.  Yearning and seeking–but also making time to meditate on Scripture, discipline in obeying its wisdom.  Though spiritual maturity will come in its own time, these practices might hasten that day.
            And in both arts, like a shadow behind the bright yearning for perfection, is the inevitability of failure.  The Apostle Paul laments this in a poignant, brilliant passage: “I do not understand what I do.  For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.  For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do–this I keep on doing.
            So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me.  For in my inner being, I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin.  What a wretched man I am! 
            Failure–or, theologically, sin–is the antiphon to our yearning for goodness; to be loving; to be, in the Biblical word, righteous.  But through it all, through the valley of failure,  emerges a faint, pointillist likeness to Christ.  You are changed as you seek to imitate Christ, and more, to be merged with him, to be blood brothers in the ancient sense, and have his sweet life flow through you as sap through a vine, in his metaphor.
            When I write, I desire beauty in my inmost being.  I want my sentences to be as iridescent as Nabokov’s, as grave and freighted and precise as Alice Munro’s, as haunting as Keats’ or Hopkins’ or Sylvia Plath’s.  I want to create essays as lovely as a bough quivering with spring blossoms or glistening with icicles.  I do not see this in my drafts.  Wretched woman that I am, what will rescue me from this imperfect work?  Time might, and hard work might, and reading constantly and critically might.
            Or perhaps nothing will.  I may never be Nabokov or Rushdie, my favorite prose stylists.  John Gardner claims that more people fail at becoming successful businessmen than at becoming writers.  If so, I must know many of the unsuccessful, for I know many who write hard, and read hard, and long hard for success, but whom success eludes, who have very minor careers at best.  Solotaroff, less encouragingly, looks at the young writers full of bright promise that he published in the “New American Review,” and estimates that one-quarter go on to have reasonably successful careers; one-quarter have marginal ones in the alternative literary community of the little magazines and small presses; and one half simply disappear.
            What separates the writer who emerges from the one who disappears?  These help budding talent flower–the time and quiet to write, the stimulation and encouragement of the literary community, the support of family, adequate money and privacy: “500 pounds a year and a room of one’s own”–a concatenation of happy circumstances.  When I read biographies of writers, I am struck by how their development as artists was aided by “luck”–a crucial nurturing friendship with a mentor or a fellow writer in their formative years, the zigzags of life leading to the books, paintings, cities, teachers, friends they needed to blossom.  As the old weary book of Ecclesiastes observes, “The race is not to the swiftest, nor does food come to the wise, or wealth to the brilliant, or favor to the learned, but time and chance happen to them all.”  On the other hand, luck does tend to happen to gifted people who work hard.  And good writing is the best connection, the best “in” to the loop.
            And then there’s “talent,” arbitrary, undemocratic thing.  In Christ’s parable of the talents, the master at random gives his three servants one, two, and five talents.  The latter two servants work mightily, but limited by their “raw talent” produce four and ten talents respectively.  If you start out with but two talents–of time, energy, intelligence, literary education, opportunity, flair–all your diligence will probably increase it to no more than four talents.  And it may take ten talents to write a truly beautiful book.  These are facts one accepts, then forgets about; they do not take away from your duty to work, nor from the joy of work.  For there is no exact gauge for literary talent; you do not know how luminous a book you might write till you have written it.
            You need luck, you need talent, and you need determination and perseverance which, finally, is crucial.  “The writer’s main task is to persist.  Her most important imperative is to be at work,” Solotaroff says.  Through constant reading, writing, revision, a style is forged.  To finish writing a difficult book, or to mature spiritually until you transcend your oldself as modern saints like Gandhi, or Mother Teresa, or Maximilian Kolbe, takes the stamina of a pilgrim walking across a continent, or a gold miner digging in the almost unendurable heat of the Kolar gold fields of India, his eyes on the prize.
