When Prayer Needs the Work

When I am not writing, it is hard for me to pray.  Writing is connected with prayer in ways I don't understand.  Why is it that when I shy away from the work of letting the words out and honing them on the page I find it hard to lift my voice to heaven?  It's not the same thing, at least not always at the same time.  Prayer is a matter of joy and obedience.  Writing can easily be called a matter of joy, but what if it, too, requires obedience?  It is hard to speak in this way, but I find no other way of describing my life.

Yesterday I said I am filled with words that must be let out.  But why do I experience the world this way?  I have friends who share my environment and academic lifestyle who take things in very differently.  (One friend told me, "I think in paintings and emote in words.")  I can only conclude that God made me this way.  I believe he made me with the capacity - or even the need - to maintain a relationship with language.

If this is the case, when I choose not to commit to that relationship I am defying God.  These sound like stark terms for addressing the need to create, or make art, which my surrounding culture often seems to see as elective.  Everyone has certain basic challenges, of course: earning enough to cover one's expenses, finding meaningful connection with other human beings, dealing with hardship and mistakes.  These are the "givens" for nearly everyone.  In these terms the making of art is often labelled unnecessary, a luxury to be attained if possible that we will come to no harm for having to do without.

But if God made some of us as artists (as surely as He made some of us as mathematicians, athletes, and diplomats), are we not attempting to thwart His purpose for our characters if we refuse to make art?  Of course I'm not saying that making art is the only thing He calls upon us to do.  But if it is somehow basic to who we are, it seems reasonable to conclude that God had a reason for making us that way.  If the circumstances of our lives give us any chance at all, we must make some attempt at our art, put some effort toward discovering the reason for our gifts.  (The need to make art is the foundation of artistic gifting, it seems to me.)

Our gifts are for ourselves and for God first, before they can be shared with anyone else.  When a painter takes a canvas into a field, honoring the meadowflowers God made by painting them and taking pleasure in the effort, it seems to me that God is pleased whether any other human being sees the painting or not.  When a writer lays honest words on a page (or the metaphorical page, the screen) it seems to me God is pleased even if the piece is read by Him alone.  Sometimes I even wonder whether the purpose of some works is simply to be written, and not to be read.

Perhaps this is why it is difficult to pray when I'm not writing.  Perhaps the concentrated veiling of my heart that causes me to stop writing is also a kind of hiding from God.  He calls me to the page to be vulnerable, to say out loud the things I'm frightened of, happy about, or angered by, so that He can answer me in His own way.  He too has spoken in a book.  He too has revealed Himself in writing.

Destiny and the Lonely Writer

I told myself I was going to hit "publish" on this post no matter what happened.

Here goes.

I am a writer who has gotten out of the habit of writing.  You would be justified in asking (O mysterious reader) why I call myself a writer if I'm not, in fact, producing many words.  Although I write something down nearly every day, it may just be a paragraph in a journal, something like, "I do not like the way this day is going.  I wish the weather would clear up so I could see the sky.  It feels as though the sky has gotten lower in my life too because of busyness."  These little bursts are like the trickling of a water balloon with a leak.  The words must get out.  I'm filled with them.

To be Edith is to be a writer, the way for some to be Welsh is to be a singer.  It was not a quality I chose for myself and it has not always felt welcome.  When art becomes like a runner's addiction it can get painful.  One almost wishes one hadn't built up the stamina so that one's legs needed the daily exercise.  One cannot rid them of the energy except by running.  I cannot rid myself of this poetic kind of energy except by writing.

Sometimes I have simply refused.  I have told myself I had better things to do than write what I wanted, which was fiction.  I have curled up inside and held myself tight, hiding from the need to face the page.  But it never left.  It only became cramped, sore, or worse, ingrown.  And the blank page was always waiting for me somewhere.

I am facing the page now.  I am tugging at myself, trying to let myself uncurl inside, to stretch and stand up straight, and there is pain in the process.  There has been so much tension for so long that it could not have been painless to ease out of it.  But it is the pain of healing.  I hope I am becoming wise enough to know that the pain of healing, or the pain of facing the page, is better than the pain of denial.

