Every now and again, someone asks me about my process for writing sermons. This question usually gets me pretty excited. I studied the creative process in graduate school and seminary, I like thinking about the theology of creativity, and like most people like a scholarly bone in their bodies, I like talking about what I’ve learned and what I think. As a fiction and non-fiction writer, I’m also flattered when people take an interest in how I write. As a priest, however, my job isn’t to gab on and on about my own projects but to dig into the question itself – and why the person asked it in the first place. And so, instead of writing about my creative process here, I’d like to meditate on this question and why people ask it.

People ask me about a person’s writing process for a variety of reasons. Some ask because they’re not writers themselves and are interested in how anyone can write something each week on a generally limited topic of Christian living and theology (kind of like how I might ask about how a lawyer how they hold all that information in their head at once or how a trucker can deftly pilot an 18-wheeler). Some people really like my sermons, and they want to know how I learned to get so much out of the Bible and my relationship with God; others don’t like my sermons and may want to suggest some different approaches. Once, a professor of rhetoric asked me about my writing process – that was a really fun conversation!

Beneath all of these reasons, and others, is a simple, human interest in the inner workings of another person. I think that humans are generally curious about other people, but we don’t always know how to get to the object of that curiosity. Here we are, thinking, believing, breathing human beings, and there are other thinking, believing, breathing human beings all around us. We can’t reach out and touch the consciousness of others like we can touch a tree or some other physical object, but we don’t always know how to. We do, in fact, have a sort of spiritual sense of others, but we don’t have many opportunities in our culture to develop this sense. And so we ask questions with words in the hopes of learning more about what it means for others to be human, which may help us understand what it means for us to be human.

In seminary, when I was learning what it means to be a priest, I found that priests are able to ask questions that others can’t – or, more likely, that others don’t feel that they can. Asking a question like, “What’s your prayer life like” isn’t something that many people feel they can ask. It’s seen as too personal. Or what about, “How’s your relationship with God?” or “What have you been talking about with God lately?” We might not ask these questions, because they may not be any of our business, or we’re too embarrassed about asking, or we simply don’t want to assume that other people are thinking about God in these ways or that they think about God at all. Priests, though, ask these sorts of questions all the time. I remember my mentor in Tennessee asking my agnostic friend (who he had just met) straight out about his spiritual life. This friend, who was usually very composed, stuttered and blubbered over his answer. My thought after seeing this interaction was, “Wow, we get to ask questions like that?”

The answer is, yes, we do – and I think others want to ask those questions, too. Again, we want to know because we’re interested in other people and because we want to see our own life with God in relation to how others interact with God. And so we ask different questions – like “how do you write your sermons?”

We ask religious and spiritual questions much more than we might assume. People also often respond to run-of-the-mill questions with rather spiritually rich responses. How many times have you asked or been asked about the weather (a usually pretty safe topic), and the answer has been about the way the crisp, clear air of winter makes us feel, or how we’re yearning for spring, or how we always wait for the return of birdsong or the poking of daffodils up from under the soil? These are spiritual answers. They get to the depth of who we are. They speak of our interactions with the natural world in spiritual ways. They express or speak of our deep appreciation of God’s Creation, and they’re often grounded in a deep sense of thanksgiving. In other words, we are often at the ready to talk about or tell others about rather personal and intimate parts of who we are as people.

When others ask me about writing sermons, I often respond first with a rather simple question: why? (again, as a priest, I find that people respond with less anxiety or shyness to this question than before I was ordained) Most of the time, people respond to this question with a bit of child-like wonder. It’s as if I’ve been to the Grand Canyon and they want to know what it’s like; or, if a person is critical of my sermons, that they’ve been to the Grand Canyon and they want to tell me what it’s like. Or, often, somewhere in the middle. People will tell me about their own interactions with the Bible, the liturgy, or the Sacraments, or they might tell me about some of the things that my sermons have made them think about later in the day on Sunday or throughout the week. One really beautiful thing is to see the connections that people are making between their lives on Sunday mornings, their lives throughout the rest of the week, and their own inner lives. 

I can’t tell you how precious all this is to me. Or, to put it another way, I can’t adequately explain how blessed I feel to be invited into such a holy place. Besides distributing the Eucharist (which is literally the best thing in the entire world besides the Eucharist itself), being invited into another person’s spiritual life with God is a deep, deep privilege, and it’s always a humbling experience. So many people want to talk about these things. So many people are eager to share these really beautiful, personal parts of their lives with someone who has given them their undivided attention. How magnificent, isn’t it? 

I wish I could tell other people’s stories, to share them with a world that is hungry for the spiritual and the religious, but of course I can’t. I’m sworn to secrecy, whether what I’m told is secret or not. These stories are also not mine to tell. They don’t belong to me. They belong to the person telling them, and their power is in their being told by the person who they belong to. I pray, though, that more people tell them to others and not just to a priest because he’s sworn to secrecy. I pray that people talk about God more to others and not just to people whose call means putting on a white-collared, black shirt. These stories give people hope. They make life (which can be a struggle) livable. They are the meat of our lives.