             Both writing and prayer require a strenuous attempt at detachment from our distracting world of dollars, demands, the telephone, mail, friends, false friends, and extended family–“the enemies of one’s own household,” Jesus calls them.  The world that is too much with us.  Entering the world of the imagination is like gazing into the enchanted universe of an intertidal pool in which purple sea urchins and emerald sea anemones glow, along with hermit crabs hiding in other creature’s shells, and sea stars, black, white, and orange.  I must tiptoe into this world–leaving behind the nagging Old World of people and their irritations, mess in the house, to-do lists, the jagged edges of life jabbing me–slowly, gingerly, like an immigrant unsure of the language, the customs, the geography of a country.
            So spiritual directors suggest rituals to nudge the spirit into the presence of God–reading scripture, or breathing deeply to calm the body and concentrate thought before floating free.  I offer myself absolution for the bumpy hours of easing into the zone, the priming rituals of reading great stylists until my pulse throbs in a complex rhythm I’ve unconsciously absorbed–or mechanically rereading the last few pages I’ve written to reenter the imaginative field of my piece.  And then when ideas race from my neurons to my fingers, when my mind starts connecting all the scattered leaves of my universe, and I begin writing, almost instinctively, the language of literature: metaphor, imagery, alliteration, assonance, poetry, and my sentences sing, a car pulls into the driveway, my husband and daughters are home, and I am back to my old life, blinking like Lazarus, summarily summoned from death’s dark kingdom to the blithe goings-on of the everyday, to the crowd that gapes at him, quite unaware of the shadow world of beauty and terror (if Dante is to believed).  I return shakily, a bit uncertainly, like one roused from a vivid dream, dazzled in the light.
            Both writing and prayer are best done in the same place, at the same time.  When I walk up to my familiar writing place–my armchair facing the woods–and see it waiting, quiet and ready, I start feeling calm.  I feel like writing.  An inner voice says, “Hurry up now; it’s time.”  And contrary to romantic myth, a steady, scheduled life helps writers as much as it helps pray-ers.  Flaubert: “It is good to be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
            So too, the memories of the previous times we have met with God on our habitual holy ground usher us into an expectant quietness.  Merton describes prayer in his accustomed sacred spot: My chief joy is to escape to the attic of the garden house and the little broken window that looks out over the valley.  There in the silence, I love the green grass.  The tortured gestures of the apple trees have become part of my prayer….  So much do I love this solitude that when I walk out along the road to the old barns that stand alone, delight begins to overpower me from head to foot, and peace smiles even in the marrow of my bones.”
            Praying is like talking a foreign language.  The nouns and verbs in this holy terra incognita are in a softer, lower timbre–patience, quietness, humility, self-denial, or turning the other cheek.  When I read the New Testament, I’m struck by this “upside-down kingdom,” its reversal of the values of even good people.  Do not repay anyone evil for evil.  Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you. Give secretly so that your right hand does not know what your left hand is doing.  Invite those to your home who cannot invite you back.   
            In our world, we trust in our ability to work, network, charm, maneuver.  But “the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight,” the Apostle Paul says.  In God’s world, the person who trusts in God will be as blessed as “a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream.  It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green.  It has no worries in a year of drought, and never fails to bear fruit.”  Our world values action, quick success–grabbing our desire from the jaws of hostile fate, battering down doors with our will.  In God’s realm, we work quietly, knowing success will come according to his will, and in his perfect timing.  In the world we know, we blow our own trumpet for fear that no one else will do it for us.  If we try to walk Christ’s way, we do not exalt ourselves, believing Jesus: “For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”  We wait, feeding off the wise, strong, sweet life of Jesus, God made flesh, metaphorically eating his flesh and drinking his blood.  And when we glimpse the quietness and wisdom of God, and even momentarily take a God’s eye view of our life, our internal chatter of anxiety and annoyance is silenced as our perspective shifts, and our spirit sings in worship.