So I will hit "publish" on this post.  It helps me to know that my trickle of words doesn't flow out into a vacuum.  You may be out there, somewhere, the nebulous "you," the representative of the world I am trying to reach with my writer's voice.  And if you are there, you may be listening.  It might help me to know; but whether or not I know I must keep writing, sending out my voice, as though you are there, as though it does matter, even if in the end the only answer I get is an echo.  Myself is better company than none.

Before the Silver Cord is Snapped

Perhaps too much has already been said about being young.  It seems to have been considered from every possible angle:  As unmitigated blessing, as inevitable struggle, as joyride, as travail, as triumphal emergence, as process of disillusionment.  One might question how many universal statements can be made about it since its environment shapes it so deeply.  Further, there is an apparent irony in studying it.  Those who have a large enough perspective to grasp the vagaries and essences of youth are usually past it; they may have dimming memory of how it felt encountered firsthand.  Those in the midst of youth have vivid, abundant experiences of it for data, but often lack the perspective to fit their experience into a large enough context.

It seems to me that a similar irony exists when the young examine any of life's "big issues."  At the time of life most formative and most crucial in the examination of life's deep considerations, the young are often (due to their youth and lack of broad experience) ill-equipped to wrestle well with these very things.  This seems proof enough that younger people need - not simply benefit from - the consistent involvement of caring older people in their lives, and I would hold tenaciously to this principle.  But let me speak for a moment of how this irony affects me and, especially, this blog.

I am still in my youth (suffice it to say I'm college-age) and find in myself many of youth's limitations.  Yet for years already I have found myself unsatisfied by investing my deepest thought or effort into anything shy of ultimate questions of reality and living.  I have a philosophical bent (and always have), but I imagine many of my fellow young people, whether or not they enjoy academics per se, feel a similar urgency in grasping reality.  I need to think through challenging questions, and having thought through them to the best of my present ability, to enter into conversation about them.  But this puts me in a dilemma.  I believe in - and feel - the human need for wise, tested, true answers to life's questions, yet I find in myself the desire to join the conversation before I can contribute much more than a few hard-won observations and numerous (possibly unoriginal) questions.

Youth is wisest when it is humble.  I felt it was important to say these things before I plunged into topics that many older and wiser people have considered with more insight and grace than I can ever hope to muster at this stage in my life. It is only because I hope that someday I will be one of those older and wiser people that I offer these thoughts.  Let me encourage my fellow young people to do the same:  Join life's great conversation now, whether you have much, little, or even nothing to say.  Come to listen and grow, to coordinate pieces of knowledge, and to appreciate the wisdom of those who have trekked these roads before us.  Never give up the pursuit of truth; never allow realism to sour into cynicism; never let matters too light to build a life on rob you of a sure foundation.  Strive to receive the mentoring of the wise so that someday you can be a wise mentor.  If this doesn't seem to us to be living life to its fullest, we have not yet grasped the terrifying gravity of living.

"Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth,

before the evil days come and the years draw near of which you will say,

'I have no pleasure in them;' before the sun and the light

and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds

return after the rain, in the day when the keepers of the house tremble,

and the strong men are bent, and the grinders cease

because they are few, and those who look through the windows

are dimmed, and the doors on the street are shut -

when the sound of the grinding is low, and one rises up

at the sound of a bird, and all the daughters of song are brought low -

they are afraid also of what is high, and terrors are in the way;

the almond tree blossoms, the grasshopper drags itself along,

and desire fails, because man is going to his eternal home,

and the mourners to about the streets -

before the silver cord is snapped, or the golden bowl

is broken, or the pitcher is shattered at the fountain,

or the wheel broken at the cistern, and the dust returns

to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.*

Solomon, c. 10th Century BC

*Ecclesiastes 12:1-7 ESV

A Timely Word.

I ran across this word in a book about writing fiction.

I think it's one of my new favorites.

Are you ready?

Bricolage