This afternoon I came home to find something very exciting waiting for me at my front door: a print copy of my second fiction book. The book is still in draft form and needs a heavy edit, and so I used an online publishing company to print it out (editing on paper is much easier for me than editing on a computer screen). I had the book printed out in a large format, 8×11, so it is extra hefty, also being 390 pages. It feels great to hold in my hands something that I’ve worked on for so long. I feel like it’s in a more completed form than when it was sitting on my computer. In a way, it feels like the book was born today, in one sudden swoop, and not over the past few years that I’ve worked on it and the original draft.

I have to admit that I’m not all that excited about editing the book. I felt a sense of relief when I wrote the last chapter a few weeks ago, and part of that relief is that I was done with reivisons. I assume this is the case for most artists of any kind, but I enjoy composing far more than revising. Both are a lot of work, but I feel like, when I compose a story, I’m much more in conversation with the Holy Spirit. Or, to put it another way, I feel like revising requires a lot of death and rebirth, while composing is all about birth. The Spirit surprises me so often during composition, and not just in terms of the plot or insights into character. The Spirit is about connections, and there are times, when I’m writing, that God puts into my heart something that happened recently, that I’ve been thinking or pondering about, that happened to me long ago, or just something that is at the periphery of my mind and spirit – whatever it is, God takes this thing and re-presents it to me in the form of a story, or a conversation, or a description. I feel, at the same exact time, the interest in the story that I’m writing and the re-presented aspect of my life, mingled together into one form. The weight of this sense is sometimes overwhelming, and I’m often exhausted by the time I’m finished writing just a few pages. It’s a good exhaustion, though, in which I feel emptied out and yet filled up at the same time. 

God’s presence in the creative process is something that has long interested me. It’s what I studied in graduate school and, had I continued into academia, it’s what I would have written about primarily. Now, as a priest, I get to do something equally as fun: not only do I have the pleasure of hearing about God’s presence in people’s lives, I also help the Holy Spirit as they are led through the work of art that we call the liturgy. I feel a deep sense of privilege (the good kind) in being welcomed into people’s personal relationships with God and to help them deepen that relationship. I just can’t explain adequately to you how much I love this part of my job. In the liturgy, we are not only “living” art but also “creating” art each Sunday morning. One question I’ve long pondered about this is, if the liturgy is a living work of art, what is the “canvas” of that art? For visual artists, the canvas may be a literal canvas or a digital one; for writers and poets, the canvas is the blank piece of paper on which we write stories and poems; for sculptors, the canvas is the clay, metal, or whatever else might be used; what about the liturgy?

This is a rather abstract sort of question, but I think it’s an important one. And it’s one that the early 20th century author Dorothy L. Sayers can help with. Sayers was a mystery novelist, but she was also a writer of theology and popular philosophy (in other words, she was a blogger before there was an internet). One of her books is called The Mind of the Maker. Here she maps the creative process onto the life of the Holy Trinity. The “idea” for a book is God the Father – it’s the general principle that founds all things and is the spring from which comes the story itself. The book itself is God the Son – it’s the incarnation of the “idea” or starting-place of the story. All parts of that “idea” are worked out in the actual story itself, which reveals the general and otherwise unutterable “idea” behind the book. How about the Holy Spirit. This is where Sayers gets really interesting. The Holy Spirit is the connection between the book and the reader that communicates the “idea” behind the book. The Spirit then connects the author, the book the author wrote, and the reader who does not know the author personally, and the “idea” that is, in many cases, a bit of inspiration from God in the first place. All these things are connected together, even if (or especially if) each part is not known to the other. And the book itself, the told story, is at the center, just as Jesus Christ is at the center of our understanding of others and our understanding of God.

As an author, a poet, and a “preacher”, I write and speak things that affect people’s lives. I’m not the best author, poet, and preacher, and I look forward to growing as I grow as a writer and public speaker, but even still, most weeks I find that something I said has an effect on an important part of someone’s life. Many times, the most important parts of my sermons and other writing aren’t what I think to be the main points. As an old rhetoric teacher, I make sure my sermons have one main topic and that each paragraph has supporting ideas with their own topic sentences. At the end of the day, what most people find moving aren’t the main topics or paragraph topics that I spend time making sure are all in line; what people find most moving are things like the sense of grace in my writing, or the sense of love or acceptance or comfort. None of these things come from me. They all come from the Holy Spirit. And in saying this, I’m not trying to be modest. I can feel in my writing, both in the process and the actual text itself, the presence of someone other than just me. It reminds me of a Calvin and Hobbes comic in which Hobbes, Calvin’s tiger friend, writes an assignment for him. When Calvin’s mother asks if he’s finished, Calvin responds that his story is written, but he hasn’t read it yet.

I feel a similar way with what I write. I’ve technically written each and every word, but I haven’t really read what I’ve written. When I return to my writing, I often find things that are familiar and which I know I wrote, but I also find things that are surprising. I know I wrote them, but they hit me differently. They feel strange sitting in my chest or mulling about in my mind. And the grammar of that last sentence is important. These things that I wrote but also didn’t have an agency to them. They move on their own. They work on me and my insides (be it my heart or mind or spirit) differently than paragraphs that are otherwise “uninspired.” There have even been times when I’ve realized these times of “inspired” writing even as I’m in the act of writing. It’s a rather amazing feeling.

I often wonder how other people feel about their own creative processes, but these are very personal places (I would call them holy places), and so people understandably don’t talk about them. One reason I wanted to write about my own experiences is to encourage others, if they feel open to doing so, to write about their own. One of the joys of being a priest is that many people are open with me about their own personal, holy experiences in the art of the liturgy or even in God’s art that we call Creation. I feel so humbled when people open their hearts to me as a priest and tell me of their great moments of beauty and joy in the world. I treasure these moments in my ministry, and I wish others could partake of them, too. They give me so much hope for the future and, perhaps more importantly, for the present. God is so very much at work in the world around us, even now as you read this, and at all moments, world without end.