            Humility, an acceptance of unknowing, is a shortcut in both paths.  “If the angel comes, it will be because you have wooed him by your grim resolve to be always a beginner,” Rilke muses.  I have grown as a writer through the humility that rejection brings.  A publisher turns down my work, I do not get the fellowship I applied for, and I realize that my writing is probably not good enough–yet.  In the first humbling, I feel I know nothing about literature or writing, nothing at all.  Then I read with an alert hunger, studying again Speak Memory or Midnight’s Children.  I study the craft of writing; I let books on tape murmur to me at fallow moments in the car, on the treadmill.  I revise my manuscript with renewed rigor, a rekindled passion for beauty.  And through this starting again as a beginner with fresh joy, trying again to say in as few words as possible exactly what I mean; once more reading continually the books that are truly great, I learn, I grow; my writing changes, matures.  Rejection is a disguised friend, freezing me in my onward motion, forcing me to rethink my essay, my vocation.
            The support of a community strengthens one in both quests because they are counter-cultural; in fact, senseless judged by the efficient values of the marketplace.  We invest much time in seeking God, without any scientific certainty that he exists, just the knowledge of the heart.   And when with twentieth century rationality, I query: Do I really believe that God invaded human history 2000 years ago; walked our mountains and waters teaching, was crucified for uttering uncompromising truth; it helps me believe when I see Jesus’ great insights proved true, not only in the wrinkles of my own life, but in the lives of other Christians.  That joy comes not from gratifying every clamorous desire, but in silencing the frog chorus, I, I, I, and losing oneself in contemplating Christ and in loving–spouse, children, friends; in seeking righteousness rather than the gratifications of money or success.  In my Christian friends too, I often observe increasing goodness and a slow deepening, as they are transformed from glory to glory, in the Apostle Paul’s phrase.  And though I do believe, deeply, as one does when faith is verified by experience, I am an existentialist Christian when assailed by doubt.  I choose to believe like Puddleglum, the Marshwiggle in The Chronicles of Narniawho says: “I’m on Aslan’s side, even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it.  I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.”  And so I go to my small church most Sundays to pray and worship with other believers, refiring my weary distracted heart with other’s fervor.
            Few writers evolve in solitude. At some point, even the martyrs of art–like Emily Dickinson, Keats or Thoreau–met other writers who shared the twin passions of the love of literature and their own ambition.  It is reinforcing to have other writers in our lives to share the glow of that first publication in a literary journal for which we made fifteen dollars, but which meant that our craft had begun to take that miraculous leap from saggy, unpublishable writing to  publishable, published writing.  It strengthens our passion to have people to talk to about books and writing, and esoteric conditions like writer’s block, who understand our anguish when the chapter, the book we worked on for so long miscarries.  Our fellow-travelers bolster our conviction that our vocation, often dismissed as a pleasing hobby, an indulgence–Oh how nice!  You write!  Have you published anything I might have seen?--rather than the disciplined pursuit of an art is significant, worthwhile work for grown-up people. 
            Thomas Merton connects the two vocations in his essay, “Integrity.”  “Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves.  They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God.  They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their lives.
            They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint.  They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to write somebody else’s poems or possess somebody else’s spirituality.
            There can be an intense egoism in following everybody else.  People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular–and too lazy to think of anything better.
            Hurry ruins saints as well as artists.  They want quick success and they are in such haste to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves.”
            Writers begin as babies or mockingbirds–by imitating.  Partly because of the mimicry involved in the extended process of finding their own voice and subject matter, many writers–consciously or unconsciously–sound like someone else while in their apprenticeship.  The fashionable, with its lures of quick success or fame, tempts.  However, once the writer grows in confidence and begin to tell the truth, she slowly discovers her own quirky, original voice.  A distinctive style begins to shape itself.  She begins to draw, truthfully, on her own ideas, convictions, emotions, family, and biography, unfashionable and squirmy though they may be, not on what has been published or is popular, and so finds the memoir that she alone can write, that is like no other memoir ever written, just as the inner geography of her life in its hills and valleys, heartbreak and delight, is like no other life.  If she dips her pen into the sore of her own grief, her shame, her secrets, she will add electricity to her memoir, or to the more disguised forms of autobiographical writing like poems, novels, or short stories.  Rushdie–“A writer’s injuries are his strengths, and from his wounds will flow his sweetest, most startling dreams.”
            And from the molten lava of her own guilt, her hypocrisy, her pangs of despised love, and yes, stabs at virtue, self-forgetting love, longing for transcendence, the writer can mold powerful art–with this six inches of ivory, this postage stamp of earth.  In The Enigma of Arrival, V.S. Naipaul describes how he tried to sound cosmopolitan when he first started to write, while striving to edit out his past in his Asian community in Trinidad, his naivete and clodhopperish inexperience, and the humiliations attendant on his transplantation to the West, not realizing that in his peasant background and behaviors lay his most authentic story.  Later in his masterpiece, A House for Mr. Biswas, he lingers on the things he was most ashamed of.  He writes, “Man and writer were the same person.  But that is a writer’s greatest discovery.  It took time–and how much writing!–to arrive at that synthesis.”
            Both writing and prayer are disciplines of little things.  I love this poem by Robert Francis:
                        Excellence is millimeters and not miles.
                        From poor to good is great.  From good to best is small.
                        From almost best to best sometimes not measurable.
                        The man who leaps the highest leaps perhaps an inch
                        Above the runner-up.  How glorious that inch
                        And that split-second longer in the air before the fall.
            What are the millimeters from almost best to best?  Spare writing with every unnecessary word shaken off the page.  Details almost invisible to the rapid reader: the imagistic verb, the painterly image, a sentence that sings.  Writing that in Conrad’s phrase, “makes you hear, makes you feel–that is, before all, makes you see.”  So too, it’s in the details of love that spiritual transformation occurs and exhibits itself–not so much in the showy dahlias and cannas, but in violets and bluebells.  The Apostle Paul declares in, probably, the most famous passage in the New Testament: “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.”  He explicates the tiny virtues.  “Love is patient, love is kind.  It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.”
            A snide definition of a classic: a book which everyone wants to haveread, but no one wants to actually read, today, tonight–the Iliad or The Remembrance of Things Past.  We desire the blessings of God–life in its fullness, joy, peace, fruitfulness more than we desire God himself.  We yearn for a book magical, lyrical, perfect, more than for the actual process of rewriting a chapter yet again, the long months and years before the finished book.  And in both quests, the secret of joy is losing yourself in the pleasure of the present, in the play of words, in learning Christ, his quirky values, and imitating him.
            How crass this sounds, but in both endeavors, quality springs from quantity!  “If you want to pray better, you should pray more,” Mother Teresa says.  Somerset Maugham writes: “I venture the opinion that you cannot write well unless you write much.”  The more we write–if we do so critically, learning from good teachers, getting insightful feedback, reading, reading, practicing, practicing–the better we write.  As loving-heartedness is the touchstone of the verity of our prayers, the market is the red light in writing.  Rejection slips speak their own language.  Of admonition.  You are not there yet.  Seize the day.  Work as hard as you can.
            Both writing and prayer usher us into the heart of mystery.  From where do poems come?  Or from where, indeed, does nature?  Or God?  The faces of the audience at the Geraldine Dodge Poetry Festival at which I sought a total immersion into poetry, were rapt as at a religious service.  For literature partially and temporarily slakes the religious yearning for beauty, order, truth.  Both disciplines are therapeutic in their search for the difficult truth that frees.  Like prayer, the very act of writing calms and focuses us.  Often, the difficulty lies in just settling down and doing it.  As with sex or exercise or good conversation, it can be hard to get going, but once we have, it’s as if we can keep going indefinitely.  Good writing and good prayer, like good sex or good mothering, demand self-forgetfulness, losing ourselves in the other, our subject, our Lord.  And the flow of creativity or prayer can be jammed and dammed by similar barricades–anxiety, hostility, anger, cherishing  untruths, saying too many Noes.
            We are lured into both by the dream, the promise of joy.  The cost turns out to be more than we ever imagined: “not less than everything.”  We begin to experience the disappointment, doubt, rejection, agony–and the ultimate triumph of sacrifice–involved in becoming an artist.  And we learn the rending cost of denying ourselves, taking up our cross daily, breaking out of the prison of the self and its incessant needs and demands, choosing small deaths, in a sense, so as to transcend ourselves and have a richer, more fruitful life.  Jesus  understood it: “Unless the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone.  But if it dies, it yields a mighty harvest.”
            When we train ourselves in the scriptural precept to pray constantly, trying to be continually aware of the quiet presence of Christ: a radiance, a luminosity, like the silent, ever-present ghost in old movies, a quietness begins to sink over our beings, the quietness in which creative thought is engendered.  We must persist in both disciplines until they become instinctive, until we convert every thought, desire and frustration into a prayer, turning to God as naturally as a flower turns its face to the sun and the butterflies.  Similarly, the writer must keep writing until this inward work, this daily creation, becomes as necessary as thinking; so essential that a day in which she has not written will seem a day in which she has not fully lived.
            A Chinese saying: “From boredom to fascination.”  Though difficult at first, both quests lead to an awareness of joy, shimmering, pulsing through life.  As I mature spiritually and psychologically, my values shift.  Oh dear, they become more old-fashioned–the preciousness of the family I have chosen, my husband and my daughters; the balm of friendships; the durable self-forgetting pleasures in reading, art, nature, gardening.  And writing?  It remains my vocation, my duty and my desire, a precious strand in the tapestry of my life, a beloved pure note in its orchestra, a joyous obligation like those to my husband and children, who have no other wife, no other mother.  And amid life’s richness in the busy season–two daughters, four years old, and four months old; a career; a husband with a career; a house, a garden, a dog, friends, a life–can writing wait?  At times, it will have to.  And in the forge of dreams deferred, other jewels might be crafted:ethos, character, undergirding and lighting the logos, words, and pathos, emotions they evoke–the three elements of great art Aristotle outlines in his Rhetoric.  Writing with wisdom, depth, power.  And now, in the season of duties, as I choose books to read or subjects to write on more for the pleasure that dwelling on them will bring rather than for rewards of glitter or success, I am recovering some of the joy I’d lost in my anxious, striving, ambitious twenties.
   Though the gloomy may say that the life of a writer is simply “the exchange of one level of rejection, uncertainty, and disappointment for another,” persisting long enough to learn and master your craft gives you ever more of those moments of enchantment when your whole being is intensely alive; you are lost in the joy of work; sparks flash from your imagination and set the page on fire; and you read over a finished piece, and like God in the garden of Eden, behold what you have written, and–temporarily–decide that it is good.

Brennan Manning on Grace (from The Ragamuffin Gospel)

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An excerpt from Brennan Manning’s The Ragamuffin Gospel.

Paul Tillich in The Shaking of the Foundations writes:

Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life…

 It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage.

Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: “You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know.

 Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything, do not perform anything, do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted.”

If that happens to us, we experience grace.

Because salvation is by grace through faith, I believe that among the countless number of people standing in front of the throne and in front of the Lamb, dressed in white robes and holding palms in their hands (see Revelation 7:9), I shall see the prostitute from the Kit-Kat Ranch in Carson City, Nevada, who tearfully told me she could find no other employment to support her two-year-old son. I shall see the woman who had an abortion and is haunted by guilt and remorse but did the best she could faced with grueling alternatives; the businessman besieged with debt who sold his integrity in a series of desperate transactions; the insecure clergyman addicted to being liked, who never challenged his people from the pulpit and longed for unconditional love; the sexually abused teen molested by his father and now selling his body on the street, who, as he falls asleep each night after his last “trick,” whispers the name of the unknown God he learned about in Sunday school; the deathbed convert who for decades had his cake and ate it, broke every law of God and man, wallowed in lust, and raped the earth.

“But how?” we ask.

Then the voice says, “They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”

There they are. There  we  are—the multitude who so wanted to be faithful, who at times got defeated, soiled by life, and bested by trials, wearing the bloodied garments of life’s tribulations, but through it all clung to the faith.

My friends, if this is not good news to you, you have never understood the gospel of grace.

 

Inspiration from Brennan Manning’s “The Ragamuffin Gospel”

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Brennan Manning

 I am listening to Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel on my iPod as I walk (on the hottest days of the year to date). And I experience grace. I allowed myself to become overweight through 3 decades of being sedentary, and eating carelessly and unthinkingly. And I get to listen to amazing stuff—the Bible, Blue Like Jazz, and The Ragamuffin Gospel—as I walk to fend off further weight gain, and with grace, burn off some unnecessary pounds.

Anyway, the rest of this post shares some of Brennan Manning’s fabulous insights from Chapter 1 of The Ragamuffin Gospel .

“As we read Psalm 123, “Just as the eyes of slave are on their masters’ hand, or the eyes of a slave-girl on the hand of her mistress,” we experience a vague sense of existential guilt. Our eyes are not on God

Our approach to the Christian life is as absurd as the enthusiastic young man who had just received his plumber’s license and was taken to see Niagara Falls. He studied it for a minute and then said, “I think I can fix this.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky caught the shock and scandal of the gospel of grace when he wrote in Crime and Punishment:

At the last Judgment Christ will say to us, “Come, you also! Come, drunkards! Come, weaklings! Come, children of shame!” And he will say to us: “Vile beings, you who are in the image of the beast and bear his mark, but come all the same, you as well.” And the wise and prudent will say, “Lord, why do you welcome them?”

And he will say: “If I welcome them, you wise men, if I welcome them, you prudent men, it is because not one of them has ever been judged worthy.” And he will stretch out his arms, and we will fall at his feet, and we will cry out sobbing, and then we will understand all, we will understand the Gospel of grace! Lord, your Kingdom come!”

 

I believe the Reformation actually began the day Martin Luther was praying over the meaning of Paul’s assertion that righteous shall find life through faith (see Romans 1:17). Like many Christians today, Luther wrestled through the night with this core question: How could the gospel of Christ be truly called “good news” if God is a righteous judge who rewards the good and punishes the evil? Did  Jesus really have to come to reveal that terrifying message? How could the revelation of God in Christ Jesus be accurately called “news” since the Old Testament carried the same theme, or for that matter, “good” with the threat of punishment hanging like a dark cloud over the valley of history?

But as Jaroslav Pelikan notes: “Luther suddenly broke through to the insight that the “righteousness of God” that Paul spoke of in this passage was  the righteousness by which for the sake of Jesus Christ, God made sinners righteous through the forgiveness of sins in justification.

When he discovered that, Luther said it was as though the very gates of Paradise had been opened to him.”

What a stunning truth!

“Justification by grace through faith” is the theologian’s learned phrase for what Chesterton once called “the furious love of God.” He has a single relentless stance toward us: He loves us. He is the only God man has ever heard of who loves sinners. False gods—the gods of human manufacturing—despise sinners, but the Father of Jesus loves all, no matter what they do.

But, of course, this is almost too incredible for us to accept.

Nevertheless, the central affirmation of the Reformation stands: Through no merit of ours, but by His mercy, we have been restored to a right relationship with God through the life, and resurrection of His beloved Son. This is the Good News, the gospel of grace.

With his characteristic joie de vivre, Robert Capon puts it this way: The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellarful of fifteen hundred-year-old, two-hundred-proof grace—of bottle after bottle of pure distillate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly.

The word of the gospel—after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps—suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they started… Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale; neither goodness, nor badness, nor the flowers that bloom in the spring of super spirituality could be allowed to enter into the case.